Cisco to acquire Tail-f Systems for USD 175 mln

Cisco announced an agreement to acquire Tail-f Systems, a developer of network service orchestration products for traditional and virtualized networks. Tail-f's products help service providers and enterprise IT organizations implement applications and network services across networking devices. Headquartered in Stockholm, Tail-f is a privately held company. According to Cisco, its technology helps reduce the time-to-market for network equipment vendors building equipment for software-programmable networks. 

The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco's cloud virtualization strategy, while supporting Cisco's commitment to open standards, architectures and multi-vendor environments. With Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology, Cisco's service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio will simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks. Tail-f's products are equally applicable for traditional network problems, such as layer 2 or layer 3 VPN provisioning, and next-generation networking based on network function virtualization and network programmability, Cisco said. 

Upon completion of the acquisition, Tail-f employees will join Cisco's Cloud and Virtualization Group. Cisco will pay approximately USD 175 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Tail-f. The acquisition of Tail-f is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2014.