RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK — Those looking for more gloom and doom about telecom and networking on Tuesday were disappointed when Cisco beat Wall Street expectations for revenues and earnings. Plus, Cisco forecast strong growth through the end of the fiscal year in July.

Citing a rash of good news across numerous profit lines and the ability to maintain high profit margins despite having to offer some discounts, Cisco CEO john Chambers had much to crow about.

“The long-term momentum we are seeing across product families, geographies and market segments clearly points to Cisco’s strong competitive advantage,” he said in a conference call following the quarterly earnings report.

Cisco beat Wall Street expectations by a penny on earnings, at 23 cents on $1.41 billion in profits. The networking giant also reported higher than expected revenues at $6.2 billion rather than the projected $6.16 billion. Profit margins remained high at nearly 69 percent. Sales were up 10 percent over a year ago despite a re-emerging malaise on the Street, and Cisco shares remain some 25 percent off their 52-week high.

“The home run for the quarter was the continued balance that we’ve been able to achieve in geographies, market segments and product families,” Chambers said.

The outlook for the future is strong enough that Cisco added 1,100 employees in the quarter – including some in RTP — boosting total employment to 37,050.

Cisco reported increased bookings for orders in all but one region. US orders are up 1 percent (46 overall), Europe and Middle East up 1 (32 overall), Asia Pacific up 1 (11 overall) and Japan up 1 (7 overall). Others remained flat at 6 percent.

Major buyers such as telecommunications providers continue to upgrade networks for advanced services such as Voice over Internet Protocol, virtual private networks and integrated security services. Chambers pointed out that telecom orders jumped 20 percent in the quarter and sold 1 million VoIP phones in the same time frame.

“It is very possible we will soon become the largest provider of overall enterprise telephony,” Chambers said as quoted by The Associated Press.

Maverick Marketing Hosts Fundraiser

Maverick Marketing will be hosting a fundraiser to fight leukemia at its office in Cary on Wednesday afternoon from 4-7 PM.

For a map to the office and details, see: www.maverickmarketing.com

Llamawerx Launches a Blog

Rather than continue distribution of a newsletter, Llamawerx is launching a blog.

“The Llamatrax Weblog” and can be found at blog.llamawerx.com or from our homepage at www.llamawerx.com . This is a soft-launch while we work the kinks out — if you find something that doesn’t work, please let me know,” says Doug Griswold, CEO and co-founder of Llamawerx.

The firm offers consulting, outsourcing, software development, and training.