By 7:30 pm ET, Cisco shares had risen to $23.06, having closed at $21.21 during the regular session. Its results, reported earlier today, were only slightly ahead of the consensus view, but as with so many things today, slightly good is good enough.

The better news is that Cisco has historically been a pretty good barometer on the state of the tech economy generally. What it sees in its results, good or bad, is what other companies usually see within a couple of quarters.

“Slow and steady growth” was the phrase of the day. Sales grew by slightly more than 5 percent, but several segments grew faster. Service revenue grew by more than 7 percent year on year, while sales of products grew 5 percent.

Products sold into data centers, mainly servers in Cisco’s UCS line, grew by a healthy 77 percent, but accounted for only $515 million, or slightly more than 4 percent of sales. Wireless sales grew by 27 percent, but at $523 million weren’t much bigger as a percentage of revenue.

Service provider video grew 30 percent, accounting for nearly $1.3 billion in sales. And at least part of that growth can be attributed to NDS, the Israeli software company for which Cisco paid $5 billion last year.

In switching, Cisco’s biggest business segment, sales were $3.4 billion, down 2 percent year on year, but when you compare that to the results of other networking companies like Juniper, Riverbed and F5 Networks that have been reporting more difficult quarters in recent weeks and months, a drop of 2 percent isn’t so bad.

I just got off the phone with Cisco CEO — and D: All Things Digital speaker — John Chambers. A quick summary of our conversation is below:

AllThingsD: John, it felt like a fairly positive quarter in a tough environment. What’s really going on?

Chambers: I’d break it into four pieces. First, it was our ninth consecutive quarter with record revenue. And it was the sixth where earnings grew faster than revenue. That’s a pretty good indicator that we’re growing well in a tough environment. Secondly, we’ve moved from being the No. 1 communications company to having a shot at being the No. 1 IT company at the moment when those two things will actually combine. … It’s that transition that we now have in front of us that’s kind of exciting. It also says that we’re in the right technologies: Cloud, data center, mobility, video. We’re also the thought leader on the Internet of everything, which will be the next major transition for the enterprise and service providers. The fourth one was the geographic breakdown. I don’t think anyone saw as strong a set of numbers in the U.S. as we did, and it was across all market segments. Public sector grew 5 percent, enterprise grew 10 percent, commercial grew 13 percent, service providers grew 10 percent. It means that our relevance is changing. It also means that, barring a surprise, the U.S. economy is going to continue to recover at this pace. And it has to for the rest of the world to come out of all this.

Let’s talk about IT. If you’re becoming more of a general IT player, if you see yourself shaking up that business, then who do you see yourself taking business away from?

In the data center, it’s clearly the IBMs, the Hewlett-Packards and the Dells of the world. In the wireless space, it’s often the startups or some of the traditional players. It wasn’t so long ago that startups like Aruba were awfully tough on us. In the data center with software and hardware and silicon coming together, there’s the people who think it’s going to be a software-only world [like Big Switch --Ed.]. We think it’s an architectural play that we’re going to win on. So our competitors are different in every category, but that’s what you want. If the customers are going to buy an architecture that solves a business problem and you’re the only major supplier that crosses the service provider and the enterprise and commercial segments, and you go from the cloud and hybrid clouds to the data centers, and reach any device and you’re agnostic about whatever device it is, that is a strong position to be in.

And still one of your biggest segments, switching, was down slightly. What’s going on there?

It has been a tough environment there. As you know, our industry peers have had terrible year-to-date numbers on their stocks. When I look at the F5s and Junipers and Riverbeds of the world, you’re seeing them surprising the market and declines in their share prices. Same thing with the IT players. We’re one of the few players that hit and exceed expectations in that category. So it speaks to our relevance changing. If you’re selling standalone products, the market gets really tough. And speaking of our competitors, a lot of them said they never saw us coming. We’re pretty good at flying under the radar at first and then blowing right by, and then being tough. We’re really tough to beat.

It’s at this point that I pick a song that I think best portrays Cisco’s results. It has become a little tradition that I began when Cisco started to turn around after another sequence of disappointing quarters, and when we talk, Chambers always asks about it.

