Cisco Continues Playing Pac Man by Acquiring JabberCisco Continues Playing Pac Man by Acquiring Jabber

Sometimes you have to wonder about the Pac-Man-like strategy that Cisco has for acquisitions. Today's announcement of the Jabber acquisition, I believe, is their 57th acquisition since 2001. That is a lot, even by Oracle's standards.

Sometimes you have to wonder about the Pac-Man-like strategy that Cisco has for acquisitions. Today's announcement of the Jabber acquisition, I believe, is their 57th acquisition since 2001. That is a lot, even by Oracle's standards.Seriously, though, at least it seems they have a strategy. I will comment on others' criticism (see comments) of the Pac-Man approach in which they say that Cisco doesn't create any of their own technology, they just acquire it, as that isn't true. Not only have they created a ton of their own - just go back to their networking roots, and then look at the beautiful internal setup they have for nurturing skunk works teams into new products, and you can see that it's not true. It's just that when they decide to enter a market that traditionally has been foreign to them, such as contact centers or unified communication; they go after it in a big way. Let's face it folks, Cisco is big. They do this because they can. For example, they can acquire a company such as Latitude for conferencing, and then add WebEx which has conferencing and so much more, and then down the road blend them together. Why not? People might not like the strategy, but it's strategic. It gets them there fast.

Cisco calls this strategy build, buy and partner. It makes sense. Most companies these days supplement building their own with partnering, as the old mentality of doing everything internally just doesn't fly anymore because due to the speed of technology change, most companies don't have the resources to spread themselves so thin. It is better in many cases to partner with a specialist, and if you have the financial resources that Cisco has, sometimes you are lucky to be able to acquire those specialists. Let's also not forget the fact that Cisco is up against other like-sized and minded companies such as Microsoft, who aren't exactly sitting back and making everything themselves either.

Getting back to Jabber - in this case, the Jabber acquisition furthers Cisco's strategy of providing always available services embedded into the network in general, and strengthens their unified communications and collaboration portfolios in particular. I think this was a great move for them. Hmmm. I wonder who is next?