posted by: Mark Cortner
Cisco announced early today its intent to acquire Jabber, one of the pioneers and leaders in presence technology. Jabber is frequently closely associated with XMPP protocol. Cisco intends to initially integrate Jabber’s technology with its SaaS-based WebEx Connect collaboration offering, followed by integration with itss premises-based Unified Presence Server.
Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber should bring additional credibility and momentum to its UC and collaboration offerings, especially in the financial services vertical and federal government (key Jabber areas of success). The move also signals Cisco’s recognition and positioning strategy that presence will require a multiprotocol approach.
Over the last 12-18 months, UC vendors have been aggressively positioning and bundling presence capabilities within their applications and platforms. And while interest in presence has been accelerating, questions surrounding the protocol that presence should be based on have surfaced (SIMPLE or XMPP). Cisco’s announcement, while not necessarily a blow to implementation of the SIMPLE protocol, certainly adds momentum to the acceptance (and potentially preference) for products utilizing the XMPP protocol. Look for both protocols to survive and thrive but the key here is both.
Cisco has now joined several other major players, most notably Avaya from a telephony perspective and Google from a SaaS perspective; that have elected to develop or include XMPP within their product strategy for presence-enabled UC applications. In the battle for the UC market, this must drive a response or new strategy from vendors such as IBM and Microsoft – otherwise it may appear as if these historically leading enterprise IM platforms are following behind or not adapting to changes in the UC market …
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