Cisco buys ScanSafe

Yesterday's news that Cisco is to acquire Web-security provider ScanSafe for $183 million did not really come as a surprise. In fact, I mentioned to a couple of clients last week that I thought an acquisition of ScanSafe was imminent and that Cisco was on my list of the three most likely prospects for acquiring the company (although I thought that Symantec was more likely to acquire the company).

I think that some are underestimating the potential impact that Cisco might have on the market for workplace communications. The company has acquired the only Exchange alternative that does not require an Outlook plug-in (PostPath), a top-flight security provider (IronPort), a leading Web conferencing provider (WebEx), a leading real-time communications company (Jabber), as well as a a host of other companies, and now ScanSafe. Add to all of this that Cisco is already an established and major player in unified communications and has a presence on millions of desktops.

Cisco has probably not developed as cohesive a message around unified communications in the minds of many decision makers as IBM, Microsoft or Google has created, but Cisco clearly has all of the pieces it needs to be a quite formidable competitor in the business email and unified communications markets.