Roadster. And the courting of 21st century fox. More potential buyers for parts of that company emerge the fate of the company and what it means for overall media and shares of cisco having a great week so far. Chuck robins joins us on set in a cnbc exclusive. We start this morning with the latest potential bidders for assets of fox that include its studio, its ownership of sky, star, fx, the National Geographic channel, Regional Sports network, i could go on and on ownership of hulu, comcast our Parent Company the latest company to be in talks with fox as i reported later last night as we reported yesterday at cnbc as well for those assets in what is described by people close to the situation as an all stock deal that would in Effect Exchange comcast shares for the assets in question giving comcast potentially a much larger international component, certainly what is described as a whole if you want to think of it that way in the companys current construction largely a domestic company, giving it potential control of hulu , though it is under Consent Decree until august of next year. That expires, this deal would not close until after that comcast ownership stake and fox equals control of hulu and a number of other very important assets not to mention the studio, all of which of course has people scratching their heads when they think about the Regulatory Impact of a deal like this and whether in fact it could ever pass antitrust muster that doesnt seem to be stopping fox from entertaining and discussing this possibility. As i reported earlier, probably the next three or four weeks is when you get a decision one way or the other in terms of disney and its continuing talks and comcast continuing talks, both deals are all stock. That obviously has the effect of deferring the tax implications, which potentially is helpful and giving fox shareholders, of course, the key ones being the murdoches, others as well, the opportunity to participate to a certain extent in the scale that would be created by merging the assets with those of disney or with those of comcast. The key point being as i pointed out when we broke this story last monday, the fact that the Murdoch Family doesnt believe they can necessarily gain that scale on their own to compete with the facebooks and googles and amazons and netflixes of the world. Youre already saying theyre to the point where theyre talking stock. This is that deep. No. I added some details to the original reporting we did quite some time ago, both discussions center on deals that would be all stock. So if youre the murdoches, youre thinking, okay, all comcast stock or disney stock. I dont know, they havent value is the key here. How much what are you going to pay for all the assets is the question if you are fox, 21st century fox and the board is thinking what is the best stock. I do want to own a significant piece of comcast or own a significant piece of disney, maybe they turn to you and say which one, jim, which one . I heard the antitrust person talk yesterday what do you if fox, okay, if fox listens to what is happening, if any of these Companies Listen to what is happening, with time warner at t, then theyre wasting their time do they not realize this isnt Justice Department that has do you know, we could get a tweet any minute and the tweet could say, comcast and fox, are you kidding me theyre great people at those companies. I work for one, ill work for the other f the if there is a tweet, ill save you a lot of legal fees. It aint happening, just like greg hayes said about honeywell. It feels like people stepping on the gas just as theyre getting a yellow light. It does and it is curious. That said, as you guys well know, there are many people who are expert in antitrust law who dont believe that the government has a sufficient case to make here you never know what is going to happen in court in front of a d. C. Circuit court judge when it comes to a vertical integration. Comcast would say the descent decree was fairly onerous, they operated from under it 70 of the financial contribution from these assets is international and so comcast said they they want to be international. Theyre including the domestics assets, the cable networks, the studio, no doubt about it. But okay, let me give you time, time warner, at t, they go to they go to the federal court but they havent been sued yet. Came in monday thinking they would be sued, it is friday, they still havent been. But no antitrust person i spoke to thinks the government has a case. I know. So how about your comcast, at t goes, they win in court, comcast is ready thats right. If youre fox, do you take that risk, sign up now for a deal you dont know yes, because the antitrust department is loco youre saying two Different Things shouldnt do the deal, now youre saying you should ready to do the deal. Time warner will win in court with at t. That will get done do you think that could be a year or two away. Thats why theyre ready. That deal will take two years to close. This Justice Department is run by tweet okay okay one question for you, david, whether or not, some investors wonder if were thinking if were thinking it is too limited in terms of the array of would be souters for the assets, is it unthinkable that amazon comes out of nowhere no, it is not listen, we broke the story, day one, there was expectations that other bidders might arrive given the what, again, was the change in world view from the murdoches in term of scale and willingness to consider selling. So, no there is no doubt that you could. Verizon, some reports that what was that i dont think it is real. Sony did make a phone call but nothing more than that right now it appears to be two tracks, disney and comcast, antitrust hovering over all of it on both sides more so on the comcast side. Well have to wait and see. Im checking twitter to see if the deal will go