The booming London startup scene is marking another high-value exist with Cisco Systems Inc.’s acquisition of local enterprise communications specialist Acano Ltd. for a massive $700 million in cash and stock. The deal will help the networking giant make its teleconferencing solutions more attractive for its largest customers, which often struggle to take full advantage of the software due to the difficulty of connecting their different offices.

The problem stems not so much from the distance itself as the disparities that tend to form in the way that the geographically disparate divisions of a global organization handle their internal operations. The administrative team of one branch may find that Cisco’s TelePresence suite best matches its requirements, while another might decide on Microsoft Corp.’s competing Skype for Business. The result is a situation where employees from different locations can’t communicate effectively without either hiring an expensive consultancy to bridge the technical gaps or refresh their entire teleconferencing infrastructure at a potentially even greater cost.

Acano offers a much more convenient alternative in the form of a gateway that can automatically unify certain incompatible video and audio streams to allow for interoperability without requiring any major operational changes. The integration extends all the way to the management capabilities in Skype for Business, which can be used to set up groups and encrypt important calls like executive briefings to ensure any sensitive business information brought up during a conversation isn’t exposed to hackers. Everything else, including setting up welcome messages and maintaining session logs, can be handled directly in the startup’s user-facing client.

The technology will enable Cisco to significant lower the adoption barrier to its communications solutions for organizations with existing teleconferencing investments to maintain. But there’s no reason to believe that its plans stop there. Acano could be integrated with the presentation and screen sharing capabilities the networking giant gained through the acquisition of Tropo Inc. earlier this year to produce a one-stop platform for enterprise collaboration that would be able to put up a much better fight against Skype. The interoperability between the two only serves to make the switch much easier for Microsoft customers than it otherwise would be. 

Image via Geralt