Star student Cisco set to meet analysts
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(InfoWorld) - When Cisco meets analysts Wednesday at an annual conference about its business outlook, the dominant networking player will bring a good financial record and an even more impressive forecast. Rapidly expanding beyond its traditional routing and switching businesses into voice, video, wireless, and other categories,Â the company now sees gold in collaboration using Web 2.0 technologies. Last month, when it reported results for its fourth quarter and 2007 fiscal year, Cisco upped its forecast for quarterly revenue growth, year over year, to between 12 percent and 17 percent on average. That prediction is likely to be a hot topic at the conference, taking place at Cisco's San Jose, California, headquarters. That's impressive for a company that's anything but a startup with a market capitalization of about $200 billion and annual revenue of nearly $35 billion. Even Microsoft's quarterly revenue hasn't consistently been growing that fast in recent years. The new forecast is a jump up from a previous standing estimate of 10 percent to 15 percent that was controversial when first made a few years ago. Analysts credit smart moves and generally good execution in entering new technology areas as well as strength in its core markets for the company's ongoing success. Real-time communications of all kinds, including voice, data, social networking, and a form of high-quality videoconferencing Cisco calls Telepresence, will drive continued growth, Chairman and CEO John Chambers said last month. The company has aggressively acquired to capture new markets,Â buying video infrastructure vendor Scientific-AtlantaÂ last year andÂ online collaboration service WebExÂ earlier this year, in addition to many smaller players. But its followup is just as important, according to Brian Riggs of Current Analysis, who specializes in communications. Cisco doggedly builds on the products it acquires and modifies its lineup to meet customer demands as it did with its Smart Business Communications System for small businesses earlier this year, Riggs said. Cisco also seems to have a smarter approach to developing markets than do other first-world tech companies, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Starting at the top with heads of state and convincing governments of the value of Cisco's technology, the company sells into poorer countries without eroding its profit margin, he said. Threats still loom, however. Microsoft is getting ready to take on Cisco's unified communications architecture with Office Communications Server 2007 despite the two companies' pledge last month to work together. Hewlett-Packard's well-priced ProCurve products are gaining in enterprise LANs, F5 Networks could threaten Cisco in data centers, and there's a danger of Cisco's infrastructure gear becoming a commodity unless the company keeps innovating, Kerravala said. However, Chambers's rhetoric and Cisco's results also say something about the industry as a whole, he said. Sales of HP and Foundry Networks's enterprise products are also growing in a cycle that Kerravala attributes to upgrading networks that were built in advance of Y2K. "At first glance, you can say he's being overly optimistic, but on the other hand, he's rarely wrong," Kerravala said.
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Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today participation in the following upcoming events with the financial community, for the month of June, all of which will be webcast. Interested parties can view these events on Cisco's Web site at http://www.cisco.com/go/investors.
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By Ari Levy  Cisco Systems shares rose Wednesday after its chief executive, John Chambers, forecast that fiscal third-quarter sales at the company, the world's biggest maker of computer-networking equipment, would beat analysts' estimates.
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Can Ned Hooper keep the magic of Cisco's acquisition machine alive? A lot depends on the answer to that question.
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Stocks appeared set to open higher on Wednesday, particularly on Nasdaq, after Cisco Systems Inc.'s  results and outlook exceeded forecasts and reassured investors on prospects for corporate earnings.
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U.S. shares look set to open higher on Wednesday with technology shares in focus after better-than-expected results from Cisco  on Tuesday, while investors also eye U.S. labor cost data.
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Acquisition is expected to help Cisco Systems reinforce its network management offerings.
