Defrag Blog

Cisco has been screaming that collaboration is key to its future growth — both in analyst calls and with its actions. They backed this up again today by acquiring Jabber. (Full disclosure: Andre Durand, one of the founders of Jabber, is one of my close friends and has been a business partner in the past.) With this acquisition, Cisco has now acquired Webex, IronPort, Securent, PostPath and Jabber on the collaboration front. Looking briefly at each:

Webex: conferencing and collaboration platform

IronPort: email and messaging (web) security.

Securent: entitlement management (control and audit access).

PostPath: Linux-based email and collaboration suite.

Jabber: XMPP/Presence and IM company (as much an XMPP platform as anything).

When viewed in pieces, its pretty easy to see that Cisco is quickly assembling a collaboration portfolio - and I expect that they’ll continue acquiring companies in this space (in fact, I predict at least 1 defrag sponsor will get acquired by Cisco in the next 12 months). Over on twitter, Sam Lawrence and I have been commenting on how Cisco and HP are probably going to be HUGE forces and players in the “social computing” space. That seem obvious in the wake of today’s news.

It’ll be fun to watch this wave build, and it’s one of the reasons that I’m confident that the future of the “defrag space” is a nice, big growth curve.