Cisco to buy more security

Investment banks see M&A on tap as company looks to triple share of enterprise spend

Cisco’s looking to double or triple its share of enterprise security infrastructure spend, from 9% to 20% and 30%, according to SeekingAlpha, citing investment banking analysis from meetings with Cisco management. That means it will be looking to acquire more security companies.

Cisco believes the typical large enterprise has to deal with over 54 security vendors. In an effort to “simplify” that scenario, Cisco will acquire point product companies to assimilate into its end-to-end architecture sales strategy, thereby consolidating the security industry, increasing its share of spend, and decreasing the number of security vendors an enterprise has to deal with.

Investment bank UBS believes Cisco will make smaller, more targeted acquisitions rather than a large one involving, for example, Palo Alto Networks or CheckPoint, the SeekingAlpha post states. Gaps in Cisco’s security portfolio include identity access, data loss management, and application security testing.

Cisco recently acquired domain name service security company OpenDNS for $635 million to help fill out its Security Everywhere initiative.

More from Cisco Subnet:

Jim Duffy has been covering technology for over 28 years, 23 at Network World. He covers enterprise networking infrastructure, including routers and switches. He also writes The Cisco Connection blog and can be reached on Twitter @Jim_Duffy and at jduffy@nww.com.

The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2022