Cisco Systems, Inc.

Welcome to Cisco's third quarter fiscal year 2019 financial results conference call. At the request of Cisco, today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect. Now I would like to introduce Marilyn Mora, head of investor relations. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thanks, Michelle. Welcome everyone to Cisco's third quarter fiscal 2019 quarterly earnings conference call. This is Marilyn Mora, head of investor relations, and I'm joined by Chuck Robbins, our chairman and CEO, and Kelly Kramer, our CFO. By now you should have seen our earnings press release. A corresponding webcast with slides including supplemental information will be made available on our website in the investor relations section following the call. Income statements, full gap to non-gap reconciliation information, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and other financial information can also be found in the financial section of our investor relations website. Throughout this conference call, we will be referencing both gap and non-gap financial results and will discuss product results in terms of revenue and geographic and customer results in terms of product orders, unless stated otherwise. All comparisons made throughout this call will be made on a -over-year basis. The matters we will be discussing today include forward-looking statements, including the guidance we will be providing for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019. They are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on forms 10-K and 10-Q, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. With respect to guidance, please also see the slides and press release that accompany this call for further details. Fiscal will not comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. In Q2, on October 28th, we completed the sale of our SPVSS business and accordingly had no revenue or expense from that business in Q3 fiscal 2019. As such, all of the revenue, non-gap, and product orders information we will be discussing is normalized to exclude the SPVSS business from our historical results. We have provided historical financial information for the SPVSS business in the slides that accompany this call and on our website to help understand these impacts. The guidance we provided during our Q2 earnings call and today's call has been normalized in the same way. I will now turn it over to Chuck.

Thank you, Marilyn, and good afternoon, everyone. We had another strong quarter of performance across the business demonstrating our ability to execute despite the ongoing uncertainty in both the macro and geopolitical environments. Technology continues to be at the heart of our customer strategy and now more than ever our market-leading portfolio and differentiated innovation is resonating with them as they transform their IT infrastructure. In the quarter, we delivered strong revenue, margins, non-gap earnings growth, and operating flow. As we continue to help our customers achieve their business objectives, I am confident about the future of Cisco and the growth opportunities ahead of us. New technologies like cloud, AI, IoT, 5G, and Wi-Fi 6, among others, are coming together to revolutionize the way we operate our businesses and deliver new experiences for our customers and teams. We are fundamentally changing the way our customers approach their technology and infrastructure to address the rising complexity in their IT environments. We are building the only integrated multi-domain intent-based architecture with security at the foundation. This is designed to allow our customers to securely connect their users and devices over any network to any application no matter where they are. We are integrating capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning across the entire portfolio so customers have greater insights resulting in faster business outcomes. Now for some highlights across our business. Starting with infrastructure platforms, over the past several years we have been working to integrate intent-based networking across our enterprise access portfolio to help our customers manage more users, devices, and things connecting to their networks. We brought to market tremendous innovation across wired, wireless, and enterprise routing including SD-WAN resulting in a continued strong traction of our enterprise networking portfolio. We are moving into an era of truly immersive and pervasive wireless connectivity which generates demand for high density, low latency performance for real-time experiences over both wired and wireless networks. Enterprise networks today must be optimized for agility and security leveraging cloud and wireless capabilities with the ability to garner insights from the data and security integrated throughout. Cisco is in a unique position to deliver this for our customers. We recently announced several new platforms expanding our enterprise networking portfolio with the launch of our subscription-based Wi-Fi 6 access points and Catalyst 9600 campus core switches purpose-built for cloud-scale networking. By combining our automation and analytics software with our broad portfolio of switches, access points, and controllers we are creating a seamless -to-end wireless-first architecture for our customers. We also expanded our open-roaming partnership ecosystem to now include Apple, Intel, Samsung, and others to make Wi-Fi onboarding simple. With our newest Catalyst 9000 family additions, we have completed the most comprehensive enterprise networking portfolio refresh in our history. We have rebuilt our entire access portfolio with intent-based networking across wired and wireless. We also now have one unified operating system and policy management platform to drive simplicity and consistency across our customers' networks, all enabled by a software subscription model. In the data center, our strategy is to deliver multi-cloud architectures that bring policy and operational consistency no matter where applications or data resides by extending ACI and our hyperconverse offering HyperFlex to the cloud. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are great examples of how we continue to work with web-scale providers to deliver new innovation. For example, we recently introduced Cisco Cloud ACI for AWS, a service that allows customers to manage and secure applications running in a private data center or in Amazon Web Services cloud environments. We also expanded our partnership with Google. We announced support for their multi-cloud platform Anthos to help customers build secure applications everywhere, from private data centers to public clouds with greater ease. Going forward, we will integrate this platform with our broad data center portfolio, including HyperFlex, ACI, SD-WAN, and StealthWatch Cloud to deliver the best multi-cloud experience for our enterprise customers. Moving to security, we continue to see strong momentum with another quarter of double-digit growth driven by our world-class security portfolio. Cisco is the world's largest cybersecurity company for enterprises with thousands of cybersecurity experts helping our customers globally. Our portfolio covers the entire threat continuum of the modern enterprise and integrates security into every networking domain. We are enabling all of our customers to transform and secure their networks for the rapidly evolving multi-cloud world. We have a platform that continuously detects threats and verifies trust. By combining Duo, Umbrella, StealthWatch, ICE, and Tetration, we offer an -to-end zero-trust architecture that is strongly resonating with customers. Now turning to applications, we continue to execute very well in our collaboration business. These platforms are becoming increasingly critical to how enterprises operate and manage their workforce. Customers are always looking to enhance their meeting experiences, and cognitive collaboration is quickly becoming the de facto standard for delivering more personalized experiences and transforming how we work. At Enterprise Connect, we introduced several new cognitive collaboration capabilities within our WebEx portfolio, integrating AI and ML to bring context and intelligence to meetings. The new innovations we launched include People Insights, Facial Recognition, and WebEx Calling, all which help to increase our customers' productivity, making work simple and seamless. Going forward, you'll see this greater level of intelligence integrated into every piece of our collaboration portfolio across calling, messaging, meetings, devices, and contact center. We also had another quarter of strong growth in AppDynamics as thousands of customers rapidly adopt our application intelligence platform for smarter and faster decision-making. The ability to manage -to-end application performance across all cloud environments is increasingly important. AppDynamics is the market leader in application and infrastructure analytics delivering unparalleled innovation. We offer the most comprehensive -to-end visibility from connected devices and applications to the underlying network providing better application performance and user experience. To summarize, I'm very proud of the progress our teams have made against our strategic priorities to drive profitable growth, accelerate differentiated innovation for our customers, and successfully execute our own transformation to more software and subscriptions. Enterprise IT architectures must transform to help our customers get the most out of all of their IT investments. More than ever, our customers need a trusted partner with an -to-end architecture strategy to simplify, transform, and secure their businesses, and Cisco is that partner. Kelly, I'll now turn it over to you.

