8×8, Inc. has acquired LeChat, the maker of Sameroom, an interoperability platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration in the enterprise.
The acquisition means that 8×8 can provide interoperability between more than two dozen team collaboration clients as part of the 8×8 Communications Cloud.
Sameroom further strengthens 8×8’s cloud communications capabilities and provides employees, customers and partners with the ability to collaborate across disparate team messaging solutions, as well as the capability to launch 8×8 communication services from within these apps.
“The acquisition of Sameroom marks an important milestone for 8×8 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 8×8. “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 8×8’s services.”
Sameroom brings to 8×8 a depth of experience in building and launching high-scale, commercial group-messaging solutions, as well as extensive knowledge of the industry’s leading team collaboration apps. Sameroom makes it possible to establish reliable, bidirectional collaborative environments involving unrelated organizational units using different chat platforms.
“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. “8×8 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 8×8 Communications Cloud.”
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