through in a second democrats were not obstructionists, still focused on this tax bill and. Dont forget franken. Franken, yeah there is franken on this. Franken when we come back, an exclusive with ciscos chuck robins, right here at post nine, well talk about the road ahead for the company after its earnings beat. Take another look at the premarket, s p, with a bit of a downdraft this week about the worst in 16 weeks. Back in a minute [ keyboard clacking ] [ click ] [ keyboard clacking ] [ clacking continues ] good questions lead to good answers. Our advisors can help you find both. Talk to one today and see why were bullish on the future. Yours. Talk to one today and see why were bullish on the future. Throughout my career, ive been fortunate enough to travel to many interesting places. Ive always wanted to create those experiences for others. With my advisors help along the way, its finally my turn to be the host. When you have the right financial advisor, life can be brilliant. Ameriprise networking giant cisco out with results this week theyre seeing Revenue Growth in the coming quarter, first time in a little while. Joining us here at post nine is cisco ceo chuck robbins. A lot of things came together this quarter, clearly your cat leice catalyst, you have a double subscription business. All these paying a role or something bigger going on, youre going from hardware to software and thats what people want jim, first, thanks for having me, good to see you live as opposed to standing in a studio staring at a camera. But, you know, our strategy is working. We have been hard at it for the last nine quarters and when you think about the fact that were fundamentally reinvent the networking industry for the future, were really helping our customers navigate this multicloud environment that they operate in, which is evidence by the google announcement, security is front and center for every customer we have, and were beginning to see the results in the Business Model transition that you talked about with some of the software moves making. What surprised me, you in the previous quarter, talked about, look, it could be be patient, it may be kelly cramer your fabulous cfo, no relation, did say, look, may not until 2020 but it looks like that your new products kind of took the world by storm security up 8 youre clearly taking share from someone. Could you explain to me the dynamic and how very quickly your competitors almost seemed to fold, youve always had a great sales force, something along the last three months that made you go far, far ahead of everybody else. Well, you know, first of all, this is one quarter and were very happy about our progress. We have this Network Intuitive that we launched this summer and david and i spent some time talking about it is really about helping our customers deal with the pace at which theyre trying to move in the future bringing automation, analysttic security, deep into the network. We can now determine when there is malware inside encrypted traffic without decrypting it, which is previously was deemed an unsolvable problem. And you know, it is only happening in the network through a combination of deep hardware and software, so but at the same time, we have been shifting hard to our Software Model and the recurring model, couple of stats for you that you know, were now 32 of our business coming from recurring and nine quarts ago, 26 we went from 2. 5 billion in deferred software revenue. I think our teams have done a good job, making good progress. Some of the sale side has been annoyed or irked when segments are changed, the way theyre reported some argue disclosure took a hit. Do you agree is that part of the street getting used to new revenue models, new product models well, we shifted because our customers are looking at wholistic infrastructure as we introduce programmability and the whole notion of technology that is going to become more intuitive as it learns, it really is going to happen across all of the platforms that we have built whether it is wireless routing, switching our compute platforms, data center switching platforms, we put all that into an infrastructure platform group, we gave color around how some of the subelements were actually this past quarter, talked about the fact we did have strength in our campus switching business, which was part of the launch we did this summer. We continue to be, i think, very transparent about what is going on in our business one thing that really struck me, interesting, you made a lot of acquisitions. You have bought back a lot of stock. You pay a big dividend yet your cash flow is so voluminous that your catch balance never seems to go down and very little of it is domestic if you got tax reform, chuck, would your company not be the single biggest beneficiary of repatriation were one of the top five i think that clearly were optimistic about what is happening right now with tax reform we believe that the house and the senate will come together and settle their differences and get something through. Were hopeful. And clearly we would love to have access to that cash and it would give us the ability to do lots of Different Things from a Capital Investment perspective. Like what i think thats the key here. You are the key to this bill in terms of what you do with that money. Dont think that pressure on you but youre youre the key. Youre the key. You are, the point being, of course, what you just said is supposed to be the cat, why were doing all of this, right it is not just going to be dividends, not just going to be buybacks, you see increasing capbacks and investment here in the u. S. If it passes. Yes we do. We see, look, it is a combination, lots of businesses that are capital intensive businesses that will put that cash to work we see increased m a, we see the ability to do obviously dividends and buybacks as well well leverage