Mergers and acquisitions are one of the greatest growth frauds of all. You buy another company, and you add its revenue to yours, and suddenly you have a much greater revenue figure. However, you haven't really DONE anything, you've just combined two streams into one larger one.

Generally, Cisco mergers are not a matter of adding revenues.

Most of their mergers are actually technology mergers, i.e. to get hold of technology that they do not already posess. The reason for this will either be to improve existing solutions or to extend business into new areas.

Obviously, the end goal of this is to increase revune, but it will at least be through moving into new markets and/or introducing new products.

...sometimes it's cheaper to buy the company than to pay for licences of their product. ;)