After closing a $1.8 billion merger with Citrix's GoTo Meeting business in early 2017, Boston-based public company LogMeIn is introducing a new brand of corporate online communication tools that integrates different products for video meetings, phone calls and text messaging into a unified collaboration tool.
The launch of the GoTo brand comes months after CEO Bill Wagner detailed "executional missteps" stemming from the company's merger, which was announced in 2016. In a quarterly call last year, Wagner explained that enterprise customers failed to renew their one-year subscriptions, partially because of a number of changes that LogMeIn made to the terms, duration and renewal process of GoTo contracts; in July 2018, LogMeIn saw $1.4 billion worth of its market valuation wiped away.
"Whenever you bring two companies together, there's a lot of operational challenges," Wagner said on Thursday. "We're now past that stage and now the business is performing well; this product is really the culmination of everything that we were working on in the last couple of years."
Wagner added that the main difference between the original suite of products and the new one is that the software is easy to use. GoToConnect, the company’s first product under the unified "GoTo UCC" brand, will be generally available in early April in North America, with additional international availability expected later in 2019, according to LogMeIn.
Wagner commented on the release of the GoTo brand while LogMeIn - which has 800 Boston-based employees - was hosting the second edition of "InGames," a charitable sport tournament to raise money for local nonprofit BUILD Boston.
To participate into the tournament, companies such as Drift, Akamai, Rue Gilt Group, Bullhorn and VMWare sponsored a team who went to play basketball, ping pong, corn hole and pool at LogMeIn's headquarters on Thursday afternoon. Through the event, BUILD Boston raised approximately $35,000.
"We don't make a physical product, we make software; and so for us, the importance of people and, therefore, education, is super viable," Wagner, who's on the board of BUILD Boston since 2017, said.
Now in its eighth year of operation in Boston, BUILD teaches entrepreneurship to kids from under-resourced communities as a way to build their confidence and propel them to high school and college success. It works with seven partner schools and serves around 400 kids a year through its 4-year program for high schools students in Boston public schools.
The money raised through the "InGames" will support the teachers who are participating into the program as well as mentor training, according to Ed Wilson, director of development at BUILD Boston. The nonprofit has a network of 160 mentors in Boston, who come to the schools each week or every other week to help students in their entrepreneurial journey.
