Cisco Systems Chief Executive Officer John Chambers Wednesday stoked the networking vendor's love affair with IT investors by pointing to the company's unified communications strategy and broad product portfolio as a way to sustain growth over the long term.
At the company's annual financial analyst conference in New York, executives said Cisco will sustain double-digit growth through the rest of the decade by incorporating data, voice, video and mobile capabilities -- what it calls its "quadruple play" -- across product lines, while addressing the service provider, enterprise, commercial and consumer markets.
The company will announce a video conferencing product in the next few months, and fine-tune quality control for VOIP and video across several router lines, executives said.
"Now if you're the innovator and the leader it protects you from the startups and the advanced players," Chambers said.
Cisco expects to sustain a 10 percent to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth rate through the rest of the decade.
The company will be able to take advantage of the breakdown of barriers among vertical-market product lines, as consumers and professionals increasingly expect to get both corporate data and home and family information anytime, anywhere, Chambers said.
"The network becomes the platform," noted Chambers, in a frequently repeated phrase during the event.
At the corporate level, product integration is fueled by a trend in businesses to move from a "command control" style of management to a more collaborative model, he said.
"If you asked me a few years ago I would have said collaboration could account for maybe 10 percent to 20 percent productivity efficiency but now I would say that's closer to .... 30 percent to 50 percent," he said.
The company is banking on business uptake of video collaboration tools to boost network traffic and the need for new infrastructure. The quad play equipment and services Cisco offers will be taken up broadly, by smaller commercial companies as well as Fortune 500 businesses, Chambers said. As an example, he pointed out that a 12-store Subway food chain in Texas has already implemented a quad-play Cisco-based system, which uses video to reduce theft.
Cisco can also help companies innovate and transition to new technologies, noted Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer. Giancarlo said Cisco "reinvented the TDM PBX [time division multiplex public branch exchange] industry ... bringing it into the unified communications era" through VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) gateways and other products and services.
In response to questions from attendees, Giancarlo said, "we will be introducing ... a very significant video product in the next few months." Though he declined to announce details, attendees said that they had been expecting the company to announce a high-end, enterprise video-conferencing product.
The big question for attendees was whether Cisco can sustain growth and product leadership. The company has had 21 straight quarters where it met or exceeded Thomson Financial analyst consensus expectations, noted Chief Financial Officer Dennis Powell. The company's share price has benefited, surging by about 25 percent over the last year, compared to about 5 percent growth for the Nasdaq exchange.
Powell forecast 19 percent to 21 percent growth for the quarter ending this October (including revenue from recent acquisitions), about even with Thomson Financial expectations for the first fiscal quarter, of 20.4 percent revenue growth.
Conference attendees noted that so far the company has been able to deliver on its promise to expand into new markets from its traditional corporate switching and router base. One institutional investor who declined to be named noted the company has placed its Carrier Routing System-1 carrier-class product into some 60 companies.
Cisco will also update earlier product lines with features that will allow service providers to have more quality control over applications, according to Mike Volpi, senior vice president of the company's routing and service provider technology group. The idea is that with more controls, providers can charge more for premium services, and generally upgrade application features. For example, the 12000 Series routers will add per-session control for business VOIP and video in this fiscal year, he said. The 7600 Series routers will also gain per-session controls and subscriber-aggregation features, he said.
While attendees said they would like more specifics about upcoming products, several agreed that certain specifics about the business appear to position the company for further growth.
For example, Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors, one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, noted Mark Sue, an analyst with brokerage RBC Capital Markets. "Of course we'd like to know when, but that is a positive sign," Sue said.