Cisco’s core switch business may be declining, but the company has been working hard to cover as many areas in its offerings portfolio as possible. These currently range from teleconferencing to blade servers, and the latest development to Cisco’s strategy was announced today – the acquisition of Pari Networks. Pari Networks is a provider of network configuration and change management (NCCM) solution, as well as compliance management offerings.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Pari Networks’ technology will integrate into Cisco’s smart services and help accelerate the ability of Cisco and its partners to manage the health and stability of customer networks through proactive, personalized services.

In addition to advanced technology, Pari Networks brings to Cisco an industry-leading team of engineers that will continue to build out and strengthen Cisco’s smart service capabilities.”

Pari’s employees are now a part of Cisco’s Technical Services, and the networking giant is also getting geared up for some new partners. The company announced a new cloud partner program at the Cisco Partners 2011 Summit held in New Orleans. The program aims to help partners decide what role and business models they want adopt in the Cisco cloud echosystem, and senior VP of worldwide channels Edison Peres had this to say: “Cisco doesn’t want to be a cloud services provider. We want to enable our partners to become the[cloud services] providers.”

Cisco took the podium in its partners’ summit, and was also a prominent fixture at the Enterprise Connect 2011 trade show. There Cisco unveiled the Cisco Jabber unified communications offering, which features several new tools. These include the Cisco TelePresence System 1300 Series enterprise video utility, the Cisco MXE 3500 Media Experience Engine file sharing offering and the Cisco TelePresence Content Server presentation building network device.

Cisco reached a key milestone a few weeks back, when its newer offerings officially generated more revenues than its core switch business. This comes after a decline in sales, but also as the company’s branching efforts are beginning to pay off.