Cisco And Microsoft

"After years of battling it out for collaboration supremacy, the ice between Cisco and Microsoft is thawing," CRN reported as Cisco launched a new offering that allowed interoperability between Cisco collaboration products and Microsoft’s Skype for Business. "The Cisco approach up until the last year or so has been around, 'It has to be us or nothing,'" Chris Bottger, chief technology officer at IVCi, a Hauppauge, N.Y.-based solution provider told CRN at the time. The partnership involved the new Cisco Meeting Server, which allowed customers to easily connect people in Cisco video rooms with others who are using Skype for Business. The solution was built based on technology Cisco acquired from Acano, a collaboration startup that specializes in Microsoft. (Cisco bought Acano for $700 million in January.) More importantly, this opens the door for greater interoperability between the kings of networking equipment and productivity software.