The next time you make a Meraki purchase tell the sales team you will only buy Cisco Meraki if you can manage your legacy Cisco (pick one device that you have the most of) with it. Ask them for a roadmap as to when it's going to get done and when the rest of the portfolio will be included.
This is not a technical issue it is a political issue.
My prediction The "Meraki Child" will end up eating the Cisco parent.
This is and excerpt from "Growth by Acquisition: The Case of Cisco Systems"
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/15617?gko=3ec0c
JOHN CHAMBERS: We have a philosophy that we will eat our own young before somebody else does. In Internet years, things change at a much faster pace than you realize and we get surprised periodically.
Here's an example. We acquired a company called Lightstream in 1995 for its high-end A.T.M. [asynchronous transfer mode] capability. When we acquired it, it had only about $1.5 million in hardware revenue. We paid $120 million for it. One year later, its run rate was $45 million. It was well on the path to being a success, perhaps even a home run.
But then we began to notice that wide area networking and local area networking were coming together more rapidly than we had thought. Customers were telling us they were going to make buying decisions that were going to be implemented in the next year or two based on technology that was available today. In essence, they were telling us that while they liked our direction with Lightstream and liked our next-generation product, we were not going to have the market share that they needed to feel comfortable with in the next 12 to 18 months.
So even though Lightstream was on a tremendously successful run rate, we literally ate our own young and acquired StrataCom for $4.5 billion -- getting a much bigger player in the A.T.M. business -- because the market changed quicker than we thought.
Bruce Winters
