Cisco announced revenue of $12.8 billion (+6 percent) in Q4 fiscal 2018 and $49.3 billion (+3 percent) in full fiscal year – fuelled by growth in all business segments and regions.
One of the main highlights of Cisco earnings was the $2.353 billion revenue (+9 percent) from network security business.
Cisco performance in Q4
Cisco achieved revenue growth of 5 percent in Americas, 8 percent in EMEA, and 6 percent in Asia Pacific including India, China and Japan.
Cisco, the largest network and enterprise security company, said it achieved revenue growth of 12 percent to $7.443 billion from Security business, 10 percent to $1.339 billion from Applications, 7 percent to $627 million from Infrastructure Platforms and 3 percent to $3.202 billion from service business.
Infrastructure platforms grew 7 percent with growth in all businesses except for routing which was down slightly. Switching revenue rose supported by growth in campus driven by the ramp of the Cat9K and growth in data center driven by the Nexus 9K.
Cisco wireless revenue increased with strength in Meraki and Wave 2 offerings. Cisco said data center had very strong double digit growth driven by servers and HyperFlex.
Routing declined slightly driven by weakness in SP routing. Applications revenue rose 10 percent with growth across all the businesses. Cisco achieved solid revenue growth in unified communications, telepresence, conferencing, and AppDynamics.
Cisco said developer program DevNet surpassed 500,000 registered members.
Viptela has been deployed at over 800 customers driven by its ability to provide higher capacity at a lower cost.
Cisco said more than 3 million customer service agents globally are using Cisco’s contact center software.
Cisco reported operating expenses of $4.6 billion (+1 percent) and operating income of $3.3 billion (+10 percent), with operating margin of 26.1 percent.
San Jose, California-based Cisco said it expects to achieve revenue growth of 5 percent to 7 percent in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019.
“We had a very strong finish to a great year and generated our highest quarterly revenue of $12.8 billion,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of Cisco.
Update on Cisco acquisitions
Cisco closed the acquisition of Accompany, a provider of AI-driven relationship intelligence platform, in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018.
Cisco purchased July Systems, a privately held company that provides enterprise-grade location platform through cloud-based subscription offerings, in the first quarter of fiscal 2019.
Cisco announced the acquisition of Duo Security, a provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud.