Cisco Systems Incorporated, a San Jose-based multinational corporation, announced that it has purchased open instant messaging technology provider Jabber Incorporated, in an attempt to improve their messaging features and also expand the current capabilities of their collaboration platform.

The financial terms of the deal that is scheduled to close in January, 2009 have not been disclosed by the two companies.

The Denver-based Jabber’s services are used by Google Talk and Gizmo, since the company enables collaboration across systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo instant Messenger via their open-source Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol.

Cisco senior vice president Doug Dennerline stated that the deal was aimed at meeting the enterprise organizations’ needs for a messaging platform that can integrate with business applications. Moreover, director of marketing of Cisco WebEx Alex Hadden-Boyd informed that the company would embed Jabber's XCP through Cisco's on-premise unified communications suite, as well as through their software as a service (SAAS) app, WebEx Connect.

Cisco both designs and sells networking and communications technology and services under the Cisco, Linksys, WebEx, IronPort and Scientific Atlanta brands. As of this year, the revenue the company has registered has amounted to $39 billion, while their number of employees presently surpasses 66,000.

Founded in 1984, the multinational was one of the first companies to sell commercially successful routers that supported multiple network protocols, although they were not the first to develop such a device. Presently, Cisco’s tagline is "Welcome to the human network."

Privately held Jabber Incorporated’s work-force is at a current number of 50 employees.