Northland Securities and Cisco Systems to Host Analytics Tech Talk Corporate Call Summary

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Great, Mike. I would be delighted to do that. Tim and I will both have a couple of questions. Why don't -- if I could -- Mike, start it off with big picture. Could you help us with the origin of how you chose to get into this market? How you've been working on it, to date, and then, why you chose to lift the cover off, or unveil the service late last year?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : The trick, then, is that you have data for the customers that nobody else has, right? If you feed this into a Splunk or what have you, which I'm sure Tim will get there. This is not something that the company would have -- these are data sets the company wouldn't have except for what is, in many cases, in your own systems that they purchased. Is that a fair sense of your differentiation, in part?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : That makes sense, Mike. Tim, please?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Operator, at this point, would you mind polling for questions?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Mike, while we are paused, could I ask you -- what can you tell us, in terms of the financial profile for data analytics? I think we spoke before that the revenues are too small for now, but you might want to talk about them more in a year or so. How about on the margin side? Should we assume that this is primarily a software driven offering, or, are there a lot of consultative services in there that change the market profile?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Great, and revenues?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Operator, do we have any questions in the queue?

Question: Blake Omlie - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Just a quick one on privacy issues. Do customers in that retail analogy you made have to opt in or something?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Let's do one more, and then we will wrap up. I think, Mike, at a very high level, I think we've heard a lot from Cisco, in general, about a push towards software, and that might be acquiring companies like Meraki, for example, WebEx well before that of course, and it might be the Cisco ONE pricing initiative for some of your existing infrastructure. What can you tell us about the support across the organization to move Cisco's revenues in the direction of software as a service, recurring revenue?

Question: Jeff Kvaal - Northland Securities, Inc. - Analyst : Excellent. Well, with that, everyone, thanks very much for joining. Mike, Marilyn, I'm grateful to you for spending some time with us this morning, talking through where Cisco is, and where it's differentiated in data analytics. For those of you who are on the call, I will certainly be more than happy to talk in more detail about this, either this afternoon or just down the road. With that, operator, you can feel free to conclude the call.