Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Acano Limited, a privately held company based in London that provides collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software. Acano’s hardware and software includes gateways, and video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments. This acquisition will help Cisco’s collaboration strategy to make their VTC stuff work with anyones.

Cisco says that less than 10 percent of the conference rooms in the world are connected via video. Thus, they see a big market for growth in VTC, still. Cisco’s collaboration business segment claims 17 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016. Acano’s technology will allow Cisco to accelerate our development in the key areas of interoperability and scalability.

• Interoperability: Acano shares Cisco’s vision of interoperability; they have focused on developing products that connect a wide variety of endpoints and systems from all the major collaboration vendors. Their technology further enhances Cisco’s ability to deliver video from the cloud to any screen. This includes enhanced support for Microsoft’s proprietary protocols and mobile browsers through WebRTC support.

• Scalability: As collaboration adoption grows, so does the need for infrastructure models that can support a higher capacity of users and systems than customers have ever required before. This is important in both cloud-based environments and hybrid environments where customers have a mix of cloud and on premises solutions. Acano has solved several key challenges in delivering collaboration at dramatically increased scale – with both dedicated hardware appliances and virtualized software options that allow customers to connect tens of thousands of users and meeting rooms without compromising on the audio and video experience.

With Acano, Cisco believes they can accelerate their collaboration momentum and bring new capabilities to market faster. Together, Cisco and Acano say they will be able to capture the expanding market opportunity in collaboration and deliver open and interoperable solutions whether in the cloud or via a hybrid model.

The Acano team will join the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group led by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $700 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention based incentives for Acano employees who join Cisco. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory review.

Here’s a blog from Cisco’s Vice President of Corporate Business Development, Rob Salvagno, that explains the purchase.