Cisco Systems came out with its financial report card for its fiscal fourth quarter and full-year 2008 period after the close of markets today, and in typical Cisco fashion, the numbers were marginally ahead of what Wall Street was expecting.
The financial performance — sales growth of 4 10 percent over the same quarter last year ($10.4 billion vs. $9.8 $9.4 billion) and a 13.2 percent rise ($39.5 billion vs. $34.9 billion) for the full-year period — masked Cisco’s biggest challenge: how to overcome the law of large numbers.
On the company’s conference call with analysts, CEO John Chambers basically admitted as much, saying that even though the company wants to get back to 12-to-17-percent growth, it doesn’t know when that will happen. Check back here later for the full story.
To view a video of Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni talking about our FY08 and Q408 earnings, visit our Cisco blog:
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/video_cisco_cfo_frank_calderoni_discusses_fy08_and_q408_earnings/
i think people underestimate how much cisco stands to benefit from the movement to the cloud. as app architecture changes, the infrastructure underneath has got to change and i think cisco will be one of the bigger beneficiaries of that move. as most if not all enterprise data centers begin to look more and more like internet data centers, newer and different kinds of interconnecting switches (layer2, 3) will be required. i wouldnt count cisco out of that whole growth ramp.