Cisco to buy Tail-f Systems

Cisco continues its wireless shopping spree, this time with the $175 million acquisition of Tail-f, a developer of multi-vendor service orchestration solutions. The purchase is part of Cisco’s drive to dominate service provider and enterprise cloud services.
Tail-f works with network operators and enterprise IT departments to deliver applications and services from the cloud, across multiple devices and appliances. The company specializes in OSS virtualization. Carrier demand for this service is clearly on the rise; just last week Sprint announced a deal with ItsOn for a similar cloud-based offering.
Tail-f made headlines earlier this year when AT&T tapped the Swedish company for its Domain 2.0 program, which is a supplier program aimed at moving more services to the cloud. When the first Domain 2.0 vendors were announced, Cisco was absent, along with some other big names like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia.
But, Cisco is working hard to create platforms that will help operators deliver services from the cloud, and the Tail-f acquisition looks to be a step in that direction.
“The acquisition of Tail-f’s network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco’s innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality,” said Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s SVP for corporate development.
The Tail-f purchase, expected to close in the fourth quarter, is the latest in a string of Cisco acquisitions that are related to mobile networks. Cisco bought Meraki for Wi-Fi and cloud services, Ubiquisys for small cells, Intucell for self-optimizing network technology and BroadHop for policy control solutions.