Tag Archives: Cisco

Cisco’s A&D

In 2009, I had analyzed Cisco’s strategy of Acquisitions and Development (A&D) which was claimed to be a substitute to R&D. You can have a look at my previous article also entitled Cisco’s A&D. I decided to redo the same analysis, i.e. the size of Cisco per year (sales and employees) as well as the number and values of its acquisitions. I also analyzed the geographical location of these acquisitions. The results follow. I just add that Silicon Valley remains the main source of acquisitions. The total value of the M&As were about $75B ($48B until 2006 and $27B in the last 10 years).

Cisco_1984_2016_figures

Cisco_1984_2016

Cisco_1984_2016_geography_figures

Cisco_1984_2016_geography

Finally the exhaustive list (from Cisco’s web site and Wikipedia).

Cisco_M&A_1993_2006

Cisco_M&A_2007_2016

Cisco’s A&D

For those who read my book, it will be clear there is no typo in my title. It is not R&D but really, A&D, acquisition and development. Cisco has been known to consider M&A as the best source of innovations for its future development. So I was not surprised to see that Cisco did two acquisitions recently: ScanSafe, Starent. But what is crazy with them is that between reading this and writing this post, they had done another one (which is not included in my numbers, sorry!): DVN. This gave me the impetus to look at how A&D has developed since I published Start-Up. So here are the numbers (put in parallel with the growth of its employees and sales).

or if you prefer visual info:

Final piece of info: where are the acquistions coming from? No surprise, mostly Silicon Valley: