Tandberg Unveils Video Phone Provisioning App

Tandberg continued pumping out new products Tuesday even as its stockholders mulled over Cisco's final drop-dead offer to acquire the Norwegian video conferencing firm for an enhanced price of $3.4 billion.

Tandberg introduced a large-scale provisioning solution capable of almost instantly deploying hundreds or even thousands of Tandberg E20 video conferencing phones and Tandberg Movi PC video conferencing applications. The solution, which is scheduled to be available by year's end, is primarily carried out through a software upgrade to the Tandberg Management Suite. The company bolstered its telepresence line last month.

"Demand for personal video conferencing in the enterprise is growing faster than any other part of the video communications market," said Scott Morrison, a research vice president at the Gartner Group, in a statement. "But IT departments are wary of the impact of deploying and supporting so many end-user devices. The ability to centrally provision -- and re-provision -- on a large scale is a key concern for organizations with large numbers of remote workers where end-user install can avoid the cost of a truck roll."

Tandberg noted that traditional video conferencing hardware deployments can take 30 minutes per device to install by an experienced technician. That cost is eliminated over the hundreds and thousands of installations that can be provisioned by a single software upgrade.

In addition to the scalable Tandberg Management Suite, the remaining key pieces of the provisioning application include Tandberg's E20, a desktop video conferencing device; Tandberg Movi, a combo USB camera-microphone-speaker device linked to PCs; and Tandberg's scalable Video Communication Server.

In a development in the ongoing Cisco-Tandberg acquisition saga, Tandberg ECO Fredrik Halvorsen Tuesday urged the firm's stockholders to accept Cisco's new $3.4 billion offer for Tandberg. Cisco raised its offer from $3 billion and set a deadline of Dec. 1 for acceptance of the offer. Norwegian law requires a 90% stockholder approval of acquisitions.

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