The Web Conferencing Blog

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Acano

SAN JOSE, Calif. – November 20, 2015 – Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Acano Limited, a privately held company based in London that provides collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software. Acano’s hardware and software includes gateways, and video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments. This acquisition will accelerate Cisco’s collaboration strategy to deliver video everywhere, providing the best collaboration experience across every endpoint, every screen, every workspace, and to every user.

Today, less than 10 percent of the conference rooms in the world are connected via video. However, there is a massive market shift underway in collaboration – customers want the ability to easily connect from anywhere, from dedicated hardware endpoints to sharing video on a mobile phone. Cisco’s collaboration business is already seeing the impact of this trend, with 17 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016. As the momentum continues, there is a need to deliver solutions that will connect any system, regardless of vendor, at a scale that is dramatically higher than ever before. Acano’s technology and expertise will enable us to accelerate our development in the key areas of interoperability and scalability.

•       Interoperability: In this rapidly growing industry, customers expect any new collaboration solution to work with their existing technology. Acano shares Cisco’s commitment to interoperability; they have focused on developing products that connect a wide variety of endpoints and systems from all the major collaboration vendors. Their technology further enhances Cisco’s ability to deliver video from the cloud to any screen. This includes enhanced support for Microsoft’s proprietary protocols and mobile browsers through WebRTC support.

•       Scalability: As collaboration adoption grows, so does the need for infrastructure models that can support a higher capacity of users and systems than customers have ever required before. This is important in both cloud-based environments and hybrid environments where customers have a mix of cloud and on premises solutions. Acano has solved several key challenges in delivering collaboration at dramatically increased scale – with both dedicated hardware appliances and virtualized software options that allow customers to connect tens of thousands of users and meeting rooms without compromising on the audio and video experience.

With Acano, we believe we can accelerate our collaboration momentum and bring new capabilities to market faster. Together, Cisco and Acano will be able to capture the expanding market opportunity in collaboration and deliver open and interoperable solutions whether in the cloud or via a hybrid model.

“People, companies and organizations are more geographically dispersed than ever before, and collaboration is essential to helping teams increase productivity and drive growth,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “Acano’s innovations make it easier for customers to collaborate when, where and how they want. Together, we will help our customers to extend collaboration to every room, every screen and every user.”

The Acano team will join the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group led by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $700 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention based incentives for Acano employees who join Cisco. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory review.

Highlights from Cisco's Annual Financial Analyst Conference

Last Friday Cisco executives meet with technology analysts at its Financial Analyst Conference in New York. Topics such as strategy, M&A, competition, data center and software were discussed. Here a few highlights:

Cisco is launching a massive global marketing campaign called "Tomorrow Starts Here," which will formalize its aspirations to become the No. 1 IT player in the world. The paradigm shifts around cloud, mobile and services are all dependent on the network. This shift represents a $4 trillion market.

Cisco argued it is already a software company and plans to control, not be controlled by, the shift toward software in the network and data center. Cisco's software business is currently about $6 billion, and Chambers and other executives said several times at FAC that it intends to double that revenue number within five years.

It was only three years ago that Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS) and was laughed at by the server establishment for its apparent hubris. It's Cisco that's laughing now, with a 17 percent global market share in x86 blade servers and bona fide disrupter status in the overall server market. Cisco's data center TAM will be about $62 billion by 2015, growing at a 7 percent CAGR. Chambers disclosed one interesting little tidbit: Cisco server and data center networking products are now used by nine of the world's top 10 largest data center customers, everyone except Google.

Security is a major area of focus for Cisco, said Chambers, who told reporters that Chris Young, Cisco's first-ever SVP-level executive for security, has been given essentially a "blank check" to acquire, hire and build in Cisco's security practice. Security, along with services, emerging markets and software, is one of Cisco's four investment priorities heading into the new year.

Chambers said Cisco will not enter a market unless Cisco thinks it has a "reasonable probability" of getting 40 percent market share in that market. At the very least, he added, Cisco has to achieve 20 percent. "If you don't have at least 20 percent [of a market], you can get wiped out very quickly," he explained.

