By now, any interested reader should have been able to get their fill of of news stories about the Cisco acquisition of WebEx. Overly cautious types will point out that this is not a done deal, merely a tendered offer accepted by WebEx management. WebEx shareholders could vote it down or another company could come in with a higher competitive buyout offer. The odds are tremendously low for either of those scenarios to occur.
Cowen and Company's Peter Goldmacher says that a big "data oriented vendor" such as IBM, Oracle, or SAP could decide to go after WebEx as a data platform instead of a communications platform. Others have bandied about the possibility of Google or Yahoo bidding for WebEx to offer unified desktop applications and communications as part of an expanded hosted services platform. Nobody really expects any of these companies to get into a bidding war with Cisco though. The industry consensus is that the deal is a feteaccompli.
Analyst and blogger reactions have been mostly positive about the acquisition for both companies. It is seen as giving Cisco an entree into the small and medium business (SMB) market to broaden their reach from hardware designed for use in large enterprise data centers. It also gives them a way to expand the use of internet-routed data and thus, the use of more of their routers. Surprisingly, I haven't seen many articles talking about Cisco's past tentative steps towards offering combined collaboration services.They gave a shot at introducing a package with integrated telephony and web conferencing called Cisco Unified MeetingPlace, which
Tom Keating says in his TMC VoIP & Gadgets blog that
That should give you some material to chew through that is more than a standard restatement of the acquisition press release. I'll check in again soon with the view from the vendor community.
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