FlexPod Friends NetApp And Cisco Scheduled Their Earnings Reports An Hour Apart

Close partners NetApp and Cisco have resumed, at least for one quarter, their coordinated release of quarterly financial reports.

Cisco has scheduled its hour-long fiscal second quarter 2017 financial analyst call at 1:30 p.m. PT on Wednesday, Feb. 15. NetApp plans to start its fiscal third quarter 2017 financial analyst call at 2:30 p.m. the same day.

Coordinating their financial analyst conference calls, which just happened to be on the same day, was a regular occurrence for the two companies who partner closely on the FlexPod converged infrastructure solution. However, that changed for the past year or so when the two started reporting their quarterly financials on different days.

[Related: IDC: Converged Systems Revenue Up, But Cautions Linger]

By coordinating their conference calls to start an hour apart, they did not step on each others' results, company executives told CRN in the past.

A NetApp spokesperson said that company had no comment. A Cisco spokesperson said nothing had changed at Cisco, which always reports its financials on a Wednesday.

The fact that the two close partners are holding their quarterly financial calls does not necessarily mean that the two have some surprise planned, even though Cisco has been thought of for years as the most likely suitor for NetApp, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and close channel partner of both vendors.

Cisco does need a storage play if it wants to be more competitive with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies, both of whom have strong server, storage, networking, and other data center infrastructure businesses, Woodall told CRN. However, he said he has not heard of any such announcement for tomorrow.

"It's an interesting observation," he said. "But I guess it's polite for strategic partners to not announce financials at the same time."

Woodall said that neither Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins nor NetApp President and CEO George Kurian called him to ask who should go first.

"If they did, I would have told them to not talk over each other," he said. "Apparently, they took the advice I would have given them."