Since it was first founded in 1984, Cisco Systems Incorporated has acquired a number of other companies, in an effort to bring innovation and improvement to their services and devices.

Back in 1999, the company purchased Petaluma-based Cerent Corporation for $7 billion, which was Cisco’s most expensive deal at that time. All the acquisitions, which included Stratacom, Scientific-Atlanta and Linksys, have been successfully integrated into the company, helping Cisco to become the most valuable company worldwide in 2007, with a market capitalization exceeding $500 billion.

After buying, in 2007, the on-demand collaboration, online meeting, web conferencing and video conferencing applications provider WebEx Communications Incorporated for $3.2 billion, last month, the multinational purchased maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server, PostPath Inc for $215 million.

Yesterday, Cisco announced that it has acquired yet another company, Jabber Incorporated, a privately held messaging technology provider. The latter’s services will be used to complement two of Cisco’s apps, the WebEx Connect and the company’s on-premise unified communications suite, in an attempt to provide users with a more capable messaging platform.

The deal, whose financial details remain undisclosed, will also allow large organizations to use instant messaging without fearing security breaches, since Jabber’s software is fitted with additional safety and archiving tools. Currently, the aforementioned software can work with Google Talk, AIM, Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Cisco's chief executive John Chambers stated that the corporation aims at winning the race against their competition on the collaboration market, Microsoft and IBM, since this industry seems to be a highly profitable one, estimated to be able to bring in $34 billion.