The communications apparatus made by Cisco Systems tends to lie-around in the deepest, darkest parts of data centers. And when it functions smoothly, Cisco’s hardware lives in relative anonymity. Over the last few years, however, Cisco has pushed its way to get itself more direct exposure onto workers’ desks.
On Friday, Cisco, the networking giant rounded out that online play extending its cover to sectors such as unified communications and collaboration, with the acquisition of open-source instant messaging software maker Jabber, a privately held messaging specialist, whose protocols are used by Google Talk and Gizmo.
The company did not disclose financial details.
Instant messaging (IM) may still be disapproved –- or even banned — in many offices. But especially for those many –- just entering the workforce — IM’s real-time text conversation and file sharing software has replaced email as their communications media of choice.
Jabber, whose core technology is the open source XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), is famous for the integration of presence data it provides across different devices, users and applications, allowing multiple instant messaging to “talk” to one another. Jabber will help bolster Cisco’s unified communications and collaboration software strategy versus Microsoft, IBM, Google and others.
Cisco will incorporate and offer Jabber’s XCP for users through both Cisco’s on-premise unified communications suite and its SAAS (software as a service) WebEx Connect application, said Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing of Cisco WebEx, in a podcast about the deal.
In essence, Jabber’s system allows multiple IM platforms to “talk” to each other. This means that it allows people using tools such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google to send messages to each and get presence information about one another.
Jabber’s technology is already used by some large companies including AT&T, BT, EarthLink, FedEx, and JP Morgan.
Cisco will use the Jabber technology to complement the WebEx platform, said Charles Carmel, vice president of corporate development for Cisco.
With its increasingly comprehensive array of collaboration products, Cisco now competes head-to-head against the likes of Microsoft, I.B.M., Yahoo and Google, which are all courting the same market.
Given the amount of business Cisco does with these companies, it maintains a certain level of decorum when characterizing its broader software plans.
“Both Microsoft and I.B.M. are important partners to Cisco in many parts of our business,” Carmel said. “I think the collaboration part is an area where there is overlap, and our objective is to make that as seamless as possible.”
Based in Denver, Colorado, Jabber specializes in enterprise messaging software, bills itself as a seller of “commercial messaging solutions.” Cutting the lingo aside, Jabber offers instant-messaging software that has a more corporate shine than applications like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. Jabber’s software provides additional security and message archiving functions that make it possible for financial, government and other large customers that must adhere to regulatory measures to use instant messaging within their organizations.
The acquisition will facilitate Cisco to compete even more aggressively against Microsoft in the unified communications market. And it will fit nicely with some of Cisco’s previous acquisitions including the purchase of Web conferencing company WebEx.
The company also sells voice-over-Internet-protocol phones along with video conferencing systems. It has acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion in March 2007, adding an online meeting and collaboration software element to its arsenal, and purchased the e-mail and calendar software provider PostPath last month for $215 million.
The company says it will also utilize Jabber’s smarts add IM capability to PostPath, yet another recent acquisition. PostPath is an online email and calendaring app that competes with Microsoft’s Live services and Google Apps like Gmail and Calendar in an online collaboration software market Cisco sees exploding from peanuts today to $US34 billion a year.
More extensively, Cisco’s maneuvering represents an attempt to capitalize on the shift to “cloud computing” services where users tap into software running in a data center rather than bothering with applications locked to individual computers. Cisco could benefit from this shift in at least two ways.
“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,” said Doug Dennerlune, senior vice president of Cisco’s collaboration software group.
“Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space.”
Cisco declined to discuss financial details of the acquisition but said that it was expected to close in the first half of the company’s fiscal 2009. Upon completing the transaction, most of the 54 Jabber employees will join Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group, Carmel said.