It’s a new year – for Cisco at least. Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is set to report its first quarter fiscal 2011 earnings after close of market on Wednesday, November 10th.
The first quarter is a critical period for the company as it looks to build momentum after fourth quarter revenues of $10.84 billion fell short of analysts estimates. For the first quarter of 2011, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters are projecting revenues of $10.73 billion.
From a business perspective, the first quarter was a period of networking acceleration for Cisco. The Application Velocity Engine was announced by Cisco during the quarter as new set of technologies for WAN acceleration, being integrated on top of the ISR G2 routing platform.
Cisco has also provided enterprises with a new express version of its Unified Computing System. With UCS Express, enterprises can run virtual servers on top of routers in an updated approach to the AXP platform that Cisco rolled out in 2008.
For the security side of the business, the ASA 5585-X security appliance debuted during the quarter, providing a new top-end for Cisco’s firewalls. According to Cisco, the ASA 5585-X can scale up to 35 Gbps of large packet throughput for firewall performance.
On the collaboration side of its business, Cisco announced the Umi home telepresence unit, marking the company’s entry into the consumer space for high-end video conferencing.
New products weren’t the only focus for Cisco during the first quarter either: It also announced new and expanded partnerships with Orange Business Services for cloud services and Citrix for desktop virtualization.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
