In case you haven’t been following, Cisco completed its acquisition of Tandberg on April 18. By coincidence, I was attending a Tandberg training class at their Reston, VA facility on the first official day of the marriage. There was certainly an atmosphere of excitement in the area during that week.
I had been vaguely familiar with the Tandberg product line prior to my training. At the conclusion of that week of class, it became varies obvious why Cisco choose to pursue this acquisition – Tandberg’s VTC products rock! Tandberg’s impressive offerings include a software video MOVI client, various desktop units, room based solutions, and a Telepresence offering that is absolutely incredible. Their management GUIs are extremely intuitive and I look forward to many of those features being integrated into Cisco’s UC product portfolio (awesome troubleshooting tools!).
As a leading Cisco Gold Partner, I am very excited about this new set of solutions that I can now offer my customers. One of my DOD customers has told me that the word “Tandberg” is often treated as both a verb and a noun and is synonymous to VTC (e.g.: “Please Tandberg me to the Deputy Director”). There will undoubtedly be some kinks in the weeks and months ahead in terms of integrating the product line into Cisco’s UC portfolio. However, this acquisition certainly reinforces John Chamber’s belief that Video Is the next Killer App, as discussed during the 2009 Networkers Conference.