Great. Thanks, Chuck. I'll start with a summary of our financial results for the quarter, followed by the guidance for Q4. Q3 was a strong quarter across the business. We executed well with solid orders momentum, strong revenue growth, margins, EPS, and operating cash flow. Product orders grew 4%. Total revenue was $13.0 billion, up 6%. Our non-GAAP operating margin rate was 32.2%, up 0.2 points. Non-GAAP net income was $3.5 billion, up 8%, and non-GAAP EPS was $0.78, up 18%. Let me provide some more detail on our Q3 revenue. Total product revenue was up 7% to $9.7 billion. Infrastructure platforms grew 5% with solid growth across all businesses. Switching had another good quarter with growth driven by the continued ramp of the CAT 9K and strength in our ACI portfolio. Routing grew driven by SD-WAN. We saw solid growth in wireless driven by growth across the entire portfolio, and data center was up with growth in HyperFlex and servers. Applications was up 9% with growth across all the businesses. We saw solid growth in unified communication software, telepresence, and app dynamics. Security was up 21% with strong performance in identity and access, advanced threat, and unified threat. We're very pleased also with the integration of Duo into this security portfolio. Service revenue was up 3% driven by software and solution support. We continue to transform our business, delivering more software offerings, and driving more subscriptions. Software subscriptions were 65% of total software revenue, up 9 points year over year. When we look at the impact of acquisitions on our Q3 results year over year, there was a 40 basis point positive impact on revenue. We saw solid momentum in Q3 with total product orders growing 4%. Looking at our geographies, Americas was flat, EMEA was up 9%, and APJC was up 6%. Total emerging markets was up 5%, with the BRICS plus Mexico down 2%. In our customer segments, enterprise was up 9%, commercial grew 5%, public sector was up 10%, and service provider was down 13%. From a non-GAAP profitability perspective, total Q3 gross margin was 64.6%. In terms of the bottom line, from a GAAP perspective, Q3 net income was $3.0 billion, and EPS was 69 cents. We ended Q3 with total cash equivalents and investments of $34.6 billion. Q3 operating cash flow was $4.3 billion, up 79%. Normalized for the $1.3 billion of foreign taxes related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act we paid in Q3 of fiscal 18, operating cash flow was up 16%. From a capital allocation perspective, we returned $7.5 billion to shareholders during the quarter that was comprised of $6 billion of share repurchases and $1.5 billion of our quarterly dividend. We continue to invest organically and inorganically in our innovation pipeline. In terms of M&A, we closed on the Luxterra acquisition. These moves are consistent with our strategy of increasing investment and innovation and R&D for our growth areas. To summarize, we had a strong Q3. We executed well with strong top-line growth and profitability. We're seeing the returns on the investments we're making in innovation and driving the shift to more software and subscriptions, delivering long-term growth and shareholder value. Let me reiterate our guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal 19. This guidance includes a type of forward-looking information that Marilyn referred to earlier. Note that we have normalized our fourth quarter guidance to exclude the SPVSS business for Q4 of fiscal 18, which we divested on October 28, 2018. We have provided historical financial information for the SPVSS business in the slides that a company this call. We expect revenue growth in the range of .5% to .5% year over year. We anticipate the non-GAAP gross margin rate to be in the range of 64 to 65%. The non-GAAP operating margin rate is expected to be in the range of 31 to 32%. And the non-GAAP tax provision rate is expected to be 19%. Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to range from 80 to 82 cents.

