SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco today announced the contribution of Basic ConfD, a free version of its powerful ConfD management agent software, to accelerate the adoption of programmability for the broader networking industry. Tail-f, now part of Cisco, provides two products, ConfD and NCS. NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.

By implementing an end-to-end programmable network based on open standards, service providers can reduce configuration and management costs by nearly 50 percent over a five-year period, while having the agility to easily add new services. Today's announcement about the future of Tail-f ConfD, demonstrates Cisco's commitment to advancing open standards in the best interest of the networking industry.

ConfD is a mature, proven management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices. Currently in use by more than 75 network equipment providers, ConfD provides the industry-leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language. The no-cost Basic ConfD is feature-rich and will be available for production use without additional fees for NETCONF. The premium version of ConfD, including a complete set of north-bound interfaces including CLI, REST and SNMP, continues to be commercially available.

"We continue to see strong demand from networking vendors, as they sharply ramp up their efforts to provide standardized programmatic interfaces to their virtual or physical network devices," said Fredrik Lundberg, director of strategy and planning, Cisco's cloud and virtualization group. "ConfD dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to develop network management interfaces. Networking vendors leverage Basic ConfD to rapidly develop products that are fully NETCONF- and YANG-compliant."

Basic ConfD is available now and can be downloaded from the Tail-f website. The software is made available with an unlimited, perpetual license.

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)