Juniper Networks Inc. is focusing on helping customers move artificial intelligence in their networks from vision to reality, and today it laid out its plans at its AI-Native NOW customer event at the New York Stock Exchange. Over the last several years, Juniper has developed strong AI networking products, and interest in AI for networking is extremely high, as engineers need help keeping up with modern networks’ complexity.
There hasn’t been a tech tailwind as strong as artificial intelligence since the early days of the internet. Many companies are vying to be the kingpin in the AI battleground, with Nvidia Corp. taking the early lead. The company has kept that position by taking a systems approach to AI. One of the key differentiators for Nvidia has been NVLink and NVSwitch, which enabled better and faster connectivity between graphic processing units to help with inferencing.
Cisco Systems Inc. provided positive numbers in its fiscal fourth-quarter results Wednesday, and there’s a story behind those numbers. The networking giant posted a modest revenue beat of $13.64 billion, $100 million more than consensus estimates. Gross margin, boosted by the acquisition of Splunk Inc., came in at a whopping 67.5%, the highest number for Cisco in 20 years. Product order growth rose 14% year over year, 6% excluding Splunk.
Contact-center-as-a-service provider Five9 Inc. broke the billion-dollar revenue run rate mark today as it posted second-quarter sales of $252.1 million, up 13% from a year ago and surpassing analysts’ expectations. Even more promising as it focused on larger customers, its enterprise subscription revenue grew 21%. Its adjusted profit of 52 cents also beat estimates.
Over the past two decades, the contact center industry has promised capabilities that will significantly improve customer experience. This is important because CX is now the top brand differentiator, with many consumers switching loyalties because of a single bad experience. Though it’s true that the contact center providers have delivered new capabilities such as omnichannel communications, self-service tools and more, consumer satisfaction with contact centers remains low.