I'll now Michelle, let's go ahead and open the line for questions and start to begin the queuing process.

Thank you. Rod Hall with Goldman Sachs. He may go ahead.

Yeah, guys. Thanks a lot for the question. I guess I'm going to ask an obvious one and then from the order volumes, another obvious one. I wonder if you could comment on the trade situation and the 25% rate increase and just kind of give us some idea for how much is contemplated in guidance of that and anything else you can tell us about exposure of the business. I know that you guys had said that you thought if we went to 25% there would be price elasticity effects. So that's the first question. The second was obviously the service provider orders down 13%. That is a quite a lot worse number than we would have expected. So I wonder if you could just give us any more color on what's happening there. Thanks.

Sure. Thanks, Rod. So on the tariffs, if you remember back many months ago when the 10% tariffs were announced, we said we had basically three phases to our strategy. The first was we would continue to dialogue with the administration to make sure they understand the impact. The second is we'll continue to do what we've always done, which is optimize our supply chain, which we've been doing for the last 20 years. And then the third is we would make pricing adjustments where necessary if needed. I'll tell you that the team has been working incredibly hard over the last six months. And so last week when we saw the indication that the tariffs were going to move to 25% on Friday morning, the teams kicked in and we actually have executed completely on everything that we need to do to deal with the tariffs. We are operationally all that we needed to do is now behind us. And we see very minimal impact at this point based on all the great work the teams have done. And it is absolutely baked into our guide going forward. That's the first question. The second question on the service provider business. Look, we've always talked about this business as being highly lumpy and very big customer driven. And we've seen quarters where you see several big customers stall. And this is a result. And most of the impact of what we saw was in the Americas. And if you just look at the capex spend year over year, I think it's in the U.S., Kelly, the data that we had was the capex spend overall was down almost 20%. So this is something that we have always said from one quarter to the next until we get into a real network build out relative to 5G that we knew these quarters are going to be lumpy. So it was very isolated to the Americas. And I think that the strength in our public sector and our commercial and enterprise business continues to indicate that the innovation that our teams have brought into the portfolio is still resonating with our customers.

Great. Appreciate it,

guys. Nice

job on the execution. Such a tough environment, too. Thank you.

Thank you. Next question, please.

Thank you. Itai Kidron with Oppenheimer. You may go ahead.

Thanks. And again, congrats on a great quarter and execution. Chuck, maybe we could talk about applications. A big deceleration from level we've seen over the last four quarters. Clearly, AB Dynamics is doing well in there. But now zoom out now in the marketplace, making a lot of noise. Help us think about WebEx, how that business is doing. How do you feel competitively positioned in the marketplace? And how do you think about addressing potential competitive headwinds over there?

Yeah. Thanks, Itai. So a couple of comments. Number one, the WebEx business continues to grow very solidly. We're very happy with what's been going on. The team has done a phenomenal job of really modernizing that platform over the last year under Amy's leadership. And the other thing to remember is that this is the first quarter where Broadsoft is normalized in the run rate. So we've had the benefit of that. So some of the growth rates that you've seen were obviously boosted by that over the last few quarters. So that's on the numbers front. I tell you what, the cognitive collab stuff that was announced at Enterprise Connect, I think, is going to be game changing. What we see with some of our competitors is that they're focused on taking four collaboration endpoints into a customer and showing a great simple experience. And frankly, if we take four endpoints in with WebEx, the new WebEx, we can show a great more rich simple experience as well. So one of the things that we're focused on right now is transitioning all of our customers to our modern platforms. Because we've been in this business for years. And so our customers have varying combinations of technology. So one of the big things that we need to do is get everybody to the most modern platforms, which we think are very competitive. And when you put the cognitive capabilities on top of it, that if you haven't seen it, we should get you a demo of it. It's pretty powerful. So we're very confident where we are in this space. Very good.

