Cisco Acquires PostPath

By Stephanie Jordan
in

For the messaging industry, acquisition news was the buzz of August. (If you’re keeping track, earlier this summer another significant acquisition happened when Proofpoint announced that it had acquired Fortiva, Inc.) On August 12 Return Path, Inc. announced the acquisition of its closely held competitor Habeas, Inc. On August 26 MessageLabs announced its acquisition of Fortium ICA Limited. Now the most recent news is from Cisco. In its announcement from last week, Cisco states that its acquisition of PostPath will enhance the existing email and calendaring capabilities of Cisco’s WebEx Connect collaboration platform.

On the company blog, Doug Dennerline, SVP, collaboration software group for Cisco writes, “Communications, globalization and automation have flattened the world and transformed the competitive landscape. The traditional competitive advantages of size and scale have been replaced by speed and flexibility. In this new world, effective, adaptive collaboration is critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Today’s acquisition of PostPath is part of our commitment to create a comprehensive cloud-based collaboration platform. By offering an on-demand version of the PostPath solution, we can provide flexible, cost-effective email and calendaring integrated with our collaboration portfolio of Cisco Unified Communications, WebEx and Business Video.”

Reacting to the news, Richi Jennings, analyst with Ferris Research notes, “PostPath is the vendor who reverse-engineered the Exchange client protocol, MAPI/RPC, and the related on-the-wire details needed to make a vanilla install of Outlook talk to a non-Exchange mail server with full fidelity. It’s an impressive feat.” In his closing remarks Jennings writes, “Sounds like Cisco wants to offer SaaS collaboration, based on PostPath and WebEx. Whoever said the email world has become dull and uninteresting?”

Published September 4, 2008