Exam Code: 300-735 Practice test 2023 by Killexams.com team
Automating Cisco Security Solutions (SAUTO)
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Cisco Systems Inc. specializes in networking and communications products and services. The company is probably best known for its business routing and switching products, which direct data, voice, and video traffic across networks around the world. However, Cisco also offers storage networking, applications for unified communications, telepresence and collaboration (WebEx), and an array of services from simple product support to complete solutions for data centers and cloud management.

To ensure that IT professionals have the skills and knowledge necessary to support Cisco products and solve customers’ technology problems on many fronts, the Cisco Career Certification program is all-embracing. That is, it begins at the entry level, then advances to associate, professional, and expert levels, and (in some certification areas) caps things off at the architect level.

Each level offers one or more credentials. Obtaining a credential usually involves passing one or more certification exams. Most Cisco exams are delivered by Pearson VUE. For higher-level credentials, candidates must also prove they meet necessary prerequisites. The higher the level of certification, the more credentials and prerequisites one needs to meet those requirements.

Cisco certification program overview

Certifications within Cisco’s portfolio include the following credentials:

  • Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT)
  • Cisco Certified Technician (CCT)
  • Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)
  • Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA)
  • Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP)
  • Cisco Certified Design Professional (CCDP)
  • Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE)
  • Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE)
  • Cisco Certified Architect (CCAr)

There are many certifications and paths one can take in Cisco’s career program. That said, its two main paths cover network operation and network design. A typical Cisco networking certification ladder begins with the entry-level CCENT credential, moves up to the CCNA, onto the CCNP and culminates with the CCIE. The design-oriented might instead consider starting with the CCENT, moving up to the CCDA, then the professional-level CCDP, followed by the CCDE, and finish the program with the CCAr.

The Cisco Career Certification program also includes a number of specializations. These certifications acknowledge a professional’s skills in a specific Cisco technology, such as data center application services, voicemail and messaging or rich media. Cisco specializations are organized into two primary categories: one targeting technical specialists and another targeting digital transformation specialists. Between these two categories, there are currently 15 specializations among which IT pros can choose.

The Technical Specialist category includes specializations across six subcategories:

  • Collaboration
  • Data Center (FlexPod)
  • Network Programmability
  • Operating System Software
  • Service Provider
  • Internet of things (IoT)

Digital Transformation specialists includes credentials geared to Business Architecture and Customer Success.

Achieving a specialist credential generally requires passing one or two exams. Some credentials also impose prerequisites.

Entry-, associate- and professional-level credentials are valid for three years, CCIE and specialist certifications are valid for two years and the CCAr is valid for five years. To keep certifications current, Cisco professionals need to recertify by passing a recertification test or advancing to a higher level in Cisco’s certification hierarchy.

Cisco’s entry-level certifications

Cisco has two entry-level credentials: the Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT) and the Cisco Certified Technician (CCT). No prerequisites are needed to obtain either the CCENT or CCT credential, and candidates must pass a single test to earn each credential.

CCENT certified professionals install, maintain and troubleshoot small networks or a branch of an enterprise network, and implement basic network security. The CCENT credential is a prerequisite for some associate-level CCNA solution track credentials and the CCDA.

CCTs work onsite at customer locations, diagnosing issues and repairing or replacing network-related equipment. A CCT can choose one of several specialty tracks, which currently includes Data Center and Routing and Switching.

Certification Exams Number of Questions Time to Complete CCENT 100-105 ICND1 45-55 90 minutes CCT Data Center 010-151 DCTECH 65-75 90 minutes CCT Routing & Switching 640-692 RSTECH 60-70 90 minutes

Cisco’s associate-Level Certifications

Cisco’s associate-level certifications include the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and the Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA). One must pass one or two certification exams to achieve a CCNA or CCDA credential, depending on the track you choose.

The CCNA recognizes basic skills in installing, supporting, and troubleshooting wired and/or wireless networks. One can choose from several tracks, including Cloud, Collaboration, Cyber Ops, Data Center, Industrial, Routing and Switching, Security, Service Provider and Wireless. The CCNA is a prerequisite for the professional-level CCNP certification. Prerequisites for the CCNA vary depending on the solution track chosen as do the number of required exams. All solution tracks require either one or two exams.

Cisco created the CCDA to identify individuals who can design basic wired and wireless networks, and incorporate security and voice solutions. The CCDA is a prerequisite for the CCDP certification. To obtain the CCDA, candidates must possess either a valid CCENT, CCNA Routing and Switching (or any CCIE certification), and pass a single additional exam.

Certification Exams Number of Questions Time to Complete
CCDA 200-310 DESGN 55-65 75 minutes
CCNA Cloud 210-451 CLDFND 55-65 90 minutes
210-455 CLDADM 55-65 90 minutes
CCNA Collaboration 210-060 CICD 55-65 75 minutes
210-065 CIVND 55-65 75 minutes
CCNA Cyber Ops 210-250 SECFND 55-60 90 minutes
210-255 SECOPS 60-70 90 minutes
CCNA Data Center 200-150 DCICN 55-65 90 minutes
200-155 DCICT 65-75 120 minutes
CCNA Industrial 200-601 IMINS2 65-75 90 minutes
CCNA Routing and Switching** 200-125 CCNA 60-70 90 minutes
100-105 ICND1 45-55 90 minutes
200-105 ICND2 55-65 90 minutes
CCNA Security 210-260 IINS 60-70 90 minutes
CCNA Service Provider 640-875 SPNGN1 65-75 90 minutes
640-878 SPNGN2 65-75 90 minutes
CCNA Wireless 200-355 WIFUND 60-70 90 minutes

**Candidates for the CCNA Routing and Switching may take test 200-125 OR test 100-105 plus 200-105.

Cisco’s professional-level certifications

Cisco’s professional-level credentials include two main programs: the Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) and the Cisco Certified Design Professional (CCDP). To obtain the CCDP, one must pass three certification exams and possess both the CCDA and CCNA Routing and Switching credentials or any Cisco CCIE or CCDE certification.

All CCNP solution tracks, except Routing and Switching, require candidates to pass four exams. Only three exams are required for the CCNP: Routing and Switching credential. Prerequisites for all CCNP solution tracks include either the lower-level CCNA credential or any CCIE credential. The CCNP: Service Provider credential also accepts the Cisco Certified Internet Professional (CCIP) credential as a prerequisite (which retired in 2012).

The CCNP credential recognizes professionals who plan, deploy, and troubleshoot local networks and wide area networks. The CCNP tracks are the same as those for the CCNA, except for Industrial and Cyber Ops, which are not offered in the CCNP track. The CCNP is recommended to climb up to the next step on the cert ladder – the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert.

The CCDP identifies proficiency in designing and deploying scalable networks and multilayer-switched networks. From the CCDP, you can move on to the Cisco Certified Design Expert.

Certification Exams Number of Questions Time to Complete
CCDP 300-101 ROUTE 45-65 120 minutes
300-115 SWITCH 30-40 120 minutes
300-320 ARCH 60-70 75 minutes
CCNP Cloud 300-460 CLDINF 55-65 90 minutes
300-465 CLDDES 55-65 90 minutes
300-470 CLDAUT 55-65 90 minutes
300-475 CLDACI 55-65 90 minutes
CCNP Collaboration 300-070 CIPTV1 65-75 75 minutes
300-075 CIPTV2 50-60 75 minutes
300-080 CTCOLLAB 55-65 75 minutes
300-085 CAPPS 55-65 75 minutes
CCNP Data Center** 300-175 DCUCI 55-65 90 minutes
300-165 DCII 55-65 90 minutes
300-170 DCVAI 55-65 90 minutes
300-160 DCID 55-65 90 minutes
300-180 DCIT 70-80 90 minutes
CCNP Routing and Switching 300-101 ROUTE 45-65 120 minutes
300-115 SWITCH 30-40 120 minutes
300-135 TSHOOT 15-25 120 minutes
CCNP Security 300-208 SISAS 55-65 90 minutes
300-206 SENSS 65-75 90 minutes
300-209 SIMOS 65-75 90 minutes
300-210 SITCS 65-75 90 minutes
CCNP Service Provider 642-883 SPROUTE 65-75 90 minutes
642-885 SPADVROUTE 65-75 90 minutes
642-887 SPCORE 65-75 90 minutes
642-889 SPEDGE 65-75 90 minutes
CCNP Wireless 300-360 WIDESIGN 55-65 90 minutes
300-365 WIDEPLOY 55-65 90 minutes
300-370 WITSHOOT 55-65 90 minutes
300-375 WISECURE 55-65 90 minutes

**CCNP Data Center may take either the 300-160 or 300-180 exam.

Cisco’s expert-level certifications

Cisco’s expert-level credentials embrace two primary certifications: the coveted Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) and the Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE). Neither certification imposes prerequisites, but one must pass a written test and a rigorous practical test to earn either of these credentials.

