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Cisco adds Jabber instant messaging

Cisco's newly announced Jabber support should make instant messaging easier for its customers.

By Alan Lu, 4 Mar 2011 at 12:26

Networking giant Cisco has announced that it is adding support for the open-source Jabber instant messaging protocol to several of its offerings, including WebEx as well as its range of unified communications services and products.

Officially known as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), Jabber is already a popular alternative to proprietary consumer systems such as MSN and AOL Instant Messenger. It supports presence data, voice and video chat in addition to plain text IM.

Cisco is actually rather late in adopting Jabber. Consumer IM systems and applications, such as Google Talk and Apple's iChat and MacOS X iChat Server, already support XMPP. A few other enterprise IM and unified communications products also have some level of XMPP support, such as Microsoft Lync Server (formerly known as Microsoft Office Communications Server) and IBM Lotus Sametime. By supporting XMPP, Cisco users should be able to IM users of such rival systems much more easily.

Cisco has yet to confirm when its Jabber roll-out will occur. The vendor bought Jabber back in 2008.

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1 comments

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This is a bit misleading...

...if you take the view that Jabber Inc have been providing XMPP solutions for many years and have continued to do so since Cisco acquired them in 2008.

But I get your gist and it has taken them a while to get some new product lines out into the market, although I note that the Mac app they talk about still won't be available until later in the year.

There is a well developed ecosystem of XMPP / Jabber solutions providers already in the market with ProcessOne provider bespoke solutions, Isode in aviation, military, and government and Cleartext (I'm the MD) in the SMB/E spaces with content filtering and archiving.

All good news for the sector though and I expect we'll continue to see large companies take up XMPP for their solutions and some market consolidation.

By davidbanes on Saturday Mar 5