Cisco Buys Jabber to Enhance Its Collaboration Tools

Today Cisco has announced its intention to buy Jabber, Inc., the company behind the popular presence and messaging protocol that is used by many companies to power their instant messaging products, including Google in their GTalk as one of the most prominent example. The amount of the acquisition is not disclosed and the deal is scheduled to be completed by January.

The idea here is pretty simple - Cisco is planning to use Jabber to “extend the reach” of their existing instant messaging service, therefore enhancing Cisco’s communication suite. Cisco is planning to use Jabber technology within Webex, the online collaboration suite for web conferencing, and Unified Workspace, Cisco’s solution for team work and collaboration for distributed teams.

It is not particularly clear to me why they actually chose to buy Jabber when anyone with a domain name can run a Jabber server of their own without having to pay anything. Jabber open-source technology connects multiple IM protocols, including Google Talk, Microsoft Office Communications Server, AOL AIM, and Yahoo. But Matt Asay suggests that the acquisition must be a very small one for Cisco since Jabber could never build a really profitable business out of their excellent technology. And probably Cisco wanted to feel secure owning the company behind the product and experience of its developers to integrate the protocol into their collaboration tools using these very developers. Besides, it may be yet another move in the competitive struggle in the collaboration industry with Microsoft.