Cisco scoops up Jabber
In a sign that open source has truly gone mainstream, Cisco Systems forgot to mention that Jabber is an open-source messaging company when it announced the acquisition of Jabber on Friday.
(Credit:
Jabber)
Indeed, the real news centers around Cisco's growing battle with Microsoft over collaboration, as Larry Dignan points out over at ZDNet. Open source? That's just necessary plumbing, apparently. Indeed, even Jabber hardly mentions open source throughout its Web site, preferring instead to focus on "open standards."
This is appropriate, since Jabber has never been about 100 percent open-source solutions. The company uses open Jabber technologies, but its products are not necessarily open-source.
The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but I suspect that this was a very small acquisition for Cisco. Jabber makes great technology, but I've never heard of it making a great business from it. The only customer it appears to have announced in 2008 is the U.S. Marines.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
"Jabber makes great technology, but I've never heard of it making a great business from it. "
For a lot of "start-up companies" [yet not strictly the case with Jabber] the whole "profit plan" is "survive until you are bought by a big company"!
@lmasanti: Yes, that seems to be the normal mode of exit for most companies, but I really wish we had more standalone open-source companies to prove out the model.
@azmolek: Fascinating. I didn't know that, but it makes this deal much richer than I originally guessed.
You are correct - Jabber (server-side) is open standard not open source. Jive Software also uses XMPP (Ignite). XMPP does not have the install-base within the enterprise but this acquisition is still a good move by Cisco and reinforces a trend (Avaya) of vendors re-examining how to approach presence.
More: http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/09/cisco-announces.html
Hope you are well. Any news on what happens to djabberd?
Warm regards,
ddg
CEO
Dimdim.com: Meet freely
Cisco must have seen some value that Jabber, Inc. could bring to their products, though, and I hope that this arrangement works out well for all parties involved.
Small companies that offer infrastructure or platform technology are often under strong NDA's that prevent the most interesting sales to be made public.
@simmons142: I'm sure if you gave Jabber a call they'd be happy to clarify the differences between themselves and Openfire.
- by xmppwin September 19, 2008 2:22 PM PDT
- "but I've never heard of it making a great business from it. The only customer it appears to have announced in 2008 is the U.S. Marines."
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(9 Comments)Small companies that sell infrastructure or platform technology are often under strong NDAs that prevent their most interesting sales from being made public.
@simmons142: I'm sure if you gave Jabber a call they'd be happy to clarify the differences between themselves and Openfire.