Via GigaOm, Cisco seems to be adding another piece to its email- and specifically Outlook-integration strategy, by investing in a startup called Xobni.
It's a small investment in a small company addressing a small piece of the email/collaboration puzzle. But it's another indication that Cisco, as it did when it purchased PostPath last year, intends to challenge Microsoft on Microsoft's turf.
Xobni (that's "inbox" spelled backwards, which is cleverer than sticking parentheses in your company name) makes a plug-in for Outlook inboxes. And as with PostPath, I think there's an attempt here by Cisco to, at a minimum, dilute Microsoft's value in its core desktop point of strength.
Xobni's plug-in lets you integrate Yahoo Mail, Skype, LinkedIn and Facebook into your Outlook client. Including LinkedIn shows that this is aimed at the business community.
Xobni says its value prop is to help users manage the growing volume of messages that come in from social networking and IM sites; specifically
Xobni extends Outlook by offering fast search, conversation threading, a social networking platform, and many other features designed to make email better.
I say the value to Cisco is that if you're of a mind to integrate Yahoo or Skype IM (and potentially voice) into your Outlook email client, maybe you'll decide you don't need Microsoft's Communicator client, which means you don't need Office Communications Server (OCS). Sure, what you'll have with the Xobni-based integration probably won't be as full-featured or robust or well integrated as Communicator working with OCS, but if users buy into the Xobni approach on a piecemeal basis--on the theory that they're already on those other social networking tools anyway--then maybe Communicator starts to seem like overkill.
Enterprises that are truly set to embark on an OCS migration probably won't be won over, for obvious reasons. But if your major initiatives are on hold anyway because of the economy, or if you're a small- to medium enterprise, you may not yet have come to grips with OCS. And this could give you another reason to hold off some more.
Seems to me that it's in Cisco's interest to keep the desktop communications environment unsettled at least in the short term. At this point, they don't care nearly as much about what you choose as your integrated communications dashboard--as what you don't choose.
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