Cisco has revealed how AI orders are assisting the networking giant to increase its revenue target to $56 billion – $56.5 billion for fiscal 2025, compared with the $55.3 billion – $56.3 billion forecast earlier.
Cisco, in its earnings report, said it has significantly benefited from its focus on the global AI industry. AI infrastructure orders from webscalers surpassed $350 million in Q2 fiscal 2025 and a year-to-date total of approximately $700 million. The company is on track to exceed $1 billion in AI infrastructure orders for FY25, highlighting its strong momentum in this space.
New product orders grew by 29 percent, with growth of 11 percent when excluding Splunk. Enterprise product orders increased by 27 percent, with double-digit growth across all geographic regions, while the Service Provider & Cloud segment experienced a 75 percent rise in product orders, primarily driven by triple-digit growth in webscale. Orders from three of the top six webscalers rose in triple-digit, and two saw growth of more than 50 percent, demonstrating Cisco’s increasing importance to this expanding market as AI infrastructure scales.
In the Service Provider & Cloud segment, orders from telco customers grew by over 20 percent as they reinvest in core networks to support AI connectivity. Public Sector orders rose by 13 percent, with governments worldwide relying on Cisco as a trusted partner for sovereign AI cloud development and digital transformation.
Networking product orders saw double-digit growth, fueled by switching, enterprise routing, webscale infrastructure, and IoT-driven industrial networking applications. Campus switching orders also grew significantly, with further traction expected due to increasing return-to-office policies. Additionally, data center switching achieved its fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. The launch of Cisco’s 800G Nexus switches, powered by its 51.2T Silicon One chip, is set to drive further expansion in AI cloud buildouts.
Enterprise AI orders are beginning to rise as businesses look for seamless installation and security solutions to integrate proprietary data into AI-driven production environments. Cisco signed multiple AI system deals in Q2, providing integrated solutions including Nexus, UCS, and other hardware to power enterprise AI applications.
The newly introduced Cisco AI POD, which combines Cisco’s hardware and software for simplified AI deployment, is also gaining early traction. Cisco’s Industrial Internet of Things solutions, particularly its ruggedized Catalyst products, have performed exceptionally well, with orders growing over 40 percent in the first half of FY25 and exceeding 50 percent in Q2.
Cisco’s security business
Cisco’s security business has seen tremendous growth from its AI focus, with security orders more than doubling this quarter. This surge was driven by the advanced data management, analytics, and threat detection capabilities of Splunk, as well as strong demand for key products like Cisco’s refreshed firewall.
Over the past year, Cisco Secure Access and XDR have each gained more than 1,000 customers and approximately 1 million enterprise users, demonstrating the rapid adoption of AI-enhanced security solutions. Even before full production, Hypershield is gaining traction, with two Fortune 100 enterprise customers booking major platform deals to deploy security in a fundamentally new way.
Since acquiring Splunk almost eleven months ago, Cisco has continued integrating the business while maintaining strong momentum. Talos was integrated into Splunk’s newly released Enterprise Security 8.0, and AppDynamics was incorporated into Splunk’s on-prem log observer. Key innovations rolled out include Splunk on Azure, Splunk Federated Analytics, and AI Assistant for Splunk Observability.
Last month, Cisco launched AI Defense, a major security breakthrough designed for enterprises to develop, deploy, and secure AI applications with confidence. Leveraging Cisco’s unmatched network visibility, AI Defense safeguards against AI misuse, data leakage, and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
AI opportunity
Cisco frames its AI opportunity across three interconnected pillars: AI training infrastructure for webscale customers, AI inference and enterprise clouds, and AI network connectivity. The company’s technology, spanning networking, security, and observability, is helping customers modernize, secure, and automate their networks in preparation for widespread AI application deployment.
Additionally, AI is being embedded into Cisco’s security and collaboration platforms, with AI Assistants in production and agentic capabilities under development. Cisco is also enhancing customer experience with AI-driven tools like the Renewals Agent, co-developed with Mistral, which streamlines renewal proposals. A new AI Assistant helps customers digitize and de-risk network change management, while predictive analysis and proactive technical support in network security products significantly reduce time to resolution. These innovations mark key milestones in Cisco’s journey toward an AI-led customer experience.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
