Mergers and acquisitions are heating up and in a move that has sent shockwaves through the video collaboration market, Cisco has made a hefty bid of $3 Billion in cash to acquire Norwegian videoconferencing vendor TANDBERG. The definitive agreement was recommended unanimously by Tandberg’s board of directors and represents an 11.0% premium to Tandberg's closing stock on Wednesday and more than 25% to the average closing price over the last three months.  The merger of the two companies will likely create an unstoppable force that both disrupts the collaboration market and extends the reach of both platforms from low bandwidth desktop and mid-range group based videoconferencing systems to HD videoconferencing and TelePresence. In nothing short of a brilliant move by Cisco to acquire rival in the space, the San Jose company will add Tandberg's portfolio of middle market end points, desktop units, multipoint control units (MCUs) and network infrastructure solutions into it's growing line of video offerings.  Video collaboration is hot and Cisco knows that. In the NY Times, Ashlee Vance highlighted Cisco's recent M&A activity:"In recent years, Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., has been one of the technology industry’s most aggressive companies when it comes to acquisitions. It has bought close to 40 companies in the last five years, including the $6.9 billion purchase of the set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta and the $2.9 billion purchase of the Web meeting software maker WebEx. This year, Cisco bought Pure Digital, which makes the popular Flip video camera for consumers, for $590 million."Several years earlier, Cisco acquired web conferencing platform WebEx which has become the desktop standard for many companies and core to Cisco's unified communications experience. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers pointed out that Cisco and Tandberg share similar cultures and visions on video technologies and unified communications collaboration and video communic From Collection: klessblog's vid