With the phrase “slow and steady” appearing so much in Chambers’ comments, and with the quarter’s results generally feeling upbeat, I thought the muscular 1971 Aretha Franklin classic “Rock Steady” fit the bill. Here it is.

Sprint agreed to buy the half of Clearwire it doesn’t already own for $2.2 billion, or $2.97 a share, but that offer has been opposed by numerous shareholders. Influential adviser Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. is backing Sprint’s bid, saying it falls within “an appropriate valuation range,” while adviser Glass Lewis & Co. holds the opposite view and contends that Sprint didn’t make a strong enough case for its offer.

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Trulia Chief Executive Pete Flint characterized Market Leader as “an excellent strategic fit for Trulia,” pointing to the software company’s partnerships with real estate franchisors and brokerages.

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At an April 12 meeting in Mr. Montebourg’s Paris office, the minister told Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Henrique de Castro, and France Télécom’s chief financial officer, Gervais Pellissier, that he didn’t want 75 percent of a rare French Internet success story to be sold to an American Web giant, according to people briefed on the meeting.

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A “potential acquirer with access to non-public information decided to end its quest to acquire Dell at a higher price. Since they had information we didn’t, we believed it was prudent to assume they might be right. So we sold our stock and will put the proceeds into other stocks that we are more confident are undervalued,” said Bill Nygren, co-portfolio manager of the Oakmark Fund, Oakmark Select Fund and Oakmark Global Select Fund, in a statement published Wednesday.

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That was the conclusion Blackstone Group LP reached about Dell Inc. after it set a small army off to decide whether the private-equity firm should bid for the computer maker.

Blackstone on Thursday told a special Dell board committee negotiating a sale of the company that, after weeks of review, it wouldn’t be moving ahead with a bid. It cited an “unprecedented” decline in PC sales and Dell’s “rapidly eroding financial profile.”

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Sprint is also in the process of trying to hire an investment bank to help it assess the unsolicited offer, the people said. For Dish to succeed, Sprint would have to reject its $20 billion agreement to sell a 70 percent stake to Japan’s Softbank Corp.

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Last week Deutsche Telekom sweetened its bid for the wireless carrier, after MetroPCS faced opposition from shareholders unhappy with the deal’s debt component in particular.

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1. Apple’s Ouster of AppGratis Is Just the Start of an App Store Crackdown
2. Confirmed: Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the Store for Being Too Pushy
3. Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million
4. WhatsApp: We’re Not Selling to Google
5. Twitter’s New Music App Launches Friday
6. BlackBerry Tops iPhone and Android … In a “Don’t Want” Poll
7. Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

[note: this article is from February, but resurfaced this week]

8. PC Sales Show Biggest Q1 Decline Ever
9. California Court: Even Checking Maps on Phone While Driving Not Okay
10. News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox off the Airwaves if Aereo Wins

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Iron Pearl’s promise: Sustained viral growth and longer-term customer retention via a suite of optimization tools through which to monitor user engagement and product stickiness. Typically, such services are brought to bear on startups looking to steepen their growth curves. PayPal has 123 million active registered accounts across 190 markets. Clearly, it’s got massive user engagement. But there’s always room for improvement, right? New growth channels to be uncovered and exploited? And that’s the rationale behind PayPal’s acquisition of Iron Pearl.

The online payment service is creating a new “Growth” team around Iron Pearl, tapping Chudnovsky as vice president of growth and Currier as a “Growth Advisor,” and has charged the pair with further broadening PayPal usage. Some five million people joined the service in the last quarter of 2012, so its growth curve remains fairly steep. What can Iron Pearl reasonably do to improve it?

Quite a bit, says PayPal president David Marcus, who argues that because of its size the company can experience even more impactful growth.

“We’re starting at 123 million users,” Marcus told AllThingsD. “The sky is the limit when you’re working with numbers like that. We’re thrilled to create the new Growth group here, and we’re very excited to have Stan join our team and work his magic on PayPal.”

Below, Marcus’s post announcing the deal.

PayPal Acquires Iron Pearl, Names Stan Chudnovsky New VP of Growth

At PayPal, we’re seeing rapid and exciting growth. More than 5 million people joined PayPal in the last three months of 2012—the most in a quarter in over 8 years. We now serve more than 123 million active PayPal customers around the world.

But we can do more. And grow faster. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that we just acquired Iron Pearl, a Palo Alto startup that is at the forefront of the science of customer acquisition and engagement. Iron Pearl has developed groundbreaking tools, methodologies and intellectual property, built on a new understanding of the social and cultural factors that drive the viral spread of products, combined with new approaches to data analysis and predictive modeling.

Iron Pearl was founded by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. Effective immediately, Stan is assuming the role of Vice President of Growth and James will serve as a Growth Advisor to the company.

Stan is a visionary in the emerging science of growth and he has a remarkable track record of success as an entrepreneur. James and Stan started and ran Tickle, one of the first social media companies and an early explorer of the possibilities of online viral marketing. After Tickle was acquired by Monster in 2004 for more than $100 million, they founded Wonderhill, a developer offamily-friendly social online games that was acquired by Kabam in 2011. Stan was also instrumental in designing growth for companies like GoodReads, Path, BranchOut and many others.

The new Growth team at PayPal will focus on growing our customer base and engaging existing customers more actively by leveraging data to develop innovative marketing approaches and product initiatives. There are only a handful of world-renowned “Growth Hackers” with amazing track records and Stan is one of them. He managed to create genuine and sustained viral growth and retention for his own startups, and has advised others to grow at a tremendous pace, leading to hundreds ofmillions of unique new users. We’re confident that applying this unique, and highly effective skill set to PayPal will lead to making our groundbreaking payments experiences even more ubiquitous for our merchants and consumers.

Here’s to our next 100 million customers!

David Marcus, President, PayPal

CyOptics develops Indium Phosphide optical chips and components to enable bandwidth for high speed networks. It is a privately held company founded in 1999, with JVP Funds and TA Associates as its majority shareholders. The company’s revenue has more than tripled over the past three years, with net sales in 2012 reaching about $210 million, up 21 percent from a year earlier.

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The German telecom company is trying to save a deal to merge its U.S. unit, T-Mobile USA, with MetroPCS in the face of heavy shareholder opposition over the terms. The new terms would likely include a reduction in the amount of debt that will be transferred to the new company, a change some MetroPCS shareholders have sought, the people said.

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U.S. treatment of those suppliers has inflamed tensions between the U.S. and China, which are already sparring over accusations of computer hacking and trade issues. After the House intelligence committee concluded in October that Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE Corp. pose national-security risks because their equipment could be used for spying, China’s Commerce Ministry lashed out, saying the report violated the U.S.’s free-market principles and warning it could undermine cooperation between the countries.

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While there has been no official confirmation of the price, several sources familiar with the matter said it was $30 million.

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Oracle said in a statement that the growth of smart mobile devices — iPhones and iPads, as well as Android phones and tablets and the like — have exponentially boosted data traffic on networks. That has created a need for service providers to better manage the new traffic loads on their networks, while also deploying new services that can make money. Tekelec’s control software is already in use by more than 300 service providers around the world.

Additionally, Oracle said it will combine Tekelec’s capabilities with those of Acme Packet, which it acquired earlier this year for $1.7 billion.

Fusion-io, charter member of AllThingsD’s Flash Madness club, creator of flash-memory based insert cards that turn ordinary servers into super-fast data-crunching machines, today announced an acquisition.

The target is an obscure British software firm called ID7. Its speciality is software that allows storage systems to talk to interface technologies. But here’s why this deal is important: ID7 is also a major contributor to the open-source software project called SCST.

If you’re creating any kind of sophisticated storage scheme for a computer running Linux — which is pretty much anyone these days — you’re using SCST. That includes a lot of Fusion-io’s rivals, among them storage giant EMC, as well as its partners like IBM and Hewlett-Packard. SCST is basically a must-have whenever you talk storage, and ID7 is the biggest contributor to it. What it means is that everyone doing anything in the area of storage, or working toward any kind of software-defined storage scheme, will have to deal with Fusion-io.

Financial terms are not being disclosed, but ID7′s team of software developers will join Fusion-io immediately.

