poor facts
1) Cisco was ALREADY in video conferencing.
2) Tandberg do much much more than video conferencing, they do alot of hardware video transcoding in the broadcast industry.
Cisco is paying $3bn for Norwegian video conferencing specialist Tandberg. The cash offer of 153.5 Norwegian Kroner for each Tandberg share represents a 25 per cent premium on the three month average share price. It has been unanimously accepted by Tandberg's board and is expected to close in the first half of next year. …
I think HP buys Polycom next: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/10/01/cisco-buys-tandberg-hp-to-buy-polycom/
Basically, in the video conferencing market (all the way from desktop video to telepresence and other immersive solutions, and everything in between like plasma screens, etc.), the 2 leaders are Polycom (~40%) and Tandberg (~40%). Cisco, HP, Avaya, Nortel are all bit players in comparison.
Both Polycom and Tandberg have good interoperability with other standards based systems, which Cisco, for example, doesn’t. Cisco-Cisco works fine. Cisco-others doesn’t. That’s why they lost the ~$45m Regus account.