The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today about how Cisco, one of the leading acquirers of small technology companies, is changing their takeover game plan.

Cisco’s acquisition playbook is the stuff of Harvard Business school case studies.  The bada bing, bada bang plan includes new business cards the day the deal is announced, new Cisco bosses, new Cisco comp plans, and sale force integration in short order.

However, Cisco’s strategy started to change when they bought Linksys.  It made little sense to kill the consumer brand and the sales force called mostly on retailers.  Cisco rightly left the Linksys brand alone (it has more brand equity with consumers then Cisco).  The Scientific Atlanta acquisition also led to a change as most of SA’s more than six thousand employees remain in Georgia (and a target rich environment for startup technical talent) and not integrated within Cisco.  It then left WebEx alone when it bought that company. Featured in the article is how the acquisition of IronPort unfolded.

The leave the smart people that know these businesses alone, and let the brand stand strategy seems to be working.  All of the above mentioned companies in my mind continue to grow and innovate within Cisco.  Unlike the borg type strategy that Google is using on companies such as Urchin that kill innovation (compare the Urchin site to the IronPort site), Cisco’s new model seems to be working pretty darn well.  Cisco is adapting with the times and seems to be a strong suitor for a wide range of startup companies.  Startup entrepreneurs would be wise to follow their activities.

If you have an interest in reading the entire Journal article you can find it here.

As a personal aside, I got to know Scott Weiss the CEO of IronPort a bit when he was running business development at HotMail.  Our paths crossed again when IronPort competed with CipherTrust and its IronMail product.  Nice to see him get some ink.