No. Jabber and Spark client have various differences and cover today different user needs.
Jabber covers the well-known need of a personal client for IM/Presence/voice/video calling.
Jabber has a very rich feature set as softphone (have your PBX line with you while on the move, traveling, etc.) and IM/Presence client.
Apart from softphone mode, Jabber could also be used for deskphone control and/or for IM/Presence only (no license required for these functions). Cisco continues to develop and enrich Jabber (latest release is 11.9 and 12.0 expected next year).
Spark fits more in the new space of team collaboration (persistent rooms/spaces, team-centric).
On this area, Spark has unique features in the market (message and meeting services).
Now, a customer that has today BE6K/CUCM solution could integrate on-premises components with Spark (via Spark Hybrid services) and could use Spark as CUCM softphone (making/receing calls from/to user's PBX line - similar to Jabber in that sense).
BUT Spark lacks today a lot of softphone and Presence features vs Jabber (telephony features, contacts, presence options).
So, in summary:
You need Jabber to cover ''traditional'' softphone or deskphone control/IM/Presence needs which probably is applicable to most of your users.
You need Spark for selected users or teams inside your organization that are ready to leverage these new team collaboration services.
If you don't need advanced telephony/presence features, these selected Spark users could use Spark client as CUCM softphone (via Spark Hybrid services). Otherwise, if these features are also needed, these selected users could use both clients (per case).
What about Spark <--> Jabber interop ?
In terms of calling interop:
If you have Jabber users and Spark users registered in CUCM (via Spark Hybrid Services), then calling works fine between them and other CUCM endpoints. Spark client will be like rest CUCM endpoints (able to make/receive internal and PSTN calls via CUCM) but with limited softphone feature set as mentioned above.
In terms of messsaging interop:
Today there is some messaging interop between Spark users and Jabber users that use Webex Messenger service for IM/Presence (not CUCM IM/Presence).There are plans to provide messaging interop between Spark users and Jabber users that use CUCM IM/Presence - majority of cases.
hope this helps
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Alkiviadis
DISCLAIMER: this post was created in order to provide useful info to Cisco partners and customers in my area (Greece/Cyprus and Malta). For official and updated information, please consult cisco documentation, datasheets and ordering guides.
