Cisco Systems Inc. comfortably beat fiscal first-quarter expectations today thanks to higher customer spending on applications and cybersecurity tools.

The networking giant posted earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 75 cents per share. Revenue rose 8 percent from a year ago, to $13.1 billion. Wall Street was hoping for a profit of just 72 cents per share on revenue of $12.9 billion.

The strong quarter was driven by solid growth in all of Cisco’s product categories, customer segments and geographies. Cisco’s largest business segment, Infrastructure Platforms, which includes hardware such as data center switches and routers, pulled in $7.64 billion in revenue, ahead of the analyst consensus of $7.4 billion and up 9 percent from one year ago.

Meanwhile the key Application business, which includes Cisco’s collaboration tools and its AppDynamics application performance monitoring software, saw revenue rise 18 percent, to $1.42 billion. The Application business is an important one for Cisco because the company sees it as a key driver of growth going forward. Cisco’s Security segment also impressed, pulling in $651 million in revenue, up 11 percent.

“We had a strong start to fiscal 2019 and we believe our opportunity has never been greater,” Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) said in a statement. “Our strategy is working and we are well positioned with our growing and differentiated portfolio across multiple domains to bring our customers a more secure, automated and simple IT infrastructure.”

The company also broke down its revenue by geographic segment. Revenue from the Americas rose 5 percent, Asia-Pacific was up 12 percent and Europe, the Middle East and Africa up 11 percent.

The positive quarter was a boon for Cisco’s shareholders, many of whom have been waiting impatiently as the company transitions from a dependence on declining hardware sales to software subscriptions. But the strong growth across all of its business segments seems to have generated some optimism, with the company’s stock rising by more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.

“CIOs want choices and it is good to see a traditional and long-term supplier turning the corner,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “If Cisco can show demonstrable growth for the next quarters, this will dissolve some of the concerns on its prospects. Focusing on allowing enterprises run next-generation apps in a multicloud world is a good true north.”

On the news front, the first quarter was a pretty quiet one by Cisco’s standards. Still, the company found time to announce a joint hybrid cloud platform based on the Kubernetes container software orchestrator in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. Also in the quarter, Cisco announced it was baking in its security tools with its software-defined wide-area networking platform.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the company is doing a great job with Robbins at the helm. He said the latest announcements show its making good progress as it looks to diversify itself from a strictly hardware play to a security, software and services player.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done to show public cloud relevance, but its activities with AWS are encouraging,” Moorhead said.

Cisco’s guidance for the next quarter was fairly encouraging too. The company said it’s expecting a profit of 71 to 73 cents per share on revenue of $12.48 billion to $12.71 billion. Wall Street’s consensus has Cisco down for a 72-cent profit on revenue of $12.53 billion.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE