Frank Calderoni is stepping down as CFO of Cisco Systems on Jan. 1 after six years on the job.

Frank Calderoni

The networking giant announced Calderoni’s resignation as it warned that sluggish demand from emerging markets and telecom service providers would crimp its sales and profit outlook for the current quarter.

Calderoni (see a CFO video interview with him here) will be replaced by Kelly A. Kramer, currently senior vice president for business technology and finance, Cisco said in its earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal 2015. Calderoni joined Cisco from QLogic Corp. in 2004, initially serving as senior vice president for customer solutions finance.

Before joining QLogic, Calderoni spent 21 years at IBM. Cisco paid him nearly $9.3 million last year, most of it in restricted stock awards.

For the quarter ended Oct. 25, Cisco reported non-GAAP earnings of 54 cents a share, a penny above Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose 1.3% to $12.2 billion.

“This was our strongest first quarter ever in terms of revenue, non-GAAP operating income, and non-GAAP EPS,” Cisco CEO John Chambers said in a statement. “We continue to make progress towards becoming the #1 IT company in the world. We are still in a tough environment, but seeing encouraging trends as cities, businesses, governments and schools are becoming more digitized,” he added.

The company slashed 6,000 jobs, or about 8% of its global workforce, during the summer in an effort to cut costs and reinvest savings in growth areas like cloud computing.

Chambers said the outlook for the second quarter reflects reduced spending at several large telecom service providers. Sales in Asia are down double-digits, including a steep drop in China. The company is predicting revenue growth in a range of 4% to 7%, compared with analyst projections of 8%-plus growth.

Cisco stock fell 1.35% Wednesday following the earnings report. In trading Thursday, it closed at $25.68, up more than 2%.