CISCO SYSTEMS TO BUY MERAKI FOR $1.2 BILLION: SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Cisco Systems Inc., the world's largest maker of computer networking gear, said Sunday it is buying Meraki for $1.2 billion to expand its ability to let customers compute in the cloud. Cloud computing refers to the increasingly popular practice of storing software applications in remote data centers that are accessed over the Internet instead of installing programs on individual machines. Meraki Inc. is based in San Francisco and also has offices in New York, London and Mexico.