Cisco security revenue helped drive the company’s better-than-expected earnings in its fiscal first quarter of 2018. The company’s security business grew 8 percent, bringing in $585 million in revenue.
“With an expanding threat landscape, cybersecurity is the no. 1 priority for businesses worldwide,” said CEO Chuck Robbins on a conference call with investors. “As customers adopt and advance intent-based networking, our security architecture accompanied with a best-of-breed portfolio enables our customers to reduce time to detection as well as complexity and cost.”
While the company’s first-quarter revenue of $12.1 billion represented a 2 percent decrease, year-over-year, net income was up 3 percent, to $2.4 billion, compared to last year.
Software applications revenue, which includes Cisco’s Internet of Things (IoT) business, increased 6 percent to $1.2 billion. AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired for $3.7 billion in January, drove most of this growth.
Cisco reported a 4 percent drop ($7 billion) in revenue from infrastructure platforms — this includes its traditional routers and switches, which CFO Kelly Kramer attributed to declining routing product sales.
Despite the decrease in revenue from its core business, Robbins said the company saw “great traction” with its intent-based networking hardware and software.
“Our launch of network intuitive in June is an example of the investment in innovation we are driving in our core business,” Robbins said, citing the new subscription-based Catalyst 9000 switching platform with more than 1,000 customers in three months.
Robbins wouldn’t say how much of the company’s infrastructure platforms revenue comes from hyperscale customers but he said he expects this segment to drive future growth. “We’re in discussions with all of them,” he said. “We have made announcements with several of them.”
Alibaba Cloud’s newest data center uses Cisco technology, and Cisco and Microsoft offer an integrated cloud product based on Cisco infrastructure.
Robbins singled out Cisco’s hybrid-cloud partnership with Google and said Cisco is “not only working on their infrastructure but also working significantly in multi-cloud enablement and hybrid-cloud enablement.”
