SAN DIEGO, CALIF. — The biggest applause from the solution providers at this year’s Cisco Partner Summit went to Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice-president and general manager of Cisco Systems¬’ (NASDAQ: CSCO) collaboration technology group, when he announced that Jabber will be available with no client license or server license.
O’Sullivan stressed this new go-to-market approach for Jabber is not a promotion with an expiry date. Jabber will be available at no additional license cost for those customers already with Cisco Unified Communications, or as a package.
“This is a new approach for Jabber. It’s Jabber for everyone. Think of Jabber as your future profit platform,” he said.
Recently, Cisco released Jabber on the iPad and Windows. It already supported Blackberry, Android, Mac and iOS. Jabber enables users to access high quality video, voice and messaging either on premise or in the cloud. Jabber for Windows will have a unified client so that users just have one place to access all communications options. It’s also integrated into Office, Outlook and Exchange.
Providing Jabber to customers at no additional license costs for client or server will give channel partners a better chance to up-sell in voice, video, telepresence and a solution provider’s own services, according to O’Sullivan.
Beth Vanni, a channel market analyst for PartnerPath, believes Cisco will make up the revenue by driving more bandwidth. She said that by driving more bandwidth it will lead to more routing and switching sales.
“Cisco is moving towards being a workspace collaboration company. They want to drive more consumption of bandwidth and that’s where they will make up the money. They want people on Skype everyday,” Vanni said.
Jabber would compete with Microsoft Lync and Salesforce.com Chatter. Salesforce.com has also released Chatter for free to existing customers.
Follow Paolo Del Nibletto on Twitter: @PaoloCDN.