Short clip: Cisco integrates acquisitions

September 16, 2008, 10:43am PDT | Length: 00:02:01
Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco, explains how IT takes the first steps after an acquisition, streamlining critical processes and ensuring that whatever the new company has brought to the table is put to good use.

Transcript

Short clip: Cisco integrates acquisitions

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>> So Cisco is a large company, but it's also continuing to grow with acquisitions happening fairly regularly. How much of the integration of those acquired companies falls into your lap?

>> Well, it really depends on the acquisition. And you're right. We do a lot of acquisitions, and they fall into different categories. What type of an acquisition they are. And so what we do from an IT standpoint is we try to look rapidly at what should we integrate and what shouldn't we integrate and when. Now, I will tell you that it starts with the communications processes. So similar to what we've been talking about on these collaboration technologies, the communication processes are really the key processes to integrate right away so that people can connect to each other and we can start to actually get the synergy out of the acquisition that was probably the intention of the acquisition to begin with, right? When you acquire a company, you expect that they're bringing something to the table and that the power and scale of Cisco can actually make that a synergistic sort of an acquisition. So we start with the communication processes. And we are obviously interested in getting them on to our network. And so those things are all obviously in the bailiwick of the IT organization. Then we need to make some specific decisions about critical processes, starting with financial processes and HR processes; but also moving into, you know, what are our ordering processes? Who is our customer constituency? Is it the same? Are they different? And do we need to make a common experience for our customers? And so what does that mean we have to do from an application integration standpoint? You know, what are the compensation models? Do we need to integrate those or not, and when? And so IT is actively involved in all of those planning sessions; and, then, depending on how the plan turns out, we're involved in the integration aspect of it. So really critically important to do the communications processes up front.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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