#Syco small business routers software#

'If you are a year late, that market might not exist anymore. 'We have a saying here, 'Early if not elegant,' ' Mr. Until the purchase in 1996 of StrataCom for $4.5 billion in stock, its biggest acquisition by far, Cisco never used an underwriter, preferring to pursue small, privately held technology companies in uncomplicated and friendly deals.Īccording to Charles Giancarlo, vice president for business development at Cisco, the underlying premise of every acquisition is 'time-to-market.' Cisco has become dominant in its industry in recent years by using its bulk and marketing muscle and by being first into emerging markets. Companies are evaluated, approached, acquired and integrated with remarkable speed and efficiency, given the usual legal and cultural complexities surrounding such deals.

Over the years, a buying process has evolved that stresses a 'blitzkrieg' mentality for every purchase. Starting with the $89 million acquisition of Crescendo, a switch maker, in the fall of 1993, Cisco has set a relentless pace for acquisitions. Chambers set out to buy what he couldn't develop quickly enough. With product cycles dropping below 18 months and long-term bets off, Mr. To dominate such a market, Cisco knew that it could not hope to internally develop the needed array of technology. In addition, the coming of age of the Internet and the growing popularity of intranets, the corporate in-house version, put more demands on Cisco to provide a complex variety of networking solutions. Until 1993, the company's fortunes were tied almost exclusively to a hardware device called a router, which forwards packets of data from one computer to another.īut four years ago, Cisco's management team realized that the market was changing rapidly, with the advent of faster and more intelligent 'internetworking' devices like switches and hubs, which link local area and wide area networks. As recently as 10 years ago, sales came to just $1.5 million.

#Syco small business routers software#

With this model, Cisco is reinventing itself, becoming a one-stop shopping option in a market that has long been far too technologically complex to allow any one vendor to grab such a ubiquitous role.įounded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a husband-and-wife team of computer scientists at Stanford University, Cisco quietly competed in the rapidly emerging market for hardware and software to connect networks of corporate computers. In so doing, Cisco has become a prototype for the networked corporation: a decentralized set of business units that leverage the company's marketing, sales, manufacturing and distribution strengths. Not so with Cisco, which has found a formula for friendly acquisition and accelerated integration that has allowed it to gobble up small, fast-growing companies, meld the work forces and product lines and sprint forward seemingly without missing a beat. No wonder the stock price of an acquiring company generally drops on the day a takeover is announced. In most acquisitions, the buyer tends to get mired in the endless labored details of integrating the new company into the existing culture, resulting in slowed growth and downsized work forces and expectations. If the deal is consummated, it would eclipse the Cisco/StrataCom acquisition.)

Robotics Corporation, a modem maker, in a stock swap valued at $7.3 billion. (The 3Com Corporation, a major Cisco competitor, recently agreed to acquire the U.S. In fact, its ability to successfully acquire and integrate a continuing string of companies, including StrataCom, the largest acquisition in Silicon Valley history, is becoming part of the industry's new folklore. With a current market valuation of $42 billion, however, Cisco can no longer hide its mammoth presence in the high-tech marketplace. Though a darling of Wall Street, where its stock has been a stellar performer since its I.P.O., Cisco has kept a low profile throughout most of its existence. Up to a dozen more acquisitions will be made in 1997, he says. Chambers, Cisco's 47-year-old president and chief executive, the company's appetite has hardly been satisfied. The pace even picked up in 1996, as sales and net income both more than doubled, to $4.1 billion and $913 million, respectively. Thus far, Cisco has spent more than $5 billion and added more than 2,000 employees to its own rapidly expanding work force, all without slowing its phenomenal revenue growth rate of more than 80 percent a year since the company went public in 1990. In order to fulfill this ambitious goal, Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., has gone on a major buying spree, acquiring 14 companies since late 1993. did with mainframes and as Intel and Microsoft have done with personal computers. has been on a mission: to dominate its data networking market much as I.B.M. Over the past four years, Cisco Systems Inc.