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.
There has been plenty of hype and ballyhoo around artificial intelligence and networking, but much of the vendor focus has been AI for networking, where AI is used to improve network operations. The other side of the AI coin is networking for AI, where a network must be designed and provisioned to support an AI implementation. Though many businesses will likely deploy AI in the cloud, making the supporting network the problem of the hyperscaler, 58% of respondents to a recent ZK Research/theCube Research study stated they have deployed or will be deploying AI in their own private data center.
Earlier this month the United States Golf Association held the 2024 U.S. Open Golf Championship, widely regarded as the toughest test in professional golf. Given the high-profile nature of the event, the underlying network that supports it had to be equally tough.
Pure Storage made a couple of significant announcements last week at its annual user event, Pure Accelerate, in Las Vegas. First, the company said it had released three new advanced storage-as-a-service service level agreements for the Pure Storage platform: cyber recovery, resilience and site rebalance. The company also announced new capabilities in the Pure Storage platform aimed at helping information technology and business leaders improve artificial intelligence deployments, enhance cyber resilience and modernize their applications.
Unplanned downtime — whether it involves minor service interruptions or major system outages — extends far beyond technical glitches. Downtime affects the foundation of business operations and profitability, resulting in long-term consequences. Splunk Inc. analyzed unplanned downtime’s financial and nonfinancial implications by surveying 2,000 executives from some of the world’s largest companies — the Global 2000.