Cisco to Pay $175 Million for Sweden’s Tail-f Systems

Global networking colossus Cisco Systems has made waves with its profitable acquisition of Tail-f Systems, a private network management enterprise hailing from Sweden, for a handsome sum of $175 million.

This acquisition represented Cisco’s second for the year, having previously acquired the New York-hosted ThreatGrid merely a month prior. Consistently, Cisco’s business strategy has showcased a longstanding pattern of steady acquisitions, with ten businesses purchased in 2013, another eleven in 2012, six in 2011, and five more in 2010.

Launched in 2005, Tail-f operates locations both in Stockholm and Santa Clara, California. Major networking service providers such as Deutsche Telekom and AT&T actively use the company’s products.

Tail-f holds a dominant stance in the networking industry, particularly in the realm of network function virtualization (NFV), which enables telecom providers to deliver a variety of services by adjusting their equipment’s software. This obviates the need for costly and time-consuming manual changes to physical devices.

Industry expert Brian Marshall of ISI has aptly captured Tail-f’s technological expertise. He highlighted that the company’s Network Control System (NCS) provides network operators with the capability to manage their servers, network apparatus, and network services/applications via a singular, comprehensive interface.

Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s business development chief, officially announced the acquisition in a blog post, reiterating his faith in Tail-f’s technological promise to expedite the deployment and simplify the initiation of new services for Cisco clientele.

Cisco isn’t the only company centering its efforts on NFV assets. Competitor Hewlett-Packard recently launched a business division specifically to explore and foster NFV opportunities, led by former high-ranking networking official, Bethany Mayer.

When viewed in the broader context, Cisco’s procurement of Tail-f seems to be rather modest, especially when considering Cisco’s staggering financial reservoir featuring in excess of $50 billion in cash and short-term assets.

source:recode.net

Updated in 2025 to align with recent developments.