Cisco — rulers of all things network — have set their sights on something new, and they've gone out and gotten it. The it in this particular case is Jabber, Inc., the company responsible for building an enterprise offering around XMPP — the "Jabber" protocol — and the go out and getting happened yesterday, as Cisco announced that it intends to buy the 54-employee company before the end of next summer.

The acquisition is intended to boost Cisco's existing business offerings, integrating the messenger protocol with the multitude of network offerings in Cisco's considerable portfolio. As XMPP is compatible with most other mainline messenger protocols, Jabber is the perfect purchase for Cisco, which maintains partnerships with the companies behind those other services. Some of the company's offerings already included a basic messenger system, but as has been seen in the past, sometimes there's no substitute for slurping up a smaller fish that's already doing things right.

We've yet to see any numbers, but Cisco has never been shy about dropping large bundles of cash on things it wants, so we doubt the Jabberites will be going hungry anytime soon.