Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Cisco to Snap Up Jabber

Cisco has recently made its intension clear towards the purchase of open source instant messaging firm Jabber. The company plans to use the Jabber messaging software within its WebEx Connect and Unified Communications packages.

According to an announcement from Cisco, the Jabber buy will help Cisco enhance the existing presence and messaging functions in its Cisco Collaboration portfolio; a move that will further entrench the networking hardware giant into the software game against Microsoft, IBM, Google and others.

Jabber's technology 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.

"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," Doug Dennerline, senior VP for Cisco's Collaboration Software Group, said in a statement. "Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cisco hopes to complete the transaction by the end of its second fiscal quarter in January.