Networking giant Cisco has acquired privately-held US startup Versly, developer of collaboration plug-ins for Microsoft Office applications, including documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email.

"Collaboration is a top priority at Cisco. With this acquisition we're enhancing our collaboration offerings and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies within the business applications individuals and teams use at work," said Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager, Collaboration Software Group (CSG), Cisco.

"Furthermore, the integration with Versly will drive productivity improvements for organisations and their knowledge workers, many of whom are among the 600 million Microsoft Office users."

Cisco claims that there is a $US45 billion potential martket for collaboration software, which the company sees as one of its top five priorities. Versly's software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco's collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx.

For example, users will be able to receive automatic notifications within Cisco Quad when the content of a document has changed, escalate from simply reviewing a document to an instant messaging session through Cisco Jabber, or initiate a web conferencing session from a presentation through Cisco WebEx. 

"With this acquisition we are gaining strong talent and innovative technology that builds on Cisco's successful collaboration platform," said Ned Hooper, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Cisco. 

"We continue to expand our collaboration architecture to change the way businesses work."