Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) U.S. enterprise customer base growth may provide investors the confidence they need when it reports fiscal second quarter earnings this Wednesday, Feb. 8.
As reported in Reuters, analysts have forecast the vendor to report earnings of 43 cents a share in the quarter that runs until the end of January, with revenue up about eight percent to $11.23 billion.
Analysts also forecast Cisco to report earnings of 45 cents a share on revenue of $11.48 billion in the current quarter.
"We believe improving demand in the U.S. is driving a recovery in Cisco's business with solid growth across U.S. enterprise and commercial offsetting weakness in Europe and parts of Asia such as India," Natarajan Subrahmanyan, analyst at The Juda Group, wrote in a note.
One area that analysts and investors will be closely looking at is what effect has the slower service provider spending trend had on its earnings.
A number of Cisco's key competitors such as Acme Packet (Nasdaq: APKT), Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), and Tellabs (Nasdaq: TLAB) all reported lower than expected Q4 2011 earnings due to slower carrier spending. Tellabs, for instance, was forced to lay off lay off about 530 employees and refocus its efforts on wireless backhaul and packet optical networking segments.
Outside of selling routers to large service providers, Cisco has seen growing demand for its data center networking infrastructure as more service providers and their enterprise clients take advantage of emerging cloud-based applications.
For more:
- Reuters has this article
Special report: Wireline in the fourth quarter 2011
Related articles:
Cisco looking for a strong quarter as rivals struggle
Infonetics: Cisco regains lead in IP Edge router and switch market, while Huawei slides
Booming data market to spur tech M&A frenzy in 2012
Cisco acquires Comptel's AXIOSS