It’s been a year for serious cloud investments and networking specialist Cisco has closed out 2012 with a $1.2bn outlay on privately held cloud management company Meraki.

Having missed the 3G boat, Cisco is attempting to make an impression in the telco space by using its IP expertise to cash in on the migration to endto- end IP architecture brought in with LTE. At the same time, however, specialist telecom equipment providers are developing their own ‘Cisco killer’ switching infrastructure.