Editor’s note: A resurgence in core business fueled Cisco’s return to revenue growth in the third quarter, concludes Scott Dennehy, an analyst with Technology Business Research. Cisco released its latest earnings last week. He also believes Cisco will benefit from its decision to scale back a joint venture with EMC.
HAMPTON, N.H. – Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) leveraged its dominant market share position and broad portfolio to capture spending driven by cloud, mobility and security.
Recovery in its Switching business, improvement in NGN Routing and strong growth in Services and Security enabled Cisco to achieve overall revenue growth for the first time since 3Q13, with growth of 1.3% year-to-year.
The company achieved growth despite sluggish demand from service providers and in emerging markets, with total product orders down 10% and 6% year-to-year, respectively, due to its extensive portfolio of products and services that enable Cisco to capitalize on customer spending driven by cloud, mobility and security.
While the service provider and emerging market headwinds will persist for the next several quarters, TBR expects Cisco’s revenue growth to accelerate in 4Q14, reaching midsingle digits due to momentum in Switching and continued growth in key segments such as Services, Security and Data Center.
Cisco will ramp-up its software, storage and converged infrastructure road maps as a result of its reduced investment in VCE.
EMC announced in October a restructuring of VCE, its joint venture with Cisco and VMware for Vblock-branded, pre-integrated converged systems, in which VCE will cease to operate as a separate entity and will become part of EMC’s Information Infrastructure (EMC II) product division.
As part of the restructuring, Cisco will reduce its equity stake in VCE from 35% to 10%, giving Cisco more flexibility in its relationships with other storage vendors such as NetApp.
More importantly, a looser tie to EMC provides Cisco freedom and capital to pursue its storage road map, such as Invicta, more aggressively.
TBR believes Cisco is likely to develop its brand of converged systems that leverage UCS compute and Invicta flash storage components in the future. This would enable Cisco to go to market with a fully converged infrastructure stack without depending on EMC, or NetApp, for storage components.
TBR believes Cisco’s ability to deliver its converged infrastructure offering will strengthen its value proposition through a more holistic design and one-stop support.
(C) TBR
