Cisco To Buy Jabber

Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Jabber, Inc. for an undisclosed amount. This is just the most recent of a series of acquisitions -- Webex being the largest, and PostPath the most recent -- where Cisco has clearly demonstrated it's desire to contend with Microsoft for the large and growing market for enterprise collaboration.

I was unable to attend GigaOm's Mobilize event, but the CTO of Cisco spoke there about Cisco goals in the market:

[from With Microsoft in Sight, Cisco Buys Jabber - GigaOM by Stacey Higginbotham]

Yesterday at GigaOM’s Mobilize event, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told the audience that the company believes collaboration to be a $34 billion business, and emphasized the move away from selling only networking gear. Services are a crucial part of the that strategy and a robust presence platform is one of the essential services in offering real-time collaboration that Warrior highlighted in her keynote. And for those keeping score in Microsoft/Cisco showdown, Jabber (which Om has called the platform of choice for voice-over-IM) is way more compelling that what I’ve seen demonstrated in Microsoft’s unified communcations efforts through SharePoint.

Jabber Inc. has always been a innovative force, but its technology has generally been used by telephone carriers and large software companies -- like Oracle -- as a component of larger solutions. Jabber Inc. has never really had an impact at the consumer level, like AOL's AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Microsoft Messenger. While Apple has used the XMPP protocol in iChat, and Google has adopted XMPP for its Gtalk system, neither of these are based on Jabber Inc. technology, but are based on the XMPP protocol pioneered by Jabber Inc as well as the open source Jabber community.

With this acquisition, the smart folks and strong technology that has been developed at Jabber Inc. over the past years could become part of a new platform strategy from Cisco. I can't wait to talk to Paul Guerin and Joe Hildebrand about their plans as part of the much larger Cisco. Look for that next week.

[Full disclosure: Jabber Inc. is a former client of mine; I have no financial interest in the company or in Cisco.]

Who's next? Yammer?