Cisco announced earlier this week that they acquired Tandberg for $3 Billion. Tandberg is a world wide leader in video conference equipment, and puts Cisco into a very dominant position in this market.
Cisco’s acquision gives them a bigger install base for their Telepresence product including a whole new line-up in the lower end of the market. This now also puts them in an excellent competitive position against Polycom, the other dominant market player in the video / voice market.
BTW – Polycom is now an excellent market play. I’m wondering who might decide to pick-up Polycom and gain a very quick foot hold in the voice / video market to better compete in the converged world. HP perhaps ? Silver Lakes, one of the private investors that owns Avaya ? Microsoft ?
On another note, I find it rather interesting that Cisco overpaid for Tandberg, although couldn’t see any value in acquiring the Enterprise division of Nortel which was acquired a few weeks ago by Avaya for $900 Million. A Cisco / Nortel marriage would have created a Telecom powerhouse. True, there’s a lot of product overlap, and as I speculated a few weeks ago, Cisco decided to let Avaya take control over Nortel and wait for Avaya to mess it up. That’s the only reason I can think of for them not being at the Nortel bargaining table.
Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed
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