Cisco enjoyed “solid growth” last quarter, with the Webex collaborations suite playing its part.
Indeed, during the vendor’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Chuck Robbins, Chairman & CEO of Cisco, confirmed that the company had experienced double-digit year-over-year (YoY) growth in collaboration product orders – with CCaaS and CPaaS leading the way.
The reveal spotlights Webex as a growing force outperforming most of Cisco’s portfolio, with the tech giant reporting an increase of nine percent across all product orders (excluding Splunk).
That’s quite the comeback story after Webex had struggled for growth until the beginning of 2024, spending much of the previous two years in decline.
Nevertheless, the outlook has appeared much brighter this year, especially since Cisco split its cloud collaborations portfolio into Webex CX and EX.
The former saw the business bring its CCaaS and CPaaS solutions together to enable tighter integrations between its cloud contact center and enterprise systems beyond the CRM.
By integrating these products, the company is aiming to simplify innovation for its legacy customers. That’s critical for its existing on-premise contact center customers that want to replicate highly customized elements of their legacy platforms.
Yet, Robbins also emphasized the company’s commitment to growing its CX portfolio through the incorporation of the Webex AI Agent Studio and Cisco AI Assistant.
Originally announced at last month’s WebexOne 2024 event, the two contact center features have been garnering “strong initial interest from customers and will continue to strengthen our collaboration products, increasing AI capabilities.
We’re also enhancing our own productivity by using AI in our services and customer experience organization.
Unpacking the Pivot
The other aspect of Cisco’s pivot was the decision to merge Webex with its networking and security divisions into a single unit.
This move is a classic example of playing to one’s strengths.
With concerns around cloud reliability and data security having long been viewed as an obstacle to enterprise adoption of CCaaS, the vendor is leveraging its significant expertise in the field of cybersecurity to differentiate itself from its competitors.
Like with the CX portfolio, the integration of Cisco’s security solutions has already started to pay dividends.
Robbins claimed that the company’s new security strategy had contributed to security orders having “more than doubled year over year,” with the most notable win being a multinational IT services and consultancy company that agreed to 75,000 cloud security seats.
For Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, the decision for Cisco to package its various solutions together has been a long time coming, arguing that they should even consider taking it a step further. He previously told CX Today:
I’d like to see continued integration with the rest of the Cisco portfolio. For example, using ThousandEyes to troubleshoot quality problems.
“Then, there’s automatic network configuration, security settings, and all the other possibilities.”
Exceeding Expectations
Outside of the performance of its collaborative offerings, Cisco made what Robbins described as a “strong start” to fiscal 2025.
The company came in at the high end of its revenue guidance, with a reported $13.84 billion.
Elsewhere, subscription revenue increased by 21 percent to $7.8BN, while software revenue grew by 24 percent to $5.5BN.
In discussing the overall performance of Cisco for the quarter, Richard Scott Herren, EVP & CFO of Cisco, was enthusiastic about the current direction of the company:
To summarize, we started the fiscal year with a solid quarter, highlighted by strong order growth, margins, and non-GAAP EPS.
“We remain focused on making strategic investments and accelerating innovation across our business to best capitalize on the significant growth opportunities we see ahead, all underpinned by disciplined expense management.”
More Cisco Updates
In other news, Cisco announced in August that it was set to acquire Robust Intelligence, a security startup specializing in AI application protection.
The deal addresses enterprise concerns about deploying generative AI (GenAI) due to unique security challenges that traditional tools can’t fully mitigate.
Robust Intelligence’s AI firewall safeguards applications by monitoring inputs and outputs to defend against real-time threats.
