This is a bold move by Cisco (given it's commitment to SIP) to expand industry thinking around presence as well as expanding its thinking around real-time applications given the type of development capabilities made possible with XMPP.
So suddenly, I see both Avaya and Cisco as the new thought-leaders when it comes to presence.
Microsoft and IBM are locked into yesterday's view of presence and where it needs to go.
Question: What will Avaya do since they OEM'd their XMPP capability based on Jabber's platform.
The solution will show up first in the WebEx world (e.g., Media Tone Network, WebEx Connect) and then follow with an on-premises implementation.
Federation will emerge as well between the cloud/SaaS world and on-premises implementations.
Given XMPP's use within the government and financial sectors, this move will also help Cisco expand its customer relationships with those organizations.
SAN JOSE, CA -- 09/19/08 -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's Collaboration portfolio.
The acquisition will enable Cisco to embed presence and messaging services "in the network" and provide rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions, across multiple platforms including Cisco WebEx® Connect and Cisco Unified Communications.
"Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs," said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. "With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."
Jabber provides a carrier-grade, best-in-class presence and messaging platform. Jabber's technology leverages open standards to provide a highly scalable architecture that supports the aggregation of presence information across different devices, users and applications. The technology also enables collaboration across many different presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo!. Jabber's platform leads the market in system robustness, scalability, extensibility and global distribution.
The Jabber acquisition exemplifies Cisco's "build, buy and partner" innovation strategy to move quickly into new markets and capture key market transitions. In addition to internal software innovations, Cisco actively employs investments in, and acquisitions of, other companies to support its software strategy; recent purchases include industry leaders WebEx, IronPort, Securent and PostPath.
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