Beginning in July 2016, Cisco updated its expert-level exams to include an evolving technologies domain. This new domain targets cloud, network programmability and the IoT, and it accounts for 10 percent of the total test score. Cisco may change the Topics included in this domain to reflect emerging technologies as they reach strong enough commercial interest, potential and presence to make them examworthy. The company describes this mechanism as a way to help future-proof its certifications so that employers may assume that those who hold current credentials are also up to speed on important new networking technologies.

For many network-track professionals, achieving the CCIE is the highlight of their careers. A CCIE has expert technical skills and knowledge of Cisco network products and solutions in one of the CCIE technical tracks, which currently include Collaboration, Data Center, Routing and Switching, Security, Service Provider, and Wireless.

The CCDE identifies experts who design infrastructure solutions for large enterprise environments, which include technological, operational, business and budget aspects of a project.

Cisco’s architect-level certifications

For persons seeking positions such as network architect or data center architect, a smart move is to acquire the Cisco Certified Architect (CCAr) certification. The CCAr is like the Ph.D. of the Cisco Career Certification program – it’s the highest level of certification that Cisco offers. This credential validates the skills of a senior network infrastructure architect, someone who can plan and design IT infrastructures based on business strategies. Many people consider the CCAr the most difficult tech certification to achieve.

To earn the CCDE certification, you must design a network solution to implement an assigned strategy; then, you must appear before a Cisco-appointed panel to explain and defend that solution.

Whether you’re following a network operations or network design career path, Cisco certifications are uniquely positioned to assist IT professionals as they prepare to fulfill various Cisco-related career roles. Regardless of your chosen career path, job opportunities are plentiful for skilled Cisco professionals. A simple search for Cisco CCNA professionals on two popular job boards – SimplyHired and Indeed – yielded between 7,500 and 9,500 job postings each.

Job opportunities vary by factors, such as experience and whether you’re focused on network operations or network design. While certainly not exhaustive, the following list identifies some common job opportunities by certification:

  • CCENT: Help desk or technician roles
  • CCT: Engineer (field, network, application support) or systems administrator
  • CCNA: Engineer (network, telecommunications), technician (network, network operations) or analyst (network, network operations center)
  • CCDA: Engineer (network, system, design, lead), analyst (interface), interface developer or technical specialist
  • CCNP: Network administrator, engineer (support, network) or advanced technician, as well as senior-level roles
  • CCDP: Senior-level roles; senior network design engineer, senior analyst, cyber protection analyst or network designer
  • CCIE: Expert-level roles; network architect, engineer (lead, systems, network) or senior network administrator
  • CCDE: Expert-level roles; systems engineer, senior network engineer, network architect, network design engineer or IT infrastructure team lead
  • CCAr: Architect (lead, network, enterprise, voice data and more)

Training and Resources

Cisco maintains a comprehensive list of training and self-study resources. These resources include various forms of online learning, practice exams, learning labs, links to which appear on each certification’s web page. The Cisco Learning Network offers candidates a free basic membership that includes access to test topics, live seminars, IT training videos, study groups, forums, study materials and much more. The subscription-based Cisco Platinum Learning Library provides professionals with on-demand learning and access to more than 400 courses, hands-on vLabs, the support library, and more. Additional training materials are also available from Cisco Press.

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 10:00:00 -0600 en text/html https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10700-cisco-certification-guide.html
Killexams : Cisco observability: What you need to know

Observability may be the latest buzzword in an industry loaded with them, but Cisco will tell you the primary goal of the technology is to help enterprises get a handle on effectively managing distributed resources in ways that have not been possible in the past.

The idea of employing observability tools and applications is a hot idea. Gartner says that by 2024, 30% of enterprises implementing distributed system architectures will have adopted observability techniques to Boost digital-business service performance, up from less than 10% in 2020.

“Today’s operational teams have tools for network monitoring, application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, call monitoring, and more, but they rarely intermingle to provide a cohesive view of what’s going on across the enterprise,” according to Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group.

Observability looks to address real problems by gathering information across domains and using it to show how one domain influences another and to predict problem areas or trigger incident management, Pereira said.

“By using observability tools, the business is able to determine the state of its applications with a high degree of certainty and understand how their services impact business key performance indicators and customers’ digital experience,” Gartner wrote in a accurate observability report. “Observability enables quick interrogation of a digital service to identify the underlying cause of a performance degradation, even when it has never occurred before.”

At the accurate Cisco Live! event in Amsterdam, Pereira provided a preview of the underlying architecture for observability called the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform. It’s expected in June, though some details have already been announced.

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 20:39:00 -0600 en text/html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3687635/cisco-observability-what-you-need-to-know.html
Killexams : Network to Code Becomes Official Cisco Select Advisor Partner

As a Select Advisor, Network to Code is strategically poised to enhance the value of customer investments in Cisco technologies.

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / February 6, 2023 / Network to Code, the global leader in Network Automation services and solutions, is pleased to announce it has been named a Cisco Advisor Select Partner to provide Cisco customers with greater network automation support.

As a Cisco Select Advisor, Network to Code enables customers to extract more value from their current and future investments in the Cisco product portfolio. NTC is in a unique position to guide customers through addressing their current business challenges and maintaining the role of "Trusted Advisor" for customers who are on their journey towards network automation.

Enterprise networks have undergone unforeseen strains in accurate years, due largely to the rise of remote and hybrid working environments. With more enterprise networks seeing more users, devices, and applications relying on network stability and performance, there have been increased reliability and security concerns. Network automation improves the stability and resilience of networks while also helping reduce labor time and costs for common tasks. It allows network teams to put the focus back on higher value project-based work.

"Network automation is becoming essential in today's world, especially for enterprises," said John Marchese, CEO of Network to Code. "From business to education to leisure, so much of our daily lives relies on network connectivity, making the need for a reliable and secure network even more critical."

"Many Cisco customers are already engaged with Network to Code using our Enterprise Open Source network automation solutions, and we look forward to expanding that with our new partnership," said Jason Edelman, Founder and CTO of Network to Code. "Our current solutions streamline network operations with a focus on creating a Single Source of Truth across multi-controller environments powered by Nautobot, Network to Code's leading open source Network Source of Truth Platform." Beyond Source of Truth applications, Network to Code has already built numerous solutions from Compliance and Upgrades to ChatOps with Webex Teams.

To learn more about the breadth and depth of Network to Code's services and solutions, visit www.networktocode.com.

Network to Code, Monday, February 6, 2023, Press release picture

To learn more about the Cisco partner network, visit www.cisco.com/c/en/us/partners/connect-with-a-partner.html.

About Network to Code:

Network to Code is a network automation services and solutions provider that helps companies transform the way their networks are deployed, managed, and consumed. Through managed and professional services, Network to Code enables enterprises across all industries and geographies to deploy data-driven network automation based on NetDevOps principles to Boost reliability, efficiency and security while reducing costs.

NTC is the sponsor of Nautobot, an open source Network Source of Truth and Network Automation Platform with a growing ecosystem of integrations and partners. Nautobot is the leading Network Source of Truth for Enterprises looking to adopt a data-driven approach to network automation and a platform that complements any network automation journey.

Get started at https://www.networktocode.com

Media Contact:

Luke Benfield
York IE
luke@york.ie

SOURCE: Network to Code

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Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/network-code-becomes-official-cisco-140000186.html
Killexams : Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.

Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.