Good luck.

Thank you.

Thanks, Etai. Next question, please.

Thank you. Vijay Bhagavat from Deutsche Bank. You may go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Hey, Chuck. Kelly. Marilyn. Hey, Vijay. Can you speak up a bit? We're having a hard time hearing you.

Yeah. Can you guys hear me?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's better. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. First of all, honestly, we'd like to commend you for your recent social contributions. We do monitor that news flow in addition to what's going on in the business with the homeless mitigation programs. Honestly, it's like to comment on that. And then on the earnings call question, your general managers seem quite excited on this Wi-Fi 6, the campus core switch. So my question to you and helpful for all of us is how impactful is new Wi-Fi 6 refresh and the new campus core, the catalyst 6,000 refresh heading into the back half? And is there a pull forward across the portfolio or would this just be kind of a point product swap? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for your comments, Vijay. On the look, I think we have to step back and look at what the teams accomplished on the enterprise networking portfolio. We launched the first catalyst 9,000 in the summer of 2017. And two weeks ago, we completed the portfolio across our enterprise routing platforms are going through a refresh, the catalyst 9,000, switching family, as well as all of the access points. And if you go back two years ago, we didn't have a single networking product with a software subscription on it. And today, every product in the enterprise routing space, the enterprise Wi-Fi space, and the enterprise campus switching space is sold with a mandatory subscription. So the progress that the teams have made is phenomenal. They've also, you know, we had multiple operating systems running across those different platforms. We've now consolidated to a single operating system. And it all is running under a single automation platform so that our customers can deploy policy. So it's been an incredible amount of work that the teams have done. Now, when I look at, you know, as we've talked about with the customers, we're still very early in the transition. If you look at, you know, you can assume customers used to keep campus switching products for, I don't know, seven years, five to seven years. And we've been at, you know, small portions of this portfolio for the last two years, but just very small portions. And so we still believe we're in the very early days of the transition. And what you see, you know, Wi-Fi 6 is effectively what used to be called 802.11ax. And what's happening now is when you get these high performance access points into the organizations and you get the low latency, immersive experience possibilities, then it's also going to drive the need to upgrade the backbones. You know, our guys like to say behind every great wireless network is a great wired network. And so we think it's the beginning of an overarching, you know, refresh for our customers as they modernize their infrastructure based on this cloud transition that they're all going through. So that's how we look at it today. Thank you.

Next question,

please. Sammy Badre with Credit Suisse. You may go ahead.

Hi, thank you for the question. I'd like to focus in on security, more specifically in the strength in the quarter that you saw. Is that being mainly driven by the new acquisitions you guys have made, or is that more from legacy, given that you are refreshing the campus? Are you pulling forward some of the more legacy security offerings that you had, or is this predominantly just the strength in the M&A, all the acquisitions you've made being integrated and finally going to market?

I'll give you some color and then Kelly, I'll let you comment on the breakdown of the numbers. I think this is being driven, if you think about what's happening with our customers today, they built their security architecture based on the underlying assumption that they had users at the edge of the network and they had applications in a private data center. And so the way you architected that was you protected your perimeter. And now our customers are operating in an environment where they have mobile users everywhere. They have branches out there. They have this explosion of IoT connectivity that's occurring and they have applications that are running in hundreds of different places between SaaS applications, their private data center, public clouds. And so the whole notion of a security architecture has changed completely and our teams have been building towards that over the last couple of years. So what happens is we have to protect the customer's data and their traffic wherever it is. And that's why we've been investing all these new capabilities, making these acquisitions. And I think that architecture where you can actually see threats across the continuum and then dynamically defend across the same threat surface area is what's really driving the growth here. And it's also a part of our business that is very, very, very software rich and is highly concentrated in subscriptions. And so we also have that recurring piece of this business, which is what we're trying to drive in the rest of our portfolio. Kelly?

Yeah, I think the only thing I'll add to that is, I mean, it's the revenue growth. Obviously that dual acquisition I talked about in the earlier comments was part of it. But I can tell you it was very broad based across the entire security portfolio, including network security, advanced threat, cloud security is a big driver. So very broad based. And just to add to Chuck's comments, don't forget that because we are embedding security into this enterprise networking portfolio, we also benefit from the great growth that we're seeing in the enterprise portfolio.

Got it. Thank you. And then just small follow up after this is just, are you disclosing a recurring revenue percentage of total revenue this quarter just because some of the comments are on subscription? Just wondering if you were giving that out.

Yeah, no, we haven't really given out the software revenue actual number, but you know, I think the last time I gave it out was at our financial analyst conference. And again, we're growing very quickly the software portfolio in line, if not faster than what we had talked about then. So we're on track

or ahead of where we told

everyone

we would be at the financial analyst conference in 2017.

