So, there it is. Sazneo has been acquired by Access Group.

First things first, as a Sazneo user do you need to do anything? The answer is no – Access Group will continue to support the service as well as enhancing and integrating it into their own product suite.

So, what’s our take on the acquisition?

If you were to ask me 3 years ago what the future held for Sazneo, I would have honestly said I didn’t know. All I knew was that team communication within businesses was largely broken and we felt that we had a shot at fixing it.

A lot has happened since then; Google Wave has been and gone, Skype has been acquired by Microsoft and something called “Enterprise Social Media” came from nowhere to enable companies to offer Twitter and Facebook type functionality to their employees. Social tools were the new, new thing, resulting in a $1.2bn acquisition of Yammer last year, also by Microsoft.

Here’s what we learnt – the collaboration tools market is exciting, potentially lucrative and competitive. However, the challenge that these types of product face is one of adoption – people quite simply don’t like change.

About halfway through 2012 we had a realisation – Sazneo was both a product AND a feature. Group messaging makes so much sense but quite often people are reluctant to have another tool on their desktop. Sazneo Embed was our response to this, enabling you to create a group messaging function within another application with little-to-no coding. A person now hardly needed to change their behaviour at all.

And it is this thinking that means our acquisition makes so much sense. Access Group recently launched their new cloud platform, aCloud and were looking for technologies that would enable them to accelerate their growth strategy. Sazneo Embed will enable Access to rapidly offer a real-time team messaging capability from right within aCloud.

This acquisition makes sense for everyone; existing Sazneo customers should feel comfortable that their platform will continue to grow given the larger pool of development resources now available and existing Access customers will quickly get an important set of new features.

So what is happening to the Sazneo team? Mark and I are acting as advisors to Access to help with the acquisition as well as starting our new venture, B2B Leads. Jamie is working with Access to help bring their technology team up to speed and Tim is helping build out the Sazneo infrastructure. The Sazneo team is working hard to make the acquisition as smooth as possible and will remain involved going forward.

If you have any questions or support issues, you can log them in the usual way and the Access team will be taking over responsibility for picking them up. So expect nothing to really change.

As a parting note, both Mark and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all our users for their custom over the years. We know you’ll be in safe hands with Access who have a solid track record for acquiring best of breed software and delivering on their commitment to enhance and support these solutions.

I look forward to seeing the continuing Sazneo journey unfold…

Brett Davis
CEO, Sazneo
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