Cisco announced they are acquiring privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco’s Collaboration portfolio.

The acquisition will enable Cisco to embed presence and messaging services “in the network” and provide rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions, across multiple platforms including Cisco WebEx Connect and Cisco Unified Communications.

Jabber provides a carrier-grade, best-in-class presence and messaging platform. Jabber’s technology leverages open standards to provide a highly scalable architecture that supports the aggregation of presence information across different devices, users and applications. The technology also enables collaboration across many different presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo!. Jabber’s platform leads the market in system robustness, scalability, extensibility and global distribution.