Cisco headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

In another major play in the remote collaboration market, Cisco announced Thursday a plan to buy Oslo, Norway-based video conferencing solutions developer Tandberg. The Norwegian company's product is similar to Cisco's TelePresence, allowing multiple users to communicate by using large screens and video cameras.

Cisco made a cash offer to acquire Tandberg for about $3 billion and said it expected the deal to close in the first half of 2010. The offer represents an 11-percent premium to the closing price of Tandberg stock on the day prior. It is a 25-percent premium to the average closing price of Tandberg stock over three months. Tandberg board of directors recommended the proposal unanimously.

Once the deal is completed, Tandberg CEO Fredrik Halvorsen will become head of Cisco's TelePresence Technology Group.

"Cisco and Tandberg share a vision of changing the way people communicate and collaborate," Halvorsen said in a statement. "This transaction is a vote of confidence, not just in Tandberg but in our technology and our people. The combination of world-class technologies, Cisco's global scale, and exceptional people from both organizations will enable us to accelerate innovation and market adoption."

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said in a news release that collaboration was a $34 billion market that was "growing rapidly" and that the planned acquisition was a testament to Cisco's ability to capture key market transitions.

"Cisco tends to compete not with individual companies, we compete (around) market transitions," Chambers said in a conference call. "We do believe the biggest transition going on in communications and IT is all around collaboration and how this is done: any device, any content - data, voice, video - over any network. In other words the network becomes the platform for the change. Part of that collaboration is video architecture."

Cisco began playing the video "architectural game" with the acquisition of Linksys, a maker of home video equipment among other products. Since the deal's completion, Cisco has gained "about half of the available market share in terms of the home network," Chambers said.

The next play was acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta, provider of digital content distribution systems and transmission networks for broadband access.

"We then moved into WebEx and the WebEx acquisition was done in a week. That has done extremely well in terms of collaborative technologies and conferencing on it." WebEx is a multifaceted Web collaboration tool, incorporating video conferencing, VoIP and document sharing.

Cisco continued by purchasing handheld digital camcorder maker Pure Digital with the intention of integrating its camera Flip into the architecture, where video captured by the device is fed directly into the network and can be used as part of the collaboration process in real time.