When top Cisco executives said the company would return to its traditionally brisk pace of M&A this year, they weren't kidding: Cisco has acquired or is in the process of acquiring 10 companies already and on Tuesday added an eleventh.

Cisco confirmed its intent to buy BroadHop, a Denver-based specialist in policy control and service management technology for carrier networks. It plans to integrate BroadHop's technology for mobile and fixed networks into its Service Provider Mobility Group.

"How does this benefit customers and end users directly? A service provider can integrate BroadHop technology to enable end users to purchase customized premium service packages," Hilton Romanski, vice president of corporate development, wrote in a post to Cisco's Platform blog. "For example, if a consumer desires premium on-demand streaming, BroadHop technology allows the service provider to add value to and monetize this particular service. In return, the user is granted a high level of service and premium bandwidth to ensure the best possible experience."

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Financial terms of the deal weren't provided. The BroadHop team will join Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group under Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager, Cisco Software and Applications Group.

Founded in 2003, BroadHop already was a service provider Wi-Fi partner to Cisco and partners with Hewlett-Packard, NEC, IBM and others. Romanski added that BroadHop's technology would support Cisco's Open Network Environment (ONE), the software-defined networking initiative Cisco's been talking up for network programmability.

Cisco CEO John Chambers recently told investors at Cisco's Financial Analyst Conference that Cisco would continue to acquire. During its global restructuring, Chambers reasoned, Cisco stayed a little too far away from M&A activity that would have further bolstered its revenue and profitability by 1 percent.

Cisco has made both major and minor deals in 2012, including the $5 billion and $1.2 billion it's plunked down for NDS and Meraki, respectively, and the tuck-in buys it made of companies such as Cloupia, vCider and, most recently, Cariden.

PUBLISHED DEC. 18, 2012