(From siliconrepublic.com) -- Cisco has signed a deal worth an estimated 500,000 with Irish university NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) to create the next wave of enterprise social networking tools for the workplace of tomorrow.

Cisco said this morning that it is investing nearly 400,000 with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway, to further develop its enterprise social networking and collaboration platform Cisco Quad.

An additional 100,000 will be invested in a strategic research agreement between Cisco and DERI for a project titled 'Advances in Real-Time Date Integration, Recommendations and Social Network Analysis for the Social Semantic Enterprise' (ADVANSSE).

Cisco's 170-strong R&D operation in Galway is already making significant contributions to the networking giant's product strategy, especially several unified communications features of Cisco Quad.

Cisco Quad, one of the latest collaboration solutions from Cisco, enables workers to easily connect to the right people and access and share content irrespective of location.

"DERI is a recognised global leader in the semantic web," said Murali Sitaram, vice-president and general manager, Enterprise Collaboration, Cisco.

"And this partnership with DERI enables us to accelerate our research and development in this area, enabling Quad as a social semantic platform for the enterprise."

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