Cisco acquires Latitude for $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.