Cisco on Tuesday announced that it is planning to acquire Sweden-based network orchestration software supplier, Tail-f Systems for around $175 million.
Tail-f Systems specialises in offering “multi-vendor service orchestration,” which is basically a software layer that enables users to manage a wide range of networking devices through a single interface.
The acquisition deal, expected to close sometime in the fourth quarter of the year, will see Cisco dole out approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all Tail-f shares.
“Tail-f will help achieve our goal of aiding customers in their quest to simplify and automate network management, enabling service innovation and deployment acceleration,” Cisco senior VP Hilton Romanski said in a statement.
“The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco’s cloud virtualization strategy of delivering software that increases value to our customers’ applications and services, while supporting Cisco’s long-standing commitment to open standards, architectures and multivendor environments.”
Cisco also announced that when the deal closes, Tail-f employees will move to its Cloud and Virtualisation Group, headed up by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager.
The Tail-f team in an official statement said that the Cisco deal will enable them to provide an “open, standards-based and model-driven service orchestration NCS software to more customers and partners” worldwide. Their products will continue to be sold on a standalone basis.
With this acquisition, the tech giant plans to merge Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology with its own service provider cloud and virtualisation portfolio to automate provisioning and management for physical and virtual networks.
