(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Accelerating Cisco’s vision of delivering simple, unique and interoperable collaboration experiences, Cisco (www.cisco.com) has acquired Norwegian video communications firm TANDBERG (www.tandberg.com), and announced the consequent creation of an extensive combined product portfolio.
Following the completion of a “compulsory acquisition of shares,” Cisco will have purchased all of the outstanding shares of TANDBERG for 170 Norwegian kroner per share for a total of approximately 19 billion Norwegian kroner or $3.3 billion.
According to its announcement this week, the full TANDBERG product line is effectively part of Cisco’s TelePresence portfolio, creating a combined offering that provides customers access to a fully integrated architecture, a comprehensive network-based endpoint and infrastructure portfolio. In keeping with its The portfolio is designed to help provide multi-vendor interoperability, and a suite of unique experiences, customizable applications and flexible deployment models.
“Today we are celebrating a very important step for our customers in the journey to put people at the center of collaboration and change the way we work,” Cisco emerging technologies business group senior vice president Marthin De Beer stated. “We strongly believe that telepresence – the next generation of videoconferencing – along with Cisco’s entire rich collaboration portfolio, powers this new way of working where everyone, everywhere, can be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration.”
Fredrik Halvorsen, TANDBERG’s former CEO, will be taking the helm of the new TelePresence Technology Group as senior vice president. This newly-formed group includes three fully integrated businesses that will focus on endpoints, infrastructure and Cisco TelePresence cloud services.
According to a report from the San Jose Mercury News, Cisco’s announcement, which closely coincided with Hewlett-Packard’s (www.hp.com) announcement that it had bought networking equipment-maker 3Com for $2.7 billion, is the latest chapter in the emerging rivalry between the two Silicon Valley companies. The article notes that HP executive vice president David Donatelli said HP is prepared to compete with Cisco in computer networking business. Likewise, Cisco’s latest acquisition sees it providing a range of services wider than before, treading in the videoconferencing hardware and software business in which HP also competes.
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