Cisco has announced its intended acquisition of ScanSafe – a specialist in Web Security in the Software as a Service space. Although this time the company ‘only’ cost $183 million it again demonstrates Cisco’s eagerness to add to its strengths at a period when the downturn has restricted growth. ScanSafe is being bracketed by Cisco with IronPort, which it acquired in January 2007 for $274 million.
I’m tracking all acquisitions from major suppliers. Another year-to-date picture of Cisco’s by specialisation is shown in Figure 1.
It has moved away from the nuts and bolts of adding switching, optical and silicon expertise to other areas, such as voice and video. I’ve added ScanSafe to the ‘security’ category, although it could be argued it belongs equally in ‘software, service, web’. The addition will help Cisco compete with both Symantec and McAfee. Like them Cisco will be able to use these offerings to build out its Cloud Computing services.
Cisco is due to publish its next quarterly results on November 5th. Its financial quarters are one month adrift from calendar periods (tis next one ends in October, rather than September). As you may remember I try to ‘calendarise’ results in my revenue calculations. I also try to adjust regional growth to take away the movements affected by currency fluctuation – in this case restating Asia Pacific in Japanese Yen and EMEA in Euros.
Regional growth has been interesting for Cisco. Unlike a few other vendors (Dell for instance) who have reported weakness in EMEA, Cisco’s recalculated revenues suggest it has been the strongest of the three for revenues over the last few quarters. I’ll be looking at Cisco’s regional results again once it reports its quarterly results. Is this update interesting? Let me know by commenting below.