Webex Usage Exceeded 500M 'Meeting Participants' in April, Says Cisco CEO

Cisco’s Webex videoconferencing platform is operating “at three times the capacity we were running at in February to manage the dramatic increase in usage growth” during the COVID-19 pandemic, said CEO Chuck Robbins on a quarterly call Wednesday. “We had well over 500 million meeting participants, generating 25 billion meeting minutes in April,” he said. Cisco added “many new prospects” through free Webex trials “that we anticipate converting to revenue in the future,” he said. Many enterprise customers already had Webex licenses but “exceeded their usage” and needed to add more users, said Robbins. “We'll work with them to clean that up in the future.” The priority during the crisis was “getting them up and running and just allowing them to be productive,” he said. Cisco spent the past two years “rebuilding and modernizing the Webex architecture,” he said. “We've now gone through two months of building out capacity on a global basis. Webex was the largest platform in the world in February, and now it's three times what it was then.” The stock closed up 4.5% Thursday at $43.85.