Cisco slightly beats Q3 expectations
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Cisco published its third quarter financial report on Wednesday, slightly beatig market expectations.
The company posted a non-GAAP earnings of 78 cents per share on revenue of $13 billion, a 6 percent year-over-year increase.
Analysts were expecting earnings of 77 cents per share on revenue of $12.89 billion.
Product revenue was up 7 percent to $9.72 billion, and service revenue was up 3 percent to $3.24 billion. Product revenue includes sales from infrastructure platforms, which grew 5 percent to $7.55 billion for the quarter. Sales of security products grew 21 percent to $707 million, and sales of applications grew 9 percent to $1.43 billion.
By geographic segments, revenue in the Americas grew by 9 percent, in EMEA by 5 percent, and in APJC revenue was down 4 percent.
"Our strong performance in the quarter was across the business, reflecting our customers' confidence in our strategy, business model and market-leading portfolio," CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. "Technology is at the heart of our customers' strategies and we are building the technology to help them achieve their business objectives."
In Q3, Cisco closed the acquisitions of Luxtera, a privately held semiconductor company, and Singularity Networks, a privately held network infrastructure analytics company.
For the fourth quarter, the company is predicting non-GAAP earnings between 80 cents and 82 cents with year-over-year revenue growth between 4.5 percent and 6.5 percent.
Within Infrastructure platforms, Robbins noted on a Wednesday conference call that Cisco has been integrating intent-based networking across its enterprise access portfolio "to help our customers manage more users, devices and things connecting to their networks."
The company recently announced several new platforms expanding its Enterprise Networking portfolio with the launch of our subscription-based WiFi 6 access points and Catalyst 9600 Campus core switches, purpose-built for cloud scale networking.
"By combining our automation and analytics software with our broad portfolio of switches, access points and controllers, we are creating a seamless, end-to-end, wireless-first architecture for our customers," Robbins said.
In an email to ZDNet, analyst Patrick Moorhead noted that Cisco doesn't break out its 9K switch sales. However, he said, "I believe the company is seeing success here." Cisco's strong quarter and solid outlook is "a testament to the company's refocus on security, software while at the same time succeeding with its core switching business," Moorhead said.