Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) tried to beef up its Cisco Quad enterprise collaboration product this week by purchasing Versly, a small software vendor still in private beta. The Versly product, however, provides a way for users to collaborate at the document level inside Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office, which was probably the appeal for Cisco.

Certainly Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco saw it this way. "The integration with Versly will drive productivity improvements for organizations and their knowledge workers, many of whom are among the 600 million Microsoft Office users," Sitaram said.

But given how early Versly is in product development, consultant Dan Keldsen from Information Architected sees this as more of a talent grab than a technology buy in the pure sense.

"As others are suggesting, the acquisition seems to be mostly a talent grab, since it is unlikely that Versly has much client traction, with the private beta only months old. In general, this rounds out the portfolio of collaboration tools for Cisco to compete with Jive, Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, VMWare, and to a smaller extent, Google," he said.

In a statement, Ned Hooper, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Cisco suggested this might indeed be the case. "With this acquisition we are gaining strong talent and innovative technology that builds on Cisco's successful collaboration platform," Hooper said.

Keldsen believes that Cisco may be doing this to speed Quad to market. "Cisco Quad and the related offerings need to ship pretty quick--the pre-announcement of last year is getting a bit long in the tooth at this point. This economy prizes speed over FUD, we'll see if the Versly team adds some gas to the tank here," Keldsen said. 

Whatever the reason, Cisco appears to be making a big push in enterprise collaboration and social software, and this purchase is meant to boost that to some degree.

For more information:
- see the Cisco press release

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