Cisco, an incredibly active acquirer, is ready to start doing deals again, according to CEO John Chambers on the networking company’s financial results call Wednesday afternoon. Chambers said,”We expect to be more active with acquisitions,” and the company will focus on its five core areas of focus.

Those five areas are switching and routing, the data center, collaboration, video and architectures for business transformation. In the last year Cisco has done six acquisitions with half of those occurring in the last three quarters while it was handling its restructuring. As we’ve documented, Cisco’s previous forays into M&A have helped the company spread its bets on emerging technology around, but haven’t always helped it boost its bottom line. Cisco also had seemed to lose focus on previous years, letting other firms come into its market and take share.

Based on the financial results at the end of Cisco’s fiscal second quarter of 2012, the company has $ 46.7 billion available in cash and cash equivalents. It’s profitable and generating cash as well after it completed its reorganization, which has cut $ 1 billion off its annual run rate. In response to questions about M&A strategy on the call, Chambers said that the acquisition strategy remains the same, buying companies with about 100 engineers and products close to coming to market that Cisco customers tell the company it should buy. He pointed to the acquisitions of Tandberg and Starent as good examples of deals and said that of all the large players out there making acquisitions only Oracle had a similar success rate as Cisco when it came to integrating deals.

If Cisco is back in the shopping mood, we’ve got a few suggestions for places where it should start. It should go all in on the cloud, which seems like where Cisco wants to focus anyhow.

Since software-defined networks and OpenFlow are clearly an emerging area in the networking space, Cisco should shell out money for a player in this space. Big Switch would be a good bet, as it’s trying to create an ecosystem using open source controllers and then focusing on building services and applications on top of that platform. The model is different for Cisco, but the focus on enterprise applications and services is one that would benefit Cisco and lead to higher margins.

As clouds are deployed, monitoring and tracking web site and application performance from within the network is important for Cisco and its enterprise clients, which is why New Relic could also be a good pick up for the company. New Relic’s SaaS-based software monitors performance and tracks issues back to the data center to help enterprises or web site owners pinpoint bottlenecks and problems.

If Cisco wants to go big, my colleague Derrick Harris suggest that NetApp might be a good buy because it reduces Cisco reliance on EMC, a relationship that is rumored to be on the rocks. If it’s not NetApp, any storage vendor with a strong virtualization story and promise in the enterprise would help bolster Cisco’s burgeoning server division as well as its storage networking lineup.

Given the array of startups bringing both intelligence and performance improvements to different areas of the network, there are plenty of opportunities for Cisco to pick up new customers, technology and market share by buying a startup or established company. Who do you think Cisco should snap up?

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Facebook Messenger arrived yesterday, bringing a cross-platform group messaging solution that leverages your Facebook network and SMS to reach a wide potential audience. I compared it at a high level to other messaging solutions, but let’s take a closer look at Facebook’s offering and what it can do.

Getting started

Facebook Messenger requires only that you have an active Facebook account to play. That should make things easy for about 750 million of you. If you’re among the rare few smartphone owners who aren’t yet on Facebook, you can also sign up for an account right from the Messenger app, thanks to a link that shoots you to the mobile sign-up page in your device’s browser.

Home screen

Once you’ve signed in, you’ll be taken to a screen displaying a list of your messages. This will pull in any existing conversations you have on Facebook itself, including Facebook Chat conversations and Facebook Messages. You can interact with any of these existing message threads just as you would on the Facebook site. Each message in the list displays the names of conversation participants, a preview of the most recent message received or sent, when the last message was received or sent, and a blue circle if there are unread messages in the conversation thread.

Swiping left on any conversation listed on the home screen will bring up a button that allows you to archive it. Archived messages can still be viewed from the Facebook website, under Messages, by scrolling to the bottom of your inbox and hitting the View: Archived link.

Creating new messages and replying to existing ones

From the home screen, tapping the new message icon in the upper right corner (the one that looks like a pen writing on a square of paper) will bring up a new message creation screen. Here, you’ll asked to specify recipients in the “To:” field. Just start typing on the device keyboard to begin bringing up potential recipients from your on-device address book, or from your list of Facebook friends. A little phone icon next to a person’s name indicates that they have a mobile number available, which means your message will be sent to them via SMS if they don’t have the Facebook Messenger app installed. If a recipient receives a message from the app via SMS, they can simply reply to that text to contribute to the thread.

Once you’ve chosen your recipients, or if you’re replying, once you’ve tapped a conversation listed on the home screen, tapping the text entry field just above the keyboard will let you enter your message. The little arrow at the right of that same field indicates location sharing. Just tap it to either enable or disable sharing your location information with the message recipients. Tap the camera icon to the left of the text field to either take a picture, or choose one from your device’s library to include in the message.

Changing universal settings

From the home screen, tap the gear icon in the upper left corner to access settings that apply to all conversations. You can choose to mute new message alerts here for either one hour, or until the next morning at 8 AM. You can’t turn entirely off alerts for all conversations from here, but you can effectively do that by turning off Notifications for the Facebook Messenger app entirely in the iOS Settings application.

