Cisco Confirms Staff Layoffs as Collaboration Sales Grow Again
Cisco confirmed that five percent of its workforce would be laid off in its most recent earnings call while revealing that collaboration sales grew for the second consecutive quarter.
In Cisco’s earnings call for Q2 FY2024, the vendor announced that collaboration sales had grown three percent — the same as in Q1. Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins and CFO Scott Herren credited the growth to new collaboration software releases, collaboration devices, and calling, but meeting revenues declined, which “partially” undermined collaboration’s growth.
Scott Herren, CFO at Cisco, commented:
Collaboration was up 3 percent, driven by growth in collaboration devices and calling, partially offset by a decline in meetings(…)
However, despite the growth in collaboration, security (three percent) and observability (16 percent) sales, there was less positive news across the earnings call.
As reported earlier this week, Cisco formally announced it was cutting five percent of its workforce. “We are realigning our investments and expenses to reflect the current environment to help maximize long-term value for our shareholders,” said Herren. “As part of our announced restructuring plan, we expect to impact approximately five percent of our global workforce with estimated pre-tax charges of approximately $800 million.”
Additionally, networking revenues, a key business arm for Cisco, declined 12 percent, contributing to a decline in total revenues (six percent) to $12.8 billion. This saw Cisco lower its full-year outlook for FY 2024 for the second successive quarter from $53.8 billion-$55.0 billion in Q1 to $51.5 billion-$52.5 billion.
Slack AI is Now Generally Available To Boost Productivity
Salesforce has announced the general availability of Slack AI, a generative AI experience to boost worker productivity.
Slack AI, first revealed in September, is native to Slack’s collaboration platform, meaning users can leverage the wealth of collective company knowledge shared within Slack through guided experiences powered by AI. These experiences feature AI-powered search functionalities, channel recaps, thread summaries, and an upcoming “digests” feature that Salesforce is teasing.
These capabilities intend to empower users to rapidly discover answers, distil knowledge, and cultivate ideas more efficiently.
"For the past decade, Slack has revolutionized the way we work, bringing people, apps and systems together in one place," Denise Dresser, Slack CEO, said. "With Slack AI, we’re excited to take this transformation to the next level. These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth.”
Slack AI is now available as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans and in US and UK English.
Microsoft Unveils the New Copilot in Teams Experience
Microsoft has updated the Copilot experience in Teams with an improved UI, more intelligent prompts and a detailed chat history.
