Through the Looking-Glass, and What Cisco Found There

Davey Winder
Saturday, 20 September 2008 19:57

IT Industry - Market

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogoves, and then Cisco bought the IM babe. Actually, I doubt Lewis Carroll would have put it quite like that, as the Cisco Systems purchase of open protocol Instant Messaging software outfit Jabber is far from nonsensical.

Was it really only last month that Cisco Systems announced it was snapping up the Linux-based email and scheduling outfit PostPath in a deal thought to be worth in the region of USD £200 million?

Did that announcement really surprise anyone, given the long history of Cisco buying tech businesses? The answers, by the way are yes and no.

Were we expecting Cisco to acquire Jabber, the Denver-based open protocol IM business which has built up a solid reputation and loyal user base? The same answers apply, both of them.

Considering that Adobe had already made its move and jumped into bed with Antepo in the Instant Messaging space, it was always on the cards that Cisco would be looking for something to buy and beef up Cisco's collaboration portfolio.

There had not been any real rumour circulating that Jabber would be in the frame though.

Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president of the Collaboration Software Group, says that "with the acquisition of Jabber... our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

Certainly there is no doubting that Jabber is able to provide a carrier-grade presence and messaging platform. The leveraging of open standards provide a highly scalable architecture is ideal for the kind of space that Cisco plays in.

The multi-platform collaboration, encompassing presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server and IBM Sametime, makes it ideal for the business market. It adds eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) support to the Cisco platform which previously was SIP/SIMPLE only.

As eWeek reports "The deal will also make Cisco a tougher rival to others in the UCC space, including Microsoft, IBM, Google and several other smaller players."

Of course, consumers have historically been attracted to Jabber because it supports cross-platform chat for AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo! users. It is not clear where the existing non-business users will be left after January when Jabber is pitched into the corporate arena.