8X8 Acquires Sameroom

SAN JOSE – 8x8 Inc. announced today its acquisition of Sameroom, an interoperability platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration in the enterprise. The acquisition catapults 8x8 into an industry-unique position in the team collaboration market by providing interoperability between more than two dozen team collaboration clients as part of the world’s first 8x8 Communications Cloud (see related press release). This interoperability solution further strengthens the company’s cloud communications capabilities and provides employees, customers and partners with the ability to collaborate across disparate team messaging apps, as well as the capability to launch 8x8 communication services from within these apps. Sameroom makes it possible to establish reliable, bidirectional collaborative environments involving unrelated organizational units using different chat platforms.

According to the 2016 Mary Meeker Internet Trends report, the team collaboration market is continuing to grow and messaging tools are outpacing other popular apps. However, today most solutions place users in communications silos due to their inability to interoperate with each other. Increasingly, companies are using chat services to augment or replace email for team collaboration, but the result is fragmentation, siloed information, multiple accounts for each employee, an inability to securely extend collaboration outside of the enterprise, and a violation of corporate data governance policies. This fragmented user base and scattered information ultimately deters enterprise-wide adoption of team collaboration solutions.

“The acquisition of Sameroom marks an important milestone for 8x8 as a company and the cloud communications market as a whole. We’re ushering in the era of the first true and open communications cloud, complete with cross-cloud integration and interoperability capabilities with real-time analytics,” said Vik Verma, CEO of 8x8. “With Sameroom, our customers will enable their internal teams and external partners to collaborate across different team messaging apps of their choice, creating an open, more seamless communications and collaboration environment that is fully compliant with corporate policy. This new technology is the key to delivering messaging capabilities to all of 8x8’s services.”

The Sameroom team will bring deep expertise in chat and messaging to 8x8. Team members have experience building and launching high-scale, commercial group-messaging solutions, as well as a deep knowledge of leading team collaboration solutions.

Sameroom addresses fragmentation and noncompliance challenges by enabling users to stay in their “home” team collaboration service and simply connect with other users’ “rooms” on the same or different platforms. Sameroom relays all messages and files to the connected rooms in real time. This way, users in different groups only need to maintain their home team collaboration account. Since all of the data is replicated and each room retains its own copy, none of the parties violate any corporate data governance policies.

Over 200 enterprises, including leading universities, ecommerce websites, car sharing services, professional sports leagues and more are using Sameroom everyday to communicate between various internal and external team collaboration channels. With this acquisition, Sameroom customers will continue to enjoy the same seamless interoperability, and will also soon be able to leverage embedded enterprise communications features from 8x8, such as start online meetings, audio calls and video conferencing, from within their team collaboration service of choice.

8x8 Inc. (Nasdaq: EGHT)