Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) Raymond James Technology Investors Conference December 6, 2022 9:45 AM ET
Company Participants
Kip Compton – Senior Vice President-Strategy and Business Development
Conference Call Participants
Simon Leopold – Raymond James
Simon Leopold
Folks, thank you very much. My name is Simon Leopold, Raymond James’ Data Infrastructure Analyst, here at our in-person tech conference in New York. It’s exciting to see people again, to get dressed and to put shirt on with buttons and shoes, nice change, but we’ve got a session now with Cisco, Kip Compton.
So Kip, to get started, we’ve known each other for many years, crossed paths many times. You strike me as sort of the ultimate utility player. You’ve done a lot of things at Cisco side. I almost feel like no question is out of bounds, but I’m sure they are. So to help us maybe set the context for our conversation and the boundary conditions, maybe tell us a little about your current role and current focus. And we’ll dive into the outline. And folks, if you have questions, raise your hand, we’ll try to take questions from the audience as well.
Kip Compton
Thanks, and it’s great to be here in-person. I think we’ve had shirts with buttons for a while, but shoes and all the rest of it is great as well as seeing everyone in-person. Before I jump in, I’m compelled by my Investor Relations team to say that I’ll be making forward-looking statements that are subject to the risks in our latest filings.
With that out of the way, I’ve been – as you mentioned, I’ve been at Cisco a long time, I’ve done a lot of different roles. I’m currently Senior Vice President for Strategy and Business Development, for a business that internally we call Cisco networking. We’re trying to simplify things, including with our organizational names.
In terms of our external reporting segments, that roughly maps to Secure, Agile networks as well as Internet for the future and represents the majority of the product revenue in business at Cisco.
Simon Leopold
And I guess in terms of, I’ve got sort of my notion of what to ask you about, but I think it’s important for us to understand what are you spending most of your time on? What’s – what are you occupied with? What do you – what keeps you busy?
Kip Compton
Yes, it’s a large business. And so when you think about strategy and business development, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how can we grow the business, how can we generate more differentiation in our products that are valuable to our customers.
I spend a fair amount of time on inorganic activity as I think people who are familiar with that know you send more time on deals that you decide not to do than you do, and those are pretty important. And I spend time working with our go-to-market teams, understanding how we can accelerate the business.
Simon Leopold
And the volume question is a macro question, but I want – I understand. I want to ask it in the context of your job. But given we’ve got a strong U.S. dollar, recession worries, various changes by regions and products, how are you thinking about those elements influencing the way you think and what you’re working on?
Kip Compton
Well, I’m in the product, our research and development side of Cisco. So we tend, frankly, to take a longer view. So we pay close attention to macroeconomic forecasts in terms of our operations and understanding how we should be managing our supply chain and our forecast and our sales and all that.
But in terms of our strategy and our research and development, we’re looking out a three to five year sort of timeline. And we have – I mean we’ve seen – you mentioned some of the strong dollar for us over – I think 90% or more of our revenue is actually dollar denominated, and we do have some hedges in place for some of our costs. So we’ve so far seen a fairly material impact from that.
And in terms of softness, I mean, I think on our call, we mentioned we’ve seen some areas of softness, including in Europe. On the other hand, I think we just had our second biggest first quarter bookings number in the history of the company, second only to last year when things were jumping as people were building out networks in the pandemic.
So we’re monitoring the situation, but we’ve also seen – I mean, Gartner recently published a report, surveying IT folks and companies. And I think 51% of them said technology was the last area that they plan to cut. So we’re watching things carefully. We’re investing for the future in R&D, but we’re seeing some resiliency right now.
Simon Leopold
And the succinct next question is lessons learned from the pandemic. And what I mean by that is prior to the pandemic, maybe you might sole source certain components that now you multisource. So how has the experience in the last couple of years affected the way you think about long-term strategy?
Kip Compton
Yes, absolutely. I mean it hasn’t fundamentally changed our strategy. That said, we learn and adapt to an environment just like everyone else. And so where we may have had our supply chain more optimized for certain things as we’re in a time of uncertainty, clearly.
Right now, I think there’s a lot of exogenous forces, certainly the pandemic and now the geopolitical environment. Our supply chain team and everyone else is adjusting to the environment that we see, going forward.
Simon Leopold
And so Cisco hosted an analyst meeting. Was it September? Lights are blur, seemed like that. But it was the first analyst meeting that the company hosted in a while, and you outlined at the time a TAM growing to $900 billion, which is pretty big. So I’m not asking you to repeat the entire content of the meeting, but help folks understand really what are the big growth drivers, what are kind of the most exciting transitional aspects of what’s influencing that kind of massive TAM.
