Cisco has completed its acquisition of TANDBERG, a global player in video communications.

The close of this transaction, and the consequent creation of an extensive combined product portfolio, accelerates Cisco's vision of changing the way people communicate and collaborate by delivering simple, unique and interoperable collaboration experiences.

The full TANDBERG product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio. Through this combined offering, the Cisco TelePresence business provides customers with access to a fully integrated architecture, a comprehensive network-based endpoint and infrastructure portfolio – designed to help provide multivendor interoperability – and a suite of unique experiences, customizable applications and flexible deployment models.

Beyond interoperability across company boundaries, the combined Cisco TelePresence portfolio provides a rich assortment of options designed to facilitate any-to-any video interoperability. These multivendor support options and our commitment to deliver broad-based industry standards through the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) for native telepresence interoperability, provide customers with investment protection and flexible options for extending their investments to new forms of collaboration.

TIP provides the underpinning for a scalable multiscreen switched architecture and was released as a method to provide native telepresence interoperability. TIP is currently available under license from Cisco and will be transferred to the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC) or another independent industry body to facilitate interoperability.

To advance native telepresence interoperability, Cisco is launching the TIP Open Source project and will publish the TIP source code libraries by July 1, 2010. Nine videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have licensed TIP so far.