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Let's talk about some of your ecosystem partnerships, particularly EMC and VMware. We saw VMware acquire Nicira, Cisco ally with Fusion-IO in one respect, EMC sign a server agreement with Lenovo, and there's been a lot of media noise about the fraying of the EMC-Cisco relationship. On the last earnings call, you did say that EMC and VMware need Cisco. Is it fair to say they need you more than you need them?
If the relationship is good, you need each other. In terms of an area of the market, we are going to continue to be very open. When we partner ... well, I'm not looking at my wife and saying I'm going to partner with you till I find somebody cuter. That wouldn't work. That's how we approach partnerships. We are far from perfect, but we do not say we're going to partner and then move on our partners. Almost every major vendor in the [industry] wants to partner with Cisco right now. The network is at the sweet spot of every major market transition going on. It's all about the network. Will EMC be a very good partnership for us? Maybe our best? Yes. Will we compete against VMware as it relates to networking? Absolutely. And when we compete, we don't lose
When there's an opportunity to partner, i.e. EMC, we partner. When there's software competition against Nicira, they're a competitor. Microsoft is a great partner in the data center, maybe a great partner in terms of hypervisors, and then we compete against them in collaboration. IBM may be a partner in some areas and a competitor in others. What you see is an ecosystem.
If we make mistakes, what we've gotten better at over the last 18 months is we just adjust. And remember what we always say about our acquisitions. Saying two-thirds work is saying one-third fails. In an industry where 90 percent of acquisitions fail, that's pretty good, but people tend to focus on the one we fail on -- the Flip we fail on. We should have moved FlipShare into the cloud and put it on every smartphone. We missed that move.
But watch our big ones. That one, Flip, was $600 million. Starent was $3 billion; we've had tremendous success on the edge and that grew 30 percent again this last quarter. Tandberg, so important to our video strategy. And you've seen what NDS is doing -- that's a $5 billion acquisition and already off to a great start. So while people tend to focus on the negatives, that's just part of the culture of the industry press. We are the one that in the past years has had the courage to continue to acquire, and boy, if we hit two out of three, that's so much better than what anyone else in the industry does.
So much of the converged infrastructure play is related to the network, so why does Cisco prefer to partner in storage versus acquire in storage or build in storage?
Very fair question. We see storage evolving very rapidly. If you gave the choice between partnering with a player like EMC, and a very good partnership we have with NetApp, or you take it out to related markets like what we have with Citrix, or Red Hat, or Microsoft, or an OpenStack capability, or IBM, I vastly prefer the bigger picture. We've always had a philosophy where we'd like to make the pie much bigger and have a smaller percentage of the pie, instead of having a much smaller pie on our proprietary advantages but a much smaller revenue stream. It's our culture. We have an open culture; we think that's what wins.
But, we are looking to compete. I love to compete. Look at in terms of the direction, say Arista in low-latency [networking]. They may have had their last good quarter when it comes to year-over-year growth. We've moved very aggressively against them, we're winning jump balls by a long way and we're blowing them out of accounts where they used to have a foothold. And Silver Spring [Networks], which you may not have heard of, they were our toughest competitor two and a half years ago in smart grid, and we're winning there now.
What you are hearing is a sense of competitiveness across the board at Cisco. I think it's time. We took more shots than maybe we should have, and I think as a family we need to be critical of ourselves without having to read about it in the press. We're going to have transparency but also a very direct message: when you compete against Cisco, you're going to lose. It is that confidence we have across the board. We all know we could falter, and anything I've said here shouldn't be taken as saying anything about this quarter. It's just that I wouldn't bet against us.
NEXT: How Cisco Wrestles Market Transitions
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