Kip Compton
Yes, absolutely. And I think you’re referring to our Investor Day in September 2021. For folks who might want to look that up, all the materials are online. I think what I would say in terms of drivers over the next, let’s say, three to five years, certainly, we’re seeing hybrid work, IoT and then the web scalers as being three good drivers for us.
On the hybrid work side, the immediate thing you think of is our collaboration portfolio, and particularly, we believe with some of the devices that we have as companies are outfitting their campuses for hybrid work and realizing basically that every meeting is going to be a video meeting, and so every conference rep needs to have that equipment in it, that’s an opportunity for us.
But in my job on the networking side, we’re focused on the opportunity with the networking. And we’re seeing that whenever a meeting is a video meeting because every meeting will have some remote participants, the load and the traffic on the campus networks is intense.
And that’s driven a wireless and campus upgrade cycle that we think is fairly durable. That along with the traditional generational upgrades for WiFi 6 is – WiFi 6 has been very good. We’re seeing 6E now kicking into gear as well.
On the IoT side, we’re seeing people putting sensors into carpeted spaces and starting to use these to understand occupancy, to understand and optimize their energy usage. And actually, our office here in New York, there’s some videos online Wall Street Journal just did a feature on it, where we renovated and put these technologies in as a good showcase for that.
On the web scaler side, we just continue to ride the growth there. I mean we saw a strong double-digit growth in our first quarter that just ended. We’re really excited about the pipeline of technologies that we have to offer those folks and expect that to continue to drive growth as well.
Simon Leopold
So one of the things that I suspect is the way Cisco operates is the business units are sort of given their targets and you run with it, you run your business. And as long as you’re running it, go. And so when we think about the – essentially, moving strategy to execution, that’s the mystery to me from – as an outsider observing it. So you’re looking out years and your colleagues are busy working on day-to-day, what’s the process? And how does it go from your vision and your activities out years to come into the business day-to-day?
Kip Compton
Sure. Well, one thing I’d say, I mean, as you mentioned, you’ve known Cisco for a long time. So it’s – I think it’s a good observation of how we’ve treated our businesses in terms of autonomy. I would say, we formed the Cisco networking organization that I’m part of, we just formed in October.
And we actually brought together all of our networking businesses across both service rider and enterprise, for instance, really looking to be able to get more synergies and deliver more integrated solutions. So we’re actually blending that classic model with more governance and more sort of big-picture thinking, so that we can get more efficiency as well as more differentiation.
In terms of how strategy works at Cisco, we have an annual long-range planning process, where we build three to five year plans that outline financial forecasts as well as strategies and areas that we want to enter investments we want to make. Those are presented and discussed with our CEO and his staff.
Once those are in place, we actually translate those into strategic intents for each of our businesses. And we work – my team actually works with them quarterly to monitor the progress against what needs to happen to have those strategies in place.
As well as in this environment, frankly, if there are any changes that would cause us to tweak our strategy, we’re not changing strategy every quarter, of course. But depending on what’s happening in the world, we might decide that an element of it should be sped up or another element maybe a little bit relatively less important. And then we repeat that process on an annual basis. So we feel good about that model.
Simon Leopold
So I want to ask about what the R&D priorities are. And I imagine there’s a one-word answer, which is software. So let’s go a little bit deeper.
Kip Compton
Absolutely. So when I think about it, I think in terms of two buckets for R&D, one is core technologies, and the other is essentially experiences that we’re looking to invest in to deliver to our customers. So I think the core technology side, no big surprises there. By the way, software is big, but we’re continuing to invest heavily in our ASIC strategy, right? Our Silicon One ASIC strategy is very important. We’re investing in our optics, which is highly differentiated and something that’s helped propel our webscaler success. We’re investing in core networking software. I think some of the things that we’ve made our name on and that we lead the world in. And we’re also investing heavily in security. So those are some of the core technology areas that we think are just important long-term plays, and that we’re pouring R&D investment into.
On the experience side, we’ve seen that what customers want is simplicity. And the way we think about this is what kind of experience. These core technologies are amazing. They enable essentially the modern world. But if you can’t operate it and you can’t get the outcomes out of it that you want, it’s not very compelling. And so investing in things like Meraki dashboard and what we announced last summer, and bringing Meraki across our whole portfolio is a big part of what we invest in as well.
Simon Leopold
Now, you did make a comment earlier on about inorganic efforts, and having filed Cisco for a while, I’ve observed the strategy that, I guess, we call outsourced R&D maybe that’s a common term. But you’ve invested in private companies historically, often they become acquisitions. How do you think about that particular strategy? It may be my imagination, or it just seems like you’ve made fewer acquisitions over the last 12 months than the prior period. But there could be a lot of variables there. So maybe update us on how Cisco thinks about that strategy.
Kip Compton
Sure. So, internally we have what we call our build by partner framework. And whenever we’re looking at a new capability or getting into a new business, we’ll ask ourselves and we’ll often actually do the analysis, scenario-based analysis, hey, if we built this ourselves, what does that look like? How long would it take? How much would it cost? What kind of differentiation could we build with our technologies and our engineers? If we partnered, what does that look like?
We don’t need to do everything ourselves. We have great partnerships across the industry, including somewhere we put things on our price list where it makes sense. And then last, and the one that generates the headlines is the buy, the acquisition case. And we’ll look at what targets are out there, what would that likely cost, what kind of cultural fit? I mean, you buy a company and you get the technology, but the team bolts, that’s usually not a value creation event for us.
And so we’ll actually map out all three of those and then sit down and look and decide, what’s the best path for each area. To your point about acquisitions, we don’t have a quota. It’s like, I’d have to go look at the numbers, my perception’s kind of aligned with yours. But we don’t have sort of a plan at the beginning of the year, oh, we’re going to buy this many companies because we do look at it through this build by partner. And what we do depends on the outside environment, where – what targets are available and what makes sense from a business perspective.
Simon Leopold
And in terms of the criteria, you mentioned cultural fit, I hear that over and over and over again. What are some of the other criteria used in making these decisions?
Kip Compton
I mean, some of the criteria are somewhat deal specific. So I don’t want to suggest like we have like a scoring, rubric or something, if only it was that easy. I think how complimentary the technology is, like maybe it’s obvious, but if we’re looking for a particular capability or product and the company has it, but it has a whole bunch of other stuff that either overlaps with what we have or has things that we would not want, and so we would be potentially exiting. Those tend to not be very good deals.
Where the mission – where we buy a company and then are like, oh yes, we’re going to change what you do. We’re going to take you in a different direction after we buy them. That’s often a little bit of a warning sign. I mean the general thing that I tend to think about a lot, I mean, the strategic fit is kind of obvious. The thing that I think about a lot of times is the fact that it is far easier to buy a company than is to like integrate it and keep the team and get the multi-year successful outcome out of that company. That is the hard part. And so, if anything I tend to bias my evaluation in that area.
Simon Leopold
So I want to pivot the questions towards a topic I’ve been noodling with a bit more is around this idea of power consumption. So there’s been a lot of press lately about how much electricity data centers consume that they’re detrimental to the environment. And I read an interesting article saying, well, but if you’re not getting on a plane and flying, you’re reducing greenhouse gases. And so maybe there’s a good use. And so, I guess with rising costs of electricity, these questions have to be come up. So maybe could you talk a little bit about how you’re thinking about power consumption and the production of greenhouse gas as CO2 in the sort of engineering side and how that’s evolving with your customers and your engineering?
Kip Compton
Sure. So this is a huge focus for us, and it’s been for a while in terms of just – excuse me, our own sustainability goals. And what, I think we published some pretty ambitious and aggressive goals as a company. And part of those sustainability goals is how we reduce not just the greenhouse gases from Cisco’s own operations, but from our customers who are using our equipment. That’s part of our framework as it is for most companies. So this has been an effort for a long time.
In terms of the focus on engineering, last year I actually formed a engineering sustainability office that’s in engineering and works with all our engineering teams as well as the supply chain, as well as our Chief Sustainability Officer for all of Cisco to make sure that this is first and foremost as we’re designing products.
In terms of what we’ve seen in the market, this was important and then it became important and urgent with the rising energy costs and particularly in Europe. And what we’re seeing is that there are multiple places where we can help our customers. Customers are coming to us and one is with our Silicon One technology that is significantly more efficient on a per gigabit basis. Watts per gigabit is a metric in networking. I think we announced deployment with Deutsche Telekom publicly where they said that they reduced their power requirements by 92% on a per gigabit basis. So that’s a pretty significant improvement if you’re looking at a big energy bill.
Another area where we can help customers is with power over Ethernet technology. So this is technology that lets you send power over low voltage wiring. It turns out that this makes the power supplies much more efficient. So we’re seeing a lot of people when they renovate spaces or even build some data centers using this technology. And it improves the power supply efficiency pretty significantly.
The other area is in IoT and I mentioned earlier the sensors and environments. We did a study with Forrester using our Meraki sensors where Forrester saw a 27% energy improvement by using these sensors to trigger close the blind when it’s hot. These are some very basic things, but if you can use sensors to automate them, you can get those savings at scale.
