Cisco To Buy Jabber

Danny Rathjens writes "In the continuing trend of big companies buying out small companies with open source products, Cisco has announced that they are buying Jabber. The press release doesn't really talk about the open source aspect of Jabber, and Jabber's website doesn't mention the news yet. I'm sure the question many of us have is whether Jabber's open source status will be changed in any way due to the purchase." Reader Eddytorial had this to contribute: "eWEEK offers a good look into how Jabber's messaging client will fit into Cisco Systems' overall 'presence' strategy in its market wars with Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel, and others. Cisco, which already had a basic instant messaging option, but one that didn't scale for an enterprise nearly as well as Jabber's, has just about everything else in place." It's also worth noting that Cisco open-sourced Etch in recent months.

Comments

Cisco

[Enderandrew]

Cisco already provides phones, PBX, etc. and tools to mix your voicemail and e-mail into one system. Buying an IM company allows them to offer voicemail, e-mail, and IM on one platform. However they could have just used Jabber without buying it, unless they intend to end the open source licensing.

Re:Cisco

[gehrehmee]

Or if they just wanted a good way to get engineers who know their way around a particular family of technology, and who have a successful name backing them up...

Re:Jabber Inc

[davolfman]

Or perhaps it gets them a few programmers who already know the ins and outs of said protocol and can now be added to projects creating an enterprise product from the system.