Microsoft late Wednesday said it has acquired group chat vendor Parlano and will add the company’s MindAlign software to its portfolio of real-time communications wares.

Microsoft says it intends to make Parlano’s persistent chat functionality a feature of Office Communications Server (OCS) and the Office Communicator client.

The Microsoft platform provides presence, instant messaging, conferencing and VoIP.

Terms of the deal to acquire the privately held Parlano, which has been a Microsoft business partner for the past three years, were not announced.

Persistent chat is a sort of a living instant messaging window that is organized around specific topics or projects and can stretch across workgroups that are spread out geographically. It includes security to secure communication across disperse networks, archiving capabilities and search features.

Parlano’s MindAlign 2007 integrates with Office Communications Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, and SharePoint for instant messaging and presence management.

MindAlign can work in a stand-alone mode, but many of Parlano’s customers use it in conjunction with OCS to bring together voice, text, and presence for both internal and external communication. The software also includes the ability to integrate with consumer IM services.

Parlano targets its software at vertical markets such as financial services and its customer list includes ABN-AMRO, Deutsche Bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.

The Parlano acquisition is the second move Microsoft has made since a CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers held a staged event to reiterate the two were working on interoperability, including in the area of unified communications. Last week, Microsoft introduced a server role option for OCS that monitors voice and video quality and positioned it against Cisco's CallManager 5.0.