Cisco : Form10-K

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UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549

_____________________________________

FORM 10-K

(Mark one)

• ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the fiscal year ended July 27, 2019

or

• TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the transition period from ____ to ____

Commission file number 0-18225

_____________________________________

CISCO SYSTEMS, INC.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)

California

(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)

170 West Tasman Drive

San Jose, California

(Address of principal executive offices)

Registrant's telephone number, including area code: [phone]

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

77-0059951

(IRS Employer

Identification No.)

95134-1706

(Zip Code)

Title of Each Class:	Trading Symbol(s)	Name of Each Exchange on which Registered
Common Stock, par value $0.001 per share	CSCO		The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC
	Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None
	_____________________________________
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.	x Yes	o No
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act.	o Yes	x No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. x Yes o No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files). x Yes o No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer," "smaller reporting company" and "emerging growth company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Large accelerated filer	x	Accelerated filer	o
Non-accelerated filer	o (Do not check if a smaller reporting company)	Smaller reporting company	o
		Emerging growth company	o

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). o Yes x No

Aggregate market value of registrant's common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based upon the closing price of a share of the registrant's common stock on January 25, 2019 as reported by the Nasdaq Global Select Market on that date: $204.0 billion

Number of shares of the registrant's common stock outstanding as of August 30, 2019: 4,245,290,230

____________________________________

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant's Proxy Statement relating to the registrant's 2019 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, to be held on December 10, 2019, are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K where indicated.

Table of Contents
	PART I
Item 1.	Business	1
Item 1A.	Risk Factors	11
Item 1B.	Unresolved Staff Comments	27
Item 2.	Properties	27
Item 3.	Legal Proceedings	27
Item 4.	Mine Safety Disclosures	27
	PART II
Item 5.	Market for Registrant's Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters, and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities	28
Item 6.	Selected Financial Data	30
Item 7.	Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations	31
Item 7A.	Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk	52
Item 8.	Financial Statements and Supplementary Data	54
Item 9.	Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure	106
Item 9A.	Controls and Procedures	106
Item 9B.	Other Information	107
	PART III
Item 10.	Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance	107
Item 11.	Executive Compensation	107
Item 12.	Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters	107
Item 13.	Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence	107
Item 14.	Principal Accountant Fees and Services	108
	PART IV
Item 15.	Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules	108
Item 16.	Form 10-K Summary	110
	Signatures	111

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This Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations," contains forward- looking statements regarding future events and our future results that are subject to the safe harbors created under the Securities Act of 1933 (the "Securities Act") and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act"). All statements other than statements of historical facts are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts, and projections about the industries in which we operate and the beliefs and assumptions of our management. Words such as "expects," "anticipates," "targets," "goals," "projects," "intends," "plans," "believes," "momentum," "seeks," "estimates," "continues," "endeavors," "strives," "may," variations of such words, and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements that refer to projections of our future financial performance, our anticipated growth and trends in our businesses, and other characterizations of future events or circumstances are forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict, including those identified below, under "Item 1A. Risk Factors," and elsewhere herein. Therefore, actual results may differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements for any reason.

PART I

Item 1.

Business

General

Cisco designs and sells a broad range of technologies that have been powering the Internet since 1984. Across networking, security, collaboration, applications and the cloud, we are integrating intent-based technologies to help our customers manage more users, devices and things connecting to their networks. This will enable us to provide customers with a highly secure, intelligent platform for their digital business.

We conduct our business globally and manage our business by geography. Our business is organized into the following three geographic segments: Americas; Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC).

Our products and technologies are grouped into the following categories: Infrastructure Platforms; Applications; Security and Other Products. In addition to our product offerings, we provide a broad range of service offerings, including technical support services and advanced services. Increasingly, we are delivering our technologies through software and services. Our customers include businesses of all sizes, public institutions, governments, and service providers. These customers often look to us as a strategic partner to help them use information technology (IT) to differentiate themselves and drive positive business outcomes.

We were incorporated in California in December 1984, and our headquarters are in San Jose, California. The mailing address of our headquarters is 170 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, California 95134-1706, and our telephone number at that location is [phone]. Our website is www.cisco.com. Through a link on the Investor Relations section of our website, we make available the following filings as soon as reasonably practicable after they are electronically filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and any amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. All such filings are available free of charge. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this report.

Strategy and Priorities

As our customers add billions of new connections to their enterprises, and as more applications move to a multicloud environment, the network continues to be extremely critical. We believe that our customers are looking for intent-based networks that provide meaningful business value through automation, security, and analytics across private, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Our vision is to deliver highly secure, software-defined, automated and intelligent platforms for our customers. Our strategic priorities include the following: accelerating our pace of innovation, increasing the value of the network, and transforming our business model.

