9/30/2008 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last week announced its intention to acquire privately held instant-messaging (IM) provider Jabber, upping the ante relative to competitors Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Google Inc. in a fast-exploding unified communications (UC) market segment.

Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but market watcher Gartner Inc. sees it as a clear indication that Cisco plans to take the fight directly to Microsoft, IBM and Google. (Cisco has long-standing partnerships with both Redmond and Big Blue, for the record.)

Cisco pulled the trigger on the acquisition at a particularly fraught time, noted Gartner analysts David Smith, Bern Elliot and Jeffrey Mann. The market itself is consolidating, as Microsoft, IBM and other players work feverishly to build out IM and presence platforms to bolster their unified communications and collaboration (UCC) bona-fides.

The Gartner trio sees the Jabber acquisition as complementing Cisco's purchase of the former WebEx Inc., which gave Cisco a software as service (SaaS) platform for Web conferencing, calendaring, shared team workspaces and an IM tie-in with AOL. More recently, Cisco bolstered its e-mail credibility by picking up PostPath, the Gartner trio pointed out.

"The Jabber acquisition signals a furthering of Cisco's standards-based rich presence initiative to aggregate and surface multiple sources of presence," they wrote. "With its 'network as a platform' vision, Cisco has a key opportunity in a market dominated by IBM and Microsoft to push interoperability between IM and presence protocols."

Gartner sees a huge upside for Cisco, starting with Jabber's large installed base in the financial services and government verticals, "which should give Cisco inroads into those industries."

There's also Jabber's XML-based XMPP protocol, which Gartner noted "has garnered strong support from application developers, who use it to develop Web-based applications." SIP/SIMPLE will likely remain the protocol of choice for both IM and VoIP, Gartner conceded, but XMPP is popular on the Web 2.0 tip. "Microblogging applications like Twitter are based on XMPP as well as Google Talk," they wrote. "[T]his affords Cisco entry into Web 2.0 and social software."

On the other hand, Cisco must overcome a few challenges, starting with integration between Jabber's own platform and its Cisco Unfiied Presence Server (CUPS). "Though Cisco has not yet offered a road map for integration, we believe Cisco will move Jabber servers into the data center to aggregate and federate presence servers. Cisco's dual SaaS and on-premises vision will complicate this task. Though the growth opportunities will mostly lie in SaaS offerings, Cisco must integrate with its on-premises offerings," they wrote.

Integration at the protocol level could also prove problematic, according to Gartner."Cisco's communications infrastructure is SIP-based, while the WebEx connect presence technology is based on the AOL Instant Messenger Open System for Communication in Realtime [OSCAR] protocol." --Stephen Swoyer