So we see – we talked about – Chuck mentioned on our most recent conference call, we see these energy costs as obviously a potential macroeconomic headwind for everyone. But we also see there being an opportunity for us to help our customers in this area. And we’re seeing some instances of customers actually accelerate investment to get those energy savings.
Simon Leopold
So basically the scenario is a customer has a, let’s say four, five year old campus or data center network consumes more electricity than the newer generation of product. So because of that, they’re refreshing in order to reduce…
Kip Compton
That’s right.
Simon Leopold
The total cost of ownership.
Kip Compton
Maybe they were thinking of refreshing in a couple of years, and now they’re looking at that return and saying, given the energy costs, perhaps I should refresh earlier. And that’s a potential catalyst. Now, on the other side, I mean, realistically there may be customers who decide to delay projects because of energy costs. But we are seeing the energy efficiency for both the sustainability and the current economic reasons as kind of a top of mind topic.
Simon Leopold
And I want to ask about the sort of impact of hybrid multi-cloud on your business. Because it feels to us that eight and 10 years ago, Cisco sort of took the attitude of, I’m not going to sell to those guys, I’m going to just help my enterprise customers. And maybe five years ago, your corporate mind changed and said, you know what, this isn’t going to change. Let’s help the enterprises, embrace multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, we’re a neutral party. So maybe help folks understand a little bit of that history and what you’re doing to help your enterprise customers and their adoption to migration to multi-cloud.
Kip Compton
Sure. So I mean, it’s – cloud for Cisco really impacts our different businesses in different ways. So in the Campus business for instance, a lot of that is about using the cloud to make it easier to manage a campus network. You can’t move your campus switches, your access points to the cloud. You still need them in the building. But we can leverage cloud technologies to just radically simplify and accelerate how people run those networks. And Meraki is a great example of that. And our internet for the future segment, well, that’s where we’re actually helping the webscale is build their clouds with our Silicon One technologies, our Cisco 8,000 product, which is the fastest growing product in the history of the company is really being fueled by that.
On the data center side, it’s kind of what you were referring to which is okay. Most of our customers are going to be in a hybrid state. We’re bringing technologies like the Cisco network control – Cisco Cloud network controller that lets customers design and implement policies and automation and visibility across their on-prem networks as well as their VPCs at Amazon and their networks at Azure and Google Cloud as well. So helping our customers take advantage of multi-cloud for workloads in the same way that we’ve helped them take advantage of on-prem networks.
So you see us with kind of a multifaceted. In terms of the evolution of our attitude here, and I think it took us some time, the webscalers are a different kind of customer. And I think it’s – it took us some time to learn how to sell to them. I think the success we’re seeing now demonstrates that we crack the code and we form the relationships and have very tight engineering – to engineering relationships with the key webscalers and that’s enabled us to achieve that success.
Simon Leopold
Yeah, it’s sort of interesting in that from your disclosures, it works out to be 5% to 6% of revenue from public cloud, which on the surface, oh, well, that’s not a big number, but it’s a big number of a $50 billion revenue company, which would make you the biggest vendor of IT equipment or X servers into that vertical. I think that often goes miss. And so in terms of those partnerships, and from your vantage point of the enterprise, do you see the cloud players as receptive to working with you as a partner? Or do you feel like they’re more competitors?
Kip Compton
No, I don’t see them as competitors. They’re customers and partners. As you said, at this point we’re selling, they’re buying billions of dollars worth of technology from us each year. And I think particularly with what we can bring with our Silicon One technology, our optics and the Cisco 8000 platform, which is actually built on Silicon One is a pretty differentiated value proposition for them in terms of how they can really scale their network and achieve phenomenal economics and power efficiency at the same time. And that’s why you see them adopting their technology.
Simon Leopold
And you mentioned a little bit earlier the effort to extend the Meraki model, let’s not take for granted that everybody knows what that meant.
Kip Compton
Absolutely.
Simon Leopold
Maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of helping us understand the importance of doing that and what it is?
Kip Compton
Sure. So Meraki dashboard is a cloud management tool. So Meraki customers are able to manage their networks by just going to essentially a website in their browser, and they can see their whole network and manage everything from there. And because we’ve got all of that telemetry and all of that configuration information in the cloud, we’re able to provide recommendations, provide more powerful tools and generally make it much easier for our customers. We also on that platform have an incredibly rich set of APIs and a very strong developer ecosystem and partner ecosystem around it, where people are able to build solutions on top of and around the Meraki cloud. And getting all of that – getting essentially the network control plane to the cloud is really key there because developers can access that as opposed to a situation where you’ve got different controllers On-Prem in different enterprises.
