Cisco buys Jabber to expand interoperability

Cisco, has announced that has purchased Jabber, the open source instant messaging company.

Many companies' communications systems are powered by the Jabber presence protocol such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo.

"Enterprise organisations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs," said Doug Dennerline, Cisco's senior vice president for its collaboration software group.

"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. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

"This is a very interesting acquisition by Cisco", commented Mickael Remond, chief executive of instant messaging solutions company ProcessOne.

"Cisco buying Jabber represents a major victory for open protocols, and more specifically for [its protocol] XMPP against the SIP/SIMPLE protocol in the battle for an open instant messaging standardultimately this is a sign that internet protocols are winning against telecom oriented protocols."

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Benny Har-Even is a twenty-year stalwart of technology journalism who is passionate about all areas of the industry, but telecoms and mobile and home entertainment are among his chief interests. He has written for many of the leading tech publications in the UK, such as PC Pro and Wired, and previously held the position of technology editor at ITPro before regularly contributing as a freelancer.

Known affectionately as a ‘geek’ to his friends, his passion has seen him land opportunities to speak about technology on BBC television broadcasts, as well as a number of speaking engagements at industry events.