Every product category at Cisco posted double-digit order growth in the same quarter. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders, data center networking, workplace networking, and security all moved together, not just the AI infrastructure line that draws the headlines. That pattern is the more useful read of Cisco's fiscal fourth quarter than any single number in it.

Total product orders rose 35% year over year, or 25% excluding hyperscalers. Growth showing up outside the hyperscaler column is the detail worth sitting with.

Order Growth Shows Up in Every Category, Not Just One

Full fiscal 2026 revenue reached $63.3 billion, up 12% year over year, the strongest year in Cisco's 40-plus year history on revenue, operating margin, and earnings per employee combined. Product revenue for the full year grew 16%, and Q4 product revenue alone climbed 24%, driven by broad demand across AI infrastructure, campus networking, and security rather than any single line item.

Networking product orders grew 40% year over year in Q4, the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders reached $9.3 billion for the fiscal year, 4.5 times the prior year, with $4 billion of that arriving in Q4 alone. Data center networking orders grew more than 35% in the quarter. Workplace networking, covering campus switching, wireless, and industrial internet-of-things gear, grew 20%. Cisco's entire security portfolio, Splunk included, posted double-digit order growth in the same period.

Four categories, four different customer bases, one direction. Enterprises buying campus refreshes are not the same budget holders as hyperscalers signing multi-year AI infrastructure commitments, and both grew orders at the same time.

Data Center Demand Reaches Well Beyond Hyperscalers

Cisco disclosed three new hyperscale AI design wins in the quarter: one Silicon One P200 scale-across deployment, one G200 scale-out deployment, and one optical line system, bringing the P200 platform to three hyperscalers total. The order mix for the year ran roughly 60% Silicon One systems and 40% optics. Acacia optics took in more than $1 billion in orders during Q4, and Cisco has shipped over 850,000 400G and more than 75,800 800G coherent pluggable optics to date.

Outside the hyperscaler set, neocloud, sovereign, and enterprise customers placed more than $400 million in AI infrastructure orders in Q4 alone, and enterprise Nexus switch orders tagged for AI deployments rose more than 85% sequentially. Cisco's Jeetu Patel pointed to a specific enterprise example: a large US bank ordering 1,000 Cisco data center smart switches, a deal Cisco described as replacing both an incumbent networking vendor and an incumbent firewall vendor in favor of a single secure networking architecture.

Workplace Networking Growth Ties Directly to Model Upgrade Cycles

The 20% jump in workplace networking orders is where the AI infrastructure story stops being a hyperscaler story. Patel attributed the growth to four tailwinds: a portfolio refresh cycle, infrastructure upgrades tied to Mythos-class model deployments, rising agentic traffic volume across enterprise networks, and a common control plane through Cisco Cloud Control. Wi-Fi 7 now makes up half of Cisco's wireless mix.

Enterprises upgrading campus and wireless infrastructure to support frontier-class model deployments inside their own networks is direct evidence for the thesis Patel put forward in his own post-earnings note: this is not the attraction of a shiny object, it is the market recognizing that AI infrastructure readiness now reaches every layer of the network, not just the data center.

Security Has Room to Grow Beyond Cisco's Existing Base

Security revenue grew 14% year over year in Q4. More than 1,500 customers adopted new security products during the quarter, including Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield, and AI Defense, bringing the cumulative new-customer count for those products to 6,400 since launch. Firewall orders rose more than 30%, and the entire security portfolio, Splunk included, posted double-digit order growth.

Selling security into Cisco's own networking base is the easier motion. Splunk and Cisco's other security acquisitions came with customers who were not previously buying Cisco's network, and converting that installed base into broader platform buyers is a different sales problem than upselling an existing Cisco account. Cisco's continued investment in keeping Splunk interoperable with other vendors' data, alongside its Frenemy integrations that keep the platform open to multi-vendor environments, is part of what makes Splunk worth buying on its own rather than only as a Cisco add-on. Management's own guidance points to high single digit security growth for FY27, a pace worth tracking against how well that standalone attach motion works.

Flat Services Revenue Reflects a Partner-Led Playbook

Services revenue held flat at $15 billion for the fiscal year and $3.8 billion in Q4 while product revenue climbed 24% in the same quarter. Routing multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure deployments through system integrators and channel partners lets Cisco scale delivery at hyperscaler speed without building an internal services organization large enough to match it. The flat line is the byproduct of a partner-led go-to-market built to make Cisco the default network underneath these deployments, not a gap Cisco left unaddressed.

Guidance Extends the Same Pattern Into FY27

Cisco guided Q1 FY27 revenue to $18.0 billion to $18.2 billion and full-year revenue to $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion, roughly 15% growth at the midpoint, up from FY26's 12%. AI infrastructure revenue is expected to reach $7.5 billion in FY27, up from about $4 billion in FY26, a figure Cisco says is already largely booked.

Broad-based order growth across every geography and customer market, the kind that shows up in campus refreshes and enterprise bank orders as much as hyperscaler contracts, is a different signal than a handful of large deals concentrated in one customer segment. That breadth is what separates a durable infrastructure cycle from a single shiny-object purchase.

About Shashi Bellamkonda

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