Cisco Duo enhancements strengthen access control

The cloud-based Duo service helps protect organizations against cyber breaches by using adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify the identity of users and the health of their devices before granting access to applications.

Cisco paid $2.35 billion in 2018 for Duo and has been enhancing and expanding its use across its product line. Most recently, Cisco rolled out Duo Passwordless Authentication with support for biometric authentication, including Microsoft Windows and Apple Macs. Passwordless authentication is aimed at reducing the risk of phishing attacks and their ability to utilize stolen passwords as well as addressing MFA fatigue.

With that in mind, the Duo service now also supports features called Remembered Devices and Wi-Fi Fingerprint that allow users to avoid repeated authentications as they move from application to application in trusted operations. Another new feature, called Checked Push, enables Duo to recognize behavior from known attack patterns and require the user to enter a code instead of just pushing a button to confirm.

Using MFA fatigue as an attack vector has led to some high profile breaches, said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of security at Cisco. “Attackers have built an attack that will look like an MFA request on your phone, but it's actually a way to get into the network,” he said. “So rather than have users mindlessly clicking through MFA requests, we have added the ability to intelligently and selectively let customers set a security policy that reduces that possibility.”

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:04:00 -0600 en text/html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3687139/cisco-security-upgrades-strengthen-access-control-risk-analysis.html
Killexams : Cisco beats earnings and revenue estimates, boosts full-year guidance
Cisco supply chain issues continue to ease

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Cisco reported better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter results on Wednesday and lifted its forecast for the full year. Shares of the computer networking company initially jumped in extended trading before paring most of their gains.

Here's how the company did:

  • Earnings: 88 cents per share, adjusted, vs. 86 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
  • Revenue: $13.59 billion vs. $13.43 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

Cisco's total revenue grew 7% year over year in the quarter, which ended Jan. 28, according to a statement. Net income fell about 7% to $2.77 billion.

Some components that go in Cisco's hardware products remain constraints, but the company did see an improvement across the board, CEO Chuck Robbins said on a conference call with analysts.

"Based on the sequentials that we saw, demand remains stable," he said, although he added some sales cycles are longer than usual.

Cisco's public sector business performed more strongly than it has historically, while in the service provider category, some customers are adjusting to the better delivery of the company's products into their environments, Robbins said.

The company called for fiscal third-quarter adjusted earnings of 96 cents to 98 cents per share and 11% to 13% revenue growth. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had been looking for adjusted earnings per share of 89 cents and revenue of $13.58 billion, which implies almost 6% growth.

Cisco lifted its guidance for the 2023 fiscal year, and now expects $3.73 to $3.78 in adjusted earnings per share and 9% to 10.5% revenue growth. Both numbers are well ahead of analysts' estimates.

But Cisco said its backlog increased year over year. The backlog for both hardware and software is still considerably higher than usual for Cisco because of limited supply availability, said Scott Herren, Cisco's finance chief.

"We continue to have very low order cancellation rates, which remain below pre-pandemic levels," Herren said.

Logistics costs have come down somewhat, he said.

In the fiscal second quarter Cisco's largest business segment, Secure, Agile Networks, featuring networking switches for data centers, posted $6.75 billion in revenue. That was up 14% and more than the $6.52 billion consensus among analysts polled by StreetAccount.

The Internet for the Future unit, which includes routed optical networking hardware, contributed $1.31 billion, down 1% and just below the $1.32 billion StreetAccount consensus.

Revenue from Cisco's Collaboration division containing Webex fell by 10% to $958 million, falling short of StreetAccount's $1.06 billion consensus.

In the quarter, Cisco announced updates to its AppDynamics cloud software for application monitoring and disclosed a restructuring plan that includes changes to its real estate portfolio.

Notwithstanding the after-hours move, Cisco shares have inched about 2% higher, while the S&P 500 index is up 8% in the same time period.

WATCH: Earnings season is in full swing, and here's how to play 3 of the biggest names

Earnings season is in full swing, and here's how to play 3 of the biggest names

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Wed, 15 Feb 2023 17:23:00 -0600 en text/html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/cisco-csco-earnings-q2-2023.html
Killexams : Cisco Systems (CSCO) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO)

Q2 2023 Earnings Call

Feb 15, 2023, 4:30 p.m. ET

Contents:

  • Prepared Remarks
  • Questions and Answers
  • Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Welcome to Cisco's second quarter fiscal year 2023 financial results conference call. At the request of Cisco, today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect. Now, I would like to introduce Marilyn Mora, head of investor relations.

Ma'am, you may begin.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Welcome, everyone, to Cisco's second quarter fiscal 2023 quarterly earnings conference call. This is Marilyn Mora, head of investor relations, and I'm joined by Chuck Robbins, our chair and CEO; and Scott Herren, our CFO. By now, you should have seen our earnings press release. A corresponding webcast with slides, including supplemental information, will be made available on our website in the Investor Relations section following the call.

Income statements, full GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation information, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and other financial information can also be found in the Financial Information section of our Investor Relations website. Throughout this conference call, we will be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results, and we'll discuss product results in terms of revenue and geographic and customer results in terms of product orders unless stated otherwise. All comparisons made throughout this call will be done on a year-over-year basis. The matters we will be discussing today include forward-looking statements, including the guidance we will be providing for the third quarter and full year of fiscal 2023.

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This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and memorizing the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability.

The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cisco Systems. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

They are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically, the most accurate reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which identify important risk factors that could cause real results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. With respect to guidance, please also see the slides and press release that accompany this call for further details. Cisco will not comment on its financial guidance during the quarter unless it is done through an explicit public disclosure. I will now turn it over to Chuck.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Marilyn. I hope everyone is doing well. With the tremendous results we delivered in the first half of the year, fiscal '23 is shaping up to be very strong, fueled by demand for our cloud-driven networking portfolio, our continued business transformation success, and an improving supply situation, thanks in large part to our team's aggressive actions. Before I dive into additional details on the quarter, I wanted to take a moment to say how incredibly proud I am of the team here at Cisco.

While the environment we're operating in remains dynamic, Cisco is better positioned today than at any time since I became CEO almost eight years ago. We have reshaped and transformed the company and our portfolio while remaining highly disciplined, both financially and operationally. This gives me great confidence that we will continue to succeed in the long term. Now, I'll touch on the quarter in more detail.

Our Q2 financial results were strong as we again exceeded the high end of our guidance ranges. We delivered our second-highest quarterly revenue of $13.6 billion up 7% and record non-GAAP EPS at $0.88. We also delivered solid ARR growth, sequential non-GAAP margin expansion, and record non-GAAP net income. In terms of our business model shift, we continue to make great progress with 10% growth in software revenue and with software subscription revenue up 15%.

Recurring revenue also now represents 44% of our total revenue. In addition, we have built up nearly $32 billion in remaining performance obligations, and our backlog remains robust. Even as we drew down backlog by 6% sequentially, our total backlog still grew year over year. These metrics, along with our increasing visibility, led us to raise our full-year outlook, which Scott will address in a moment.

This quarter, we also achieved record operating cash flow, enabling today's dividend increase and the buyback of over $1 billion. We continue to deliver on our commitment to drive returns to our shareholders. Let me also provide an update on the supply situation. While components for a few product areas remain highly constrained, we did see an overall improvement.

Combined with the aggressive actions our supply chain and engineering teams took to redesign hundreds of our products, we increased product deliveries and saw significant reductions in customer lead times. As our product deliveries increased, channel inventories also declined as our partners were able to complete customer projects. Like I shared last quarter, as supply constraints ease and lead times shorten, we expect orders would normalize from previously elevated levels as customers return to more typical buying patterns. As a result, sequential quarterly order growth is a better indicator than year-over-year growth.

And in Q2, despite improving lead times, our quarter-over-quarter order growth was again in line with our historical ranges across most of our geographies and customer markets. With that, let me touch on what we're seeing with customer demand. In our customer markets, we experienced normal double-digit sequential growth in both our enterprise and commercial markets, while public sector performed better than we have seen historically. Within our service provider business, our order rate was below accurate sequentials as some customers are absorbing the improved delivery of our products into their production environments.

