Cisco said it enterprise business is looking strong but service provider segment still sees challenges
Cisco reported third quarter 2015 revenues of $12.1bn this week, just over 5 per cent what it raked in during the same quarter last year. In a call with analysts this week Cisco execs said the company sees continued growth in its enterprise segment, but its service provider business continue to struggle.
Revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2015 was $36.3bn, up from $34.8bn for the first nine months of fiscal 2014.
Kelly Kramer, Cisco executive vice president and chief financial officer said the company saw a good balance across its portfolio, with its enterprise segment looking fairly strong, much like the previous quarter.
UCS revenues for the quarter were $3bn, which is sequentially flat but a 30 per cent year-on-year increase, and the company said its seeing growth in its converged infrastructure offerings (those co-developed with VCE and IBM). Its cloud revenues grew 11 per cent year-on-year, mostly on growth in its conferencing cloud software.
In a call with analysts this week Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the company is seeing better performance in its enterprise segment than its server provider business – hindered in part by an industry-wide slowdown in spending seen over the past few quarters now.
“In enterprise, the shift to selling outcomes, not products, is resulting in larger opportunities and dramatic increases in pipeline. In US enterprise, for example, the value of our pipeline of deals over $1 million increased approximately 60 per cent year-over-year, with the average deal size up over 30 per cent,” he said.
“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7 per cent, as global service provider capex remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organisational changes we have made in our global service provider organisation are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet.”
“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7%, as global service provider CapEx remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organizational changes we have made in our global service provider organization are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet”
Chambers also said Cisco’s intercloud strategy announced last year will kick into “phase 2” shortly, and while he declined to specifically outline what that entails he did shed some light on the programme’s challenges in its bid get other service providers on board with it.
“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time.”
“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those,” he added.