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.
Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced an update on its commitment to responsible generative artificial intelligence at its annual Summit in New York. Before the summit, which is being covered by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, I spoke with two AWS team members — Diya Wynn, responsible AI lead, and Anubhav Mishra, principal product manager for Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock.
Cisco Live was held last week in what has become my second home, Las Vegas. I had dubbed this the most important Cisco Live in the Chuck Robbins era, as the company is looking to put a stake in the artificial intelligence ground. Simultaneously, Cisco Systems Inc. is integrating its Splunk acquisitions and reshaping the security business in real time. For most companies, doing one of these things would be all-encompassing, but these are not typical times.
Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas this week, has evolved from focusing on hard-core contact centers to a broader customer experience event. This aligns with the contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS providers’ direction, where their products have expanded beyond the traditional agent to other customer-facing roles.