Cisco enjoyed "solid growth" last quarter, with the Webex collaborations suite playing its part.
Indeed, during the vendor’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Chuck Robbins, Chairman & CEO of Cisco, confirmed that the company had experienced double-digit year-over-year (YoY) growth in collaboration product orders - with CCaaS and CPaaS leading the way.
The reveal spotlights Webex as a growing force outperforming most of Cisco's portfolio, with the tech giant reporting an increase of nine percent across all product orders (excluding Splunk).
That's quite the comeback story after Webex had struggled for growth until the beginning of 2024, spending much of the previous two years in decline.
Nevertheless, the outlook has appeared much brighter this year, especially since Cisco split its cloud collaborations portfolio into Webex CX and EX.
The former saw the business bring its CCaaS and CPaaS solutions together to enable tighter integrations between its cloud contact center and enterprise systems beyond the CRM.
By integrating these products, the company is aiming to simplify innovation for its legacy customers. That's critical for its existing on-premise contact center customers that want to replicate highly customized elements of their legacy platforms.
Yet, Robbins also emphasized the company’s commitment to growing its CX portfolio through the incorporation of the Webex AI Agent Studio and Cisco AI Assistant.
Originally announced at last month’s WebexOne 2024 event, the two contact center features have been garnering "strong initial interest from customers and will continue to strengthen our collaboration products, increasing AI capabilities.
We're also enhancing our own productivity by using AI in our services and customer experience organization.
Unpacking the Pivot
The other aspect of Cisco’s pivot was the decision to merge Webex with its networking and security divisions into a single unit.
This move is a classic example of playing to one’s strengths.
With concerns around cloud reliability and data security having long been viewed as an obstacle to enterprise adoption of CCaaS, the vendor is leveraging its significant expertise in the field of cybersecurity to differentiate itself from its competitors.
Like with the CX portfolio, the integration of Cisco’s security solutions has already started to pay dividends.
Robbins claimed that the company's new security strategy had contributed to security orders having "more than doubled year over year," with the most notable win being a multinational IT services and consultancy company that agreed to 75,000 cloud security seats.