In the Facebook Messenger general settings, you can also access the online Help database for the app, as well as view a screen instructing you how to turn location services on and off for the app in general. Finally, you can log out of your account from this screen.

Changing individual conversation settings

For each conversation thread, you can set specific settings that won’t affect the behavior of others. To do this, simply tap on any conversation from the home screen, and then tap the gear icon in the upper right corner of the conversation screen.

If you’re working with a conversation between only two people, you’ll be presented with a screen that lets you change the alerts for this particular conversation. You can choose to turn alerts completely off, as well as mute them for one hour or until the next morning. If you’re looking at a group conversation, you’ll also have the option to change the conversation name here, which makes it easier to keep track of what’s being discussed in each thread.

From the conversation settings screen, tap at the bottom to view the people involved in the conversation, or the map icon to view the locations of participants, if they’re sharing that info. On the People screen, you can see a list of everyone taking part in the conversation, and either create a group conversation if you’re looking at one with just two participants, or add additional people if there are more than two people involved. On the Map screen, tapping map pins will tell you who checked in there, and how long ago they checked in.

That’s pretty much all you need to know to get started using Facebook Messenger. Some have been heralding it as a threat to iMessage, but considering that iMessage will be built-in to all iPhones once iOS 5 arrives, and will work automatically when users go to send text messages, they aren’t really all that competitive in my opinion. I, for one, intend to use both. Anyone else planning on making Facebook’s offering a permanent part of their device setup?

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Web technologies across the board can make faster and better progress now that the CSS 2.1 specification is a final, completed standard and published as a Recommendation. First, finishing CSS 2.1 unblocks faster progress moving the Web forward with the rest of CSS and other important technologies in the broader W3C HTML5 family.   Even more important, the lessons from CSS 2.1 raise expectations for measuring and improving the actual interoperability of Web standards.

Because CSS 2.1 has been “mostly working” for some time, it’s easy to overlook the importance of this milestone that has been in the making for over ten years. It’s exactly because CSS 2.1 is only mostly working that the milestone is so important. We expect our hard drives, monitors, and keyboards to do much more than mostly work. Finishing CSS 2.1 is a turning point for the Web.

Moving the Web Forward, Faster

Finishing CSS 2.1 provides a stable base for the CSS Working Group to move the Web forward with CSS3. The W3C and Web community recently finished work on the CSS 2.1 specification, completing the final step in the standards process (link) and publishing the CSS 2.1 Recommendation (link, link). The W3C published the final CSS3 Color standard at the same time as the CSS 2.1 standard. CSS3 Selectors and many other technologies (link) can now follow quickly – much more quickly than CSS 2.1 took to complete. Last week, at the working group meeting in Japan (link), the community made progress on a number of new CSS3 features including Microsoft’s grid layout proposal, Adobe’s regions proposal, and the flexible box model. Microsoft also proposed a new module for CSS3 Floats and Positioning.

Finishing a standard is an important part of making the technology site ready for developers and consumers. The problems for consumers and developers of prematurely putting unfinished and unstable technologies into products are covered in a previous post. The related (potentially NSFW) video dramatization of the experience for developers received many comments. The diagram below shows many of the W3C HTML5 specifications under development and where they are in the standards process. Stabilizing and finishing these technologies is important to advancing the interoperable Web’s state of the art.

Professional-grade engineering

CSS2.1 is the most tested and interoperable Web standard today. Its comprehensive test suite sets the bar for all subsequent standards. The community should expect at least this level of testability going in the future.

Testing is an extremely important part of the standards process for developers, consumers, and businesses. It is a crucial engineering pattern for high-quality, robust, industrial-grade standards to achieve real interoperability. The CSS Working Group and community worked hard to deliver this level of quality. Every feature has two or more independent and interoperable implementations, proving that the standard itself can work. The test suite is comprehensive in its coverage of the specification. The community’s work to make sure that all the suite’s tests are valid and that vendors are aware of and can fix the issues uncovered in their browsers is important to make the standard actually work in practice. For any new feature to work in an interoperable way, the community needs it specified unambiguously in a way that everyone can implement it interoperably and test its correctness.

Looking Ahead

The W3C HTML5 specification has reached a significant milestone: Last Call status.

The HTML5 Test Suite is critical for making sure that the same markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – works the same across different HTML5 implementations. The community will need more tests than the current nearly 30,000 in the suite. Anybody in the community can contribute tests. To learn more about how to help, read the HTML Testing Taskforce Wiki pages and send questions to public-html-testsuite@w3.org. We encourage you to help us finish CSS3 modules as well by creating your own tests and submitting them to the W3C.

CSS 2.1’s completion is a milestone for interoperable and powerful Web standards. We’re excited for interoperable Web standards to keep getting better.

– Adrian Bateman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

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