Accelerating Pace of Innovation - Enabling Network Automation

The initial development of new network product offerings that feature our intent-based networking technology was announced in fiscal 2017. The intent-based networking platform is designed to be intelligent, highly secure, powered by "intent" and informed by "context"- features aiming to constantly learn, adapt, automate and protect in order to optimize network operations and defend against an evolving cyber threat landscape. Our intent-based network started with the Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) technology, one of our leading enterprise architectures. These offerings are designed to provide a single, highly secure network fabric that helps ensure policy consistency and network assurance; enables faster launches of new business services; and significantly improves issue resolution times while being open and extendable. SD-Access, built on the principles of Cisco Digital Networking Architecture (DNA), provides what we see as a transformational shift in the building and managing of networks. Our Catalyst

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9000 series of switches represented the initial build of our intent-based networking capabilities and provides highly differentiated advancements in security, programmability, and performance, while lowering operating costs by innovating hardware and software.

Since the initial launch, we have integrated intent-based networking across our enterprise access portfolio to help our customers manage more users, devices and things connecting to their networks. To enable our customers to do this, we have introduced several innovations that extend our intent-based networking capabilities to wireless and enterprise routing products, including Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) and Internet of Things (IoT) edge platforms.

To further our innovation in this area, we are applying the latest technologies such as machine learning and advanced analytics to operate and enhance network capabilities. These new network product offerings are designed to enable customers to detect cybersecurity threats, for instance, in encrypted traffic. We have created what is in our view the only network that is designed for security while maintaining privacy.

For the data center, our strategy is to deliver multicloud architectures that bring policy and operational consistency regardless of where applications or data reside by extending our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and our hyperconverged offerings.

Increasing the Value of the Network

Unlocking the Power of Data.Our customers are increasingly using technology, including networks, to grow their businesses, drive efficiencies, and more effectively compete. We believe data is one of an organization's most strategic assets, and this data is increasingly distributed across every organization and ecosystem, on customer premises, at the edge of the network, and in the cloud. As the number of new devices connected to the Internet grows, we believe the network will play an even more critical role in enabling our customers to aggregate, automate, and draw actionable insights from this highly distributed data, where there is a premium on security and speed. We believe this is driving our customers to adopt new IT architectures and organizational structures and, more specifically, to seek network deployment solutions that deliver greater agility, productivity, visibility, security, and other advanced network capabilities.

Security is Foundational.We believe that security is the top IT priority for many of our customers. Our security strategy is focused on delivering an effective cybersecurity architecture combining network, cloud and endpoint-based solutions. Our portfolio is designed to prevent, detect, and remediate a cyber-attack and to integrate security across networking domains. Our intent is to enable our customers to secure their networks for a multicloud world by delivering a platform that continuously detects threats and verifies trust. By combining a number of security technologies, we are delivering an end-to-end,zero-trust architecture. Additionally, through our offerings we help our customers shorten the time between threat detection and response.

Powering a Multicloud World.Our customers are operating in multicloud environments with private, public, and hybrid clouds. Our cloud strategy is to deliver solutions designed to simplify, secure, and transform how customers work in this multicloud world to maximize business outcomes.

As our customers navigate the multicloud world, they need to connect new devices, protect their assets and monitor cloud consumption, and they also require advisory cloud services that are provided in a consistent manner. We are focused on enabling simple, intelligent, automated and highly secure clouds by delivering the infrastructure to navigate complex IT environments through our software and subscription-based offerings including Webex, Meraki cloud networking, and certain other Security and Applications offerings. We believe that customers and partners view our approach to the cloud as differentiated and unique, recognizing that we offer a solution for all cloud environments, including private, hybrid, and public clouds.

In our view, over the next several years, customers will be increasingly writing modern applications that can run on any hybrid cloud, and will be adding billions of connections to their environment. We believe Cisco is uniquely positioned to enable successful business outcomes for customers in hybrid and multicloud environments. In our view, the network has never been more critical to business success and we believe our customers will benefit from the insights and intelligence that we are making accessible through our highly differentiated platforms.

Transforming our Business Model

We are transforming our offerings to meet the evolving needs of our customers. As part of the transformation of our business, we continued to make strides during fiscal 2019 to develop and sell more software and subscription-based offerings. Historically, our various networking technology products have aligned with their respective product categories. However, increasingly, our offerings are crossing multiple product categories. As our core networking evolves, we expect we will add more common software features across our core networking platforms. We are increasing the amount of software offerings that we provide and the proportion of subscription software offerings. We have various types of software arrangements including system software, on premise software, hybrid software and SaaS offerings. In terms of monetization, our software offerings fall into the broad categories of subscription arrangements, including SaaS and term licenses, and perpetual licenses.