Sources familiar with the deal say it was a sizable one for such an early-stage outfit, with a price driven upward thanks to interest from some deep-pocketed companies. GigaOM and TechCrunch both claim that Mailbox was acquired for a price “well over” $50 million, with a significant chunk of stock that pushes it closer to $100 million. Here at AllThingsD, we’re hearing that’s generally accurate, but with a caveat: The stock consideration makes it tough to compute real value. “It’s somewhere in between,” another (cagey) source said of the deal.

That Dropbox was able to best such rivals in a bidding war is an impressive feat, and one that speaks to the company’s momentum and its valuation, which these days hovers between $4 billion and $5 billion. Not nearly as impressive a feat as the one Mailbox just pulled off by fetching well over $50 million for a nascent, unproven business, though.

And here’s something else to calm your nerves: Our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 4:

1.) White House: It’s Time to Legalize Cellphone Unlocking

2.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

3.) YouTube’s Show-Me-the-Money Problem

4.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

5.) What Could Apple Buy With Its $137 Billion? About 18 Homes Each for Every Yahoo to Not Work At, and More!

6.) Former Top Yahoo Ad Exec Sues Yahoo, Accusing It of Trying to “Cheat” Him Over Acquisition Compensation

7.) Heads Turn as Microsoft Shows Off 3-D Scanning Techniques

8.) Loose Lips: Yahoo M&A Head Told Employees Company Looking at Two “Significant” and a Half-Dozen Small Buys

9.) The Disappearing Interface

10.) Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

“The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told AllThingsD in a statement. “Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Facebook won’t be buying the technology or product behind Storylane; it’s a straight-up talent grab.

Storylane was spearheaded by Jonathan Gheller, a regular in Silicon Valley circles, who launched Storylane late last year with the aim of highlighting personal content that’s more in-depth than other social mediums (or so Gheller said upon launch last year).

I hear that Gheller will be joining Sam Lessin’s team at Facebook, the man who spearheaded Facebook’s massive Timeline project. That could prove interesting, especially since I’ve also heard that Facebook is working on some significant changes to Timeline, as well. (Though, as always, Facebook is constantly tweaking the dials on all of its products to see what works best on a user-engagement level. Take a look at News Feed, for example!)

Also curious: One of Storylane’s key features was following the stories that were seeing the most trending activity within the service itself. Sort of interesting, given Facebook’s “best socialized newspaper” metaphor that Zuckerberg continuously referred to at Facebook’s new News Feed event on Thursday. It also sounds a lot like what Twitter has done for ages, and is trying to get better at. Perhaps joining Lessin’s team will integrate some of the trending “stories” into Timeline in a more cohesive way. (Or not. We’ll see what Gheller and his crew end up doing.)

“Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about,” Gheller said in a post on Storylane on Friday.

Here’s how Visual Revenue works: When an editor is deciding on the layout for a page, Visual Revenue uses data to predict how well a story will do given its placement, includes a number of automated tools like switching between headlines until it finds the most effective one, and tracks performance.

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That was a point that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty made today in remarks at the company’s investors day in San Jose, Calif. IBM is known for making numerous acquisitions over the years, a recent example being StoredIQ.

What does IBM look for in an acquisition? Rometty boiled it down to three questions the company asks before every deal: “Does it extend a capability we have? Does it have scalable intellectual property? Can we extend it to 173 countries around the world?”

In a perhaps not-so-veiled shot at rival Hewlett-Packard, given its combined $16 billion in write-downs on the acquisitions of EDS and Autonomy last year, Rometty said IBM feels strongly that “companies get in trouble when they acquire something that takes them into a new space.”

But just as important to Big Blue’s success in recent years has been its decisions to get out of certain businesses. Examples include the PC business, which it sold to Lenovo in 2004, and, more recently, its retail point-of-sale business, which it sold to Japan’s Toshiba last year.

“Over the last decade, we have divested $15 billion worth of revenue,” Rometty said. “If we had not, we would be a larger company, but we would also be a lesser-margin company, and we would have capabilities that our clients would be less interested in.”

Rometty also said that IBM expects to continue its big bets on technologies like Big Data and analytics. “Data will be the basis of competitive advantage for every company, for every industry in the coming decade.”

To that end, she said that IBM now expects revenue from business analytics to account for as much as $20 billion in annual revenue by fiscal 2015. The prior target was $16 billion. And if Big Blue hits that goal it would amount to a doubling of analytics revenue from 2010.