Cisco’s move to refocus operations around the high-growth artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity market paid dividends that have offset more modest results from its core networking systems.

That AI focus drove $600 million in new infrastructure related sales from webscale customers during Cisco’s third-fiscal quarter, which when combined with the $700 million in sales already pocketed for the year, pushed Cisco’s total well past its initial forecast of $1 billion in total sales for its fiscal year.

The latest sales numbers were parsed out as being roughly two-thirds from Cisco-branded networking systems and one-third from silicon and optics. That break out was more networking heavy than initial AI-related sales, which were more evenly split between those two operating segments.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins explained that this mix change showed “the growing importance of our technology to web-scale customers for their AI training use cases.”

“With agentic AI, the network is fundamentally constrained and will require ultrafast, low-latency, energy-efficient networks, which we can deliver,” Robbins added.

Cisco’s $28 billion Splunk acquisition also boosted the vendor’s security business, which posted a 54-percent year-over-year increase in sales. CFO Scott Herren added that the vendor also saw a boost from its secure access service edge (SASE) platform.

Cisco did manage slightly better networking growth in the latest quarter, reporting an 8-percent year-over-year increase compared to just 3-percent growth the previous quarter. Cisco’s switching and enterprise routing platforms drove that growth, offsetting ongoing declines from its server business. Cisco’s data center switch business was recently ranked a market leader by Gartner.

While servers were down, Robbins did add that Cisco was not seeing a shift away from the vendor toward white-box systems.

“When they want to buy white boxes, we can work with them to actually integrate our silicon and actually manage the process for them and help deliver that product. But we see the predominance is still buying systems,” Robbins said. “Every hyperscaler has a different set of kind of issues that lead them to the answer. And in some cases, some of them have had an answer two years ago that now has changed, and they're doing it a different way.”

Tangentially related to Cisco’s realignment last year, Robbins also noted that Jeetu Patel had been promoted from chief product officer of Cisco’s networking business to that same position over all of Cisco’s operations. Patel, who joined Cisco in mid-2020, took on his previous role in a move that saw long-time networking executive Jonathan Davidson exit Cisco.