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List of acquisitions by Cisco

Wikimedia list article

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ6604905
Source-derived summary

Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American computer networking company. Cisco made its first acquisition in 1993, which was followed by a series of further acquisitions.

Founded in 1984, Cisco did not acquire a company during the first seven years of its existence; but, on September 24, 1993, Cisco acquired Crescendo Communications, a LAN switching company. Following the first Cisco takeover purchase, acquisitions have constituted 50 percent of the company's business activity.

The company's largest acquisition as of October 2023 is the purchase of Splunk—a software company that develops software for the analysis and monitoring of machine-generated data—US$28 billion. Cisco's previous largest acquisition was tied between Cerent Corporation and Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion in 1999 and 2005 respectively.

The majority of companies acquired by Cisco are based in the United States (U.S.) and a total of 149 companies had been acquired as of March 2011. Most of the companies acquired by Cisco are related to computer networking, with several LAN switching and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) companies included in the list of acquisitions.

List

Each acquisition is for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified, and the date of the agreement between Cisco Systems and the subject of the acquisition is listed. The value of each acquisition is listed in the US$ currency because Cisco Systems is headquartered in California, U.S.

The majority of its products and business units have come from acquisitions, with Cisco Systems spending more than $70 billion to acquire approximately 218 organizations as of October 2021.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of acquisitions by Cisco” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, acquisitions and Cisco, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1993, 1984, 2023, 1999—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, List, acquisitions and Cisco is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “wikimedia list article” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6604905. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1984, 2023 and 1999.

Critical limits

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow List of acquisitions by Cisco primary sources, List of acquisitions by Cisco archive and List research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from List of acquisitions by Cisco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.