Motley Fool today had a piece quoting Cisco saying it plans to be more aggressive in M&A activity in the second half of the year than in the first, and more aggressive this year than last. Given that it’s sitting on $30 billion in cash and the current economy is depressing values, it’s no wonder.
Fool then speculated on which companies might make suitable targets for Cisco. Citrix heads the list, given its remote application performance expertise and virtualization arsenal:
But in a single blow, a Citrix deal would augment the WebEx corporate collaboration platform and the Telepresence remote meeting system. Citrix’s expertise in remote application delivery makes the deal attractive in its own right — oh, and then there’s the little bonus of giving Cisco some skin in the high-stakes virtualization game. VMware might not be happy about seeing Cisco’s server systems shipping out with Citrix XenSource installed, but you can’t please everyone, and with its push into Unified Computing Systems, Cisco has shown it’s not afraid to take the risk of upsetting strategic partners.
Amen. This is not the first time a Cisco attraction to Citrix has been noted though.
Citrix is also serious about cloud computing, a Cisco hot button. Citrix this week was a lead investor in open source networking vendor Vyatta’s C series round of $10 million. Vyatta will become a partner within Citrix’s Cloud Center (C3) stable and participate in data center-to-cloud interactions in the C3 Lab with Amazon Web Services.
Citrix said it will update two C3 “blueprints” with Vyatta networking applications running as VMs on Citrix’s XenServer hypervisor for private cloud-to-Amazon Web Service interactions. Vyatta will augment Citrix’s NetScaler “cloud-to-user” VPN capabilities with “cloud-to-cloud” VPNs, said John Fanelli, Citrix vice president of solutions and community marketing.
Fanelli wouldn’t say why Citrix chose to invest in Vyatta rather than just co-market, but he said the Vyatta virtualization capability — coupled with its standard x86 hardware and open source routing and networking packages — is “central” to emerging cloud computing.
Here comes the virtualized routing/networking server for data centers and clouds. Cisco might want to take both of these companies out.
Others on the Fool list of possible Cisco targets include network filtering specialist Websense; and video recorder pioneer TiVo or video-on-demand specialist SeaChange for the digital home initiative.
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