IBM and Cisco team up on enterprise collaboration to stave off rivals like Slack and Microsoft | TechCrunch

Communication/collaboration "cognitive" consolidation

"The bigger picture in this latest IBM and Cisco deal is that both companies are feeling the heat of competition from a wide range of rivals, some big and some actually quite small.

They include standalone services from popular startups like Slack, Quip, Trello and Asana; as well as those offered by large companies like Microsoft and Citrix, which not only build their own solutions but have been aggressive acquirers of those startups that have built popular enterprise productivity tools.

It’s a mark of how far we’ve come in the tech world that some of these products from much smaller outfits can give huge IT businesses a run for their money."

IBM and Cisco team up on enterprise collaboration to stave off rivals like Slack and Microsoft | TechCrunch