Along with its validity as a data center player, another bet Cisco made and won, Chambers said, was its assertion that service providers would want to consolidate their spending with a preferred vendor, not buy piecemeal from multiple different telecom infrastructure providers. Cisco is going gangbusters in service provider business and boxing out competitors left and right.

Cisco will continue to partner, rather than build or acquire, in storage. Chambers even used the same pie metaphor, saying that while Cisco would own more of "the pie" if it owned the storage, the pie itself would be smaller overall, and Cisco would in fact be part of fewer deals than it might be with existing storage partners like EMC and NetApp.

The traditional seven-layer OSI model of networking is changing, said Chambers. Thanks to the shifts toward cloud and mobility, it will look more like two or three layers: a flat infrastructure layer, a platform layer and an application layer.

Cisco's M&A strategy came up plenty, and Chambers told analysts that Cisco should have made more -- not fewer -- deals over the past few years even as its M&A activity slowed thanks to a global restructuring. Cisco likely lost 1 percent in potential revenue and profitability by not acquiring even more than it did in the past two to three years, Chambers said, and it had stopped making major deals like Starent and Tandberg that added significantly to its growth.

Chambers and Cisco CTO and Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior, who now runs Cisco's M&A, said Cisco's $1.2 billion acquisition of cloud-managed networking provider Meraki was an ideal Cisco deal based on the technology, talent and market opportunity it acquired. "Think of Meraki as a software company," Chambers said, adding that Meraki's technology potentially pulls through a lot of Cisco networking in the midmarket. "It was one of the hottest companies in the Valley, and it could have gone anywhere it wanted. It wanted to be part of Cisco." Expect more mid-level Cisco deals of that sort, the company said.

 In a roundtable with journalists, Cisco didn't exactly call the HP competitive threat vanquished, but Chambers earlier in the day had asked the analyst crowd if any thought HP would be the most important technology company in the world in five years, and not a single hand went up. Chambers later told journalists that the current market and HP's struggles provide a "moment to take share in almost all categories." When later asked by CRN if Cisco considers Dell a competitive threat, Chambers said that Dell likely considers Cisco a competitive threat. "Michael Dell and I are good friends," he said, adding that Cisco and Dell have sought ways to work together over the years, and there hasn't yet been a major area that made sense.

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Truviso

Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Truviso, Inc.  Based in Foster City, Calif., Truviso provides scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software. Together, Cisco and Truviso will provide instant access and visibility into network use and services to help increase operational efficiencies and drive new revenue streams for customers.   

The proliferation of end-user devices and growth in network-connected applications is exponentially increasing the amount of data on the network. Both service provider and enterprise customers are looking for ways to better understand this data and act upon it in real-time to improve operations, customer experiences, and service offering differentiation. Truviso’s continuous query technology, with its analyze-first, store-later capability, addresses this requirement by allowing companies to get detailed information and visibility of network use and services in real-time.

Truviso’s software analytics further strengthens Cisco’s network management platform, Cisco Prime, with the core technology to gather and analyze streaming data.  

“Customers want to be able to tap into and better analyze the enormous volume of data traversing their networks to identify ways to enhance services and generate new revenue opportunities,” said Jamie Lerner, vice president and general manager, Cisco Network Management Technology Group.  “Embedding Truviso’s real time business intelligence into the network will help customers unlock these capabilities at the speed of the network.”

The Truviso acquisition reinforces Cisco’s commitment to delivering intelligent networks and supports its five foundational priorities - core, data center, virtualization, collaboration, and video - with differentiated analytics technology. The Truviso team will be integrated into the Cisco Network Management Technology Group.

Specific financial terms of the transaction are undisclosed.  The acquisition of Truviso is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2012.

Cisco to buy VideoScape Provider, NDS, for $5B

According to Reuters, Cisco Systems made its first major acquisition in over two years with a deal to buy NDS, which develops pay TV software, for $5 billion, aiming to boost its presence in the video communications market.

In its biggest acquisition since it bought Norway's videoconferencing company Tandberg for $3.3 billion in 2009, Cisco said NDS was a strategic fit for its video system Videoscape, as NDS' software allows cable and satellite TV companies to deliver encrypted content through televisions and other devices.

Chief Executive John Chambers said Cisco first began looking at NDS about a year ago because of what customers were saying about the company.

