Cisco sees enterprise network opportunity in public cloud

Cisco has reported earnings of $13bn for the third quarter of 2019 – a 5% increase on the $12.5bn for the equivalent quarter in 2018.

Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said: “Our strong performance in the quarter was across the business, reflecting our customers’ confidence in our strategy, business model and market-leading portfolio. Technology is at the heart of our customers’ strategies and we are building the technology to help them achieve their business objectives.”

In a transcript of the earnings call posted on the Seeking Alpha financial blogging site, Robbins discussed how cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), 5G and Wi-Fi 6 were coming together to support new business initiatives. “We are fundamentally changing the way our customers approach their technology infrastructure to address the rising complexity in their IT environments,” he said.

Robbins said Cisco was integrating capabilities such as AI and machine learning across its entire portfolio. He said this integration would enable Cisco customers have greater insights, resulting in better and faster business outcomes.

“We are moving into an era of truly immersive and pervasive wireless connectivity, which generates demand for high-density, low-latency performance for real-time experiences over both wired and wireless networks,” he added.

Robbins described Cisco’s role in this new age of connectivity as about supporting and securing enterprise networks. “Enterprise networks today must be optimised for agility and security, leveraging cloud and wireless capabilities with the ability to garner insights from the data and security integrated throughout,” he said.

Asked how the trend to run more enterprise workloads in the public could would affect Cisco, Robbins said: “It’s really hard to quantify because the technology we’re building is either integrated in with the cloud providers or offered off the cloud platforms or enabling our customers to transition to the cloud or expand to the cloud.”

He said Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) extends from the private datacentre into the cloud to provide Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure developers with virtualised security and routing functions. It also integrates with hybrid stacks, such as Azure Stack and the container management platform Kubernetes, he added.