[PeterCorless]

I sat in on the all Cisco acquisitions teams from c. 1994 - 1999. Even during that heyday there were awesome acquisitions that took off and others that went nowhere. Cisco was historically always better at hardware acquisitions than pure-play software. It would often kill the software products entirely — Internet Junction, TGV, Precept come to mind.

The one other rule that John Chambers lived by was "no merger of equals." It was always about a big fish swallowing a smaller one. Cisco's market cap is an order of magnitude greater than Splunk's, but this is as close to breaking that Chambers Rule of Acquisitions as anything they've done to date.

Here's the full history of Cisco acquisitions. Maybe someone with more M&A lore would scorecard it to see which were dreams and which were duds.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-offic...

[marcus0x62]

I think they had better success integrating hardware companies, but SA — which was pretty much a hardware company — was a pretty big counter-example. I’d also argue the further they strayed from their core market, the worse the results. See also: Flip and Linksys.

[mpalfrey]

I worked for NDS when they were acquired by Cisco. They've spat them back out a few years ago. Not entirely sure Cisco should have got into the video space.

I enjoyed Cisco (great 4th July parties!) but it never felt like we were properly integrated.

[throwaway892238]

Based on my experience in (mostly) software companies, hardware just seems more likely to work. The people building it are formally trained, the government forces a minimum amount of safety testing, and a design mistake could cost millions to fix, besides the reputational damage. Software is more like getting retail workers to build a remote controlled forklift out of junkyard parts.