Got it. Thank you very much. Yep.

Thanks, Chuck. Next question.

Thank you. Paul Silverstein with Cohen and Company.

Thanks. Two quick clarifications and a question. Kelly, I know we'll see it shortly, but can you talk about the rate of price erosion and what you're saying specifically with respect to DRAM? And then Chuck, on your comment earlier about the 25% tariff, I apologize if I misunderstood, but I just want to make sure. Are you telling us that you've shifted all of your supply chain out of China so there's no exposure going forward? Or is it just a matter that you've incorporated into your guidance? And then for the question, some of your smaller peers have commented about a pause in wireless LAN and related switching deployments as customers waiting for Wi-Fi 6. You've now rolled out your Wi-Fi 6 access points, you upgraded the new 9600, etc. Are you seeing that pin up demand?

So maybe I'll start with the first few and then, Chuck, you can hit on the question. So Paul, on price, we continue to be very disciplined on price and what you'll see in the queue is from a product gross margin rate impact, it was 1.1 points year over year. So right in line, it's not slightly better than what it has in the last few quarters. And to your question on DRAM, yeah, as we expected, DRAM turned this quarter and became a tailwind for us in Q3. So that is part of why I guided Q3 gross margin where I did and where we actually ended up on our gross margin at the 64.6. We're benefiting from that. And if I'll just comment a little bit on the tariff question, as Chuck said, it is baked in our guidance. And from what we have baked in, there will be, we still have some manufacturing happening in China, but we've greatly, greatly reduced our exposure working with our supply chain and our suppliers. So the impact that we're expecting that, again, we're trying to mitigate, we have incorporated in the guide that we gave for Q4 and we think we can manage through that. Of course, we'll be watching that as the quarter goes on.

Yeah, and Paul, then on the Wi-Fi, I don't think we've seen any substantive change on the Wi-Fi front. I saw some of the same comments earlier in the week, I think, but in general, I think our customers, I think most of our customers are just continuing to build out and I think they'll transition now to the new Wi-Fi 6 enabled ones and

keep moving. We launched in the last week of our quarter, so it was too early for the to take any...

Yes, we wouldn't have any

given

when we launched. And the tariffs, I'll tell you, our teams have just done an amazing job. I mean, that's the bottom line. And so, you know, everybody worked so hard to a point where, you know, literally last week, the teams executed on everything incremental we needed to do to deal with it. And it's relatively immaterial at this point and it's baked in the guide. Super. Thank you.

Thanks, Paul. We'll take our next question.

Thank you. James Suba with Citigroup Global Markets. You may go ahead.

Thank you very much. Some companies have talked about pauses in demand, whether it be digestion of inventory, such as overbuilding, a uncertainty, economic environment. It appears, if I'm reading your outlook and your results pretty correctly, you haven't seen that. Can you maybe help us bridge the gap of, was it, do you have a lot better pulse on the inventory and the channel, or end markets a little different? Because if I remember right, I think your cloud sales are, you know, north of 20%, but maybe below 30% or something. But we've heard a lot about a pause in cloud spending. Thank you.

Yeah, I think the only area where we saw a real shift was in service provider. And across the, across the rest of business, look, we watch the same TV shows you guys watch. We see the same stress around the world. We see the same risks. But if you go back and look at our quarter, you know, if you just, obviously, SP was SP. But in general, our linearity from the beginning of the quarter to the end of the quarter was pretty much the same as it was in the same quarter a year ago, based on where we ended up. So outside of SP, I don't think we saw any substantive change. No, it's really

SP. And Jim, just to clarify, because I saw your note that you published. Even when you say cloud, if you're meaning the subset of web scale, I guess, you know, that that's not that's not the correct number out there. What are our, you know, we've never we haven't given it out. But I just want to make sure that that's not really kind of like what our web scale exposure is.

Gotcha. Okay, thank you so much for the clarification. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Next question, please.

Thank you. James Fossett with Morgan Stanley.

Great. Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions, perhaps maybe for Kelly on a couple of small things. First, deferred revenue was down a little bit quarter over quarter. And I know that there's been some adjustments around 606. I'm just wondering if we can get a little reflection on kind of what the mix is doing there. And then also, I know you addressed gross margins and some benefit and tailwind you got from components there. But at least as the numbers were reported, it seemed like a lot of that the improvement was concentrated in the APAC region. And just wondering if we're interpreting that correctly. And if so, was there anything unique happening there? Perhaps not that we didn't see in the rest of the world? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So so first, the deferred revenue. Yeah, no, it's a great pickup. I will say the only thing that's kind of changed in deferred revenue is and we kind of talked about this maybe a couple calls ago is really driven by our collab business. They've gone much more to month to month billing. So therefore, it doesn't flow through deferred revenue anymore. Whereas in the past, you know, we might it might be financed with customers or it would go through they'd pay up front. Now it's really going month to month, which again is just how it's recognized through the balance sheet. So that's really what's driving it. If you look at the rest of our businesses, like with the ramp of the subscriptions of the enterprise portfolio, as well as security, those are all growing quarter on quarter. And as you know, the big the big tick down from a year ago is because of the change of accounting standard down, but from a business operational thing, the only changes quarter on quarter is really just the shift of the collab business going more month to month versus paying up front.

