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.
The network continues to grow in importance as a strategic business asset. A recent joint study between ZK Research and The Cube Research found that 93% of organizations felt the network was more critical to business operations than two years ago. At the same time, 80% of respondents believe the network has grown in complexity in that same time frame. The continuation of these two trends will lead to an untenable situation.
Accenture Plc Tuesday announced the launch of the Accenture AI Refinery framework, developed on Nvidia Corp.’s new AI Foundry service. The offering, designed to enable clients to build custom large language models using Llama 3.1 models, enables enterprises to refine and personalize these models with their own data and processes to create domain-specific generative AI solutions.