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Tandberg shareholders to Cisco: Put a bigger diamond on that ring

Cisco’s deal to buy Tandberg could be on ice.

When Cisco and Tandberg agreed to their video marriage two weeks ago, the dowry was set at $3 billion. And the deal was contingent upon the approval of the owners of 90% of Tandberg’s stock.

According to Reuters (via GigaOm), Swedish brokerage SEB Enskilda has told Cisco that it represents 21 shareholders who own 24% of Tandberg’s stock, and those shareholders want more money.  “We think the price is too low,” Amund Lunde told Reuters. Lunde is CEO of life insurance firm Oslo Pensjonsforsikring, which owns 1% of Tandberg, It’s not clear what it would take to win over these holdouts, but clearly Cisco will have to dig deeper to get a controlling interest in the company.

Apparently investors have been telling the Norwegian press that something stinks about the Tandberg deal. According to the Financial Times (via Norwegian language site Dagen IT) Rasmussen Group CEO Rune Selmar said Cisco’s promise of three-year bonus agreements to “key” Tandberg employees “probably explains part of management’s positive attitude to the acquisition.”

Ouch. That sounds awfully close to an ugly accusation.

Enterprise video: someone bought $1 million in Flip cameras from Cisco

During this week’s Cisco Systems quarterly earnings call, CEO John Chambers revealed that his company recently shipped its first $1-million order of Flip video camerasto an enterprise customer. (The cameras sell for about $250 in retail). Cisco got into the handheld HD video camera business when it bought Flip manufacturer Pure Digital for $590 million in March.

Initially it appeared that Cisco targeted Pure Digital as part of a strategy to build out its consumer technology business. That remains part of the plan; however, Cisco soon started positioning the Flip as an enterprise product as well. At June’s Cisco Partner Summit in Boston, Cisco gave out 1,500 Flip cameras to partnersat the conference and Cisco executives emphasized the importance of video to the future of collaboration.

So who is this enterprise customer? And what plans does it have for more than 4,000 Flip cameras?

Psytechnics Experience Manager demo at VoiceCon

Psytechnics, a company that was spun out of British Telecom, has a cool product called Experience Manager. The product is one of the few I know of that can measure both QoS (quality of service) and QoE (quality of experience) for voice and video applications on the IP network. Many network management vendors are good at detecting jitter, packet loss, etc., for voice and video, but Psytechnics is able to measure how the end user is experiencing these services on an endpoint device.

Here is Tom Casey, a sales engineer with Psychtehnics, demonstrating the operational interface of Experience Manager, recorded last week at VoiceCon Orlando. Sorry for the jittery camera. I drank too much coffee.