Acquisitive Access Group is building up its SaaS assets following the launch of its aCloud platform last November (see Access Group takes to the cloud), with the acquisition of UK start-up Sazneo. Although Sazneo is a small operation (it appears to have received c£350K in funding) its real time communication and collaboration technology is set to have a sizable impact on Access by accelerating the integration of persistent instant messaging services into the Access product suite by up to 18 months.
Sazneo provides instant messaging, real-time group chat and online communities and it is the real time interactive group facilities designed for business environments that differentiate it from products like Yammer and to an extent from Salesforce.com Chatter. They support instant messaging for multiple participants for example, but are based around the concept of status updates. Although a real time environment, Sazneo conversations can be captured and searched which is an enterprise-level feature. The product can be also embedded into applications thereby marrying social media with business applications and this feature will help Access accelerate its business social media journey – something it has been slow to start on. Access has its cloud platform, now it needs to populate it so this will be the first of many SaaS acquisitions, but as far as we can see it is keeping its core assets on premise and keeping SaaS for extensions and peripheral areas.