the cash across all aspects of our capital strategy. Others say, well, why, you produce an enormous amount of cash flow now and meeting the needs you feel you have, why would that change . Well, it wouldnt change anything relative to our m a strategy. In your Capital Investment strategy, why would it change that were levered and well continue to be levered it will give us an incremental capacity but the territorial tax system just gives us more flexibility to move cash around as we need it depending where we need to put it to use. And the place we would like to put it to use is in the United States. You havent done it previously because of the tax system now well, we have been taking out debt to a certain point. Youve been spending money, borrowing against what is overseas but we would have access to the capital and the ability to raise debt so it increases a total capacity we have as a company. I think the argument that we hear a lot is people have the sense there will be a way of money coming back in, but in truth, some of that money is already here in the form of debt, right . Some of it is lets talk about the google deal i think a lot of people felt cisco is a bit of a island youve come in, making deals actually with a lot of the different cloud providers. What is a deal with google bring to you that you seem so upbeat about . I think the what we see happening today is that our customers, they began this journey to the cloud and the reality is this it is not a destination, it is actually a method of Consuming Technology services and now they find themselves with multiple Cloud Services with multiple sass provider like sales force and others that theyre buying, you know, services from. They still have their private data centers and now the explosion at the edge with iot and the data being created, the single pervasive common denominators across all of that is the network as a customer tries to actually implement a consistent policy, consistent security across that complex environment, the network is where that hybrid cloud and enablement has to occur. Thats what google realized and thats what drove us to the partnership. Why only 3 the legacy business continues to drop because i felt that was a prescription on the call to think you guys could do midsingle digit growth in the next couple of years we have given longterm guidance this past summer. And were one quarter into this campus refresh we made an acquisition this summer with vitella, Software Defined win provider we think between the new innovation we built internally, the acquisition we made vitella and some of the clarity around the multicloud policy management that we can begin to help our customers evolve to the next generation Enterprise Architecture were just a quarter or two in well see. Theyre wildly bullish about internet of things are we in some sort of cusp of just a gigantic corporate spend and were being too negative by saying when is it going to end is it possibly at the beginning . Ibc, as, you know, basically predicted that in 2020 on a global basis well be adding 1 billion new devices to the network like every month or so every month. A million per hour. One million per hour. Cars, houses, industrial equipment. Thats right. Our Jasper Acquisition we made two years ago is the largest commercially available machine to machine connectivity platform in the world we have 56 million connected things to it today cars, elevators, vending machines, so were everything is being connected and were at the very beginning of it right now. Thats the case, every day i hear that these Technology Companies are overvalued, when i hear that, i think that were not being smart enough im talking wall street. What you just said is the recipe for a Company Growing for double digit growth for much longer than what wall street thinks i think what were seeing happen is technology is not restricted to it anymore thats the big change. Technology is infiltrating every industry it is no longer enabling the strategy of a company, it is fundamentally redefining the strategy of a company. And so it is at the heart of everything this is why every job will change it is going to be everywhere before we let you go, we had a discussion about antitrust and the degree to which it is being driven by tweets do you feel it is a confusing policy where the u. S. Stands right now on mergers and antitrust . I dont know. What i think is that the department of Justice Needs to do their job and thats when these acquisitions come up, i think they have to look at them rationally, and i made a couple of comments yesterday on a lot of issues relative to immigration, net neutrality, department of justice, im a fan of common sense. And so i think that that makes you an ally. I think generally they do a good job. Well, chuck, it is great to see you in person and congratulations on, i think, the breakout work. It really is everybody should know that stock is still very cheap, even you get the money back, then i know you will commit to raising the dividend you went from value to growth, chuck. Thank you, guys good to see you. Thank you. Cramers mad dash, count down to the opening bell on this friday, take one more look at the premarket. Dont go away. [lance] monica, it is absolute chaos out here gale force winds, accumulations up to 8 inches. Dont know if you can hear me, but [monica] whats he doing . [lance] can we get a shot of this cold front, right here. Winter has arrived. Whooo hahaha [vo] progress is an unstoppable force. Brace yourself for the season of audi sales event. Audi will cover your first months lease payment on select models during the season of audi sales event. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she had to buy lots of groceries. While she was shopping for organic fruits and veggies, burglars broke into her shoe. 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