Cisco, the world’s networking giant, has finally agreed to buy BNI Video in a $99M all-cash deal. This acquisition is one of the serial purchases that Cisco has made in the past few days, in order to bolster its Videoscape portfolio. BNI Video is a startup company and sells hosted control plane offering, which helps ISPs turn up new online video services. Along with these, BNI also offers other services like transcoding, digital rights management and quality of service. It combines all these services in a useful platform that can interact with service providers’ own billing and entitlements systems. The deal is expected to close in Cisco’s second Fiscal quarter, ending in January 2012.

This is not the only effort done by Cisco to transform its video landscape. Aligning its efforts with the goal, Cisco acquired ExtendMedia last year, which is a white label online video distributor. Earlier this year, it also purchased Inlet Technologies, a video encoding firm. Cisco purchased Inlet for a whopping amount of $95 Million with a focus to progress on its initiative.

Earlier in August, Cisco also announced the acquisition of collaboration startup Versly for an undisclosed amount that sells collaboration tools for Microsoft Office products, including Word, Excel and Outlook. Here’s an abstract from the announcement made in August:

“Versly’s software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco’s collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx.” One feature already mentioned is an activity stream of document updates from Versly to Quad, Cisco’s enterprise social networking product: “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.”

All these developments and acquisitions show that Cisco is quite active in the collaboration game. Last but not the least; Cisco also took some important steps toward restructuring of its business by adding new switches to its networking portfolio and updating several existing offerings. Besides, it also introduced the second generation Nexus 7000 Series, including the new Nexus 7009. It features a compact form factor of 14RU in addition to support for all the existing Nexus 7000 I/O modules and Cisco’s NX-OS datacenter operating system.

This latest milestone is just one of many developments from Cisco lately. On top of the major updates, there have been other additions made, such as IPv6 support for the Cisco Application Control Engine portfolio.