The adoption of agentic AI is fuelling a “networking super cycle”, Cisco’s CEO said as he unveiled market-busting Q4 and full-year results.
The NASDAQ-listed networking giant last night topped Wall Street expectations as revenues for the three months and fiscal year ended 25 July rose 18% to $17.3bn and 12% to $63.3bn, respectively.
Notably, Cisco’s CFO claimed the vendor is not experiencing “any significant lead time issues”, which he said contrasted with “a number of different peers”.
During the quarter, Cisco saw product revenue from its core networking business jump 28%, with security, collaboration and observability up 14%, 12% and 6%, respectively.
Cisco expects revenue to advance to $72.2bn-$73.4bn in its fiscal 2027 – representing 15% growth at the midpoint.
“We believe the accelerating adoption of agentic AI is fuelling a networking super cycle,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said on an earnings call.
“As customers look to manage increasing traffic and costs, they are investing in Cisco’s networking stack for inferencing across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.”
Robbins’ comments mirror those of Extreme Networks’ CEO Ed Meyercord, who last week claimed enterprise networking is in “an extended growth cycle”, partly fuelled by new demands on the network created by AI.
“No significant lead time issues”
Robbins said Cisco is planning to roll out Silicon One comprehensively across its high-performance networking systems by fiscal year 2029, which he said would give it greater control over its supply chain and innovation pipeline.
Cisco is “leaning into our financial strength” when it comes to navigating memory shortages, Cisco CFO Mark Patterson said.
“We really do not have any significant lead time issues that we are seeing, unlike we have heard a number of different peers talk about,” he said.
“We are consistently entering into strategic agreements. You have seen us make investments like we did in Nanya on the memory side. We do not have any middleman between us and TSMC, so when we are securing silicon, we are looking at the whole supply chain, whether it is wafer substrates, assembly, and test, and really dealing directly with TSMC.”
Cisco’s smaller peer Extreme Networks last week unveiled a 12.6% rise in full-year revenues to $1.28bn.
Fellow networking protagonist Arista Networks also last week unveiled its first $3bn quarter, as its Q2 sales tally leapt 12.1% to $3.04bn.
