Cisco has been actively expanding its presence in the infrastructure market for online video. This was especially apparent during the second quarter of the company’s fiscal 2012.

The company’s second-quarter revenue was up 11% year over year, and the quarter‘s major highlights included an acquisition in the video space and launch of a new package of products and services sold as data center infrastructure for video service providers.

Cisco reported earnings of US$0.40 per share on $11.5bn in sales for the quarter – a 48% increase in EPS year over year. Its net income was $2.2bn.

The company’s CEO John Chambers said the company was executing well on its plan to drive earnings faster than revenue for three years.

“Our operational focus continues to yield positive results – we hit our billion dollar expense reduction a quarter early – and our ongoing innovation enables our customers to solve their critical business needs,” Chambers said.

During the quarter, the company closed the acquisition of BNI Video, which helps service providers deliver IP-based video for customer. Cisco was an early investor in the company, and the acquisition will help Cisco’s efforts to tap the growing internet-video-infrastructure market.

In addition to the BNI acquisition, Cisco’s foray into online video in the second quarter advanced as it announced Videoscape, a package of products designed to enable service providers to deliver integrated multi-faceted online video services.

The package includes Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS) and Nexus hardware and a series of software designed for video service providers, such as content delivery network analytics, device orchestration for video delivery, encoding and transcoding, and much more.

The company also announced toward the end of the second quarter that it had sold its UCS solution to more than 10,000 customers around the world.

The company achieved this milestone within two years since it first launched its unified solution that integrates compute, networking, management and virtualization. Release of the UCS was also Cisco’s first entry into the server market.