San Jose, California-based communications MNC Cisco announced yesterday that it has purchased open instant messaging technology provider Jabber Incorporated, in an attempt to improve their messaging features and also expand the current capabilities of their collaboration platform.

This deal comes only a day after Cisco announced that it had completed its acquisition of PostPath Inc., an e-mail and calendaring software company, for $215 million. It had also acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion in March 2007, adding an online meeting and collaboration software element to its arsenal and shows the company's eagerness to move beyond its core competence of Internet switching gears.

The financial terms of the deal that is scheduled to close in January, 2009 have not been disclosed by the two companies. Cisco said the acquisition would enable it to "embed presence and messaging services" in corporate networks. The broader markets responded favorably to the announcement, and Cisco stock rose 6.5 per cent Friday to close at $24.29.

The Denver-based Jabber's services are used by Google Talk and Gizmo, since the company enables collaboration across systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo instant Messenger via their open-source Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol.

Cisco will use the Jabber technology to complement the WebEx platform, said Charles Carmel, vice president of corporate development for Cisco.
With its increasingly comprehensive array of collaboration products, Cisco now competes head-to-head against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and Google, which are all courting the same market.  Given the amount of business Cisco does with these companies, it maintains a certain level of decorum when characterizing its broader software plans.

''Both Microsoft and IBM are important partners to Cisco in many parts of our business,'' Carmel said. ''I think the collaboration part is an area where there is overlap, and our objective is to make that as seamless as possible.''

"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 senior vice president, 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," he concluded.

Moreover, director of marketing of Cisco WebEx Alex Hadden-Boyd informed that the company would embed Jabber's XCP through Cisco's on-premise unified communications suite, as well as through their software as a service (SAAS) app, WebEx Connect.

Cisco both designs and sells networking and communications technology and services under the Cisco, Linksys, WebEx, IronPort and Scientific Atlanta brands. As of this year, the revenue the company has registered has amounted to $39 billion, while their number of employees presently surpasses 66,000.

Founded in 1984, the multinational was one of the first companies to sell commercially successful routers that supported multiple network protocols, although they were not the first to develop such a device. Presently, Cisco's tagline is "Welcome to the human network." Privately held Jabber Incorporated's work-force is at a current number of 50 employees.