Cisco Upgrades Its Collaboration Infrastructure with Jabber Acquisition

| Sep 23, 2008 | Application Infrastructure | Competitive Intelligence Report

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: High

Event Summary

September 19, 2008 - Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's Collaboration portfolio. The acquisition will enable Cisco to embed presence and messaging services "in the network" and provide aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions, across multiple platforms including Cisco WebEx Connect and Cisco Unified Communications.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Cisco’s announced acquisition of privately held Jabber. Continuing a recent string of similar collaboration additions (PostPath, IronPort and Securent) this purchase queues up advanced presence and messaging capabilities for use in Cisco's forthcoming WebEx Connect collaboration framework and Web 2.0 product suite as well, as its current unified communications (UC) product set.

• Vendor Importance: High to Cisco, as this acquisition will help the company upgrade its messaging and presence capabilities across both its WebEx and UC solutions. It will also give the company a centralized yet federation-capable presence repository and inter-application XML routing system it can employ across its entire collaboration portfolio.

• Market Impact: High on the collaboration and productivity market over the long term. Though these capabilities won't find their way into Cisco's channel until 2009, this acquisition stands as a direct warning shot over the bow of Microsoft. And given Cisco's desire to deliver Jabber capabilities as a service from its MediaTone Network, this acquisition sets the stage for direct competition with IBM and Oracle, which just announced an in-cloud and on-premise collaboration platform, Beehive.

CLIENTS ONLY

Current Perspective

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Application Infrastructure | More information

Recommended Competitor Actions

• Rivals not currently supporting the XMPP standard, relying instead on home-grown federation, should consider adding support for XMPP as a gateway between disparate messaging systems. This standard, which has been around since 1999 (in draft form) has garnered interest from some notable companies this year including Google, which financially backs the protocol and Facebook, which uses the protocol as a means of connecting Facebook chat with other messaging systems. It is also well suited to cloud computing architectures and can serve as a foundation for next-generation tools like microblogging (a la Twitter).

• Rivals should note that while the Jabber acquisition will incur some product disruption, particularly for customers utilizing the company's UC presence server, its decision to layer presence and messaging services over its existing on-premise software via the MediaTone Network will greatly offset this disruption.

• Rivals with strong UC solutions (Avaya, Microsoft and Siemens) should point out that while Cisco's plan to deliver Jabber messaging and presence as SaaS offerings will allow the firm to quickly add Jabber functionality to its fledgling WebEx Connect solution, the company will still need to integrate Jabber physically into its on-premise UC software, a task that will take Cisco well into 2009 and impose customer disruption in the form of on-site software upgrades.

• Microsoft should view Cisco's acquisition of Jabber as a serious threat from two vantage points. First, the company now owns a true, centralized presence store to compete with Microsoft's Office Communications Server. And second, Cisco has drawn a line in the sand positioning its collaboration portfolio as being truly open with support for multi-protocol communicants -- both SIP and XMPP, for example rather than just SIP/SIP for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions (SIMPLE), which Microsoft supports.

• Rivals should note that Cisco has positioned itself as a vendor interested in openness, a position backed by its recent acquisition of Jabber. This move makes Cisco instantly compatible (from a messaging perspective) with a broad range of platforms including Google Talk, AIM, Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. It also places Cisco in an enviable position as a primary driver of the XMPP standard for interoperable messaging and presence.

• IBM should point out that Cisco is a latecomer to the task of unifying presence, IM, email, telephony and Web conferences. IBM Lotus Sametime, for example, has supported XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE since 2006, offering open communications with most public messaging providers (Google, AOL, Microsoft, etc.). IBM should position its existing Lotus Sametime software and Bluehouse/Foundations solutions as being better geared toward scaling from SMB upward than Cisco's emerging collaboration offerings, which do not as yet seek to appeal to specific use cases or customer profiles.

CLIENTS ONLY

Current Perspective

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Application Infrastructure | More information

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