And can I just ask just a quick follow up there? And so when when should we expect that to stop being a drag and or are we going to see that happen across other parts of the business that you could see some volatility there?

No, I think you're going to continue to see I mean, again, the collab I think is just going through that just how we're changing our offers and what we're offering there. But I think the rest of the business is going to continue to start building up. So you'll see that get back to, you know, I'd say growing here over the next few quarters.

Okay, and then the gross margin seemingly constant in APAC. Any major reason for that?

Yeah, actually, the gross margin in APAC was literally very focused, mostly in Japan, and mostly driven by our some big deals and service provider that had some lower margins than the

other. Okay, great.

Thanks. Yep. Shall let's go ahead and take the next question, please.

Thank you. Mitch Steeves with RBC capital markets. You may go ahead,

sir. Yeah, thanks for my question. I have two one kind of security side and secondly, maybe some background commentary. So the security side is growing at 20% plus, I think that back a couple years ago, people would never believed that it would have viewed Cisco as kind of a shared donor. So I guess what has changed in terms of the products that you guys are selling? And secondly, do you think that's something that's more sustainable? Well, let's call it teens growth instead of the historical 10% growth. And then secondly, I know Cisco used to kind of give kind of a IT spend number. Can you maybe provide us any sort of commentary in terms of what you guys think at the back half? I mean, is this is a demand environment your guys view is going to be better, worse or kind of the same? Because I think it's a the first half is already been solid. So I just wanted to know if you guys give any color there as well.

Yeah, it's so on the security front, I think, you know, it's really what I was talking about earlier, the architectures and for our customers have changed. And I know I can remember conversations a couple years ago about things that we were building. And, you know, team would tell me, look, we're building for for where our customers are going to be next year and the year after. And so because I was debating with them in some cases about where they were investing, and, and they were right. So they've, you know, we've had some very strategic acquisitions that have contributed to it and continue to grow. And, and I do believe that this the architectural approach, as opposed to historically what we've seen, which is, when you're defending a perimeter, you just, you can just buy the best of breed all around. And just like if I'm defending email, I buy this if you know, put in a firewall here, and it can be they don't have to necessarily communicate. And today, the architecture really requires a platform where you you ingest threat information from lots of different sources, and then you dynamically defend across all those same vectors. And I think that's what the teams have built. So as far as growth rates, we'll have to see I'm sure it'll I'm sure they'll move around based on acquisitions and other things that we do. But I think that, you know, we're quite happy with where the teams are. And I think it's, it's a good solid business for us for a very long time. As far as the IT spending, look, I don't have anything to add to what we what you've heard. I think that in today's world, you know, we've I've said repeatedly that I've been pretty amazed at the resiliency of the global economy over the last couple of years, there are certainly, as I said early in the in our prepared comments, there's a lot of dynamics that play around the world. There's a lot of geopolitical issues, you know, we've heard some macro issues in certain cases. And we're just going to continue to execute on the things that we can do. And but we what's going to happen six months from now, I don't have any greater visibility, I don't think than than anybody else.

So Thanks, Mitch. Thank

you so much.

Apologies for that. Next question, please.

Thank you. Jeff Qual for Numera incident, you may go ahead.

Yes, thank you. I was just following up on the on the prior question about web scale. Your progress in web scale has been a little bit TBD for for a number of years. I'm wondering what you can tell us about when you think your efforts in that regard might pay off, if you think the 400 gig migration is an entry point for you? Or, or what do we have to look forward to in that particular vertical?

Yeah, it's a, it's a very valid question. And, you know, we have a lot of things going on with the web scale providers today, I think 400 gigs certainly will represent an opportunity for us to insert. I think that, you know, they, the architectural transition points is really where you have an opportunity. We've, we've known that for decades from working with the telcos and service providers, you typically don't, you know, insert into a, an existing architecture really requires that transition. So I think thinking about those kinds of things, and 400 gig would be representative of that. But, you know, to give you any timeline, I think we're just gonna have to wait and keep plugging away. We're still making progress. We've made a ton of progress on the relationship side. We've got a lot of deep technical discussions that are going on. They're spending a lot of time on our campus with us. So, you know, we continue to make progress, but these are big long term decisions that they're making, and we're going to keep plugging away.