We saw another consecutive quarter of rapid adoption of our 400 gig, Cisco 8000, and Silicon One platforms. This reflects the ongoing investments our customers are making in our innovative solutions and AI-optimized infrastructure. Within web-scale, while we saw overall slowing due to normalizing product lead times, two of our largest customers grew their orders with us over 40% in the first half of fiscal '23. We continue to take share in this space.

And over the past few years, we've grown web-scale cloud infrastructure from effectively zero into a multibillion-dollar run rate business. I'm incredibly pleased about the overall progress we've made as we are continuing to win more and more use cases within their infrastructure. We are also still at the beginning of what we believe to be a massive growth opportunity going forward. While we continue to closely monitor the global macroeconomic conditions, the overall demand environment remains steady and on par with Q1, and our pipeline and win rates remain stable.

Looking at the broader landscape, digital transformation, and hybrid cloud remain top areas of spend, which is fueling growth across our portfolio. Many customers have told me that while their spend levels may be slowing in some areas, technology remains essential as it is vital to their overall business resilience, competitive differentiation, and success. In fact, Gartner and IDC's most accurate surveys make it clear that technology budgets are growing as they forecast IT spend to increase in the mid- to high single digits in 2023. We're also seeing many customers moving ahead with their hybrid work, AI, and ML investments while building the modern infrastructure they need to deliver on their objectives.

IoT has also been accelerating. We saw record revenue growth in Q2 as customers look to connect their industrial systems in order to optimize power consumption, automation, and efficiency. Lastly, cybersecurity and full stack observability remains strategic priorities where we continue to invest and innovate. From a product revenue perspective, we saw strong double-digit growth for Catalyst 9000, enterprise routing, Wireless, Meraki, Duo, and ThousandEyes, reflecting the ongoing investments our customers are making to modernize their infrastructure to rapidly digitize and secure their organizations.

We are increasing our investments in our cloud management platforms that deliver the simplicity our customers need. You will see us continue to bring AI and ML into those platforms to further simplify how networks are managed. For example, in Q2, we announced several new innovations across our cloud-managed networking and security portfolios that offer greater visibility with AI-driven insights, enable secure connectivity, and deliver our customers the ability to simplify their IT operations. Last week, we introduced a preview our cloud-native full-stack observability platform.

the first network visibility solution to support open telemetry. This platform brings together our ThousandEyes and AppDynamics capabilities for unmatched data correlation and insights from the user to the application to the network. The network security and policy management, our unified SASE solution, Cisco Plus SecureConnect, now supports integration into Cisco SD-WAN fabrics using Viptela technology, as well as our existing Meraki SD-WAN fabric. We also introduced new flexible, more powerful, and energy-efficient servers, which not only help lower cost but also help our customers meet their sustainability goals, an increasingly critical area for most of our customers.

To close, I'm proud of what we achieved this quarter. We delivered a strong financial performance, innovated across our portfolio, and continue to make great progress on our business transformation. In addition, the increased visibility we have from almost $32 billion in RPO, a healthy backlog and pipeline, and improving supply deliver us the confidence to raise our full-year outlook. We expect those same factors to continue into fiscal year '24, giving us conviction in our ability to deliver on our commitments.

The modern, resilient, and secure networks we are building serve as the backbone of our customers' technology strategy. Cisco is well positioned to benefit from multiyear investment cycles with our market-leading hardware, as well as our innovative software and services. Together, these allow our customers to digitize rapidly, secure their environments and achieve their sustainability goals, all while delivering differentiated experiences. Now I'll turn it over to Scott.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Chuck. We delivered another strong quarter and exceeded both our top- and bottom-line expectations driven by our focused execution, continued success of our business transformation, and improved availability of supply as the actions our supply chain team have taken over the last several quarters are bearing fruit. Total revenue was $13.6 billion, up 7%. Non-GAAP net income was a record $3.6 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share, also a record, was $0.88.

Looking at our Q2 revenue in more detail. Total product revenue was $10.2 billion up 9%. Service revenue was $3.4 billion, up 2%. Within product revenue, secure Agile Networks performed very well, up 14%.

Switching revenue grew in the double digits with strength in campus switching driven by our Catalyst 9000 and Meraki offerings. While data center switching declined slightly, we saw strong growth in our Nexus 9000 offerings. Enterprise routing had double-digit growth driven primarily by strength in our Catalyst 8000 Series routers, SD-WAN, and IoT routing. Wireless had very strong double-digit growth with strength across the entire portfolio.

Internet for the Future was down 1%, driven by declines in optical and Edge. We saw growth in our Cisco 8000 offering and double-digit growth in web-scale. Collaboration was down 10%, driven by declines in meetings and collaboration devices, slightly offset by growth in contact center. End-to-end security was up 7% driven by our unified threat management and zero trust offerings.

Optimized application experiences was up 11%, driven by double-digit growth in our SaaS-based offering ThousandEyes. We made solid progress on our transformation metrics as we shift our business to more recurring revenue-based offerings, driven by higher levels of software and subscriptions. We saw strong performance in our ARR of $23.3 billion, which increased 6% with product ARR growth of 11%. Total software revenue was $4.2 billion, an increase of 10%, with soft subscription revenue up 15%.

84% of the software revenue was subscription-based, which is up four percentage points year over year. We continue to have $2 billion of software orders in our product backlog. Total subscription revenue was $6 billion, an increase of 9%. Total subscription revenue represented 44% of total revenue.

And RPO was $31.8 billion up 4%. Product RPO increased 7% and service RPO increased 2%, and total short-term RPO grew to $16.9 billion. While total product orders were down 22%, they compared against 34% growth in Q2 fiscal '22, which is one of the largest quarters for product orders in our history. We saw year-over-year declines across our geographies and customer markets.

Sequentially, total product order growth was in line with our historical growth rates. Within our customer markets, we experienced double-digit sequential growth in both enterprise and commercial, and public sector was better than we've seen historically. We continue to have very low order cancellation rates, which remain below pre-pandemic levels. Total non-GAAP gross margin came in at the high end of our guidance range at 63.9% down 160 basis points and up 90 basis points sequentially.

Product gross margin was 62.1% down 220 basis points year over year and up 110 basis points sequentially. Service gross margin was 69.1% up 30 basis points. In our product gross margin, the year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by higher component and other costs. This was partially offset by our strong product mix and positive pricing as the benefits of the actions we took in the prior fiscal year flowed through as we shifted our backlog.

Non-GAAP operating margin came in at the high end of our guidance range at 32.5% down 180 basis year over year and up 70 basis points sequentially. The year-over-year decline was primarily driven by the higher component and other costs that I just mentioned. Backlog for both our hardware and software products continue to far exceed historical levels. As we navigated a complex supply environment, we were able to draw down total backlog by 6% sequentially, although it still grew year over year.

Just a reminder, backlog is not included as part of our $31.8 billion in remaining performance obligations. Combined, our significant product backlog and RPO continued to provide great visibility to our top line. Shifting to the balance sheet. We ended Q2 with total cash, cash equivalents, and investments of $22.1 billion.

We had record operating cash flow for the quarter of $4.7 billion up 93% year-over-year driven by strong collections, and we deferred our Q2 federal tax payments due to the IRS tax relief related to the California floods. We expect to pay these federal taxes by the end of the fiscal year. We returned $2.8 billion to shareholders during the quarter, which was comprised of $1.6 billion for our quarterly cash dividend and $1.3 billion of share repurchases. We also ended the quarter with $13.4 billion in remaining stock repurchase authorization.

Today, we announced that we are raising our quarterly dividend by $0.01 to $0.39 per share, which represents our 13th consecutive increase. This reinforces our commitment to returning a minimum of 50% of free cash flow to our shareholders annually and confidence in the strength and stability of our ongoing cash flows. To summarize, we had a great quarter, delivering better-than-expected top and bottom-line performance. We continue to make progress on our business model shift to more recurring revenue while making strategic investments in innovation to capitalize on our significant growth opportunities.

Turning now to our guidance. Our guidance ranges reflect our strong pipeline and significant visibility driven by healthy backlog, ARR, RPO, and improving availability of supply as we continue to benefit from the actions our supply chain team have taken over the last several quarters. We expect those same factors will continue into fiscal 2024, giving us greater visibility and confidence in our longer-term goals. For fiscal Q3, our guidance is we expect revenue growth to be in the range of 11% to 13%.

