Cisco posts 63% gain in profit

Reporting a 63% profits raise in its third quarter results Wednesday, Cisco Systems said it has been gaining market share and predicted the favorable conditions would continue in its next quarter.

Revenue in the third quarter jumped to $10.37 billion from $8.2 billion in the third quarter last year while income rose to $2.2 billion against $1.35 billion last year. The results generally beat predictions of investment banking analysts who follow the networking giant.

"We witnessed a return to strong balanced growth across geographies, products and customer segments that we haven't seen since before the global economic challenges began," said Cisco's chairman and CEO John Chambers in a statement. "We emerge from this downturn gaining market share, a larger share of the total wallet spend of our customers, dramatically improved customer relations as a trusted technology and business partner, and having next-generation products in almost every product category."

The company cited its acquisition of video communications provider Tandberg as a high point in the quarter. Cisco paid $3.3 billion for Tandberg after a lengthy and sometimes bruising struggle with the Norwegian firm's stockholders. Tandberg's video conferencing systems beefed up Cisco's already sturdy presence in video conferencing and Telepresence.

Cisco also singled out its accelerating partnership with VMware in which the two firms are cooperating to deliver Cisco's Unified Computing System and VMware vSphere. VMware is majority-owned by storage pacesetter EMC, which is moving aggressively with Cisco to stake out positions in data centers and cloud computing.

In the earnings report, released after the close of stock markets Wednesday, Chambers added: "From almost every measurement perspective - revenues, earnings per share, new products, successful acquisitions, internal startups -- our results in Q3 were the proof points that our strategy is working and was probably the strongest quarter in our history."