With the sudden social network craze, Cisco Systems (a worldwide leader in networking equipment) has announced that they are getting into the social networking game too i.e. by acquiring Five Across, as social network software company based in San Francisco. The acquisition was announced late yesterday and the deal is expected to close within the April time frame. Financial details have yet to be revealed.

Cisco’s plan is not to compete against the big giants out there like MySpace and Facebook. Instead, they plan to use it to create a way to better connect enterprises with their customers. With that, Cisco service providers will be able to build services with the social networking technology and sell them to their business customers as a value added service.

Five Across is known for their software platform Connect Community Builder which includes features that allow enterprises to build a web presence for their customers. These features include creation of profile pages, friend lists, discussions, automatic blog postings, video and podcast implementation. NHL Connect, a site for the National Hockey League launched a platform last year with Five Across Software.

This acquisition brings about a first in Cisco’s business model of expanding into the consumer and media markets. It seems like a good move - the opportunities are huge and there aren’t too many social networking systems for the enterprise in the marketplace at the moment. This is most likely the best time to break into the enterprise market segment as it is surprisingly unsaturated.