Networking giant Cisco has taken another step of its embrace of digital video technology, announcing that it has now acquired more than 90 percent of the shares of the Norwegian video conferencing and telepresense company Tandberg, clearing the way for a complete buyout of the company.
Cisco has wrestled with Tandberg over the takeover: back in October Cisco originally proffered $3 billion to take over the company, but the offer was rejected by over 90 percent of Tandberg’s shareholders who said it undervalued the company. Cisco bought a 2 percent stake in Tandberg last month, and now says shareholders representing some 89.1 percent of the remaining outstanding shares have accepted the company’s most recent offer, which values the company at about $3.4 billion. By controlling more than 90 percent of Tandberg’s shares, Cisco can make a compulsory acquisition of all the remaining shares, taking control of the company.
Cisco already offers video conferencing solutions aimed at high-end enterprise and governance customers with its own systems, and at consumers with the acquisition of Flip Video. Tandberg’s service offerings fall somewhere in between, with video conferencing and telepresense services that are affordable to small and medium sized businesses. Cisco seems bandwidth-intensive video applications as a key driver to sales of its high-performance networking gear, both to businesses that want to use the capabilities and to network and hosting providers who will need to supply the bandwidth.
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