By Cassimir Medford
Networking gear maker Cisco Systems is making unusual friends in the social-networking business, agreeing to acquire its second small maker of such software in three weeks.
The San Jose, California-based company on Monday said it acquired three-year-old startup Utah Street Networks strictly for its software expertise.
“Cisco is acquiring, people, ideas, and intellectual capital and injecting that into its internal mind-set,” said William Lesieur, director of Technology Business Research. “They are targeting select and, for Cisco, affordable properties that can help them negotiate this area.”
The acquisition, however, does not include Utah Street Networks’ best known asset, its social networking site, tribe.net. The site, which draws heavily from sixtiesBay Area culture, claims to have at least 500,000 members who joined the tribe.net community to be part of one or more “urban tribes.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
sixtiesBaySan Francisco-based Utah Street Networks’ seven employees will become part of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG), a unit that helps corporate clients blend the hardware and software on which social networks ride.
The acquisition comes about three weeks after Cisco announced the acquisition of Five Across, another San Francisco startup that develops social-networking software (see Cisco Takes Five Across).
The acquisition comes about three weeks after Cisco announced the acquisition of Five Across, another ).
New Turf for Cisco
Cisco, which has traditionally steered clear of application software—software with which users interact—has broken those barriers with its latest acquisitions. The line between hardware and software in the networking world has been increasingly blurring.
The movement is particularly noticeable in the area of software as a service (SaaS) where vendors that once sold both hardware and software as products now sell a networked service to their customers.
“As businesses adopt social networking or whatever it’s called when it becomes a business technology, Cisco wants to be part of that,” said Mr. Lesieur.
It may be the first time the networking giant has not been the one leading the technology parade, Mr. Lesieur said. In the past Cisco invested in networking software startups such as Five Across and Utah Street Networks.Cisco also announced the completion of the Five Across acquisition.