Cisco Picks Up Jabber for Collaboration, IM

Cisco

Cisco announced today that it has acquired Jabber, an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo, for an undisclosed sum.

Cisco will try to use Jabber as a means of improving its messaging offerings in the business world. Jabber’s technology enables collaboration across a wide array of presence systems such as, Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google, which made it an ideal target for the company.

“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. “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.”

The amount of the acquisition were not announced, but considering Cisco’s desire to break into the enterprise IM space, especially in the face of new enterprise messaging services like Yammer and Present.ly, it was a hole Cisco needed to fill.