Cisco Ditches WebEx Social, Replaces It With Jive

Cisco is shelving its WebEx Social service and is replacing it with collaboration platform Jive, which will be integrated with all of Cisco’s communication products, including the WebEx meeting service, which is not being discontinued.

The move is being seen as an admission that Cisco’s own collaboration offering had lagged behind its rivals, while the firm says it will pursue a new strategy of working with enterprise social software vendors to provide native integration.

“Rather than emphasise within one product, we’re making sure [collaboration is] an integral part of all our products,” says Perder Urlander, Cisco’s vice president of collaboration solutions marketing.

Cisco Jive partnership

Cisco and its partner network will now resell Jive as a fully integrated component, allowing customers to easily switch between real-time communication and the collaboration platform seamlessly, while WebEx meetings or a Jabber chat session can be launched directly from Jive workflows.

“What really gets me excited about the Jive and Cisco integration is that we are bringing two leading collaboration and communications technology solutions together and delivering them in a single experience for our customers,” adds Urlander. “Together, we are helping our customers easily go between their real-time conversations, like instant messages, videoconferences and online meetings, with the more persistent social conversations, like blogs, discussions, wikis, posts and online groups.”

Cisco has pledged to support WebEx Social until June 2016 for cloud customers and until June 2017 for those who have it installed on their own servers and Jive will hope the deal will help it expand its reach.

“Cisco is one of the most well-respected companies on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of companies leveraging their real-time communication and collaboration offerings,” says Tony Zingale, CEO and chairman of Jive Software. “Together, we can bring Jive’s industry-leading collaboration platform to these customers, and help drive even deeper and more productive business outcomes across their employees, customers and partners.”

What do you know about the towering might of Cisco? Take our quiz!