Cisco to buy orchestration platform supplier Tail-f Systems

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) says it plans to purchase Tail-f Systems, a privately held Swedish company that specializes in multi-vendor network service orchestration offerings, for approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives. Cisco expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014.

The new assets will support Cisco's cloud virtualization offerings, including “supporting Cisco's long-standing commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments,” the company said in a press release. Tail-f's network service orchestration technology will enable Cisco's service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio to simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks, the company asserts.

"With a rapidly increasing number of people, devices, and sensors connecting across the Internet of Everything (IoE), service providers require new capabilities to deliver value-added, cloud-based services and applications," said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. "Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network. The acquisition of Tail-f's network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco's innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality."

Tail-f employees will join Cisco's Cloud and Virtualization Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager.

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