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Global networking solutions provider Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) recently announced its second-quarter results that outpaced market expectations. Cisco continues to focus on providing solutions for the hybrid workspace and leveraging generative AI capabilities into its existing offerings portfolio.
 

Cisco’s Financials

Cisco’s Q3 revenues grew 14% to $14.6 billion, ahead of the Street’s forecast of $14.39 billion. Adjusted EPS increased 15% to $1.00, ahead of the market’s estimate of $0.97.

By segment, product revenues grew 17% to $11.1 billion and subscription revenues grew 3% to $9.5 billion. By region, revenues from the Americas increased 13%, EMEA grew 16%, and APJC grew 11%.

For the fourth quarter, Cisco forecast revenue growth of 14%-16% and a non GAAP EPS of $1.05-$1.07. The market was looking for revenues of $14.94 billion and an EPS of $1.04 for the quarter. For the year, Cisco expects revenues to grow by 10%-10.5% and an EPS of $3.80-$3.82. The market forecasts annual revenues of $56.56 billion and an EPS of $3.76.
 

Cisco’s AI Focus

Cisco recently announced new solutions with AT&T that will enhance connectivity and advance the calling landscape for the hybrid workforce. The new offerings include Cisco’s Webex Calling and SD-WAN solutions alongside AT&T mobile network, which will allow businesses of any size to offer employees a simple, secure, and consistent experience to thrive in any setting. The integrations will combine the capabilities of an AT&T wireless smartphone with the native integration of Webex Calling to provide greater functionality and flexibility for on-the-go communication, in addition to helping enterprise customers lower costs by reducing the need for traditional fixed business lines.

AT&T Cloud Voice with Webex Go will allow users to make and receive business calls with AT&T’s network, elevating calls to a fully immersive Webex collaboration experience across the Webex app and devices. Ultimately, the solution will increase the ability to effectively and securely collaborate, resulting in improved knowledge sharing and faster decision-making.

Cisco continues to invest in its AI solutions and released a set of new generative AI features across its Collaboration and Security portfolios to drive productivity and simplicity across the enterprise. Its AI expansion embedded in the Webex Suite will offer new summarization capabilities that help people get up to speed quickly. The new “Catch Me Up” capability will allow users to quickly catch up on missed interactions, including meetings, calling, and other messages. Intelligent meeting summaries with key points will allow users to opt in to automatically generate the most important elements of a Webex meeting, extract the key points, and capture action items with owners. Summaries in Vidcast, its video messaging tool, will produce highlights and chapters so viewers can navigate to the most important parts of the video quickly.

It also launched new conversation summaries in Webex Contact Center that will provide agents with a fast, automated way to gather long-form text from digital chats with customers as well as facilitate post-call wrap-up and resolution with customers. Chat summaries will provide agents with a clear summarization of issues and resolutions already explored via self-service and a summary of the call to both the agent and customer once it ends.

It also embedded the AI capabilities in its Security Cloud through a generative AI Policy Assistant that will enable security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and evaluate how to best implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure. Cisco’s security operations center (SOC) Assistant will also augment security by providing a comprehensive situation analysis for analysts, correlating intel across the Cisco Security Cloud platform solutions, relaying potential impacts, and providing recommended actions.

Cisco’s stock is currently trading at $51.82 with a market capitalization of $211.2 billion. It hit a 52-week high of $52.56 in April and a 52-week low of $38.60 in October last year.

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