Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, a provider of presence and messaging software.

Jabber will enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's collaboration products (compare collaboration products), Cisco said. The acquisition will let Cisco embed presence and messaging services in the network and provide these capabilities to users through on-premises and on-demand systems, and across multiple platforms, including Cisco's WebEx Connect and Unified Communications line.

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"Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications," said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group, in a statement. "With the acquisition of Jabber . . . our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

Cisco and Jabber already had integration work under way.

Jabber's technology supports the aggregation of presence information across different devices, users and applications, Cisco says. The technology also enables collaboration across different presence systems, such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed in Cisco's first half of fiscal year 2009.

Jabber employees will become part of the Cisco Collaboration Software Group (CSG). CSG consists of Cisco's major software businesses, including the IOS network operating system, network and service management, Unified Communications, policy management and software-as-a-service offerings.