Cisco Systems, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone.

This is Sami Badri, Cisco's Head of Investor Relations, joined by Chuck Robbins, our Chair and CEO, Scott Herron, our CFO, and Mark Patterson, our Chief Strategy Officer. Cisco's earnings press release and supplemental information, including GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations, are available on our Investor Relations website. Following this call, we will also make the recorded webcast and slides available on the website. Throughout today's call, we'll be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. We will discuss product results in terms of revenue and geographic customer results in terms of product orders unless stated otherwise. All comparisons will be made on a year-over-year basis. Please note that our discussion today will include forward-looking statements, including our guidance for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties detailed in our SEC filings particularly our most recent 10-K and 10-Q reports, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking statements. With respect to guidance, please also see the slides and press release that accompany this call for further details. Cisco will not comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure.

Now, I'll turn it over to Chuck. Thanks, Sammy, and thank you all for joining us today. Q3 was another strong quarter for Cisco, with revenue, margins, and earnings per share all above the high end of our guidance ranges. We also generated solid growth in annualized recurring revenue, remaining performance obligations, and subscription revenue, which all support our future performance. In addition, we received AI infrastructure orders from web-scale customers in excess of $600 million in Q3, bringing our year-to-date total to well over $1 billion. surpassing our original fiscal year 25 AI order target a full quarter early. The performance of our core business continues to produce strong cash flows, underpinning our commitment to deliver consistent capital returns. In Q3, we returned $3.1 billion in capital to our shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, with a total of $9.6 billion in value returned year to date. Our overall strong performance was a result of accelerated product innovation, and solid execution by our teams driving sustained demand for our technologies. Total product orders grew 20% year over year or 9% on an organic basis, excluding Splunk. Despite the uncertain macro environment, this demonstrates the valuable outcomes we're delivering for customers in the era of AI. Looking at demand in more detail by customer market, I'd also like to remind you that Q3 of fiscal year 24 included six weeks of Splunk contribution. Enterprise product orders were up 22% year-over-year in Q3, driven by double-digit growth in the Americas and APJC. Public sector orders were up 8% with growth in all geographies, as governments around the world continue to trust Cisco as their end-to-end technology partner. Notably, U.S. federal orders grew double digits in Q3 after a challenging first half. During the quarter, our AI-powered, cloud-managed Meraki for Government networking solution also achieved FedRAMP authorization from the US government. Product orders from service provider and cloud customers continue to be strong, up 32% year over year, driven by triple digit growth in web scale, with three of the top six web scalers each growing orders in the triple digits. Now some color on demand from a product perspective. Networking product orders grew double digits, driven by web scale infrastructure, enterprise routing, switching, and our industrial IoT products. Campus switching orders grew high single digits in Q3 against a tougher prior year compare, demonstrating the continued demand for our campus portfolio to enterprise customers. We also saw triple digit sequential growth in orders for our Wi-Fi 7 portfolio in Q3. Year-to-date orders for our industrial Internet of Things portfolio comprised of ruggedized Catalyst products grew 35% year-over-year. As strategic infrastructure and manufacturing begins to onshore to the United States, Cisco is well positioned to help connect and protect these capital intensive investments at scale. Our data center switching orders are up double digits year to date compared with the same period last year. Cisco was recently ranked as a market leader in Gartner's magic quadrant for data center switching. This is a testament to our ability to address the full range of data center switching use cases and our vision to simplify operations while enhancing security, which is essential for critical application deployments. As I mentioned earlier, The AI infrastructure orders we have received from WebSkill customers were exceptionally strong in the quarter, exceeding 600 million and bringing our year-to-date total to well over our $1 billion target for fiscal year 25. As expected, the product mix of these orders was more than two-thirds in systems, with the remainder in optics, demonstrating the growing importance of our technology to WebSkill customers for their AI training use cases. AI orders from enterprise customers continue to show momentum as this large nascent market opportunity starts to unlock. Enterprises are seeking simple, seamless, scalable, and secure solutions for their AI deployments, which we are ready to deliver through our expanding partnership with NVIDIA. During the quarter, we announced our intent to create a cross-portfolio unified architecture where NVIDIA will enable Cisco Silicon One to become the only third-party silicon that is included as part of the NVIDIA Spectrum X Ethernet networking reference architecture. Cisco will also build interoperable systems combining NVIDIA Spectrum silicon with Cisco operating system software, allowing customers to simultaneously standardize Cisco networking and NVIDIA technology in the data center across front and back-end networks. We also announced the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, which will embed security end-to-end from the application to the workload to the infrastructure, using solutions like Cisco AI Defense and Hybrid Mesh Firewall, enabling enterprise customers to build and secure data centers to develop and run AI workloads. Yesterday, we announced a new multi-phased investment program in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia announced a new AI company, Humane, and we will be a strategic technology partner contributing to their AI infrastructure build-outs. This partnership aligns with Saudi's Vision 2030, contributing to the Kingdom's transformation into a diversified digital economy and enhancing its global and regional competitiveness in the AI era. In addition, we have joined the AI Infrastructure Partnership alongside BlackRock Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft, NVIDIA, XAI, and