Cisco is shelling out $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives to buy a little-known service orchestration company called Tail-f in a bid to extend its ambitious Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative into the lucrative telecommunications market. The nine-year-old Swedish firm, which has raised over $6 million in funding to date, develops solutions designed to streamline the long and bumpy journey to programmable networking.

Under pressure to support exponentially growing traffic from the fast-multiplying array of connected devices in consumers’ hands and homes, carriers have been squeezed to the forefront of technology adoption and, as a result, make up the core market for software-defined networking today.  In contrast with the majority of their traditional enterprise peers, many providers are already replacing their legacy infrastructure with new, open standards-based switches and management tools that decouple the control plane from the underlying hardware to allow for greater scalability and faster provisioning.

But before the benefits can be realized, each of these components have to be individually wired up to the operational support systems  that constitute the nerve centers of most modern carrier networks, a process that can take months of work and results in a lot of unnecessary complexity. That prolongs time-to-value and therefore diminishes the value proposition of SDN offerings, including Cisco’s.

Tail-f sells software that it says eliminates the need to add custom code to the management stack every time a new solution is implemented and provides a single point of control for the entire network, shielding users from the complexity of the underlying details. Besides simplifying upgrades and administration, that abstraction also does away with vendor lock-in, which means customers can choose the products that best address their requirements without worrying about hardware constraints.

All that ties in nicely with Cisco’s ACI vision and puts much-needed additional weight behind the project, which is currently still more concept than reality. Besides Tail-f’s technology, the acquisition also buys the networking stalwart its technical know-how and formidable customer base, which includes AT&T and Deutsche Telekom.

Under the terms of the deal, Tail-f employees will join Cisco’s cloud and virtualization group, where they will be set to work integrating its software into the latter’s portfolio. The transaction is set to complete in the fourth quarter subject to customary closing conditions.

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