April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers indicated the company isn’t likely to bid for Sun Microsystems Inc. even as it looks to spend a $34 billion cash hoard.

“Cisco moves very rapidly on acquisitions,” Chambers said today at a briefing in Seoul, when asked about Sun. “If we were going to be in an area, we would probably have already moved.”

Talks on a potential purchase of Sun by International Business Machines Corp. broke down this month after they failed to agree on terms including price, according to people familiar with the matter. Cisco has acquired about 130 businesses in its 25-year history, including last week’s $105 million purchase of Tidal Software Inc., to add products such as cable set-top boxes.

Cisco, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, plans to be “aggressive during this market downturn,” according to Chambers. He declined to identify targets and said the San Jose, California-based maker hasn’t changed its strategy of acquiring small, private companies with market leadership.

“Are you going to see our acquisition pace pick up? Of course,” he said.

Cisco dropped 37 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $17.56 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have gained 7.7 percent this year.

Cisco and Dell Inc., which have been mentioned as possible suitors for Sun, are unlikely to bid, according to Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. in St. Louis. Hewlett-Packard Co., which held merger talks with Sun last year, has no plan to return to negotiations, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

Acquisition Pace

In February, Chambers said he plans to use Cisco’s cash for purchases and has said he’s particularly interested in video products for consumers. The company in March bought Pure Digital Technologies Inc., maker of the Flip Video camcorder, for $590 million.

Acquisitions of technology companies in the U.S. plunged 82 percent from a year earlier to $2.2 billion in the first quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The number of purchases announced fell to 206 from 337.

Cisco is also pushing further into systems for data centers, vast rooms of computers that store company files and information.

Last month, Cisco entered the market for servers, computers used to run Web sites and corporate networks, with its own system in a bid to get more revenue from data centers by combining storage access, networking and computing.

Cisco is betting that so-called blade servers, thin computers that slide into slots in a chassis, will help customers cut costs. The blade platform lets businesses add applications and manage many more servers with fewer people than they could before, the company said in a statement on March 16.

Global server sales fell 14 percent to $13.5 billion in the fourth quarter, the most since the aftermath of the dot-com bust, according to research firm IDC.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Cho in Seoul at kcho2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 15, 2009 16:25 EDT