Cisco's TANDBERG purchase gets approval from DOJ and EC

Today Cisco got antitrust approval from two key government bodies to complete its acquisition of TANDBERG. The European Commission approved the transaction while U.S. Department of Justice said it would not challenge the purchase. While the approval from these two bodies was the last real hurdle for the merger to go through, the deal is still under review in Brazil. The two companies plan to complete the purchase in the coming weeks.

As part of the approval deal with the European Commission, Cisco had to make a few concessions. For one, Cisco had to divest ownership of its TelePresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and the library of open source software useful to implementers of TIP to an independent industry body while providing all other rights necessary to implement TIP and authorize the industry body to license those rights to any interested party, royalty-free. Cisco must also make available royalty-free information about Cisco's own implementation of the protocol that will facilitate efforts to interoperate with Cisco multi-screen TelePresence systems.

For more:
- read the release

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