The economic impacts of COVID-19 continue to hurt Cisco’s customers — and slowed their Q4 spending on the networking giant’s gear for the third consecutive quarter.

With $12.2 billion in revenue, Cisco posted a 9% year-over-year revenue decline during the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020. Earnings, meanwhile, of 80 cents per share dropped 4% compared to a year earlier.

Additionally, Cisco forecast another quarter of decreasing revenue ahead. Company executives forecast a revenue drop of 9% to 11% year over year for Q1 of fiscal 2021.

“As you would expect, the pandemic has had the most impact on our enterprise and commercial orders, driven by an overall slowdown in spending,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said on the company’s earnings call. “We are seeing customers continue to delay their purchasing decisions in certain areas while increasing spend in others until they have greater visibility and clarity on the timing and shape of the global economic recovery.”

Cloud computing is one of those increased-spending areas, as evidenced by the cloud giants’ most recent earnings reports, and Cisco is taking note. The vendor will increase its investment in cloud technologies, Robbins said on the call, and it’s also leaning into everything-as-a-service.

“We will accelerate the transition of the majority of our portfolio to be delivered as a service,” Robbins said. “We will also accelerate our investments in the following areas: cloud security, cloud collaboration … increased automation in the enterprise, the future of work, application insights, and analytics. At the same time, we will continue our focus in the following areas, many of which have been accelerated by the pandemic: multi-cloud investments, 5G and WiFi 6, 400G optical networking, next-generation silicon, AI, and more.”

The shift to selling software as a service (SaaS) isn’t new for Cisco — the vendor famously moved to “Merakify” its business, or transition away from revenue based on hardware purchases to a subscription-based software model, about three years ago. Since then, many other tech companies followed suit.

In 2017, Cisco set a goal to have 30% of its revenue come from software by the end of 2020. And while Cisco narrowly missed that target for the full year — 29% of revenue came from software during fiscal year 2020, it did bring in 31% of revenue from software for Q4 alone.

Robbins also noted that 51% of Cisco’s revenue came from software and services in fiscal year 2020, beating its 50% target. And also during Q4, 78% of Cisco’s software revenue came from subscription-based software, which exceeded its 66% target.

However, selling everything as a service is new, and it follows similar moves by other infrastructure vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell Technologies as they face increasing competition from highly scalable public clouds that offer this type of flexible, consumption-based payment model. HPE pledged to delivered its entire portfolio as a service by 2022, and last November Dell Technologies followed suit. At that time CEO Michael Dell said the company will offer all of its new products under its on-demand portfolio as well as several existing products.

Robbins did not say what percentage of Cisco’s portfolio would be delivered as a service or specify a timeframe for the shift. “It’s clear that many of our customers do want to consume the technology as a service, so we’re currently looking at the entire portfolio to see how deeply we can get into the portfolio relative to delivering as a service,” he said. “I think we’ll have a lot of that in the marketplace by the end of the calendar year.”

Later on the call, he added that this may include selling “our traditional networking hardware as a service.”

Security is another area that’s becoming increasingly important to Cisco customers, most of whom are now working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cisco saw 10% security revenue growth in Q3 compared to last year, which led Cisco’s overall product revenue for the quarter.

Robbins touted Cisco’s SecureX platform, which it announced in February and started selling six weeks ago. Since then, “we have have over 2,100 active daily customers, two thirds of which have two or more products active [on the platform].”

He also alluded to Cisco’s recent entrance into the secure access service edge (SASE) space. This network and security architecture combines SD-WAN and security capabilities into a cloud-managed platform. And, according to Robbins and others, it’s the architecture of the future. “We will also be working with our customers on their network architectures, which are certainly going to be prevalent on or dependent upon cloud security and the SD-WAN and the integration of those,” he said. “So we’re going to accelerate that.”