We anticipate the non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 63.5% to 64.5%. Our non-GAAP operating margin is expected to be in the range of 33% to 34%, and our non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to range from $0.96 to $0.98. There's also a significant change to our full-year fiscal '23 revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share guidance driven by these same factors. For fiscal year '23, we are raising our expectations for revenue growth to be in the range of 9% to 10.5% year over year.

Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to range from $3.73 to $3.78. In both our Q3 and full-year guidance, we're assuming a non-GAAP effective tax rate of 19%. I'll now turn it back to Marilyn so we can move into the Q&A.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Scott. I'm going to turn it over to Chuck just for a few comments before we start the Q&A.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Before we get into Q&A, I just wanted to send our condolences to those impacted by the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. It's been absolutely devastating to watch as the death toll has climbed, and we're working closely with our teams in the region to deliver them support and help on the ground as much as we can. We just want to let them know that we're all thinking about them, and we're here to help.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Chuck. Michelle, let's go ahead and open up the queue for questions and answers.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

Thank you, Marilyn. Ittai Kidron, you may go ahead, with Oppenheimer and Company.

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Thanks, guys. Nice quarter, nice guide. I guess the big question is when you think about the outlook that you have for continued supply chain improvement, how long would the order backlog normalization process is going to take, in your view? And maybe you can quantify in the quarter itself or perhaps on the guidance -- when you look at the guidance, how much of that is coming from your ability to fulfill more versus the true underlying demand? I'm just trying to gauge for how long you can kind of keep this going at above-normal growth rates for yourself.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Ittai, thanks for the question. and shockingly enough, that was the first question I expected. So, let me just summarize sort of what we're seeing, and then I can deliver you more detail.

But number one, let's start with the fact that our demand is stable. And that's first. Based on the sequentials that we saw, demand remained stable. And in fact, if you look out at our Q3 forecast, which we normally wouldn't deliver you, the current forecast in Q3 is also in line with historical ranges of sequentials.

So, that's the first piece. The second thing is, as Scott said, while we -- backlog came down 6% sequentially. It was up year over year, and we expect that we will end the fiscal year even with the guidance we gave you today with a backlog that's roughly double what we would normally end the year with. The other thing to take into consideration is the business transformation with 44% of our revenue now recurring really helps a great deal.

And we have $23 billion of ARR, which we can actually renew in the next 12 months. So, if you go back eight or nine years ago, we might have had to take orders for 75% of our revenue in any given quarter. And now we have 44% of our revenue coming from the balance sheet and recurring revenue. So, all that said, we actually believe that we'll still be able to deliver.

We're confident that we'll deliver positive growth in fiscal '24, obviously, with pretty significant comps based on the guidance that we gave today.

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

OK. I guess when I think normal, given your historical ranges before the pandemic, I always think about four to six is kind of the range plus/minus that you run at. Is it fair to say that from here on anything above is kind of order -- eating into backlog? And while your backlog is double, that can still mean that you can run above normal ranges for at least a couple of years, it sounds like, unless something unusual happens. Am I misinterpreting your comments?

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Scott, do you want to take that?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

No, not at all, Ittai. But what I would say is it's obviously too early for us to guide fiscal '24. What we wanted to deliver you confidence is we have better visibility than we've ever had in the past, both from the backlog and the $17 billion -- almost $17 billion of RPO that's current, that's going to turn into revenue in the next 12 months in the ARR. And we're going to roll in backlog that's roughly double what it normally would be at the end of the year.

So, we have good confidence in where we're headed in fiscal '24. I think it's a bit too early given where we are in the year just at the end of our second quarter for us to be a little more precise on that.

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

We appreciate it. Good luck. Thanks.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Ittai. Next question, please.

Operator

Amit Daryanani from Evercore. You may go ahead, sir.

Amit Daryanani -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

Thanks. Congrats on a really good quarter for mine as well. I guess maybe if I think about the secure agile networking segment growing at 14%, that's really notable. And I don't think the industry is growing nearly close to that pace.

So, I'd love to understand, I mean, do you think you're starting to see some share gains come back to with Cisco, especially as the supply chain start to improve? Is that a tailwind that you see and perhaps that continues for the rest of the year? Maybe you could just talk about that and also maybe talk about how campus did within that segment, that would be helpful.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Amit. Let me take the share question because I think I've said on several calls that, obviously, market share is reflective of revenue, and with our backlog that as we began to ship certain products that we would be a gainer of market share, and we certainly expect that when these numbers are digested and the new reports come out for Q4, that you'll see that to be the case. One example is, during last quarter, our wireless revenue was up 57% year over year. And I suspect that that's going to be a share gainer.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that market share is inexact. I would tell you that when we ship products into the web-scale infrastructure space, as an example, it goes into our routing reports and many of our competitors put it in data center switching. So, it's very difficult in some cases to get complete apples-to-apples, but I do believe that as we continue to ship our backlog that we will be gaining share. Do you want to talk a little bit about the campus switching?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Sorry, I missed that part of the question.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Amit, can you repeat your question about the campus switching, the second part?

Amit Daryanani -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

Yeah. No, I was just wondering, like within this context of 14% growth that you saw in that segment, how is campus performing for you very specifically? And how is the supply chain kind of alleviated over there for you?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Campus is doing well for us. And the supply chain -- while I don't want to leave the perception that supply chain just got better. Our supply chain team and our product engineering teams have worked pretty relentlessly over the last several quarters with product redesign, with qualifying alternative components, with working with our suppliers to get to their subcomponents to make sure we could free this up so that the increase in supply that's leading to some of the share gains that we're talking about is the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of people inside the company.

And I think, frankly, it puts us in a better position than many of our peers in the industry right now from a supply chain standpoint. But the longer answer -- the short answer is, yes, we're doing quite well in that space. And as we continue to deliver what we've just laid out as our guidance for the second half of this year, I think you'll continue to see share gain grow for us.

Amit Daryanani -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

Got it. That's really helpful. And I can just ask you really quick on your back-half guidance is obviously fairly impressive. But in April quarter, you're sort of implying gross margins will be down 130 basis points year over year, I think, for the April quarter.

Can you just talk about how much of a downtick you think is cyclical, things like the supply chain and logistics and so on versus structural? And what do you think normalized gross margin could look like for the company if supply chain is truly normalized? Thank you.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. The midpoint of the guide for the April quarter is about a 10-basis-point improvement from the quarter we just announced. So, we do see gross margins improving, and it's largely driven by -- it's less driven by cost. We're seeing some reduction in costs around logistics, in particular, but component costs are kind of staying where they are in most cases.

It's more driven by the fact that as we ship the backlog more and more of what we ship, reflects the price increases that we put in place last year. So, I think you'll see gross margins potentially continue to expand from where they are, maybe as much as 50 basis points in Q4.

Amit Daryanani -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

Perfect. Thank you.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Great. Thanks, Amit. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Paul Silverstein with Cowen. You may go ahead, sir.

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Thanks. Chuck and Scott, I appreciate that you all addressed in your prepared remarks the visibility demand trend issue. But -- so my apologies, but I'd ask you to revisit, especially in your enterprise business, including government and U.S. federal, I'm sure you and your team are aware of what your competitors have served.

I know, Chuck, you just addressed the market share issue. But can you deliver a bit more color in terms of the solidity of the demand and the visibility that's translating into?

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, as I said, you know, our enterprise and commercial business, which is reflective of how most of our peers represent enterprise, that was up double digits sequentially, which is in line with our historical. And public sector actually performed better than -- it was above our historical ranges during the quarter. So, the other thing I would point out is that our quarter itself from a linearity perspective was quite normal, and we actually had a -- we're unique in that we had the January month in our Q2. And one of the questions that we had was what's going to happen to budget as we enter into calendar '23.

And we clearly -- we actually finished stronger than we started the quarter. So, those are just a few data points for you. And I think if you look at what our customers are focused on right now, I mean, think about some of their top products. They've got a complete rearchitecture of their applications to be cloud-native, running in both public and/or private clouds.

