The acquisition, which last week earned just over the 90 percent required support, will give Cisco access to Scandinavian engineering talent as well as five strong top executives, he said. "Their leadership team may be the best total leadership team we've had since the acquisition of Crescendo in 1993," Chambers said. That acquisition brought in executives such as Mario Mazzola and Luca Cafiero, who shaped Cisco's technology for years to come.

Cisco's management may not have known exactly how the takeover drama would play out, but it probably wasn't taken by surprise when Tandberg shareholders demanded more, said JMP Securities analyst Sam Wilson.

Chambers expects Cisco to buy more foreign companies in the coming years, both because the company is expected to invest in countries where it sells a lot of products and because of the strong technology potential outside the U.S., he said. Both India and China have about 600,000 engineering graduates every year, compared with about 60,000 in the U.S., he said. "We have to go where the talent is and where the startups are," Chambers said.