Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire WebEx

15 March 2007
Acquisition Furthers Cisco's Vision for Enabling Collaboration in the SMB Market

Cisco and WebEx today announced a definitive agreement for Cisco to acquire WebEx. WebEx is a market leader in on-demand collaboration applications, and its network-based solution for delivering business-to-business collaboration extends Cisco's vision for Unified Communications, particularly within the Small to Medium Business (SMB) segment.

Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcements comes this much larger deal, worth about $3.2 billion. WebEx provides online conferencing and secure instant messaging, both as a service. It says it has about two-thirds of the market for online meetings. (See WebEx - the Multimedia Dial Tone for a profile of the company.)

The deal will take time to work its way through all the relevant rigmaroles and should be complete by the end of this year. By then, Cisco's vision for WebEx will be more evident to outsiders. Also by then, Cisco is guaranteed to have made some other purchases in this sector. It's sitting on a pot of money and has made clear its interest in human networking and collaboration.

Meanwhile, the name of one of the social networking companies Cisco didn't buy yesterday - LinkedIn - has come up in the blog of Don Tapscott. He's the co-author of Wikinomics and a man who can spot a bandwagon seventy leagues away. He reckons it's a tempting target for eBay. Read the item for his rationale.

And finally, as an example of the worthwhile use of social networking (in case you were wondering if there were any), here on YouTube is Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. It's a cleverly worked debate stirrer, using the conceit of a virtual palimpsest, from a lecturer in anthropology. You don't have to agree with it to admire it. Sadly, most of the video responses are nowhere near as witty or involving.