Puppet

CEO: Sanjay Mirchandani

Founded: 2006

Headquarters: Portland, Ore.

Analysts said one of the most interesting acquisitions Cisco could make in 2017 would be of open source software specialist Puppet. However, the only way Cisco could afford the vendor is if President Donald Trump's tax repatriation plan actually happens, said analysts, which would allow Cisco to repatriate its more than $60 billion overseas capital back into the U.S. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said this year that if President Trump follows through with his proposed repatriation plan, it would spur "a combination of dividends, buybacks as well as M&A activity."

"Cisco has become more of a developer-influenced company, and Puppet's got a huge developer-base. It could role very nicely into the whole [Cisco] DevNet program. In many ways, it becomes the thing people care about and then you can use it to pull through other equipment and maybe minimize the impact of VMware presence in the data center or Docker down the road," said Kerravala.