Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has announced a partnership with Gupshup and API.ai with the purpose of creating a fully integrated cloud-based collaborative service. The announcement was made during Cisco Live! 2016. Following this announcement, we expect to see thousands of bots quickly joining Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. The collaboration will also turn up the intensity of competition between team communication chat apps, the likes of Slack and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Skype.
Before Gupshup became an enterprise messaging service company in 2010, it had created an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India. As of today, it processes 4 billion messages a month. API.ai is a known machine learning and bot builder, being an early leader in conversational user interface. API.ai opened the API to its personal auditory assistant that predates Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s Alexa.
Cisco is expected to benefit from the new partnership by reaching to more than 10,000 API.ai developers. According to Gupshup CEO Beerud Sheth, approximately 2,500 developers have made 4,000 bots since the company opened its bot platform earlier this year. He further noted that more than 30,000 SMS’ developers use Gupshup.
According to industry research, enterprise partnership market is expected to grow from $47.30 billion in 2014 to $70.61 billion in 2019. Recent announcements by top firms including Google and Microsoft have further fueled demand for tools to integratechatbots into enterprise collaboration platforms the likes of Spark.
Jason Geocke, General Manager of Cisco’s Tropo Business Unit, noted that transforming the collaboration experience is about bringing people together and giving them quick access to critical information and the ability to share and communicate in real time. He further noted that providing their customers and developers access to Gupshup’s intuitive bot platform will create customizable experience that will enhance Cisco Spark’s capabilities.
