Nemertes Impact Analysis

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Cisco Jabs At Presence

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) intends to acquire privately held Jabber, a vendor of
software platforms for instant messaging and presence-enabled applications. This
represents the continuation of Cisco's efforts to build out its unified
communications and collaboration services to compete with offerings from
Microsoft and others.

Fifty-two percent of IT executives participating in the Nemertes' Unified
Communications and Collaboration research, are using enterprise-provided IM
services, but this acquisition is about more than IM, as Cisco seeks to leverage
Jabber's platform to provide a master presence repository and extensibility to
other applications.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Evaluate Cisco solutions alongside those from vendors such as
IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Vendors: Look for opportunities to leverage Jabber's open standards-based
extensible architecture to deliver value added applications and/or services

Investors: Cisco threatens to take away market share from IBM Lotus and
Microsoft. In addition Cisco now competes directly with privately held Avaya's "Intelligence Presence Server." Avaya's license to use Jabber code within IPS is not directly impacted by this deal.

Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director

http://www.nemertes.com/benchmarks/unified_communications_and_collaboration

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/corp_091908.html