SAN JOSE, Calif. — Cisco Systems Inc. has acquired Latitude Communications Inc. of in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $80 million.
Latitude (Santa Clara, Calif.) is the developer of the MeetingPlace conferencing product, which currently is offered for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook environments.
Cisco has been beefing up its voice-Over-Internet-Protocol product lines with a series of hardware and software acquisitions since 2000, but was lacking a conferencing product that could extend from circuit voice to packet networks.
Don Proctor, vice president in charge of Cisco's voice technology group, said a key goal in acquiring Latitude was to expand MeetingPlace with support for such standards as H.323, Session Initiation Protocol and eXtensible Markup Language.
Latitude will be managed as a unit within Cisco's voice technology group, the company said.
