There's been some buzz about this for a while, it's official today. Over 1/2 a billion dollars.
Cisco is an acquisition-hungry company. According to
wikipedia, if this deal gets completed, it'll be #168. That's an average of 10/year since 1993. This is only #2 this year. With stock prices appearing to be bottoming out around the market, Cisco must be
salivating.
I say all of this because there are pretty regular rumors that my company is in Cisco's sights. Even before those rumors were going around, it was something I had thought pretty likely. Cisco's made some obvious moves to move into our marketspace, and their competitors have recently purchased our competitors. And right now our stock is cheap.
They put up a lot of money for Pure Digital, and our, I believe, is worth quite a bit more than that (our yearly revenue nearly matches what they paid), so they may not want to pull the trigger yet. But then, looking at that Wiki list, that doesn't seem to have really stopped them in the past.
Being bought out is always risky. You never know who's suddenly going to become redundant, or which departments they'll want to relocate. But I've also never been on that side of a buy out, so it'd be an interesting new experience. Plus, I have a couple friends who work at Pure Digital, so I'd suddenly be their coworkers.