Okay, well, I'll keep, I'll keep asking then, I guess, Chuck. And then Kelly, on your side. Well, fingers crossed. Kelly, from your side, what can you tell us, I guess, I mean, the mix of software does continue to increase. What can you tell us about sort of where the you'd like the gross margins to be over a intermediate timeframe or whatever timeframe you choose, I guess?

Yeah, I mean, again, I think if you go back and look over the last, you know, couple years of where just, just even look at our over the last three years, you know, we've steadily moved up our gross margins. I think if you go back three years, we were guiding 61 to 62. We've steadily come up. And when I guided Q3, I moved up another half point to get to the 63, 64. So again, you're seeing that go through our gross margins as they're going up there. I think, you know, there's always puts and takes, you know, we have the natural price erosion that we see every quarter, but, you know, we're driving productivity, de-rampturing around is helping us a lot. And that's, you know, that's going to help us with positivity there. It's going to help us if we do have, again, incremental costs we can offset, you know, whether it's tariffs or anything else. So, you know, the 60, the 64 to 65 here we're guiding now, I think is pretty good. And our whole goal and the whole reason we're making this shift to software, besides the continual innovation is it's a great way to drive margin accretion. So you're just going to continue to see us shift our portfolio that way.

Okay. Thank you.

Yep. All right, Michelle, let's tee up the next question.

Thank you. Jim Fish with Piper Jaffrey. You may go ahead.

Hey, Chuck and Kelly, congrats on a fantastic quarter and execution here. Maybe just going back to Rod's initial question, specifically around 5G, maybe what products do you expect to benefit with or are you seeing orders for already? I know it's early days. And then Kelly, maybe you could is there going to be any impact related to the shift to VNF on the model? Like should we expect lower revenue contribution in this cycle but higher gross margin kind of going off of what you were just saying before, too? Thanks.

Okay, Jim. So let me, on the 5G front, you know, I think there's a couple of things I would call out. Number one, the capex data that we saw last quarter and, you know, even the forecasts don't look incredibly healthy for these guys. But where they are spending money primarily today as it relates to 5G is they're building out the macro radio portion of their networks first. And they're leveraging their existing core networks to run the early trials that they have on 5G, basically. And we believe that sometime in the future when they have, you know, when the number of connections increases and the capacity gets to a point, then they're obviously going to begin to build out these new backbones dedicated to the 5G infrastructure, which is where we will generally come into play. We're also obviously selling them packet core technology for the new 5G networks today. But the big play for us is when they begin to evolve their networks to accommodate the traffic. And we've always said we felt like that would be sometime in calendar 2020. We're working with lots of them on architectural designs and where they're going. But it's really going to be core routing backbone technology where we're going to see, you know, we should see the big impact from 5G. And we'll obviously have to wait and see how it plays out.

Yeah. And I'm just on the VNF. You know, I would just say, I don't, SP customers are all different than our enterprise customers, right? Everybody's looking for automation and software to find everything. And I think our entire portfolio is moving that direction. And it's just the nature of the beast, whether it's SP or enterprise, right? You know, prices per port are getting less and less of the more that we're driving, just more throughput and everything else. So it's nothing VNF specific, but it's the entire portfolio, the software value, the values where the software is and the automation that we're bringing to our customers.

Great. Thanks. Congrats again.

Thanks. Next question, please.

Thank you. Steve Milanovic from Wolf Research. He may go ahead.

Thank you. First, Kelly, any concern about bridging the 4% order growth to the four and a half to six and a half percent revenue growth? And maybe while you're talking about that, you could net out the year over year impact of 606 M&A, which I think you gave us, and then deferred, which I think is still a bit of a drag and maybe how that might look next quarter. And then Chuck, I think you wanted to kind of tweak the culture a bit when you came in. And if you could update us in terms of things like your net promoter score externally, your internal employee surveys, how you sort of assess the culture and if that's part of the results that we're seeing.

Big kill. Yeah, sure. So if I'll take the top line first. So yeah, the 4% orders growth, again, like Chuck said, if you look at the rest of the business, they were all up the 9% for enterprise, 10% for public sector, 5% for commercial. So that's all great strength and service provider where we had the issue. And as you know, when we guide, we have what's sitting in backlog, we have very good visibility into the pipeline and we have, we work with all our regional sales leaders in terms of what they're seeing. So we feel very comfortable with the guide that we're giving you based on all of those factors. So it's basically incorporated for the SP flow down that we saw in the orders. In terms of the revenue question, so yeah, we talked about acquisitions. It's really only duo a very tiny bit of Luxterra as our inorganic from acquisition. So that was only 40 basis points of our growth. And the 606 impact this quarter was only 1.2 points. It was a relatively small number compared to the other quarter. So it was 1%, slightly over 1%, 1.2 points from that perspective. And then, you know, and then on the deferred, it's, it's, you know, that's, that's more of one of the puts and takes on the margin driver, because we are continuing, like for example, the enterprise networking portfolio, deferring, we're still deferring, even though we're deferring less, we're still deferring. So that kind of, as we have these new replacement products that we have a subscription on, that hurts your rate a little bit, but, but it's nothing material. So but from a revenue, the 606 and acquisitions are fairly small.

