Cisco is buying Jabber, the lead commercial vendor behind the popular open source XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol. Jabber is used by millions worldwide (including me) and XMPP is the basis of Google’s Chat as well.�� Financial terms of the deal have not yet been publicly disclosed.
“Enterprise organizations 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 in a statement. “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.”
With WebEx, PostPath, the world’s largest networking footprint and a 65,000 member strong employee base Cisco will undoubtabely make Jabber even more popular that it is today in my opinion. Cisco is no stranger to open source either, being a strong contributer to Linux, so there is no reason whatsoever to suspect that Jabber Inc’s relationship and interoperability with the Jabber open source codebase will in any way be negatively impacted by Cisco either.
