By the way, survey of mergers found that while most mergers fail, Cisco is an outlier making successful mergers one after another. It is said that Cisco analyzed successful and unsuccessful mergers and does data-driven, evidence-based decision making.
'Cisco figured out that mergers between similar sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity.'
I recall asking people there about why they didn't acquire certain companies that I thought would make a lot of sense from a technical / product perspective.
The typical answer was right in line with that quote - that Cisco stays away bigger companies that others might try to swallow at high cost.
That they look for logical acquisitions of specific products in the few hundred million dollar range, not billions.
Of the 21 years and 136 Cisco acquisitions with prices on Wikipedia, 14 come in over $1B. The average price overall is $530M, and the average price excluding >$1B deals with $178M.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/hard-facts-mergers.htm...