They're having to rearchitect their infrastructure to actually deal with the changing traffic patterns that multi-cloud brings to them. They're dealing with hybrid work, and how do I transform our IT infrastructure for that? They're dealing with cybersecurity threats on a massive scale, and they're also all focused on sustainability, which is leading to our IoT business growing significantly as we connect industrial systems for our customers. So, if you think about those big five trends, we're actually in the middle of those with all of our customers. So, we feel good about where we are.

And the last thing I'll say is that I was in Tokyo and Singapore last week and at the same time, A lot of our -- my leadership team were in Amsterdam for Cisco Live Europe, and no one is talking about cutting technology spending right now. Everybody seems very committed to it. I think the underlying power of technology as it relates to all of our organization strategy is just too strong right now.

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Right. And, Scott, back on the margin question. I appreciate you got to walk before you run, but you're now three percentage points roughly below peak on both gross and operating in terms of the initial recovery. Any thoughts for how much of the three percentage points? Can you visually get back to 67 gross? Can you get back to 35 operating and it's just a function of time or because of the price increases with respect to semis or other things, that's just a bridge too far?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I mean, as you talk long term, there's a number of tailwinds that will come into gross margin, so not necessarily talking about our guide for fiscal '23, but longer term, there are several things that are going to be a tailwind there. One is continuing to work our way through the backlog and reflect the price increases. I think we will continue to see leverage and logistics costs, both from a reduction in the freight cost per kilo but also in the mix of how we shift between what has supply airfreight and what will go in the ocean.

So, I think we'll see some leverage there as well. I don't see a lot of our component providers outside of commodity areas like memory lining up to reduce cost to us, right? So I think it will be the combination of mix that will be beneficial to us and some cost leverage in the noncomponent areas that will drive that north.

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Do you think you can get back to 67, 35?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. So, are you asking me for a five-year forecast on gross margin, Paul? Is that where you're going?

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Yeah, long term. Long term, can you get back to that model?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Long term, there's definitely leverage to push it back to where it's been historically, for sure, and if not beyond.

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Yeah. Great. Thank you.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Paul. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. You may go ahead.

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Great. Thanks. I'm assuming as you're having conversations with customers, they're looking for more flexible subscription methods and part of your subscription transition has kind of been evolving kind of the ELA model or kind of the subscription model you guys have had. And I just wanted to get a sense of where you think you are on some of the kind of subscriptionization of some of your products and whether you are seeing a big impact to that right now and then just maybe just some commentary about how you see the M&A environment currently.

Thanks.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Meta, thank you. So, we are probably, I'd say, still in the early innings of transitioning the traditional portfolio to subscription models. The team is working hard on that right now. And we'll just continue to keep you updated.

But I think we're several quarters away from really having anything to speak about relative to the size of that business, but we're working hard on being able to deliver that. And the key is to deliver customers flexibility. Over the last seven years or so, we have disaggregated hardware and software, and silicon. We virtualized software to run on x86.

So, we want to deliver our customers whatever kinds of flexibility that they would like. So, that's the first part. On the M&A side, I would say our strategy, as you would expect, has not changed. I think the market dynamics have changed, and I think that the longer valuations remain somewhat muted from their peaks.

I think some of the companies are probably coming to more of a real position on what -- how long these valuations may exist and were prior valuations even realistic in the first place. So, we continue to stay aware of what's going on. We continue to scan the marketplace, but our strategy remains the same.

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Great. Thanks.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Chuck. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Simon Leopold with Raymond James. You may go ahead, sir.

Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst

Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to see if we could talk a little bit about the trends you're seeing in data centers. In the prepared remarks, I think you mentioned Campus was good, but data center was weak. And I guess maybe I'm looking for not just the switching part of it, but your UCS business.

And what are the broader trends? How much of that is reflective of hyperscale slowing versus the broader market? Just trying to unpack that a bit. Thank you.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I'll make a couple of comments, and Scott, I don't know if you want to deliver any detail. But I would say that our customers are increasingly balanced around how they're thinking about private cloud versus public cloud. And so, we've seen continued focus on revitalizing the private data center infrastructure. And I'll let Scott speak to -- I'm not sure on the infrastructure side or UCS, if you want to share that.

But the other thing I would point out, Simon, as I said in my comments earlier about market share, everything that we sell in the infrastructure within web-scale flows into our routing market share numbers and our routing business. So, it doesn't actually boost our data center switching the way we report it. So, it's a little bit of an apples-and-oranges issue. I just want to make sure you understood that.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

No, that's a really good point. And on UCS, if that's the root of your question, Simon, we are seeing nice growth in UCS as well. And at least based on our calculations, we feel like we're gaining share there as well.

Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst

Thanks. And then just maybe a quick follow-up. I was a little bit surprised that the metric of hardware attached software in backlog is $2 billion, same as it was in the prior quarter. I would have guessed it would have come down with the basically improvement of shipping the hard -- associated hardware.

So, maybe I don't understand that value? Or you could talk a little bit to why that $2 billion didn't come down with the extra shipments of the related hardware.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. It's a great question, Simon. And we actually did see -- if you noticed, our overall software revenue grew 10% this quarter, so back to double-digit growth. And some of that growth is on the back of shipping some of the backlog out, both the hardware and the software that's had in backlog.

So, we are seeing the benefit of shipping that out. At the same time, as Chuck said earlier, demand remains steady. And so, our overall backlog, while it came down only about 6% sequentially, there's still a significant amount of software stock in that backlog, some of it attached to hardware.

Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst

And software as a total percent of revenue or product revenue, that metric, where is that now?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Just for software, it's in the 30% range. Overall, we're in the 44% range.

Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst

Thank you very much.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

All right. Thanks. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Sami Badri from Credit Suisse. You may go ahead, sir.

Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

Hi. Thank you. I had one quick one and a follow-up. The first one is on just the data center switching redesign.

You guys made several mentions regarding supply and the team kind of working hard to get redesign through. But does that actually mean the data center switching portfolio is now completed with redesign and that part really did drive the better revenue guidance for the year? So that's my first question. The other one is we've seen several companies report elongated lead times for sales cycles and extra signatures and all these other elements. And I appreciate, Chuck, you did hit on the fact that you aren't seeing any kind of tech spend get cut.

But are you seeing some kind of resistance or slowdown as far as sales cycles impacting the speed at which you guys have historically done business? And I take into account also -- I appreciate your comment regarding linearity. But I just wanted to kind of ask this question to get it through.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Let me take the second one first, and then, Scott, you can talk about the data center switching redesign. We absolutely are seeing some elongated sales cycles. What our teams have told me is that, in many cases, there are extra signatures required. We just seem to, in general, be getting them.

It just takes a little bit longer. But look, it's a complex world right now. But if you look back at historical sort of what we would consider a bit of a crisis or a complex world environment, I've experienced demand falling off a cliff, and we obviously haven't seen that in the current situation. Scott, do you want to talk about the redesign?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Just to finish up on that, pipeline looks strong. Close rates still look good. So, we're not seeing a huge difference there.

There is, in some cases, a slight elongation. On the redesign, that's absolutely contributed to the growth that we're seeing, particularly in secure agile networks, less so from -- in terms of releasing the next successor product, more being able to design around problematic components that we couldn't get supply of. And as we work those redesigns to build the product around components, we can get our hands on, that's what we're talking about when we talk about the redesign. And so, there's no question, that's driven some of the growth that you saw in the quarter we just announced.

We'll continue to drive the significant growth that we've put out for the second half. And to be clear, we will continue to see growth into fiscal '24. All the trends we've talked about that are driving the uptick that you see in our guidance in the second half of this year, those trends continue into fiscal '24, and we continue to expect nice growth there. I just think it's a little too early to start to quantify that and deliver you a guide.

Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

Thank you.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. George Notter from Jefferies. You may go ahead, sir.

George Notter -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Hi, guys. Thanks very much. I guess I wanted to ask about your impressions of backlog and product orders relative to three months ago. And think I have this correct.

