News - Cisco acquires messaging company Jabber

[HEXUS]

Networking giant snaps up privately owned, open source instant messaging technology outfit.

Read more.

[TiG]

Having worked in the telephony industry this is a must do move for Cisco. Microsoft are really gaining ground with OCS and exchange 07 working together. Hearing that Microsoft is looking to come out with a Call centred based offering too, this will put huge pressure on Cisco in one of their core arenas.

I guess they felt they needed a competitor to the microsoft offering unlike others like Avaya who are embracing the OCS/Exchange 07 offering in their product sets.

TiG

[duodecim]

Having used Jabber for a while, I think it's a decent enough service... With one major problem. While its use is widespread amongst open-source advocates, you will not find any non-technical people using it. The whole point of IM is communication, and there's little use for the technology if you can't actually communicate with the people you want to with.

This ofcourse isn't a problem with Jabber as a technology in itself, but rather with the lack of connectivity and protectionism between different IM technologies and the companies supporting them.

IM could have been much better if it were unified in the way the phone system is, with service provider neutrality. I don't have any real figures about usage, but it seems to me that percent-wise a lot less people use IM services than over 10 years back in the heydays of ICQ. It actually looks as if web message board communication will take a large share out of email and dedicated IM services due to spam in the former and lack of interoperability in the latter case. Cisco might be rather late to the game...