Cisco Rides AI Spending Wave to Beat Estimates and Lift Outlook

Cisco Sales Jump on Networking and AI Demand: What Sellers Should Do Now

Cisco reported $14.9 billion in quarterly sales, up 8% and ahead of expectations. Demand for networking and AI-focused hardware is driving the lift and the company raised its full-year outlook to as much as $61 billion.

Profitability stayed solid: adjusted EPS rose 10% to $1.00, net income hit $2.9 billion, and operating margin came in at 34.4%. Product orders climbed 13%, and infrastructure sales to hyperscalers reached $1.3 billion-clear signs of a busy upgrade cycle.

Why this matters for sales teams

• Budgets are moving to network refresh and AI infrastructure. Use this as a door-opener with CIOs, CTOs, Heads of Network, Cloud, and Data.
• Hyperscaler momentum points to needs around cloud networking, observability, security, migration, and attached services.
• Market confidence helps your case: most analysts rate the stock a "buy," P/E sits near 17x, and the median target is ~7.5% above current-less "wait-and-see" pushback from cautious buyers.

Plays to run now

• Trigger signals: data center refresh, new AI use cases, latency issues, bandwidth bottlenecks, compliance gaps, end-of-life hardware.
• Discovery questions:
  - What AI workloads are planned over the next 12 months?
  - Where are throughput or latency constraints hitting user or model performance?
  - Which budget owns network upgrades-IT infra, data, or cloud?
  - What time-to-deploy is required to meet training or inference milestones?
  - How will ROI be measured-downtime reduction, operating cost savings, user performance, or revenue enablement?
• Value angles: performance headroom for AI traffic, reliability for critical apps, lower total cost through consolidation, faster rollout across sites.
• Attach opportunities: implementation services, monitoring/observability, zero-trust segmentation, automation, training.

Objections you'll hear (and quick responses)

• "Budgets are frozen." → Reframe: network upgrades enable already funded AI programs; route via the AI initiative budget if infra is tight.
• "We can wait a year." → Quantify risk: degraded model performance, slow user experiences, higher outage exposure.
• "Supply chain delays." → Offer phased rollout, flexible sourcing, and interim software improvements while hardware ships.
• "Integration risk." → Start with a pilot in one zone with clear SLOs, success criteria, and rollback.

Who to target and how

• Economic buyers: CIO, CFO (for TCO), CTO, VP Infrastructure, Head of Data/AI, Cloud Ops.
• Champions: network architects, site reliability, platform engineering, data platform leads.
• Partner motions: co-sell with AWS/Azure/GCP sellers where AI workloads live; bring Cisco partners in early for design and install to speed approval.

Signals to use in outreach

• Orders up 13% and $1.3B from hyperscalers suggest a multi-quarter upgrade wave.
• Guidance raised to as high as $61B signals confidence in demand durability.
• Street view: majority "buy," no major "sell," P/E steady near 17x, target ~7.5% above spot-buyers see stability, not a fad.

Helpful sources

• Cisco investor relations: quarterly results
• IDC research on AI spending and infrastructure

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