Entering server market, two multibillion dollars buys in one quarter, and a 25th birthday bash
It will be hard for Cisco to duplicate 2009. The company began the year by enterprise the blade server market, ended it by celebrating its 25th anniversary, and in between made a number of key acquisitions and product announcements.
Of those announcements, none were bigger than the two multibillion dollar acquisitions Cisco made in the same month: October’s purchases of Tandberg for $3.4 billion and Starent Networks for $2.9 billion. The acquisitions allowed Cisco to enter or expand into two key markets growth markets. Tandberg allows Cisco to move its TelePresence products and video strategy downmarket, into the desktop and mid-range system realm; and Starent enables Cisco to offer an enhanced packet core for LTE-based 4G mobile wireless networks.
Cisco entered a third market in 2009 by unveiling its own internally developed blade server in March. The Unified Computing System is perhaps the boldest and most controversial product and strategy move Cisco’s made in recent memory. Not only did it usher the networking titan into the data center compute space, but it cut off two key channels as well — IBM and HP, which some analysts say cost Cisco $2 billion in annual sales.
To top it off, Cisco celebrated its 25th birthday at the end of the year. Not a bad way to close out what might arguably be the most important year in the company’s history — aside from its founding in 1984.
Indeed, whichever way Cisco goes over the next 25 years — up or down — historians may look back at 2009 as the year that sent Cisco off in that particular direction. It was that momentous.
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