Cisco is acquiring the "presence and messaging software" company Jabber (better known to most people from instant messaging interfaces) for an undisclosed sum. The buyout means that Cisco, best known for providing the plumbing for large swathes of the internet, will be able "to embed presence and messaging services 'in the network' and provide rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions."
It's an interesting acquisition, though Cisco has been integrating Jabber into its systems for some time already.
The thing about Jabber is that it is an open IM system: anyone can use it, anyone can create an account on it. XMPP, teh Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, is clearly going to be important here.
But if Cisco is interested in getting more people messaging each other (on the basis that that means more people using networks, ergo using its products), then might the next target be Twitter? James Governor of RedMonk, which calls itself "the open source industry analyst company", thinks the deal is "big big big", and that Twitter could be next. Quite why.. he hasn't yet shared in detail. But it's certainly interesting for a giant networking company to acquire an open source messaging client.
