That won't happen... Cisco consumer and Cisco enterprise are entirely different beasts.
Cisco's track record on M&A being successful is actually the subject of a number of case studies... they generally do it really well and keep the CEOs and teams of the companies they acquire for a while.
So, I have been doing network engineering and sysadmin kind of stuff since the 90s. I remember when Cisco bought the PIX firewalls from Network Translation around 95/96.
Cisco has killed competition here by paying out the other company. Cisco absolutely will kill off a product line somewhere which conflicts with what they purchased, or vice versa.
While Cisco is pretty good about corporate integrations from a big-picture level, but I imagine the individuals with talent over at Sourcefire are getting ready to jump ship, because Cisco is really bad at promoting and compensating based on technical merit. They promote business executives and then hire cheap Indian tech talent (not trying to be racist here, it's just true).
Linksys was a weird acquisition and I don't think it's a fair comparison here at all. Instead, look to where Cisco got their big switches, their wireless networking, their IP telephony, their IDS, firewalls, and video conferencing tech. Cisco has integrated those products well, but they almost immediately stopped innovating new features and only responded to outside competition to deliver anything new. Cisco was LAST to have good 10Gb ethernet switches, LAST to have IDS products, LAST in a variety of IP telephoney features, and their PIX/ASAs still suck super hard, are buggy, and crash way too much.
Cisco sells stuff which gets the job done, but at an incredible markup, while spreading FUD about the competition. But mostly their stuff is somewhat mediocre, especially their software.
I really want Cisco to have more competition. I'm really sorry that Sourcefire sold out.
PS: Next time you are buying switches and routers, look at Juniper. Juniper mops the floor with Cisco technically, and is usually 25% cheaper.
[+] [-] kyrra|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/
[2] http://www.immunet.com/main/index.html
[3] http://snort.org/
[+] [-] INTPenis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LaSombra|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidu|12 years ago|reply
Cisco's track record on M&A being successful is actually the subject of a number of case studies... they generally do it really well and keep the CEOs and teams of the companies they acquire for a while.
[+] [-] jmomo|12 years ago|reply
Cisco has killed competition here by paying out the other company. Cisco absolutely will kill off a product line somewhere which conflicts with what they purchased, or vice versa.
While Cisco is pretty good about corporate integrations from a big-picture level, but I imagine the individuals with talent over at Sourcefire are getting ready to jump ship, because Cisco is really bad at promoting and compensating based on technical merit. They promote business executives and then hire cheap Indian tech talent (not trying to be racist here, it's just true).
Linksys was a weird acquisition and I don't think it's a fair comparison here at all. Instead, look to where Cisco got their big switches, their wireless networking, their IP telephony, their IDS, firewalls, and video conferencing tech. Cisco has integrated those products well, but they almost immediately stopped innovating new features and only responded to outside competition to deliver anything new. Cisco was LAST to have good 10Gb ethernet switches, LAST to have IDS products, LAST in a variety of IP telephoney features, and their PIX/ASAs still suck super hard, are buggy, and crash way too much.
Cisco sells stuff which gets the job done, but at an incredible markup, while spreading FUD about the competition. But mostly their stuff is somewhat mediocre, especially their software.
I really want Cisco to have more competition. I'm really sorry that Sourcefire sold out.
PS: Next time you are buying switches and routers, look at Juniper. Juniper mops the floor with Cisco technically, and is usually 25% cheaper.
[+] [-] gnoway|12 years ago|reply