Cisco/Tandberg acquisition to create collaboration opportunities for partners

Cisco and Tandberg have assured partners and customers it's business as usual. This follows the networking giant's acquisition of Tandberg in April.

Partners from both sides said the acquisition would help drive the uptake of unified communications.

Cisco general manager of collaboration A/NZ, Peter Hughes, said the cultures between Cisco and Tanberg were very similar and there were great opportunities for partners in the market.

“It’s two aggressive organisations coming together and what you’ll see is a new experiences based on video,” Hughes said. “We’re putting video at the heart of collaboration. There will be an emergence of new applications like enterprise social software and video plays a part in that.”

Cisco CTO, Kevin Bloch, said it wouldn't change its partner strategy immediately. Partners would continue to get the same access to products. However, whatever took place later would be based on partner and customer requirements, and support.

“There’s an opportunity for us to get some feedback, concerns, be open and transparent about it. We did this acquisition [Tandberg] because the demand is out there,” he said. “We’ve spent about $12 billion in acquisitions in the last five years and that’s notwithstanding the very huge slice of our $5b investment in R&D. The message is we’re absolutely serious about video.”

Bloch said Cisco expects world traffic through the internet to quadruple within four years. Video will account for 91 per cent of the rise.

“There is more traffic coming out of the 400 million smartphones used by consumers,” he said. “In the next few years there will be an explosion of data, primarily driven by video, by the consumer and enterprise”.

“What’s really interesting is that in four years, 66 per cent of traffic coming out of mobile phones, will be video. There’s no surprise seeing hi-def video going into smartphones, android phones, and so on.”

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