Cisco completes acquisition of Tail-f Systems

Cisco has announced it has completed the acquisition of privately held Tail-f Systems, a provider of multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualised networks.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $175m in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Tail-f.

Headquartered in Sweden, Tail-f's products help service providers and enterprise IT organisations to easily and cost-effectively implement applications, network services and solutions across networking devices.

The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco's cloud virtualisation strategy of delivering software that increases value to our customers' applications and services, while supporting Cisco's long-standing commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments.

With Tail-f's network service orchestration technology, Cisco's service provider cloud and virtualsation portfolio will simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks. Tail-f's solutions are equally applicable for today's network problems, such as layer 2 or layer 3 VPN provisioning, and next-generation networking based on network function virtualisation (NFV) and network programmability.

Tail-f employees join Cisco's Cloud and Virtualisation Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager.