Robbins clears up 'misunderstanding' about Cisco being a hardware company

Cisco CEO pledges allegiance to software as it opens up about company's future

Cisco's chief executive Chuck Robbins has moved to clear up the "misunderstanding" that Cisco is a hardware company, insisting instead that 80 per cent of its engineers are in fact focused on software.

Speaking at a shareholder event, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Robbins (pictured) pledged his commitment to the software space, and the cloud and recurring revenue models which come with it.

"As we look ahead, we will continue to focus on software; we'll continue to leverage our software capabilities," he said.

"There is a bit of a misunderstanding about Cisco. We're viewed as a hardware company, but 80 per cent of our engineers are software engineers. So we're going to continue to focus on bringing forth the value of the software assets that we have here. We'll continue to focus on driving this business-model transition where we will continue to provide our technology to our customers in the way in which they want to consume it, which will lead to more predictable recurring revenue streams in the future for us.

"I've joked with our teams that it's rare [that] what we want to do as a business, and what our customers would like to see us do, and what our shareholders would like to see from us - which is more recurring revenue - actually line up."

Cisco announced in October that it had teamed up with Apple to develop "the very best app and voice experience for iPhone and iPad on the best corporate networks". Robbins said that his firm has "the most impressive partner ecosystem in the world" and hinted that similar unions could be on the cards.

"Many of you have seen the Apple partnership that we announced where we did development on our side, they did development on their side, and the combination of those two efforts actually brought innovation for our customers," he said. "We're doing the same with Salesforce. We're having that discussion with IBM."