Integration-Led M&A: Cisco's Approach to Deal Success
Johanna Jaakola, Integration Lead on Cisco’s Corporate Development Integration Team, and Tesia Hostetler, Leader of Cisco’s Acquisition Integration Prac…
What you’ll learn
- What it takes to coordinate a global M&A community of more than 180 people
- When to integrate sales motions versus when to protect existing revenue engines
Who is this course for
This course is for integration leaders, corporate development professionals, and M&A practitioners at companies that do deals regularly and want to move beyond reactive integration. If your team is still pulling in integration two weeks before close, or running diligence and integration as separate workstreams, Johanna and Tesia show you what a mature, integration-led model looks like in practice — with real lessons from Cisco's approach to some of the most complex acquisitions in the industry.
Instructor
Johanna Jaakola is an Integration Lead on Cisco's Corporate Development Integration team, where she partners with deal leads from the earliest stages of a transaction to shape integration strategy, coordinate diligence across Cisco's large functional community, and drive execution through to full integration. She is a practitioner of Cisco's integration-led M&A model — bringing integration thinking to the deal thesis before diligence even begins. Tesia Hostetler leads Cisco's Acquisition Integration Practice, owning the company's end-to-end integration methodology, playbooks, and tooling — including compliance frameworks and full integration criteria. She helped design the integration approach for Cisco's recent transformational acquisitions, including the Splunk deal, one of the largest acquisitions in tech history.
Badges
Have any questions?
The Intelligence Hub is where M&A practitioners access Buyer-Led M&A™ playbooks, frameworks, templates, and real-world insights from experienced deal leaders. Courses are taught by practitioners who've run deals — not academics or advisors. Topics include integration planning, due diligence, deal sourcing, valuation, and more.
The Intelligence Hub is available 24/7 through your M&A Science membership. Access them on-demand at your pace, on any device.
It depends on where you are in your M&A journey. If you're building foundational knowledge, start with the M&A Fundamentals Track — five courses covering the full deal lifecycle from sourcing through integration. If you're already running deals and want to build a repeatable, scalable process, explore the Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification. New courses are added regularly as we deepen the curriculum.
