Cisco buys WebEx for $145,000 per customer

Cisco's chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo gave a keynote last week at VoiceCon. Given Cisco's position in the VoIP market, he kind of had to, since Nortel and Microsoft gave talks of their own. But Giancarlo's was kind of odd because he focused a great deal of his alloted time to videoconferencing and its place in enterprise communications. Now we know why. Cisco yesterday agreed to buy WebEx, which hosts web-based online conferencing, for $3.2 billion. That ranks the purchase up with Cisco's purchases of set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta or broadband switch builder Stratacom. WebEx has 28,000 customers; is each of them really worth $145,000? No, money like that is strategic, which would indicate that a) Cisco is interested in service revenue, not just hardware, and b) we should expect Cisco to get very interested in IMS, if it isn't already.

For more information about Cisco and WebEx:
- read this article from EE Times

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