About three months ago, you guys were talking about if product orders were down 10% for the year, then your product backlog at fiscal year-end would be two to three times higher than the normal kind of $4 billion or $5 billion range. And Chuck, I think you were quick to say that it didn't feel like a 10% order decline was in the cards for you. So, it feels now like you are going to burn more backlog than you were thinking previously, and orders will be a bit worse than previous. Am I perceiving that correctly? And what are your thoughts there? Thank you.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, George. I'll take that, Chuck, and then you can jump in. I don't think it is burning down backlog. We clearly are -- the good news is we're able to ship more of the backlog.

That's good news for our customers. They're waiting for these components. They've got projects that they're holding up that they need to get done. It's good news for our channels in a sense that the channel is sitting on, in some case, partial shipments.

They need that last box, so they can go out and implement that and relieve some of the pressure on their own working capital. So, it's not -- I'm responding to the burning down backlog. This is good news, our ability to shift the backlog, and that's what you see reflected there in the guide down -- or sorry, in the guide up that we have in the second half of the year. We have -- what you see now is a significantly higher revenue projection for the second half of the year than we had before.

And some of that clearly is our ability to ship backlog because of the great job our team has done to free up supply.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

And I would say on the demand side, if I go back 90 days, I would say, in general, I think there was more risk, at least there felt like there was more risk. And when I talk to my customers, there's more uncertainty. And even when you hear -- listen to the news and we talk -- I talk to my colleagues, we were in Davos, it feels like the longer we go without seeing some major shift, then the better our customers are feeling. So, obviously, we're not immune to anything, and we'll have to continue to monitor it.

But after traveling in Asia last week, our team being in Europe, I actually saw customers in New York while I was here this week, and customers are moving forward.

George Notter -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Great. That's all. Thank you very much.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, George. Next question.

Operator

Thank you. David Vogt with UBS. You may go ahead, sir.

David Vogt -- UBS -- Analyst

Great. Thank you, guys. And I apologize if you covered it. My line cut out a little bit more.

Scott, I'm just trying to clarify the order versus the backlog comment. I think, if I'm not mistaken, your run rate backlog had been sort of roughly $5 billion as you exited fiscal year. So, are you suggesting to us that the backlog comes down by about $3.5 billion over the next several quarters? And if that's the case, if I just kind of back that out of your guidance, would that imply sort of that the business is effectively flat year over year ex the backlog drawdown as we exit '23 into '24? And then I have a quick follow-up. 

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. So, let me try and walk through some of the moving parts there, David. It's a great question. What we said previously is we thought we would end the year with somewhere between two and three times normal backlog.

And normal backlog, as we said last quarter, is between $4 billion and $5 billion at the end of the year. What we now see is that it's still going to be roughly double what that same range. So, there's definitely our ability to ship some out of the backlog, which is, again, great news for our customers and our partners. The one piece that's missing in your equation is, as we ship the backlog, remember, we said there's more than $2 billion of software in there.

A lot of that software is ratable. So, as soon as we ship it, it doesn't all drop into the revenue stream. It ends up dropping into deferred revenue and being recognized over time. So, there's a -- you have to consider not just the reduction in backlog, what's the uptick in the revenue guide but also how much of this is going to contribute to growth in deferred revenue.

That may be the piece that you're missing.

David Vogt -- UBS -- Analyst

Got it. And then maybe just as a quick follow-up, so as we enter, let's say, the next fiscal year, I mean, given your excellent work on supply chain, and the team has done a phenomenal job, would that imply -- I mean, basically, we could be back at normalized backlog within a quarter, maybe two at the worst-case scenario if trends hold consistent where we are today. Is that a reasonable expectation?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Rather than try to say it's a quarter or it's two quarters, I do expect it to normalize in fiscal '24.

David Vogt -- UBS -- Analyst

Great. Thanks, guys.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Tal Liani with Bank of America. You may go ahead, sir.

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Great. He stole my thunder with the previous question. That was exactly my question. So, I want to I understand -- I want to understand something just a clarification on what you just answered.

So, at the minimum, the decline in the backlog was $600 million at the minimum because end of year is going to be $8 million to $10 million. Take 6% of that and the backlog is now higher. So, that means that the minimum year backlog declined $600 million. And that means that product growth, we should take out some of the $600 million because some of it goes into deferred revenue.

Am I correct with what you just answered?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Well, you're close. Let me run through it again, Tal, and if it's still not clear, we can catch in the follow-up. The 6% was the decline in backlog from Q1 to Q2, right? So, we were able to work off about 6% of the backlog that we came into the quarter with.

What we've said is, at the time that we gave you that Q2 guide in the full year, the previous full-year guide, we expected to end the year with somewhere between two and three times our normal backlog. We're not saying it's going to be roughly double the normal backlog. Some of that, obviously, will ship out and will be a part of the significant guide-up that we've given you in second-half revenue. Some of it, instead of turning into immediate revenue, will go into deferred revenue and be recognized ratably over time.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

And show up in RPO.

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

I hope that's -- yes, it will show up in deferred revenue and RPO. I hope that's clear. Tai. If not, we can follow up.

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Yes. Very clear. So, my question -- I want to go back to the basics and understand -- last quarter, we were all concerned about environment slowing down. We don't hear you saying environment continues to slow down.

We didn't hear Arista saying it. We didn't hear you saying that service providers were weak. Can you take us through the big customer account and tell us what is the situation of spending with your enterprise customers, commercial customers, service provider customers? Did the environment further deteriorate from the previous quarter? Or did it stabilize? And does it make you think that at least the trends so far, the year would continue to be normal on a sequential basis? Or do you expect some more deterioration going forward?

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Tal. So, on the enterprise and commercial space, we saw a double-digit sequential growth, which is in line with what we've seen historically. And as I said, public sector was actually higher than historical ranges, and federal -- U.S. federal was extremely strong.

during the quarter from a demand perspective. On the service provider side, I think you're seeing many of our competitors and peers, some of them anyway, don't deliver order data. And so, I think for us, those customers are the ones who did the most planning for long-term ordering. So, as lead times begin to come down, we would expect them to change their ordering patterns and they've already got six to 12 months' worth of consumption lined up in the backlog.

So, we'll see that normalize over the next few quarters. I will say in the web-scale space, there are roughly 35 use cases or franchises within the largest players, and we've actually been designed into 18 of those at this point. And we are very confident that we'll continue to get designed in. I got a note today that we had just got noticed about a new design win today.

And so, we're still very optimistic long term. We just think it's a short-term normalization for our service provider space.

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Got it. layoffs and the economic slowdown, my question was whether these factors you see an impact on your business on orders or they stabilized from previous quarter.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, you mean layoffs in -- like in our customers?

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Yes, yes, across the industry.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Well, if you think about what occurred, there was a lot of companies that had a massive surge in employment, and we didn't. But I think the thing that we're seeing right now is that we've seen the sequential growth be in line and some -- like it was toward the lower end. So, it's not performing at the highest end, but I think that it's in range.

And if you -- and I also shared that in Q3, our current forecast is also in line sequentially with historical ranges, which we normally don't give. We just wanted you guys to have that visibility. So, look, it's certainly an uncertain time, and I'm not -- I don't want to paint a picture that we're immune and I don't want to paint a picture that every customer is spending everywhere on everything. But we've been able to maintain and continue to see our customers moving forward with projects.

And the one thing that was really encouraging for me was to see January as strong as it was, given our -- the uncertainty around '23 budgets.

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Tal. Next question.

Operator

Tim Long with Barclays. You may go ahead, sir.

Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst

Thank you. Just hoping I can get two in here. One, could you talk a little bit about, obviously, the enterprise campus is still very strong. But I think traditionally, that's kind of a GDP-ish type of business that has been running above that.

And it sounds like your confidence for next year is pretty strong as well. So maybe, Chuck, any insights like what's kind of different there? Are we starting to decouple from like macro GDP for the campus networking fees? Any thoughts there would be great. And then second, obviously, a lot of excitement out there about AI, ChatGPT, all that stuff. Just curious what you think for your data center and cloud businesses, what kind of impact if there's kind of more of an arms race with big customers around AI, what that would mean for switching and routing business for you guys? Thank you.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Tim. So, first one, on enterprise campus, I do think that the pandemic was a great educator for our customers about the need to maintain modernized infrastructure because moving into the pandemic, I think it became quite obvious to many of our customers that they had not been updating, and they had -- they were sweating assets a little longer. So, that's one thing that's shifted. The second is we're really seeing -- these trends of multi-cloud, the trend of hybrid work, and the overall rearchitecture of their networks.

