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).

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

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: