The acquisition allows 8x8 to providing interoperability between more than two dozen team collaboration clients as part of the 8x8 Communications Cloud. Sameroom provides employees, customers and partners with the ability to collaborate across disparate team messaging solutions, as well as the capability to launch 8x8 communication services from within these apps.
“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, interoperability and 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.”
“Team collaboration has long been the internal approach of choice for technical teams. But as these tools started to spread across the enterprise, the lack of cross team and cross platform interoperability resulted in two fundamental problems - noncompliance and fragmentation,” said Andrei Soroker, co-founder of Sameroom. “8x8 understands that true unified communications and collaboration requires a new and open approach to team collaboration, which is why Sameroom was acquired. With this move, Sameroom will now be able to help more companies enable team collaboration as the technology becomes core to the 8x8 Communications Cloud.”
Sameroom addresses these 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.