Cisco Hedges Bets -- Again. But What's the Focus?

Cisco is off again on another acquisition, this time of Tandberg, a big name in video communications, for about $3 billion. And the fit should work with other commercial video acquisitions the company has undertaken. Cisco is certainly the acquisitive sort, but the smartness of this fit only brings up the question of why it has also tried to compete in the server market.

What Tandberg brings to Cisco is an extension in scale. Although Cisco has thoroughly been in the upper end of video conferencing, it hasn't had the lower range of offerings which start looking good when budgets are tight. The move also makes sense when you consider that Cisco also bought Scientific Atlanta and WebEx. (I'm still dubious about what the Flip acquisition brought.) That's video from one end of use to another, and all networked.

And then there are servers. Big, bulky, boxy behemoths. Always sitting at the end points of networks. And certainly not the direction of some disintermediation between "operating system" and "function" that seems to be the technical direction in which things might be moving. Maybe Cisco might do well to see why it's video strategy seems so solid -- working to own a category rather than being an also ran -- and, instead, consider what that uses networks might be a good choice.

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