NDS technology is used by BSkyB and Sky Italia in Europe as well as customers such as Cablevision Systems Corp, Comcast Corp and Rogers Communications Inc in North America.

NDS, which filed for a public listing in December, is 51 percent owned by private equity fund Permira and 49 percent by News Corp.

Cisco, whose bread-and-butter business is routers and switches that manage Internet traffic, is keen to find new networking functions. The company is betting heavily on video, which Chambers likes to call "the new voice" and is one of its five growth pillars.

"This is the right deal to do right now," Chambers said on a call with analysts, as the way television programming and video are being consumed is changing. "It (video) will be pervasive, on every device," he said.

He said NDS' flagship product, VideoGuard, which is installed on home TVs via smartcards integrated into set-top boxes, complements Cisco's video offerings because it allows television operators to extend their pay-TV services to other media devices while ensuring that content cannot be hacked by non-paying customers.

SMALLER ACQUISITIONS

Chambers said there were more opportunities for acquisitions, but said any future buys would likely be smaller.

Cisco said it would pay about $5 billion, including the assumption of debt and retention-based incentives, to acquire all of NDS, which Chambers said has less than $1 billion in total liabilities.

Cisco's other recent large acquisitions include online video platform WebEx for $2.9 billion in 2007 and digital cable set-top box unit Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion in 2005.

The boards of Cisco and NDS have approved the acquisition, which is expected to close during the second half of 2012.

The purchase price is about 35 percent higher than the value of NDS when it was delisted from Nasdaq in 2009.

"While we view the price as rich for a company growing sales less than 10 percent year on year, we believe it addresses a large opportunity in enabling service providers to offer comprehensive digital media and integrated video offerings," ISI analyst Brian Marshall said in a note.

Cisco said the deal would add to earnings per share in the first year but Marshall said it was not clear how that would happen other than through job cuts.

Chambers said he based his assumption on NDS' double-digit growth and recurring revenue stream.

MAJOR BUY

The NDS acquisition is the largest in Israel after the $4.8 billion purchase of Chromatis by Lucent in 2000.

Deals to acquire or merge Israeli and Israel-related tech companies were valued at $5.1 billion in all of 2011 -- the second-highest amount in a decade -- according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center.

News Corp acquired NDS in 1992 for $15 million. NDS went public in 1999 but was bought back a decade later by Permira and News Corp and turned into a private company.

Analysts said it made sense for News Corp to sell its stake.

"NDS Group is a non-strategic asset," Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger said, adding that News Corp President and COO Chase Carey has said that the company should either monetize or add to the company's equity stakes.

"As a non-strategic equity investment, it makes sense to sell the equity stake in NDS completely'" Juenger said.

"NDS' customer portfolio will broaden Cisco's presence into new segments of the service provider market," Marthin de Beer, Cisco's senior vice president of video, said in a company blog.

"It will expand Cisco's reach into emerging markets where NDS has a strong footprint with customers such as CCTV in China and Bharti and TataSky in India," he added.

Founded in Israel in 1988 and headquartered in London, NDS maintains a large research and development center in Jerusalem.

Cisco Acquires Versly: Collaboration Software

As stated by TechCrunch, Cisco this morning announced that it has acquired San Francisco startup Versly, a privately-held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all Versly employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group (CSG) upon the close of the acquisition.

Versly builds plug-ins that enable groups of people to collaborate around content in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and emails.

From the looks of it, the service was still in private beta, so this is a quick exit for Versly.

Here’s how Murali Sitaram, VP and general manager, CSG, Cisco, pitches the acquisition:

“Collaboration is a top priority at Cisco. With this acquisition we’re enhancing our collaboration offerings and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies within the business applications individuals and teams use at work.”

Versly’s software will be integrated into offerings such as Cisco Quad, Jabber and WebEx.

This acquisition supports Cisco’s focus on the Collaboration market and CSG software, with the ultimate goal of helping customers to:

• Integrate collaboration into Microsoft Office applications
• Reduce coordination costs
• Increase productivity
• Improve connections between people and the content they create

 

Cisco To Buy Comptel’s Axioss Software Assets For $31 Million In Cash

Cisco this morning announced its intent to purchase service fulfillment software assets and associated employees from the UK subsidiary of partner company Comptel, for 21.3 million euros or roughly $31 million in cash. Axioss is a fulfillment solution developed by Axiom Systems, a company that Comptel acquired back in 2008.

