From InfoWorld: Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a developer of multivendor network service orchestration systems for traditional and virtualized networks, and one of the vendors AT&T selected for its Domain 2.0 SDN/NFV project.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm.
With the Tail-f acquisition, Cisco essentially buys its way into AT&T Domain 2.0 initiative, an effort to virtualize the AT&T service network with software-defined networking and network functions virtualization. Tail-f is one of six vendors AT&T has identified publicly as Domain 2.0 suppliers, a list that also includes Ericsson, Metaswitch Networks, startup Affirmed Networks, Juniper Networks and Amdocs.
Domain 2.0 is viewed as a negative for Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure programmable networking strategy due to AT&T's reported preference for commodity, white box hardware and SDN controllers. VMware's NSX network virtualization platform is also already present in AT&T data centers.
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