Cisco CEO John Chambers has targeted between "five and fifteen" companies for acquisition over the next 12 months. All of them specialise in the voice and video broadcasting over networks.

Speaking in an interview in France's La Tribune newspaper, Chambers revealed his plan to buy five to 15 companies each year to acquire their technology.

The Great Satan of Routers' acquisitiveness is well established, but while it announced a desire to snap up companies specialising in enabling multimedia data to be zapped across a network, most of its major purchases so far have primarily added networking infrastructure technologies to Cisco's portfolio.

Companies Cisco has bought this year include switch vendor Summa Four; American Internet Corporation, which develops software that makes it easier to connect computers to the Internet; and San Jose Pipelinks. Most of the purchases have been made through exchanges of stock. ®