Chuck Robbins, the new CEO of Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), laid out to Wall Street on Wednesday evening his vision for the future of the technology giant just three weeks after officially replacing long-time CEO (and now executive chairman) John Chambers.
In a conference call to discuss Cisco’s earnings that beat Street expectations, Robbins is bullish – just as Chambers was so many times over the past two decades.
Robbins, a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, also hinted at more acquisitions, particularly in security.
Some excerpts from the conference call as provided by financial news website SeekingAlpha:
“It’s an honor today to lead this call as the CEO of Cisco. While this is only my third week officially in the CEO role, we’ve really hit the ground running since my appointment was announced on May 4. I believe that I’m stepping into this role at an incredible time for the company. John’s vision and leadership have set Cisco up for the future that I believe will be even better than our past. …
“Over the last 90 days, we’ve seen an infectious energy emerge at Cisco, and we’ve made strong moves around the four focus areas that I laid out: accelerating what’s working and changing what’s not; simplifying our business; driving operational rigor; and investing in our talent and our culture. We will continue to move quickly. And going forward it is my intention to be transparent on what we were doing, what we are doing, and more importantly, why we are doing it.
“When I think about our strategy, I look at the huge market opportunity that exists as businesses and governments use technology to drive their growth and operational efficiency. This is why our customers are moving to digital, and it is their number one priority. In the digital world, data is the most strategic asset, and is increasingly distributed across every organization and ecosystem, on premise, at the edge, and in the cloud.
“The network plays an increasingly important role enabling our customers to aggregate, automate, and draw insights from this highly distributed data with security and speed. This is driving them to adopt entirely new IT architectures and organizational structures …
“I believe our strategy and execution have enabled our performance to be quite differentiated from our peers. …
“As we look at security, in a highly distributed digital world, security is the top concern for our customers. We are pushing threat-centric security everywhere across the extended network … In Q4 we added customers more than 15 times faster than Sourcefire at the time of the acquisition.
“We’re quickly building a substantial software subscription business in our security portfolio, and you see that in the 26% growth of deferred revenue in Q4 for security. Assuming we continue to execute, I’m confident we’ll see high double-digit growth in the back half of this year.
“In switching, we are driving the transition to the Nexus 3000, Nexus 9000, and ACI, and in the quarter we grew revenue across those product families to $438 million, growing more than 100% year over year and more than 50% sequentially …
“In high-end routing, we continued to drive the transition in the core and saw both of our new platforms grow in triple digits. We’ve solidified our lead in this market.
“And with Meraki, customers are rapidly adopting this new cloud-based consumption model. Three years ago we bought Meraki for $1.2 billion, with $100 million of annual orders. We closed this year with almost a $1 billion order run rate, scaling the business through our global commercial channels. …
“We’ve only begun to scratch the surface on how we can take advantage of our scale and relevance in this digital transition and how we deliver our technology to our customers. The strategic role Cisco is playing is at the center of the digital transition today and in the future, and it’s why I strongly believe Cisco’s best years are ahead of us.”
Read the full transcript at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3434696-cisco-systems-csco-charles-h-robbins-on-q4-2015-results-earnings-call-transcript
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