More than a year after Cisco paid $3.4 billion for Tandberg in 2009, quickly inserting itself in the telepresence market and sending a message to competitors that the commercial integration landscape had changed, the industry is still figuring out what it all means.

Has Cisco become a trailblazer in an eventual consolidation of the CI world?

Will its presence become an albatross as the combined company tries to make a name for itself with Tandberg’s existing customers and the new ones it hopes to attract through the partnership with the IT giant?

The answers depend on who you ask.

“Cisco is perhaps a sleeping giant in the CI world,” says Todd McCandless, general manager of the A/V division at CI Select in St. Louis. “The IT world is higher on the technology food chain than [A/V is], and it seems like they look at video as being pervasive, so the deal makes sense from their business model’s perspective.

“There certainly is a lot of reticence in the CI world about this deal. It becomes pretty daunting when you see something like this happen,” he says.

Mark Coxon, business development manager at Orange ProAV in Orange, Calif., agrees with McCandless, calling Tandberg “a natural fit” for Cisco.

“The implications of a company like Cisco, whose strength is in network architecture, acquiring Tandberg are huge,” he says. “It can lead to innovations that may allow QOS settings to be set automatically based on connection speeds, minimizing the amount of setup needed to get a system up and running.

“It can allow for a two-way conversation between enterprise routers and the codecs to dynamically adjust these settings based on network traffic, or set them up as constants depending on the level of use of the room or even by a priority level set on the individual conference at its initiation,” says Coxon. 

Calculated Move Pays Off
David Hsieh, Cisco vice president of marketing, Emerging Technologies, says the company was following its traditional route of looking “to capture market transitions with innovative, disruptive new technologies” when it acquired Tandberg.

“In the case of telepresence, we saw a market opportunity to transition to the next generation of video conferencing: high definition, immersive, ‘like being there’ experiences,” he says. “We believed Cisco TelePresence could transform video communications into a mainstream, ubiquitous collaboration tool. The acquisition of Tandberg was a win-win for Cisco, Tandberg and our customers.”

Cisco and Tandberg, as a combined entity, have the broadest family of endpoints, complete infrastructure portfolio, interoperability and cloud services, Hsieh says. For customers, this means more deployment options and the ability to connect with just about anyone.

There were no notable glitches in the integration of Tandberg into the Cisco family, Hsieh says.

“As Cisco and Tandberg shared a complementary vision and product line, we have been very pleased with the integration,” he says. “Cisco’s broad TelePresence portfolio contains a range of video endpoints and infrastructure architecture from immersive endpoints to personal and desktop solutions and mobile PC.”

Cisco has sold more than 400,000 immersive, multipurpose, solution platforms and personal endpoint systems to thousands of customers across a variety of verticals—including food and beverage, financial services, pharmaceutical and health care. Customers include such as Bank of America, Pepsi, Tyco Electronics, BAE Systems and Duke University, Hsieh says.

”Since Cisco acquired Tandberg, we have continued to advance our integration goals by developing features across our TelePresence product portfolio,” he says. “For example, at Cisco’s Collaboration Summit in November, we announced that all Tandberg endpoints will connect natively to Cisco Unified Communications Manager, enabling end users to have one button to push for all telepresence endpoints and helping IT use one infrastructure for voice and video.”

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D. Craig MacCormack

Craig MacCormack is a veteran journalist with more than 15 years experience covering local and national news and sports as well as architecture and engineering. He joined Commercial Integrator in January 2011. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigMacCormack.

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