Zoom Communications Inc. has a variety of products, including meetings, contact center, front-line worker applications and others, but this week there’s a single theme that cut across the fully virtual Zoomtopia event: artificial intelligence. In fact, with that emphasis on how AI is expanding and enhancing Zoom’s conferencing and related services, they could have called the event ZoomtopAI.
It has been almost a year and a half since Cisco Systems Inc. acquired Splunk Inc. At the time, investors were happy because it was a good financial move. Cisco spent $28 billion and would get back about $4 billion a year in revenue that was accretive to profit margins. Splunk revenue is primarily subscription-based, which would accelerate Cisco’s march toward this model.
F5 Inc., the Seattle-based application delivery and security company, is expanding its portfolio with today’s acquisition of CalypsoAI Inc., a leader in enterprise artificial intelligence security. The acquired company was founded in 2018, showing it has been pioneers in the AI security market long before the latest hype cycle. The purchase price was announced at $180 million. The company had raised $43.2 million over three rounds, so the acquisition price provided the investors a strong return.
Cloud communications provider RingCentral Inc. announced today announced it’s acquiring CommunityWFM, a workforce management provider. CommunityWFM will be integrated into RingCentral’s homegrown contact center solution, RingCX. No purchase price was given and CommunityWFM took in no funding, but its revenue is believed to be somewhere in the $5 million to $10 million range.
Palo Alto Networks Inc. today added more capabilities to its fast-growing Prisma SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) platform by leveraging AI to create what the company calls “a blueprint for the AI-ready enterprise.” The Secure Access Service Edge service delivers protection against AI-powered threats, data security that adapts to how information flows, and unified operations capable of intelligent scaling.