If you really think about what -- how we built networks for 20 years, we built it on a premise that we have branches and we have a private data center, and all the traffic flows are very understood. Now I have to upgrade my entire infrastructure to deal with this brand-new world that I live in, supporting hybrid work, supporting hybrid cloud, etc. So, I think that's been driving a lot of this, as well as safety in the office, IoT, creating new experiences to get our employees back to work, etc. So, that's what I think has been driving a lot of the enterprise campus stuff.

As it relates to your second question around the AI play, I think that, look, these AI networks that are being built, whether it's in web-scale or whether we have some of our largest enterprise customers that are building AI networks and training AI algorithms, these are -- like in the web-scale space, they're like bigger than the core infrastructure networks that they're running, which was astonishing to me when I learned that. And the network performance required is three to four times what they've historically needed. And so, this is a massive opportunity for us and we're in active discussions with lots of customers around it. And so, we do think that this shift is going to create a good opportunity for us in the future.

Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst

OK. Thank you. Very helpful.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Tim. Next question.

Operator

Thank you. Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. You may go ahead, sir.

Samik Chatterjee -- JPMorgan Chase and Company -- Analyst

Yep. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the strong guide. Maybe if I could just quickly hit on two of the product areas post security, what sort of benefits are you seeing given your broad portfolio there in terms of customers looking to maybe some level of -- consolidation just given your position as a more broader security portfolio supplier.

And what sort of benefit does supply eases, maybe on the firewall side, should we expect creative to revenue growth -- and a similar question on Internet for the Future segment seems like a bit more supply constrained than other segments. But what sort of are you -- what are you seeing on the supply side there?

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

OK. I'll take security and you can take the supply side. So, I think that -- look, all of our customers definitely want to consolidate their security infrastructure. They've got 40, 50 different vendors, and trying to correlate these threats is very difficult and it's just -- you can't add enough people.

So, our teams right now are heads down working on some new capabilities that we're going to be bringing out over the next 12 to 18 months, and some of that is focused on exactly that, how do we consolidate and how do we create the ability to correlate threats in real time much more effectively. And so, we think that you're probably going to start seeing the benefit of that three, four quarters out. So, the team's got work to do. We've hired a significant amount of outside talent.

We've invested heavily in this space. So, while we may see -- we may not see the growth that you want to see in the near term, but you will see this begin to accelerate in FY '24. I think that we'll -- we're playing a long game here and really believe that there's a lot of consolidation that we can drive over the next few years. Scott?

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Internet for the Future, Samik, it is one of the spaces. We've worked so hard and done so much across our entire product portfolio. So, we've made great progress, in many cases.

I would say Internet for the future is one of the spaces where we're still -- we've improved lead times there, but we're still not back to more normal lead times in that space. What I'd also say, though, is we have already picked up orders just in the last several weeks from some of our peers that are also selling into that same space who couldn't meet demand. And those orders came to us instead. So, while -- it's a space we continue to work on.

And while we're seeing improvement, it's not where we want it to be, I feel like we're performing pretty well on the supply side and Internet for the Future.

Samik Chatterjee -- JPMorgan Chase and Company -- Analyst

Thank you.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

All right. That wraps up our Q&A. I'm going to turn it over to Chuck for some closing remarks.

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, first off, I just want to thank everybody for spending time with us today and also really thank our teams. They delivered on very strong results. I want to thank the supply chain and our engineering teams for quarter after quarter after quarter of hard work and redesigns, over 100 product redesigns, aggressive actions to get us to the position we're in today, the entire company for the progress we've made on our business transformation. And I'll just leave you with our feeling that our demand has remained stable.

The business transformation is contributing significantly our backlog. All of those deliver us the visibility and confidence in the future. I think the relevance of our portfolio, given the most pressing needs of our customers, is as high as it's been in a very long time, and I'm super proud of what our teams have accomplished. So, look forward to talking to you in the future, and thanks for joining us today.

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Chuck. Cisco's next quarterly earnings conference call, which will reflect our fiscal 2023 third-quarter results, will be on Wednesday, May 17, 2023, at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

This concludes today's call. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to the Cisco Investor Relations Group, and we thank you very much for joining today's call.

Operator

Thank you for participating on today's conference call. If you would like to listen to the call in its entirety, you may call 866-3614941. For participants dialing from outside the U.S., please dial 203369-0189. [Operator signoff]

Duration: 0 minutes

Call participants:

Marilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations

Chuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Scott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Amit Daryanani -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

Paul Silverstein -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst

Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst

George Notter -- Jefferies -- Analyst

David Vogt -- UBS -- Analyst

Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Tim Long -- Barclays -- Analyst

Samik Chatterjee -- JPMorgan Chase and Company -- Analyst

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Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:30:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/cisco-systems-csco-q2-2023-earnings-call-transcript/ar-AA17xB8Q
Killexams : Cisco forecast raise allays tech spending fears, lifts shares

By Yuvraj Malik

(Reuters) -Cisco Systems Inc on Wednesday raised its full-year earnings forecast and delivered strong second-quarter results, indicating that spending on network infrastructure was staying resilient in the face of an economic slowdown.

The maker of routers and other products that run computer networks and the internet said customers were keeping investments steady in systems related to cloud, artificial intelligence and tools for hybrid work.

The company is also benefiting from the easing of pandemic-driven supply chain constraints, which plagued its business last year and resulted in significant inventory buildup.

"Cisco is better positioned today than at any time since I became CEO almost eight years ago," Chuck Robbins said in a post-earnings analyst call. Shares of the company were 3% higher after earlier jumping 12% in extended trading.

For fiscal 2023, Cisco said it expects revenue growth of 9% to 10.5%, and adjusted per share earnings between $3.73 to $3.78. It had previously forecast revenue growth of 4.5% to 6.5% and earnings per share of $3.51 to $3.58.

Its second-quarter adjusted earnings of 88 cents per share and revenue of $13.59 billion were both higher than market estimates pooled by Refinitiv.

"This is very strong growth and shows that the company may finally be exiting a difficult period related to supply-chain challenges," said Scott Raynovich, chief analyst at Futuriom.

Cisco said it reduced backlog 6% sequentially, while remaining performance obligations (RPO), a metric that denotes contractual revenue that will be recognized in the future, was $31.8 billion as of January-end, compared to $30.9 billion in October.

Cisco's strong performance comes at a time of cost-cutting and restructuring across the U.S. technology sector in response to economic headwinds. Cisco had announced a nearly 5% workforce reduction in November.

(Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 08:10:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cisco-raises-full-revenue-growth-211157879.html
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Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) soared more than 10% in extended-hours trading after the networking giant reported fiscal second-quarter results that topped expectations and issued a healthy third-quarter forecast.

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Wed, 15 Feb 2023 07:18:00 -0600 en text/html https://seekingalpha.com/news/3936585-cisco-leaps-q2-results-guidance-surpass-expectations
Killexams : Cisco Systems earnings expected to hold steady
Cisco Systems Headquarters Office in San Jose, California

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When Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) reports its fiscal second-quarter results after the close of trading on Wednesday, the operative sentiment likely to come from the networking-equipment giant will be one of steadiness.

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Tue, 14 Feb 2023 17:00:00 -0600 en text/html https://seekingalpha.com/news/3936029-cisco-systems-earnings-expected-to-hold-steady
Killexams : Cisco Stock Rallies on Earnings Beat and Strong Outlook. It’s a Good Sign for Tech.

Cisco Systems shares were trading sharply higher after the networking equipment provider posted solid results for its fiscal second quarter ended Jan. 28, while sharply increasing its outlook for the full year.

Cisco (ticker: CSCO) now expects fiscal 2023 to be its best growth year in at least a decade. The strong earnings report and surprising outlook should provide a boost to investor sentiment on the outlook for enterprise technology spending.

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 19:25:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://www.barrons.com/articles/cisco-earnings-stock-price-2123ee4
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