This post was written by Katie Bumper

Cisco Systems Inc. has announced plans to purchase Denmark-based DiviTech A/S, a provider of digital-service management systems, as part of a broader video strategy and product launch. DiviTech’s DSM products offer media broadcasters, cable and IPTV service providers an intuitive interface for creating, modifying and managing video networks. Cisco plans to integrate DiviTech’s DSM product with its ROSA network and element-management system to create a platform that offers digital video element, network and service management in a single product.
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This post was written by Katie Bumper

Cisco Systems Inc. has announced that it intends to purchase privately held Pure Networks, a Seattle-based leader in home networking management software and tools. Pure Networks’ home networking-management solution allows users to easily set up and manage a home network and connect a range of devices, applications and services within a home. The acquisition of Pure Networks provides Cisco with a fully integrated home networking-management solution that will also serve as the foundation for the development of new applications, tools and capabilities for consumers to use in an increasingly “connected life” at home, at work and on the go.
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This post was written by Katie Bumper

Cisco Systems Inc. has merged the engineering teams for its small and medium-sized business (SMB) products to form a single group to develop products for the Cisco and Linksys brands. Cisco says the Linksys gear is designed for SMBs with fewer technology demands and lacks certain features of Cisco’s own small-business gear, such as unified communications and certain security capabilities. The vice president of small business sales, worldwide channels at Cisco, Andrew Sage, said that the newly formed team might swap features across the two brands so that the Cisco gear has the benefit of Linksys ease-of-use innovations and more advanced capabilities such as customization features.
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This post was written by Katie Bumper

In TheInformationWeek, Michael Singer mulls over the comments made by analyst Kaushik Roy, of Pacific Growth Equities, on a possibility that Cisco System Inc. might just love to buy storage king EMC. Singer said that according to the Reuters story posted on July 29, Roy’s comments were a reaction to options purchases, “roughly 217,000 calls traded in EMC compared to 57,000 puts in the first half of the session.” However, Cisco’s representative has quelled rumors of an EMC buyout, saying that it would be “highly unlikely” that the company would spend money on all of EMC.
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This post was written by Melissa Chang

According to this article in Barron’s, Paul Wick, manager of the Seligman Communications and Information Fund, has made an interesting prediction about Cisco. According to Wick, Cisco is overdue to do a large deal - for example, going after EMC, the large corporate storage and software company. Barron’s predicts that this would be a deal in the mid-$40 billion range. From the article:

A big deal, yes, but one for which Cisco would get considerable value. EMC is a leader in enterprise storage; they also have assembled an impressive portfolio of software assets through a deliberate acquisition strategy, and now own Legato Systems (acquired in 2003), Documentum (another 2003 deal) and RSA Software (bought in 2006).

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