The most successful company in the hottest industry of the Internet economy, it provides routers, switches and thousands of other products that power the communications revolution. Now, Cisco is second only to General Electric in market value. It is a great engineering company, brilliantly managed and technologically astute. But for the full story of Cisco's success, it's important to realize that Cisco is a great financial-engineering company as well, and therein lies a host of dangers.
Growth is at the centre of both engineering stories.
More than any other successful hi-tech company, Cisco has grown by acquiring other companies. How it chooses those companies defines its corporate strategy. How it integrates them into the Cisco empire defines its corporate politics. How it retains the people acquired with the companies defines its corporate culture. After a recent split, there were about 7 billion Cisco shares outstanding.