Cisco to buy Tail-f for $175M, enhancing its virtualization play

Cisco has added another element to its virtualization and cloud service portfolio by reaching a deal to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a developer of network service orchestration products for traditional and virtualized networks, for $175 million.

Stockholm-based Tail-f's products help service providers and enterprise IT organizations implement applications and network services across networking devices.

According to Cisco, Tail-f is valuable because its technology can reduce the time to market for network equipment vendors building equipment for software-programmable networks. 

It can also use Tail-f's technology to simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks, including layer 2 or layer 3 VPN provisioning, and next-generation networking based on network functions virtualization (NFV) and network programmability.

"Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network," Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development, said in a release. "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."

When the acquisition is completed, Tail-f employees will become part of Cisco's Cloud and Virtualization Group. After meeting customary closing conditions, the vendor expects the acquisition to be complete in its fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. 

For more:
- see the release

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