Cisco Systems Value Stock - Dividend - Research Selection

Description of the company

Cisco designs and sells a broad range of technologies that have been powering the Internet since 1984. Across networking, security, collaboration and the cloud, our evolving intent-based technologies are constantly learning and adapting to provide customers with a highly secure, intelligent platform for their digital business.

We conduct our business globally, and manage our business by geography. Our business is organized into the following three geographic segments: Americas; Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). For revenue and other information regarding these segments, see Note 17 to the Consolidated Financial Statements.

Our products and technologies are grouped into the following categories: Switching; Next-Generation Network (NGN) Routing; Collaboration; Data Center; Wireless; Security; Service Provider Video and Other Products. In addition to our product offerings, we provide a broad range of service offerings, including technical support services and advanced services. Increasingly, we are delivering our technologies through software and services. Our customers include businesses of all sizes, public institutions, governments and service providers. These customers often look to us as a strategic partner to help them use information technology (IT) to differentiate themselves and drive positive business outcomes.

We were incorporated in California in December 1984, and our headquarters are in San Jose, California. The mailing address of our headquarters is 170 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, California 95134-1706, and our telephone number at that location is (408) 526-4000. Our website is www.cisco.com. Through a link on the Investor Relations section of our website, we make available the following filings as soon as reasonably practicable after they are electronically filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and any amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. All such filings are available free of charge. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this report.

Strategy and Priorities

As our customers add billions of new connections to their enterprises, we believe the network is becoming more critical than ever. We believe that our customers are looking for intelligent networks that provide meaningful business value through automation, security, and analytics. Our vision is to deliver a highly secure, intelligent, platform for digital businesses. Our strategic priorities include accelerating our pace of innovation, increasing the value of the network, and delivering technology the way our customers want to consume it.

Accelerating Innovation — Enabling Network Automation

In June 2017, we announced the initial development of new network product offerings that feature what we refer to as “intuitive” networking technology. The intuitive network is an intent-based networking platform designed to be intelligent, highly secure, powered by “intent” and informed by “context”—features by which the intuitive network aims to constantly learn, adapt, automate and protect in order to optimize network operations and defend against an evolving cyber threat landscape. To further our innovation in this area, we are applying the latest technologies such as machine learning and advanced analytics to operate and define the network. From a security standpoint, these new product network offerings are designed to enable customers to detect threats in encrypted traffic, and we have created what is in our view the only network that is designed for security while maintaining privacy.

Our new Catalyst 9000 series of switches represent the initial foundation of our intent-based networking capabilities and provide highly differentiated advancements in security, programmability, and performance, while lowering operating costs by innovating at the hardware and software layer. These network switches form the foundation for Cisco’s Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) technology, one of our leading enterprise architectures. These offerings are designed to provide a single, highly secure network fabric that helps ensure policy consistency, enables faster launches of new business services and significantly improves issue resolution times while being open and extendable. SD-Access, built on the principles of Cisco Digital Networking Architecture (DNA), provides what we see as a transformational shift in the building and managing of networks.

We have also been focusing on furthering our innovation with respect to the move toward more programmable, flexible, and virtual networks, sometimes called software-defined networking (SDN). This transition is focused on providing a virtualized network environment that is designed to enable flexible, application-driven customization of network infrastructures. Our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solutions deliver centralized application-driven policy automation, management, and visibility of both physical and virtual environments as a single system.