Cisco buys Norway’s Tandberg

Cisco has completed its voluntary offer for Norway’s Tandberg, a global leader in video communications.

The deal will give Cisco an enhanced collaborative video-conferencing portfolio. Cisco will pay a total of 19 billion Norwegian Kroner or $3.3 billion for Tandberg.

"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," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president, Emerging Technologies Business Group, Cisco.

"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."

The full Tandberg product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio. As a result, customers now have access to a fully integrated architecture, a comprehensive network-based endpoint and infrastructure portfolio – designed to help provide multi-vendor interoperability.

With the close of this transaction, Fredrik Halvorsen, the former CEO of Tandberg, becomes senior vice president and leader of the new TelePresence Technology Group within Cisco

From multipurpose rooms and immersive solutions to personal systems that include PC clients, the combined Cisco TelePresence portfolio retains the full range of endpoints, infrastructure products and flexible deployment options from Cisco and Tandberg.

Customers are also provided with a comprehensive set of solution platforms for horizontal and industry applications.

Cisco has committed to working to ensure the entire portfolio interoperates with third-party systems and PC video clients, including Microsoft Office Communicator.

The integrated infrastructure includes offerings and services that allow customers to enjoy exceptional intra- and intercompany collaboration experiences, high-performance multipoint meetings, and any-to-any interoperability.

The services and offerings also allow robust management and scheduling capabilities and highly secure usability features like "One Button to Push" and "Continuous Presence."

Unique to Cisco, TelePresence is a set of media services for advanced recording, streaming, transcribing, transcoding and video analytics capabilities.

In addition, the combined Cisco TelePresence portfolio provides a rich assortment of options designed to facilitate any-to-any video interoperability.

These multivendor support options and our commitment to deliver broad-based industry standards through the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) for native telepresence interoperability, provide customers with investment protection and flexible options for extending their investments to new forms of collaboration.

TIP provides the underpinning for a scalable multiscreen switched architecture and was released as a method to provide native telepresence interoperability.

TIP is currently available under license from Cisco and will be transferred to the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC) or another independent industry body to facilitate interoperability.