energy partners GE Brnova and Nextera Energy. as it seeks to invest in secure, efficient, and scalable infrastructure to support AI workloads. We also announced an expanded collaboration with G42, the UA-based global technology group, to advance how secure AI infrastructure and innovation can be scaled across public and private sectors. These investments and partnerships highlight our market position as a global leader and preferred partner in AI networking solutions as well as our commitment to collaborating across the industry to create a strong global ecosystem for AI. Additionally, we expect a sovereign AI cloud opportunity to ramp in the near term and that Cisco will be a core system provider for these significant AI training and inference cluster build outs. As we look at the opportunity that AI presents for Cisco, it is worth reiterating that we frame it in three distinct but connected pillars. First, AI training infrastructure for web scale customers. Combinations of our Cisco 8K, Silicon 1, optics, and optical systems are being deployed by five of the six largest web scalers. Second, AI inference and enterprise clouds. Our accelerated innovation in hardware and software coupled with our NVIDIA partnership is designed to simplify and de-risk AI infrastructure deployment for the enterprise. And third, AI network connectivity. Customers are leveraging our technology platforms to help modernize, secure, and automate their network operations to prepare for pervasive deployment of AI agents and applications. With agentic AI, the network is fundamentally constrained and will require ultra-fast, low-latency, energy-efficient networks, which we can deliver. Shifting to security, orders grew in high double digits in Q3. Our security orders included a large multi-year deal with a major financial services company for Splunk security and observability platforms, which was driven by our combined sales force. This was a win for Splunk from an industry competitor and is a strong proof point of our go-to-market synergy. This was also the largest deal ever for Splunk. Our recently launched security products of Secure Access, XDR, and HyperShield collectively added over 370 new customers in the quarter. The majority of our new HyperShield enterprise customers are bundling it with our new N9300 smart switch because of our unique ability to embed security directly into the fabric of the network. Now I'd like to comment on some highlights from our accelerating innovation pipeline. Safety and security will be the defining challenge of agentic AI, and we recently introduced several innovations designed to help security professionals harness the power of AI while keeping security at the forefront. These include Cisco XDR correlating attack telemetry across network, endpoint, and cloud, using new AI-powered solutions to empower security teams to understand complex threats in seconds. agentic AI develop advancements for Cisco XDR and Splunk to simplify threat detection and response. A new partnership with ServiceNow, which will integrate their security operations capabilities with Cisco AI Defense and the launch of Foundation AI, a team of leading AI and security experts focused on developing cutting edge technology to address the fundamental security issues of the AI era with novel open source tools, including the first reasoning model to enhance security applications. Just last week, we introduced Cisco's quantum network entanglement chip, a revolutionary prototype making real world quantum networking applications possible in order to speed up the future of quantum computing. These applications will solve complex customer challenges and drive innovation across industries from supply chain optimization to accelerating drug discovery. In addition, we're using gen AI and agentic systems across our customer experience organization to maximize customer value, deliver great experiences, boost productivity, and create capacity. Today, over 60% of support cases are touched by AI driven automation, which is driving up the proportion of complex cases we can solve within one day. In addition, low severity cases have reduced as more customers are using our AI support assistant. Also, our AI renewals agent has enabled us to increase the capacity of our renewal specialists. As you can see, we are driving an enormous amount of innovation, and I look forward to showcasing even more new customer-centric solutions at Cisco Live next month. Before I turn it over to Scott, I'd also like to share some important organizational announcements. After careful consideration, Scott has made the decision to retire at the end of fiscal year 25. As many of you know, Scott joined us in 2020 during a period of great uncertainty around the world, and he has been instrumental in driving our transition towards more software and recurring revenue. This has driven greater predictability for our business and increased shareholder value. And I want to thank Scott for all that he has done for Cisco. I am grateful for his partnership as we've managed through many unprecedented situations together. I'm happy to share the beginning day one fiscal year 26, Mark Patterson, our current chief strategy officer, will serve as Cisco's new Chief Financial Officer. In Mark's nearly 25 years at Cisco, he's held leadership roles in finance, strategy, and operations. He also spent over a decade in sales, working in roles that spanned every customer segment and geography. Most recently, leading our corporate strategy, development, and incubation organization, Mark's focus has been on connecting our longer-term strategy and investments with our immediate and urgent growth opportunities. The breadth of his experience, along with his deep knowledge of Cisco and our customers, partners, and investor community, uniquely positioned him to help accelerate Cisco's growth in this new role. I'm also excited to announce the promotion of G2 Patel to President and Chief Product Officer. Under G2's leadership over the past nine months, he has unified our product vision and strategy and vastly accelerated our innovation pipeline, focusing on delivering even greater value for our customers and our partners. We also announced the appointment of Kevin Will, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, to Cisco's Board of Directors yesterday. These announcements further our confidence in Cisco's long-term success and durability in the era of AI. To summarize the quarter, we are seeing clear demand for our technology across our customer markets. Our innovation pipeline continues to accelerate as we fuse security deep into our networking products. And our strong performance is fueling our capital allocation model, returning significant value to our shareholders. Now I'll turn it over to Scott for more detail on the quarter and our outlook.