Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 6 of 11

Scott Herren: Yes. Matt, on your first question, I think gross margin settling, you saw our guide for Q1 of gross margins in the 65% to 66% range. And I think it settles in there for the full year. So you can do the math with what we’ve projected on the top line. That drops down to a mid-single-digit OpEx growth number, so in line with expectations certainly given the environment of merit increases. It doesn’t provide a lot of incremental investment, but I think that’s in sync with what you’ve seen us do over time. So the long-term model, look, that was opportunity-based. If you look backwards, what you’ve seen is we have delivered the bottom line growing faster than the top line. I think the only difference that you hear from us now is, as I said, we’re articulating it in advance instead of once it’s happened. That’s really the way to think about that.

Matthew Niknam: Great. Thank you.

Marilyn Mora: All right. Thanks, Matt. Michelle, let’s take the next question.

Operator: Jim Fish with Piper Sandler. You may go ahead.

James Fish: Hi, guys. Thanks for the question. Maybe just diving in on the go-to-market side. We’re hearing you guys are looking to move more of the specialist sales teams out and more towards kind of a cross-sell more portfolio kind of motion. Are you doing a larger sales restructuring right now? And is there anything you can do to better package solutions across these multiple segments, especially on the growth segments that are kind of struggling here, as Meta kind of pointed out earlier, with even security. And lastly, on the capital return side. I know you guys get asked about the technology, but — and you talked about potential being strategic and all of that. But how do you feel about the push versus pull of either further acquisitions in either of the key growth segments that you outlined, Chuck, versus possibly even spinning off some of those segments like some of the larger companies you’re starting to see do? Thanks, guys.

Chuck Robbins: Thanks, Jim. That was a lot. Let me tell you a little bit of the history on the specialist model. I’ll tell you what we’re doing in the product portfolio, which allows us to clean up the specialist model a little bit and get them a little more focused. So historically, like — let’s use Security as an example. We’ve had these different products, and we’ve sold them all individually. And therefore you need to compete with those individual competitors. So you need subspecialists, you need specialists in every little area of security. And what we’ve been doing across the portfolio is moving to more of a platform approach. And so it makes it easier to sell. And in certain areas of our portfolio like collaboration and security, we’ve moved to a suite strategy.

So we’re now packaging up the Security portfolio in different suites, which allows for us to sort of optimize the security specialist or actually align them more effectively is probably the best way to say it. And so that’s the work that’s been going on. And I think as we continue to execute on this platform strategy, it certainly simplifies the selling cycle for some of these technologies and I think getting to the suites. We’ve seen it work in collab. This past quarter, we had very strong order growth in collaboration. We had positive order growth in Security as well. And so for collab to be showing positive order growth is really a byproduct of the suites and leading with calling as the lead part of the suite and then also a big focus on cloud contact center, which grew triple-digits last quarter from an orders perspective.

So those are the things that we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get the portfolio put together in a way that makes it easier and requires fewer subspecialists in the field as we move forward. Scott?

Page 6 of 11