Founded in 2011, MindMeld helps businesses to build conversational interfaces with cloud-based services. MindMeld had previously raised $15.4 million in venture capital financing from IDG Ventures, GV, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Intel Capital, among others. "With MindMeld, we will enhance our Collaboration suite, adding new conversational interfaces to our collaboration products starting with Cisco Spark," Cisco's head of corporate development, Rob Salvagno, said in a blog post. Cisco says that the MindMeld team will form the company's Cognitive Collaboration team, a move that immediately evokes the aesthetic of IBM Watson's cognitive computing group.

Cisco today announced plans to acquire AI startup MindMeld for $125 million. Cisco decided to acquire MindMeld, a company that's been called "Siri on steroids," because many bot experiences today are disappointing, IoT and applications VP Rowan Trollope wrote in a blog post today. "Bringing the MindMeld team to Cisco is a giant leap forward in helping our customers experience the next generation of interactive, conversational interfaces." Cisco collaboration software competition includes other enterprise chat players including Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, and Slack.

The company this morning unveiled Tetration Analytics, which it said is designed to gather "telemetry from hardware and software sensors, and then analyse the information using advanced machine learning techniques". However, it is being heavily promoted as a kind of "time machine" for the data centre. "This is a good sign for Cisco Tetration," Warrilow said. Gartner sees Tetration occupying a space in a broader market Gartner calls IT operations analytics (ITOA).

The Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing are three technologies that are converging to disrupt nearly every industry. IoT refers to a connected network of objects embedded with technology that enables the collection and exchange of data. Cloud computing is the storing and retrieval of data, and accessing application programs via the Internet. Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence by machines. We are currently in the midst of the rise of the first wave of this technological convergence.