With the acquisition, Cisco hopes to extend network and service management technologies across its IP-based network platforms and enable service providers to more quickly launch new video, data, mobility and cloud services to their customers, using a single management architecture.

The AXIOSS software suite will also enhance Cisco Prime, which enables service providers to better manage their networks and network services, the company says.

Upon the close of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the third quarter of calendar year 2011, the AXIOSS team will be integrated into the Cisco NMTG and Cisco Advanced Services Group.

Gareth Senior, Comptel CTO and member of its Executive Board, will also be transferring to Cisco.

Comptel and Cisco will continue their cooperation across other areas of OSS/BSS, e.g. cloud mediation and charging. Comptel says it will continue in fulfilment business developing and selling its Comptel Fulfillment Solution, retain its existing Axioss customer relationships and continue to support these customers.

Cisco among most acquisitive in 2010

M&A activity in IT made a strong recovery in 2010, with more 1,900 deals totaling over $200 billion, according to market research firm IDC.  Coming off the 2008-2009 recession, the majority of deals were concentrated in application-related areas, including enterprise applications -- 586 deals -- and Internet applications, with 421 deals.

There were also 219 deals in the infrastructure segment, with security and storage acquisitions leading the way, according to IDC. 

Cisco acquired five companies last year covering a range of strategic markets: consumer, optical, video, smart grid and network management. Cisco disclosed the price of only one, however -- $99 million for CoreOptics, a maker of 100Gbps digital signal processors for optical transport networks.

Cisco hopes the CoreOptics deal will allow it to add high-speed optical transmission capabilities to its routers to enable service providers to add capacity to their existing infrastructures.

Another strategic acquisition for Cisco in 2010 was LineSider Technologies, a developer of network management software for creating, deploying and provisioning cloud computing infrastructure and services.  LineSider's software delegates and enforces policies - defined according to business rules aligning the relationship between users and applications, and computing and storage resources - among VMs and physical assets. It will allow Cisco routers and switches to control network access, security and services across logical and physical construct.

Meanhwile, seven of the top 10 deals in 2010 were in telecom, according to IDC. Among them were CenturyLink's acquisition of Qwest for $22.4 billion and América Móvil's $21 billion deal for Telmex.

In infrastructure, a couple of the top deals were Intel's $7.7 billion purchase of McAfee and SAP's acquisition of Sybase for $5.8 billion, according to IDC.

The most acquisitive companies in 2010 were Google, which made 27 deals, and AOL and Facebook with nine apiece. In addition to Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and VMware were most active among IT vendors, IDC found.  

IDC expects 2011 to be another active year as companies make strategic investments in converged infrastructure, mobile content, service creation and enablement, data analytics and pervasive computing.

By Jim Duffy (Network World)

Cisco to Acquire LineSider Technologies

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately held LineSider Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of network management software that helps customers build the network services necessary to securely create and deploy cloud computing infrastructure. Based in Danvers, Mass., LineSider will enhance Cisco's ability to rapidly provision network services.

"Cloud computing represents a significant opportunity for Cisco customers to create more effective business models and increase the operating efficiency of the network," said Jesper Andersen, senior vice president of Cisco's Network Management Technology Group (NMTG). "With the acquisition of LineSider, Cisco will gain a key component to helping customers make this shift. LineSider's advanced network management software integrates both physical and virtual network services with a policy-based approach and makes networks more flexible and responsive to change."

LineSider's software is designed to enable customers to organize their network resources into a flexible cloud infrastructure that integrates the network with customers' existing IT operational tools and processes. This network abstraction layer allows customers to provision and deploy numerous individual network components much more quickly than previously possible, dramatically reducing network operations costs and accelerating service delivery. LineSider's unique policy-based approach automatically responds to pre-determined business scenarios and provides maximum performance across networking products and service delivery platforms. A partner-centric approach remains a cornerstone of Cisco's strategy in the cloud computing space, and LineSider's technology will strengthen Cisco's ability to work with a broad community of software partners, particularly within the service management space.

