Collaboration Loop - Cisco Acquires WebEx Part 1: March Madness For The Unified Communications & Collaboration Market

An updated perspective on the acquisition. Part 2 should be out on Monday.

Cisco Acquires WebEx Part 1: March Madness For The Unified Communications & Collaboration Market
March 16, 2007
By Mike Gotta

What a month. Not only do we have one of the more exciting times in college sports, we have a certain level of mania hitting the unified communications and collaboration markets. On top of the news coming out of the VoiceCon event earlier in the month, and the recent Microsoft acquisition of TellMe, we now have this $3.2 billion dollar deal between Cisco and WebEx. There has been a tremendous amount of media coverage already but not all the news reports have taken a look at all the different angles this deal includes. Much of the coverage has been focused on web conferencing. While an important aspect, Cisco had many less expensive options available if all it wanted to do was buy its way into the hosted web conferencing market. In this two-part post, I’ll walk you through several facets of the acquisition, what it means to Cisco, and what it means in regards to Adobe, Google, IBM and Microsoft. Part 1 of this article is below.

Source: Collaboration Loop - Cisco Acquires WebEx Part 1: March Madness For The Unified Communications & Collaboration Market