Cisco gains a stranglehold on the Conferencing Market

It looks like the Cisco-TANDBERG acquisition story may finally be put to rest. Cisco announced today that it has completed its voluntary offer for video communications technology company TANDBERG. The full TANDBERG product line is now officially part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio.

Fredrik Halvorsen, the former CEO of TANDBERG will become senior vice president and leader of the new TelePresence Technology Group within Cisco.

“Today we are celebrating a very important step for our customers in the journey to put people at the center of collaboration and change the way we work,” said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president, Emerging Technologies Business Group, Cisco in the release. “We strongly believe that telepresence–the next generation of videoconferencing–along with Cisco’s entire rich collaboration portfolio, powers this new way of working where everyone, everywhere, can be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration.”

Under the terms of the tender offer, following the completion of the compulsory acquisition of shares, Cisco will have purchased all of the outstanding shares of  TANDBERG for about $3.3 billion.

This will cause market issues for Polycom, the current market leader. More to come on this story….

Joe Buck, N.C.E.