Cisco reports earnings, highlights IP communications

Let's set aside all the rumors and speculation about Cisco's potential mergers and acquisitions. We've got some cold hard figures to report as the company just released their first quarter financial results.

Cisco, a networking solutions vendor that's incorporating more telepresence offerings into its product suite, today reported its first quarter results for the period ended October 24, 2009 with net sales of $9.0 billion (down 13 percent year over year). Cisco's GAAP net income was down almost 19 percent year over year coming in at $1.8 billion. Despite the year over year declines, CEO John Chambers said the "Q1 results continued to reflect strong sequential growth trends that meet or exceed expectations during normal economic times." 

In its earnings release, Cisco highlighted its video and IP plays as positive moves stating that they "believe that key market transitions across collaboration, virtualization and video will drive productivity and growth in network loads for the next decade." The vendor's recent acquisition of Starent and pending acquisition of TANDBERG reflect the company's growth strategy that envisions a greater demand for more robust networking technology to meet the needs of video and IP communications applications.

Cisco also noted that it expanded its Cisco TelePresence portfolio with the single-screen, single-camera Cisco TelePresence System 1100 for multipurpose rooms with service providers AT&T, BT, Orange, NTT, Tata Communications, Telefonica, Telstra and Telmex announcing commercial intercompany Cisco TelePresence service offerings.

For more:
- read the Cisco release
- see this video of Cisco CEO John Chambers discussing the report

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