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By Matthew Quinn
After surviving the volatile economy and financial markets that started 2009, Cisco expects to keep up the pace of acquisitions it closed out the year with in 2010, according to its vice president of corporate development.
"The first half of 2009 was the nuclear winter," Charles Carmel said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "As we moved into the second half of the year, the world did start to settle and that was one of the driving factors to why Cisco really picked up its activity."
Cisco made one acquisition in the first five months of 2009 and five over the next seven, Bloomberg noted, including its $3.4 billion deal for Norwegian video-conferencing maker Tandberg.
"We plan to keep up an active pace as we go through 2010," Carmel added.
The company, which has acquired more than 130 companies in its 25-year history, has a robust deal-making operation, which includes about 50 people looking at takeover targets.
"We usually look at about 100 companies for every 10 we get into any serious level of conversation, which turns into one deal at the end of that funnel," Carmel said. "It's a 1 percent flow-through, so obviously we have a lot of activity."
Carmel spent three years as an analyst in Goldman Sach's high tech banking group, according to his LinkedIn page, before joining Cisco in 2001 after earning his MBA from Stanford.
Technology is expected to be a bright spot for M&A this year and other companies have been fine-tuning their staffs in anticipation. Last year, Dell poached a top M&A exec from IBM, David Johnson, and even Apple, not know for striking many deals, hired what is believed to be its first employee dedicated to acquisitions, Adrian Perica, also a Goldman i-bank alum.
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