Cisco buys IM firm Jabber

CISCO IS BUYING instant messaging software company Jabber to beef up its online communication product line, it said Friday.

Jabber, which lets users natter away to each other from Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, IBM Sametime and AOL AIM on the same platform, was bought by the networking and communications giant for an undisclosed sum.

Gilles Chekroun, Senior Consulting Engineer for Emerging Markets at Cisco told the INQ that the firm’s “Unified communication and Webex technology will be re-enforced with the Jabber tools”.

In an additional online statement, senior veep of the firm's Collaboration Software Group, Doug Dennerline, added Jabber would "extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform".

Analysing the move, Mickael Remond, CEO of ProcessOne, a Cisco competitor in the IM space, noted the acquisition was especially interesting coming so soon after Antepo – another instant messaging platform - was snapped up by by Adobe. Remond reckons Cisco’s purchase of Jabber “represents a major victory for open protocols, and more specifically for XMPP against the SIP/SIMPLE protocol in the battle for an open instant messaging standard”.

Before snapping up Jabber, Cisco supported only SIP/SIMPLE in its unified presence platform, but now the firm will be supporting XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) too. This, says Remond, “is a sign that internet protocols are winning against telecom oriented protocols”. And no, that’s not a load of Jabberwocky.

Cisco reckons it can close the deal with Jabber by the end of January. µ