What does Cisco get by acquiring Jabber Inc?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:35:11 -0400

This morning's announcement that Cisco was buying Jabber raises the question of what Cisco intends to do with the technology. Jabber Inc. provides "enterprise instant messaging and persistent group chat" based on the XMPP standard, which is an obvious fit with Cisco's Unified Communications offerings (which allow companies to aggregate communications ranging from IM to telephony to Web meetings across devices), and would place the company in an even better position to offer the go-to solution for corporate internal communications.

The acquisition also shines the spotlight on Jive and other competitors, such as TechCrunch 50 darling Yammer, a corporate Twitter clone that uses the same XMPP functionality as Jabber. Does this make Yammer a more or less attractive acquisition target? And how will Jive's Openfire compete with a Cisco-owned Jabber?

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