Cisco is continuing with its push into the collaboration space, with the announcement of Cisco Jabber. A product that’s a result of Cisco’s 2008 acquisition of Jabber, it’s a messaging app that brings together presence, IM, voice and video, voicemail, desktop sharing and conferencing into one product that will be available across a swathe of desktop and mobile devices: PC, Mac, tablets and smartphones (including Android, iPhone and Nokia).

The app enables users to seamlessly escalate from an IM chat to a voice, video or desktop sharing interaction on the fly, and because the app will be available with a near-identical identical feature set on nearly any platform you can think of, these features will be available wherever the user happens to be, using their device of choice.

As you’d expect, the app is based upon the XMPP messaging protocol, which means that it’s compatible with many other XMPP-compatible IM services, including GTalk, AIM and Sametime

Of course, with Skype and many other IM vendors in the market, Cisco Jabber not the only multi-platform messaging app available, but Cisco Jabber seems to be very enterprise-friendly, and also offers out-of-the-box integration with video endpoints like IP phones, WebEx and telepresence systems.

Cisco Jabber can be deployed across on-premise and cloud-based options. It’s being rolled out across the various platforms over the coming year, starting with a client for the Mac that’s available now (note that integrated video is not due to be added to the service until the second half of the year, however).

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