Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Sourcefire Inc. | Hacker News Reader

Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Sourcefire Inc.

cisco.com

22 pointsantr9 comments

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It's important to note that Sourcefire owns ClamAV[1], Immunet[2], and Snort[3].

[1] http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/

[2] http://www.immunet.com/main/index.html

[3] http://snort.org/

I really hope they leave clam alone, I don't know any good alternatives that are open source.

That is some bad news. I hope it doesn't end up like Linksys.

That won't happen... Cisco consumer and Cisco enterprise are entirely different beasts.

Cisco's track record on M&A being successful is actually the subject of a number of case studies... they generally do it really well and keep the CEOs and teams of the companies they acquire for a while.

M&A over the past 5 years hasn't been as successful.

That's probably true, but I'd say that 5 years is a short window to look at for Cisco (but still, not disagreeing with you).

In that timespan, outside of recent M&A (Meraki, Sourcefire), Tandberg was the only big one I can think of in those years... The small M&A is hard to gauge from a product standpoint, but many of the key people acquired have stayed.

So, I have been doing network engineering and sysadmin kind of stuff since the 90s. I remember when Cisco bought the PIX firewalls from Network Translation around 95/96.

Cisco has killed competition here by paying out the other company. Cisco absolutely will kill off a product line somewhere which conflicts with what they purchased, or vice versa.

While Cisco is pretty good about corporate integrations from a big-picture level, but I imagine the individuals with talent over at Sourcefire are getting ready to jump ship, because Cisco is really bad at promoting and compensating based on technical merit. They promote business executives and then hire cheap Indian tech talent (not trying to be racist here, it's just true).

Linksys was a weird acquisition and I don't think it's a fair comparison here at all. Instead, look to where Cisco got their big switches, their wireless networking, their IP telephony, their IDS, firewalls, and video conferencing tech. Cisco has integrated those products well, but they almost immediately stopped innovating new features and only responded to outside competition to deliver anything new. Cisco was LAST to have good 10Gb ethernet switches, LAST to have IDS products, LAST in a variety of IP telephoney features, and their PIX/ASAs still suck super hard, are buggy, and crash way too much.

Cisco sells stuff which gets the job done, but at an incredible markup, while spreading FUD about the competition. But mostly their stuff is somewhat mediocre, especially their software.

I really want Cisco to have more competition. I'm really sorry that Sourcefire sold out.

PS: Next time you are buying switches and routers, look at Juniper. Juniper mops the floor with Cisco technically, and is usually 25% cheaper.

I've been administering Cisco PIX/ASA boxes for a half decade and I've yet to have one crash. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Well this seems about 10 years too late.

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