Now do you believe that Cisco is positioning itself to go head to head against Microsoft? Cisco announced today that it's acquiring Jabber, the presence/IM system that's driven by the XMPP standard.
Following on Cisco's recent acquisition of email vendor PostPath, the Jabber acquisition clearly shows that Cisco is gearing up for the battle against Microsoft for UC dominance.
To me, the key quote in Cisco's announcement of the Jabber acquisition was this, attributed to Doug Dennerline, senior vice president at Cisco's Collaboration Software Group:
With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space. (emhasis mine)
Interoperability in general has been a touchy subject in UC, one that Microsoft and IBM have sparred over. In the context of Jabber, it's noteworthy because most vendors' IM/presence has been based on the SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) standard, which, as its name suggests, is based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Jabber, by contrast, runs on XMPP, an XML-based standard. Microsoft has been a strong SIP proponent, so it seems like Cisco may be trying to box their rival into a corner where Microsoft either adds XMPP support to OCS or ends up looking like they won't support open standards (both SIMPLE and XMPP are IETF-approved standards).
That's my first take on this. Your thoughts?
Update: I found this post by Mike Gotta of Burton Group, which deals with the fact that XMPP is the standard on which Facebook's chat function is built, and also addresses the issue of Microsoft's lack of support for XMPP.
Update 2: Mike also stresses the XMPP angle in his post on the acquisition today.
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