Hi Hilton,

Great review of what we have been up to in the M&A world in the recent past.

From what I gather, with acquisitions like Meraki and NDS we are making progress towards our publicly stated desire to increase software’s share in our revenue from ~12% to about 18% over the next 5 years. Our other publicly stated desire is to increase services revenue to ~25% of revenue along the same time frame; coupled with our overall guidance of long term revenue growth of 5-7%; this could mean that we are perhaps getting ready for a flat or negative growth in the core hardware business. (Those damn merchant silicon solutions☺).

It would interesting to get your views on how from an M&A perspective we can help the company navigate this major transition to possible flat or negative growth in something we do best - make and sell hardware, unbundle software and instead of monetizing it through Technical support services; be able to sell it by features, accelerate our ASIC development timeline so we can come to market faster than others with new features and software configurability to prepare for the SDN world, and doing all this with strategies in place to change the floor from under a 200+ Billion dollar installed base .

Given John’s recent interview in which he said that at his level he is moving past the repatriation tax argument; some multibillion-dollar cross-border acquisition may be in our future ☺

- Nilesh