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Cisco crowed about the sales success of its Telepresence system at its analyst conference Tuesday.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK - Cisco Systems is targeting a so-called âtriple play of the moveâ strategy as part of its strategy to drive sales to service providers.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers Wednesday stoked the networking vendor's love affair with IT investors by pointing to the company's unified communications strategy and broad product portfolio as a way to sustain growth over the long term. At the company'sÂ annual financial analyst conference in New York, executives said Cisco will sustain double-digit growth through the rest of the decade by incorporating data, voice, video and mobile capabilities -- what it calls its "quad play" -- across product lines, while addressing the service provider, enterprise, commercial and consumer markets. "Now if youâre the innovator and the leader it protects you from the startups and the advanced players," Chambers said. Cisco expects to sustain a 10 percent to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth rate through the rest of the decade. The company will be able to take advantage of the breakdown of barriers among vertical-market product lines, as consumers and professionals increasingly expect to get both corporate data and home and family information anytime, anywhere, Chambers said. "The network becomes the platform," noted Chambers, in a frequently repeated phrase during the event. At the corporate level, product integration is fueled by a trend in businesses to move from a "command control" style of management to a more collaborative model, he said. "If you asked me a few years ago I would have said collaboration could account for maybe 10 percent to 20 percent productivity efficiency but now I would say that's closer to 30 percent to 40 percent," he said. The company is banking on business uptake of video collaboration tools to boost network traffic and the need for new infrastructure. The quad play equipment and services Cisco offers will be taken up broadly, by smaller commercial companies as well as Fortune 500 businesses, Chambers said. As an example, he pointed out that a 12-store Subway food chain in Texas has already implemented a quad-play Cisco-based system, which uses video to reduce theft. Cisco can also help companies innovate and transition to new technologies, noted Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer. Giancarlo said Cisco "reinvented the TDM PBX [time division multiplex public branch exchange] industry ... bringing it into the unified communications era" through VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) gateways and other products and services. The big question for attendees was whether Cisco can sustain growth and product leadership. The company has had 21 straight quarters where it met or exceeded Thomson Financial analyst consensus expectations, noted Chief Financial Officer Dennis Powell. The company's share price has benefited, surging by about 25 percent over the last year, compared to about 5 percent growth for the Nasdaq exchange. Powell forecast 19 percent to 21 percent growth for the quarter ending this October (including revenue from recent acquisitions), about even with Thomson Financial expectations for the first fiscal quarter, of 20.4 percent revenue growth. Conference attendees noted that so far the company has been able to deliver on its promise to expand into new markets from its traditional corporate switching and router base. One institutional investor who declined to be named noted the company has placed its Carrier Routing System-1 carrier-class product into some 60 companies. While attendees said they would like more specifics about upcoming products, several agreed that certain specifics about the business appear to position the company for further growth. For example, Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors, one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, noted Mark Sue, an analyst with brokerage RBC Capital Markets. "Of course we'd like to know when, but that is a positive sign," Sue said.
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Cisco's new digital media system -- unveiled this week -- is already winning praise from one early adopter, a university in London that is using it to provide students with access to rich media.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc. will open a research center in Ireland to develop unified communications products. The office, announced on Tuesday and to be located in the western city of Galway, will initially employ 50 researchers but is expected to grow to 200 positions in the next three years. The researchers will build new unified communications applications and services, which allow workers to have a single point of access where they can be contacted via a variety of methods such as e-mail, voice mail, VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol), instant messaging and video. Cisco also plans to consider opportunities for collaborative research with industry and academic organizations in Ireland. Cisco currently employs 66 people in local sales and support in Ireland. The networking giant said it is expanding its investment in development around the world in order to be responsive to customer needs. Ireland's available talent pool and positive business climate attracted the company. Ireland's corporate tax rate, the lowest in Europe and among the lowest in the world, began attracting significant numbers of overseas companies about 20 years ago. Since then, other costs, such as energy and salaries, have risen dramatically in Ireland. As a result, the government has begun pursuing research and development investments, like Cisco's, which tend to be less reliant on extremely low operational costs and more focused on available talent than other types of operations, such as manufacturing. Ireland's Industrial Development Agency (IDA), a government body tasked with recruiting overseas companies to Ireland, said it has been courting Cisco for some time. The IDA often offers multimillion euro incentives to companies that choose to open up operations in the country. The agency said it supported the opening of the new center but it did not reveal how much it may have offered Cisco as incentive. The trend toward unified communications is growing as an increasing number of networks support IP. Earlier this year, Cisco began bundling a variety of its products related to voice, e-mail, text, videoconferencing and collaboration under a new Unified Communications System brand. Cisco also recently bought Metreos Corp. and Audium Corp. to make it easier for enterprise developers to integrate applications in the Unified Communications System. Cisco has competition in the space. Microsoft Corp. and Nortel Networks Corp. recently formed an alliance to develop unified communications technologies to enterprise customers.
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The first week of September, the unofficial start of the new season, has been hectic for IT investors. Analysts are scrambling to parse through news from networking giants Cisco Systems Inc., Alcatel SA and Lucent Technologies Inc., and a board fracas at Hewlett-Packard Co. caused the company to come under the scrutiny of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the California State Attorney General.
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Cisco Systems will open a research &amp; development (R&amp;D) center in Tokyo that will focus on IP-based technologies including IPv6, multicast and wireless for both its mainstream routers and its IOS and IOS XR software.
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One of India&#39;s leading telecommunications providers will use Cisco Systems&#39; gear to build its new Ethernet-based broadband network.
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Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) has scheduled a conference call on Tuesday, February  6, 2007 at 1:30 PM (PT) to announce its second quarter fiscal year 2007 financial results.
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Move will allow Cisco channel partners to monitor their enterprise customers' networks to provide better service and support.