Cisco agreed to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a leader in multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks, for approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives.
Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, is known for its multi-vendor configuration management and network automation software. The Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) provides a single network-wide interface to all network devices and all network applications and services, as well as a common modeling language and datastore for both services and devices. Engineers can use NCS to gain fine-grained control over multi-vendor equipment using a single tool.
The Tail-f ConfD software for on-device management provides automatic rendering of all northbound interfaces. It implements the NETCONF protocol and YANG modeling language.
Cisco said the acquisition of Tail-f accelerates its cloud virtualization strategy while supporting its commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments. With Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology, Cisco’s service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio will simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks.
“With a rapidly increasing number of people, devices, and sensors connecting across the Internet of Everything (IoE), service providers require new capabilities to deliver value-added, cloud-based services and applications,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network. 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.”
Upon completion of the acquisition, Tail-f employees will join Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager. The deal is expected to close in Q4.
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1438152
- In October 2013, Tail-f Systems announced its NCS plugin for the Havanna release of OpenStack. This helps organizations to automatically provision a multi-vendor network in response to OpenStack Cloud Network configuration changes. Tail-f said its NCS plugin allows OpenStack networking to simultaneously utilize the variety of layer 2 networking technologies found in complex real-world data centers.
- In February 2014, AT&T announced the first group of companies selected to participate in its Domain 2.0 supplier program, which was announced in September 2013. This group included Tail-f Systems.
