By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence

This week Cisco(NASDQ: CSCO) announced its intent to acquire Orative Corporation, a privately held developer of applications that integrate enterprise telephony systems with mobile devices. Nemertes believes that this acquisition underscores the importance of delivering features to the mobile device as a growing competitive differentiator among those vendors and service providers offering unified communications products and services.

Mobile device integration with enterprise communications services represents the next wave in enterprise communications with a growing demand for the capability to manage communications services such as presence, address books, instant messaging, voicemail, collaboration and conferencing, from handheld devices.

Prior to this acquisition Cisco lacked a clearly defined mobility strategy, preferring to rely on products from developer partners such as Orative and Traverse Networks. Meanwhile, competitors ramped up their mobile offerings including Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Office Communicator Mobile, Avaya’s (NYSE:AV) one-X mobile edition, Ericsson’s (Stockholm: ERICB) Mobile Extension, and Nortel’s (NYSE:NT) Wireless Mobility Client.

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