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For a discussion of the risks associated with our strategy, see "Item 1A. Risk Factors," including the risk factor entitled "We depend upon the development of new products and services, and enhancements to existing products and services, and if we fail to predict and respond to emerging technological trends and customers' changing needs, our operating results and market share may suffer." For information regarding sales of our major products and services, see Note 18 to the Consolidated Financial Statements.

Products and Services

Our products and services are grouped into the following categories:

Infrastructure Platforms

Infrastructure Platforms consist of our core networking technologies of switching, routing, wireless, and data center products that are designed to work together to deliver networking capabilities and transport and/or store data. These technologies consist of both hardware and software offerings that help our customers build networks, automate, orchestrate, integrate, and digitize data. We believe it is critical for us to continue to deliver continuous value to our customers. In fiscal 2019, we continued to make progress in shifting more of our business to software and subscriptions across our core networking portfolio, and in expanding our software offerings. Our objective is to continue moving to cloud-managed solutions across our enterprise networking portfolio. We continue to expand on our intent-based infrastructure, which focuses on simplicity, automation, and security, allowing enterprises to manage and govern the interactions of users, devices and applications across their IT environments. Our Cisco Catalyst 9000 series of switches were developed for security, mobility, IoT, and the cloud. These switches formed the foundation for our leading enterprise architectures, built on the principles of Cisco DNA. Over the last fiscal year, we continued to expand on this technology by extending SD-Access and Cisco DNA Center across our enterprise networking portfolio and by extending ACI to the public and private cloud. In addition, we now have a unified operating system and policy management platform for our enterprise networking portfolio to drive simplicity and consistency across our customers' networks.

Our switching portfolio encompasses campus switching as well as data center switching offerings. Our campus switching offerings provide the foundation for converged data, voice, video, and IoT services. These switches offer enhanced security and reliability and are designed to scale efficiently as our customers grow. Within campus switching are our Catalyst 9000 series of switches that include hardware with embedded software, along with a software subscription referred to as Cisco DNA. Cisco DNA provides automation, analytics and security features and can be centrally monitored, managed, and configured. Our data center switching offerings provide the foundation for mission critical data centers with high availability, scalability, and security across traditional data centers and private and public cloud data centers.

Our routing portfolio interconnects public and private wireline and mobile networks, delivering highly secure and reliable connectivity to campus, data center and branch networks. Our routing solutions are designed to meet the scale, reliability, and security needs of our customers. During fiscal 2018, we introduced the principles of Cisco DNA into our routing portfolio and since then, we introduced secure SD-WAN, increasing security, flexibility, and delivery through the cloud.

Our Wireless portfolio provides indoor and outdoor wireless coverage designed for seamless roaming use of voice, video, and data applications. These products include wireless access points that are standalone, controller appliance-based,switch-converged, and Meraki cloud-managed offerings. In fiscal 2018, we expanded our capabilities to include network assurance and automation through Cisco DNA and location-based services. In fiscal 2019, we introduced Catalyst and Meraki WiFi6-based access points designed for high-density public or private environments to improve speed, performance, and capacity for wireless networking in both homes and enterprises.

Our Data Center portfolio incorporates various technologies and solutions including the Cisco Unified Computing System, our hyperconverged offering, HyperFlex, and software management capabilities which combine computing, networking, and storage infrastructure management and virtualization to deliver agility, simplicity and scale. These products are designed to extend the power and simplicity of unified computing for data-intensive workloads, applications at the edge of the network, and the next generation of distributed application architectures.

Applications

The Applications product category consists primarily of software-related offerings that utilize the core networking and data center platforms to provide their functions. Our Applications offerings consist of both hardware and software-based solutions, including both software licenses and software-as-a-service. Applications include our collaboration offerings (unified communications, Cisco TelePresence and conferencing) as well as AppDynamics and IoT software offerings.

Our strategy is to make collaboration more effective, comprehensive, and less complex by creating innovative solutions through combining the power of software, hardware, and the network. We offer a portfolio of solutions which can be delivered from the cloud, premise or mixed environments, and which integrate voice, video, and messaging on fixed and mobile networks across a wide range of devices/endpoints such as mobile phones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers, video units, and collaboration appliances. In fiscal 2019, we introduced Cognitive Collaboration, integrating AI and machine learning across the Webex portfolio,

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