With 141 acquisitions under its belt, Cisco Systems Inc.'s prowess in negotiating transactions is well known. Yet the ability to dip into its $40 billion-strong cash coffer to snap up targets is just the first step in a long process of wringing value out of a deal. The oft-repeated belief that most M&A deals fail to live up to their billing is certainly on Ammar Maraqa's mind, but trying to prove it wrong is how the Cisco senior director of corporate development and strategy earns his paycheck. Maraqa oversees the often arduous process of bringing to fruition the value that drew Cisco to a particular target in the first place. The integration checklist contains many known variables, such as merging the acquired company's IT infrastructure with the buyer's and getting employees on the new parent's payroll. But Cisco has a wide breadth of target markets, from consumer video to smart-meters to enterprise data centers, and the companies it buys come from a wide variety of sizes and geographical locales. So the job of absorbing a newly purchased company presents new levels of complexity.

Maraqa, 36, joined Cisco in 2001 as a corporate development manager. He left for a five-year stint at Dell Inc., where he was director of marketing in charge of enterprise products and services business in the Americas. He returned to Cisco in 2008 and took on his current role. Two high-profile deals announced late last year have been keeping Maraqa particularly busy: Cisco's $3.4 billion agreement to buy video teleconferencing specialist Tandberg ASA and the $2.9 billion purchase of mobile broadband technology developer Starent Networks Corp. The two purchases, which closed in April and December, respectively, have absorbed resources at Cisco to the degree that they slowed the company's acquisition pace a bit, as Maraqa's corporate development colleague and M&A chief Charles Carmel acknowledged. The company has announced only four deals this year; terms were revealed for one of them, the $99 million purchase of optical networking chipmaker CoreOptics Inc.

The Deal magazine recently spoke with Maraqa and senior director Susan McDonough, a 10-year Cisco veteran who is one of Maraqa's lieutenants, about Cisco's progress on its current integrations and the challenges the networking giant faces as it absorbs acquisitions.

The Deal magazine: How has the task of integrating acquisitions evolved at Cisco?

Ammar Maraqa: There was a recognition we needed to do more with the acquisition integration process in general. We are recognized as having best practices for integration, but we wanted to take it to the next level. We wanted to think more broadly about strategy, both up front before we do a deal and after integration -- how do you maximize value beyond pure integration?

When you acquire a company, the integration is the way you achieve value, or implement the strategy that led you to acquire the company in the first place. You connect the dots in the integration: You link up infrastructure, get people on board. But beyond that, there are lots of other value-adds to bring on the strategy side that maximize the value of the acquired business and take full advantage of assets we've acquired.

When you put together a business case, it's often about all the knowns -- how it fits in the portfolio, what kind of opportunities you are going to get. That acquired technology finds uses in so many other places within Cisco that you hadn't thought about.

Whether it's my team or the strategy team, we think of the job as a way to maximize value of an acquisition. One of those could be in technology, by creating linkages between acquired companies and folks in other business units and other regions. It isn't always reflected in the up-front business case.

How many people are dedicated to integration at Cisco?

Susan McDonough: We are structured to have a corporate team of about 25 that reports under me. Then we have about 100 people across dedicated integration teams, including finance, IT and sales.

We have about 1,000 people today who are part of the integration machine that is bringing Tandberg in. Every function and subfunction has people working on integration. Having a mix that does this time and time again, and individuals that are intimate with the businesses we are acquiring and integrating, makes us best in class.

Maraqa: Part of the reason that Cisco went to the dedicated support model is there's value in functional expertise, but there is also a discipline around integration. It's not enough to have functional expertise; a base of integration knowledge is important.

So how repeatable is the integration process? Is there a playbook?

Maraqa: We have lots of playbooks. There's a hierarchy of activities you do in an integration. You always need to merge infrastructures, get people on board, get them business cards. But we also need to think about what capabilities and processes are unique to the company we are going to acquire and which of them make the company successful. You don't want to unconsciously kill a process. I call it a thoughtful integration process.

Ultimately, there has to be something that leverages both Cisco and the acquired company. It's not really an assimilation of one into the other.

With its size and geographic spread, did the Tandberg integration pose any particularly difficult challenges?

Maraqa: Both the Starent and Tandberg integrations are still ongoing. We have a big program, with more than 1,000 people touching those. In both cases, we are closer to the end than the beginning.

Tandberg is definitely complex. There were remote locations in both Oslo and London; there were lots of employees. There was also lots of excitement, which is great from a deal perspective, but puts lots of pressure on getting things done with orderability -- when products are on Cisco's price list. We were also doing two integrations at the same time, and also had a pipeline of smaller deals.

But because we were acquiring a company so steeped in video collaboration, we were able to use telepresence and video conferencing as a way to ease the complications around geography. We even did a champagne toast over telepresence at the closing because of the volcano. [Around the time Norway-based Tandberg closed, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted and disrupted travel in the region.] We had a lot of Cisco leaders go out there; we focused on the enrollment of people because you can't have employees feel welcomed into the Cisco family remotely.

Is there an official end of an integration?

Maraqa: We do have an official end, a handoff where a lot of major milestones are done. Besides employee on-boarding and getting people on the payroll, another milestone is orderability. There's one around infrastructure integrations -- when the phones are running on Cisco's network. Have you migrated all the contracts and customers so that you are able to frictionlessly serve those customers?

Since it was a consumer acquisition, how challenging was the integration of video camera maker Pure Digital?

Maraqa: When you acquire a consumer company, so much of what they do is not a typical Cisco business model. We need to be extra careful to understand what is important. We had the Linksys business [Cisco bought the home networking gearmaker in 2003, its first consumer-oriented acquisition], so it was not the first time we acquired a consumer business. But it presents its own unique challenges. With Pure, we wanted to make sure we didn't stall the business. How do you make sure you don't distract people through the integration? In this case the CEO of Pure became senior vice president and general manager of consumer products. Because it was a consumer company, more of their processes and capabilities remained intact.

What are some of the biggest challenges when integrating an acquired company?

Maraqa: One thing I'd say is a primary lesson learned is balancing speed versus process. Speed is very, very important, especially around decision making. A general manager needs to understand that they are going to be making lots of decisions very quickly, and that delaying decisions causes more disruption than making them early on.

That balance is the biggest challenge, and it's why we spend time up front on governance and on what the acquired company is going to look like in Cisco.