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Cisco aims to bolster its strategy of building internal software innovations. The company announced that it is acquiring presence and messaging software provider Jabber.This is just Cisco's latest venture into new markets following purchases of WebEx, IronPort, Securent and PostPath.

"Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs," said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. "With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

What is Cisco's real agenda with this purchase? Svetlana Gladkova at Profy says:

The idea here is pretty simple - Cisco is planning to use Jabber to “extend the reach” of their existing instant messaging service, therefore enhancing Cisco’s communication suite. Cisco is planning to use Jabber technology within Webex, the online collaboration suite for web conferencing, and Unified Workspace, Cisco’s solution for teamwork and collaboration for distributed teams. 

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and the acquisition is still subject to various standard closing condition. It is not expected to actually be completed until next year.