And Steve, on the culture issue, you know, we basically, I think, been amplifying what's always been a core part of Cisco, but really, prioritizing it and trying to, to just create an environment in today's world where people want to work because it's an incredibly competitive environment for talent. And I guess the way that we look at metrics, you know, we've been focused on communication with our employees, clear, authentic, frequent communication, we've been focused on giving back. And what what we've discovered is that we have a lot of employees who care deeply about giving back to their communities. And so I've told them that our ability to give back and our ability to do the things that they love to do is highly contingent upon us running a great business. And so the two are very interconnected. As far as how do we rate it? I mean, if you look at every external employer, you know, ranking, we've moved up the one I'll tell you around the world, great places to work. I think we're number one in countries around the world, maybe 15 to 20 countries around the world. And in the US, which is one that just came out recently, we I think when I became CEO, we're number 87 in the US. And two months ago, we were rated number six, and over 70% of the input for that rate, those rankings come from directly from the employees. And we obviously watch Glassdoor where we're above 40 and all those kinds of things. So we're working hard on it. We it's important because, you know, when your employees are happy, they actually do a much better job and help the overall results. So it's somewhat cyclical. Thank you.

All right. I believe we have time for one last question.

Thank you. Pierre Farrego from New Street Research. You may go ahead.

Hi, and thank you for picking my question. I heard you talk about, you know, how Cisco technology gets more and more integrated with the platform of leading cloud vendors. And as you can imagine, I love hearing that having different for a very long time that enterprise IT would expand into the cloud, but definitely not migrate to the cloud. So I was curious to hear from you a bit more on that in terms of how big it is today in your business. I don't know if you have an idea of the tech rate of Cisco technologies that are moved to the, that are integrated with cloud vendors. And so how you go to market with this technology? Do you go to market in partnership with cloud vendors? Is that something you offer directly to your clients? And of course, any idea of the business model, how big it is in your revenues already today?

Yeah, thanks, Peter. It's really hard to quantify because the technology that we're building that is either, you know, integrated in with the cloud providers are offered off the cloud platforms or enabling our customers to transition to the cloud or expand to the cloud as you put, which is the same word we like to use. So we appreciate you coming up with that. We stole it. You know, it's everything from extending ACI from the private data center into the cloud to offering virtualized routing functions, you know, off of AWS and Azure for developers, you know, virtualized security services, even to the SD-WAN technology and now integrating it with our cloud security gateways. And then the integration of, you know, some of these hybrid stacks like Azure Stack, or, you know, what we talked about from Google that they announced recently, you know, integrating that with our technology on premise, the Kubernetes stack that we've done. So there's an awful lot of areas where we play, you know, we talk about the fact that while customers are moving some applications to the cloud, they didn't move their employees to the cloud. And so there's a big, you know, opportunity, which is what we've been focused on, which is to evolve this access portfolio to really enable this transition to the cloud that our customers have been undertaking. So it really is touching massive amounts of our portfolio. And I think you'll only see us continue to drive more technology that facilitates our customers, you know, move in this area. So appreciate the question. So I'll wrap up. I want to thank everybody for spending time with us today. Obviously, we're proud of what our teams continue to accomplish. We're operating in an environment that has very complex macro and geopolitical dynamics right now. But we're continuing to execute as well as we can on the things that we control. And that's what we plan to do going forward. So thanks for spending time with us today. And we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

Thanks, Chuck. This is Marilyn. Just want to close up the call here. So Cisco's next quarterly earnings conference call, which will reflect our fiscal 2019 fourth quarter and annual results will be on Wednesday, August 14th, 2019 at 1 30 p.m. Pacific time, 4 30 p.m. Eastern time. Again, I'd like to remind the audience that in light of regulation FD, Cisco's policy is not to comment on its financial guidance during the quarter, unless it's done through an explicit public disclosure. We now plan to close the call. Do you have any further questions? Feel free to contact the Cisco investor relations department. And we're very much looking forward to speaking with you through the week. Thank you for joining today.

And thank you for participating on today's conference call. If you would like to listen to the call in its entirety, you may call -446-2545 for participants dialing from outside the U.S. Please dial -998-1344. This concludes today's call. You may disconnect at this time. Thank you.