Comments on: Cisco scoops up Jabber

Network equipment giant buys "open standards" messaging company, not mentioning the open-source factor. Terms of the deal, likely a small purchase for Cisco, are undisclosed.

[jabberiscisco]

Matt - The Jabber XCP platform developed by Jabber, Inc. is not open source. Jabber, Inc. is not an open source company.

[lmasanti]

quote:
"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"!

[azmolek]

Apparently nobody noticed that that Cisco, Avaya, and Google all use Jabber, Inc. technology - I guarantee you that's not news to Microsoft and IBM who officially have a very real threat to deal with in the enterprise IM space given today's news.

[Matt Asay]

@jabberiscisco: Yes, understood. I was trying to get at that but apparently failed.

@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.

[MikeGotta]

Matt, XMPP is a standard within the DoD so all vendors need to federate/interoperate with XMPP for presence. XMPP is also popular to some extent within financial services where the protocol is used for customized alerting/notification systems. The consumer market (Google) is another good example of where XMPP is being used as well - also Twitter's XMPP stream which is used by some applications.

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

[ddganguly]

Matt,

Hope you are well. Any news on what happens to djabberd?

Warm regards,
ddg
CEO
Dimdim.com: Meet freely

[simmons142]

Very interesting. I've never quite understood the value that Jabber, Inc. claims to offer over their competitors. While I appreciate the Jabber/XMPP protocol, and I'd love to support my hometown businesses (Jabber, Inc. is just down the street here in Downtown Denver), it seems to me like Jive Software's Openfire product is simply a much better, cleaner, and maintainable Jabber server.

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.

[xmppwin]

"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."

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.

[xmppwin]

"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."

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.