In addition to providing Cisco with advanced technology, the acquisition of LineSider will bring an industry-leading team of engineers to the company. Upon the close of the acquisition, the LineSider team will become part of Cisco's NMTG. Financial terms of the transaction are undisclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2011.

GoToMeeting Video

Add another player to the increasingly crowded HD video conferencing field.  Citrix is adding HD video conferencing to its GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining web conferencing products, the company announced today at its Citrix Synergy event in Berlin.

(This is a much different stance Citrix took on video 2 years ago where Brett Caine, President of Citrix Online, stated that there was no need for video collaboration a in the SMB market. Read More)

The new functionality which will be included at no additional cost and will run on any hardware and software platform. It is dubbed HDFaces and enables participants to view up to six high-resolution video conferencing streams in a high-definition session for a total maximum resolution of 1920p x 960p and also allows participants to view video and the presenter’s shared desktop on the same screen.

“Citrix Online’s core strengths have always been easy-to-use and affordable products,” said Roopam Jain, principal analyst, Frost & Sullivan's North America Information & Communications Technologies Practice, in a statement.  “ With the introduction of video conferencing, including high resolution, one-click video and simple controls, the company maintains its ease of deployment and use, which are increasingly important in a market moving beyond a niche status. Simplicity has been a key differentiator for Citrix and is sure to enhance its market momentum in web and video conferencing.”  

“When customers say they want video capabilities combined with web conferencing, they don’t mean tiny choppy images – but that’s what they currently get with the products on the market today,” said Bernd Christiansen: CTO, in a statement. “What they actually want is to see the details in others’ facial expressions just like in a face-to-face meeting or training session. That’s why it was so important to us to incorporate high-resolution video into our collaboration products. I’m confident that we’re the first to combine web and video conferencing the right way and – most importantly – to make it delightful for customers to use.”

HDFaces is based on technology from Citrix Online Germany GmbH, formerly VidSoft GmbH, a Dresden, Germany-based video conferencing provider that was recently acquired by Citrix.

Citrix said that HDFaces will include the following key features:

• Multistream HD technology, which Citrix says is the highest resolution video conferencing quality available on the market among web conferencing providers with up to six streams at a resolution of 640p x 480p each, for a total maximum resolution of 1920p x 960p.
• A video conferencing viewer that is integrated into the content screen so attendees can collaborate on shared content and see each other at the same time without the need to switch between the two.
• One-click web, audio and video conferencing.
• Video optimization that automatically adjusts to perfectly fit the hardware and network each participant is using when video, audio or screen sharing are in use.
• A resizable viewer and layouts, which can be adapted to numerous monitor and projection configurations.

BY Channel Insider Staff

 

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire ExtendMedia

Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately-held ExtendMedia, a leading provider of software-based Content Management Systems (CMS) that manage the entire lifecycle of video content through monetization for pay media and ad-supported business models. Based in Newton, Mass., with the majority of its employee base in Toronto, Canada, ExtendMedia will enable Cisco to help service providers deliver multi-screen offerings as the market transitions to IP video.

"As the video market transitions and consumers expect multi-screen engagement, service providers are enhancing their infrastructure to manage and deliver video to any device while providing a rich user experience," said Enrique Rodriguez, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group.  "ExtendMedia will strengthen Cisco's position in the delivery of IP video services by enabling service providers to provide a more interactive and personal experience and to optimize quality for consumer viewing devices."

ExtendMedia brings to Cisco a strong software team that understands the complexities of delivering multi-screen video over IP networks.  ExtendMedia's CMS software, which will integrate with Cisco's current IP video offerings, will be a core component of Cisco's next-generation video architecture.  Together, Cisco and ExtendMedia will enable service providers to deploy a next-generation, end-to-end video architecture that delivers the best consumer experience with access to any content, over any network, on any device.

Financial terms of the transaction are undisclosed. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the first half of Cisco's fiscal year 2011. Upon the close of the acquisition, the majority of the ExtendMedia team will be integrated into Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group.  The ExtendMedia Sales and Professional Services teams will integrate into the Cisco Sales and Advanced Services organizations.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/corp_082610.html?sid=BAC-NewsWire