So we don’t break out Meraki separately in our results. It’s embedded in things like wireless switching, routing, but it has certainly – it’s certainly been buttressing our market share, and we’ve certainly seen a lot of customers interested in the simplicity that cloud management delivers. And we really think that that cloud management is that the key. I talked about delivering experiences before. We think that’s the key to delivering the simplicity that our customers are looking for. Customers – if customers don’t know what operating system their Meraki products are running, they use the Meraki dashboard, and that’s a full stack dashboard with your full networking stacks, a route, switch, wireless. But now we’ve integrated a bunch of other products. So we have Meraki sensors, we have Meraki cameras, we have cellular gateways. We have systems manager for managing devices all integrated in a dashboard. And as we bring all these products together across different domains of the customer’s infrastructure in one dashboard, that enables us to make it simpler for them as well, because they can implement policies or track usage across these different domains.
Simon Leopold
And how do you think about making that management solution multi-vendor? So if the customer chooses to buy a particular component from somebody that’s not Cisco, which might happen occasionally. Do you integrate that? Do the customers lose any features or capabilities? How do you think about that?
Kip Compton
It’s a great question. I mean, honestly, right now we’re focused on bringing that simplicity across our entire portfolio, and that’s sort of job one. And last summer we announced, okay, what I described with Meraki is great, but Catalyst is the – our largest, frankly, the world’s largest campus portfolio of networking equipment. It’s the most powerful in terms of feature sets and performance, the most powerful campus portfolio in the world. We’re really focused right now on bringing that Meraki simplicity across into our – the rest of our campus portfolio.
And we think that’s the key thing for us to focus on right now. That’s what our customers frankly are asking for more than anything. And that’s something actually we’ve been working on for several years. And we have right now available for our customers cloud monitoring, where they can register their catalyst equipment with the Meraki cloud. They can now go into the Meraki cloud and see all of their catalyst equipment, see the topology, see the status, do troubleshooting. And we’ve actually added that Meraki entitlement into our DNA licenses. So now the people with the DNA licenses associated with the catalyst switches have the option of On-Prem management with DNA center or cloud management with the Meraki cloud.
Simon Leopold
So you might imagine, I talked to some of your competitors on occasion. One of the things that they consistently point out as a challenge for Cisco is the complexity. And so they’ll cite the fact that Cisco has multiple versions of every product, and it’s hard to deal with, and I get it, because if you are a massive company with a full portfolio, their complexity just comes along with that.
Kip Compton
That’s right.
Simon Leopold
And so how do you counter the challenge when your competitors who are maybe more narrow, more point focused, argue that well, Cisco’s complex and we’re [ph] easy?
Kip Compton
Oh, well, I mean, I think, I mean, the breadth of our portfolio, it’s immense and outpaces just about any of our competitors. And we haven’t done as much in the past probably to simplify that as we could. I think you’re going to see us using cloud management to bring that simplicity, frankly, without compromising the breadth or power of our portfolio. I think if you’re a point competitor in one domain, it’s a lot easier to be simple. I mean, they have a simpler portfolio, but what we are seeing and what we’re responding to is customers want simplicity. We’ve seen the growth and the power of that Meraki model. And we think bringing that to the rest of our customer base is the best thing that we can do to address complexity.
Simon Leopold
So as we’re about to run out of time, I always like to close with a question that it’s really meant fairly for – from your vantage point. So not CEO, CFO, but from your vantage point, what do you think is least appreciated by the investment community about Cisco?
Kip Compton
Well, I liked your point about the size of our webscale business. So that’s…
Simon Leopold
Keep publishing that for short.
Kip Compton
Sure. That’s great. I mean, I think the size of our software business, I think we did over $15 billion in software revenue last year. We’re – we’d like to push faster. You joked earlier about how my R&D priorities are software, software and software. We’d like to push, wish faster on that. But we’re at 43% of – since all of our revenues recurring. We’re at a point now where 85% of that software revenue is subscription, only 15% perpetual as we’ve been executing on that transition. So I think I’m – I think that’s an undertold story. At the same time, frankly, we’re not done. We feel a lot of urgency as well as a lot of opportunity to continue driving more software value for our customers and more predictable recurring software revenue for the company.
Simon Leopold
Oh, great. Well, thank you very much, Kip. Appreciate you joining us folks. Thanks for joining us with Cisco at our fireside. My job is to make sure you get to your next meeting on time.
Kip Compton
Thank you.
Simon Leopold
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
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