Cisco Systems Inc. is again on the acquisition trail, announcing Tuesday it will pay US$175 million to buy Sweden’s Tail-f Systems, a network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks.
Tail-f’s software helps enterprises IT departments and service providers implement applications, network services and solutions across networking devices, as well as reduce the time-to-market for network equipment vendors building equipment for software-programmable networks.
“Tail-f will help achieve our goal of aiding customers in their quest to simplify and automate network management, enabling service innovation and deployment acceleration,” Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s senior vice-president for business development, said in a company blog. “The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco’s cloud virtualization 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.”
Cisco [Nasdaq: CSCO] said Tail-f’s software will be part of its service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio. Not only can its solutions simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks, they can also help layer 2 or layer 3 VPN provisioning, network function virtualization (NFV) and network programmability.
Tail-f’s team has helped the development and implementation of the NETCONF protocol and YANG data modeling language, which Romanski said is the leading industry approach to simplifying and automating networks.
The company’s main product is Network Control System (NCS), which it says 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.
For OpenStack platform users, there’s also an NCS plugin that allows organizations to automatically provision a multi-vendor network when OpenStack Cloud Network configurations change.