News that Cisco has gone to the debt market to raise $4 billion has got tongues wagging and minds thinking. Not only is its ability to raise finance in this environment newsworthy in itself in this economic climate, but it is innevitably prompting speculation that it is ready to launch M&A raids.
The NYT has highlighted the "usual suspects" of EMC, Red Hat, Sun, BMC or NetApp in the enterprise space, but pointed a possible finger towards Skype given Cisco's stated desire to get more into consumer electronics. Start embedding Skype in set-top boxes or WiFi appliances to and you start to get an idea of how it might play in them a household's (internet) plumbing.
The FT takes a similar stab in the dark and reports that Cisco is on the hunt for consumer video, virtualisation software, cloud computing and data centre technology.
As everything moves inexorably into the 'cloud', the network is the computer so anything that supports that trend is bound to be on their hitlist... and with $4 billion, you've got to figure there's quite a long list of possible targets.
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