Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining. Tim Long here, Barclays IT hardware analyst. Very happy to have Juniper Networks with us. Rahim Rami, CEO, Ken Miller, CFO, our team in the front as well. Thank you guys for coming. Appreciate it. Now, maybe we'll just start, Rami, with you. Mm-hmm. Higher level. Talk a little bit about kind of priorities for the next, you know, 12 months or so. You guys have been doing a lot of, lot of different verticals, a lot of things. Yeah. Or Ken, whoever. I think Ken's just reminding me to provide you all with, Oh. Yeah. Just the usual disclaimers. We might be making some forward-looking statements in our remarks today, and I'd just direct you to our website to look at our risks and disclosures. So thank you, Tim, for having us. Really appreciate it. In terms of priorities, really, Juniper is focused on three solution areas. There's the campus and branch, the data center, and the wide area networking. Our growth solutions are the first two, campus and branch, and the data center, and especially in the enterprise. This is where we're investing for differentiation. That differentiation is absolutely working for us today, and I believe it will continue to work. A big part of the success that we've seen in the enterprise with campus and branch and our data center solution has been, you know, beyond just the innovation, the go-to-market scale. I think we'll continue to thoughtfully invest in sales and marketing to get more at bats, because what we're finding right now is our win rate, our success rate in these markets and solutions, it's phenomenal, and we want just to continue that momentum. I don't want to sort of downplay the importance of our cloud and service provider business, especially in our sort of traditional routing infrastructure. This is incredibly important to us. We continue to invest thoughtfully in the solutions, silicon, systems, software necessary there. You know, these customer verticals are going through a period, but it's not going to last forever. You know, at some point, they'll need to continue to invest in their infrastructure, and we will be ready with the solutions that are necessary to capture that opportunity. Okay, great. Great. Maybe let's start on enterprise, because that's obviously been, you know, a great market for you guys. Talk about growth drivers there. How is Juniper winning? Let's start there, and maybe we'll dig a little deeper. Sure. So the number one growth driver for us in the enterprise is our campus and branch solution, which is driven through what we call our Mistified business. And Mist is really a cloud-based, AI-driven solution that's really unique in the industry. It really addresses sort of the major pain points of CIOs and IT professionals today. They're all digitally transforming their businesses, but at the same time, they're not getting the OpEx that they need from their bosses to go and invest in their IT infrastructure. So Mist comes in with the value proposition of, you know what? Free up our resources by having robots run your network. This is where the AI comes in, and delight your end users with a superior experience that's basically achieved through a network that runs itself. I know it sounds like almost too good to be true or very lofty, AI-based PowerPoint statements, but it actually works. We're seeing some incredible results for customers around the globe. That's leading to incredible success. I mean, the last couple of quarters, our Mistified business grew at almost 100% year-over-year in revenue. Nobody else is growing like that in the industry. So that's a big area of emphasis for us. But I'm not going to stop there, because data center is also a big area of focus for us. We've taken a page out of our lesson, the lessons we've learned in our Mistified solution and applying it to the data center solution with a sort of a very seamless, easy-to-operate data center solution. That's starting to work for us as well. Apstra, which is sort of the software that we're using to automate data centers, had a record quarter in the time frame as well. So I'm encouraged by that. Okay, and maybe I think you have some pretty large customers in Mist, and that's, you know, probably the land and expand type of model for you guys. So talk about those, the win rate and, and getting large customers and what that means for the outlook for the next year or two. The great thing about Mist is that it is a solution that really scaled from the small customers. I mean, we have sort of homes that are deploying Mist, all the way up to the largest enterprises in the world that are deploying hundreds of thousands of elements, all operated under the Mist cloud using our AI engine. It scales incredibly well from small to large, and that's a testament to the architecture that we have built into the Mist platform, and that's really one of the unique value propositions of that of that solution. Obviously, for our enterprise sellers, named accounts is where we focus, right? We focus on the, if you will, like, big game hunting, large enterprises that are typically high price. Sometimes we get involved myself in these types of opportunities. When we get a true at bat with a technical evaluation, we win the vast majority of the time. I mean, I don't know if it's 80%-90% plus, but the vast majority of the time. And we rely on the channel to go after the smaller segments of the enterprise market, the unnamed accounts. And this is where we've also seen great success because more partners are starting to understand the value proposition of Mist and want a piece of the action. So they're coming to us, wanting to, in fact, engage and partner with them, and that's somewhat new for Juniper. You know, in the past, like several years ago, we'd have to sort of try to convince customers to take on the big dogs in the industry... Now the tables have shifted, and many of them are coming to us saying: "Hey, how do we become part of the action?" People have just been going after the broad enterprise. Okay. In the enterprise, you know, one of the questions that comes up, obviously, a large competitor had a little reset. You know, a lot of that's driven by macro and campus. What are the macro impacts here? As a share gainer, does it make Juniper a little bit more immune to maybe a correction in the market? How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I don't think we are immune to a macro downturn. I mean, obviously, a growing market is a better market for us. Having said that, I do believe we are able to grow even in circumstances where there are macro headwinds for a couple of reasons. The markets that we serve are massive. Our campus and branch opportunity is a, you know, $20 -25 billion opportunity. The data center opportunity is even bigger than that, and we have relatively modest share in these massive total addressable markets, which gives us plenty of headroom to compete in those markets. The second part, Tim, is what I just mentioned earlier, I believe that our solutions go to the heart of the challenges that CIOs and IT professionals face, especially in a more challenging market. They need to continue to invest in their networks, but at the same time need a reduction in total cost of ownership. That's what Mist brings to the table, and why I think we continue to see success even in sort of more challenging times. Okay. Maybe one more on the enterprise side. Could you talk a little bit about other opportunities, SD-WAN, you mentioned Apstra. You know, what's going to be the next Mist, in the enterprise for you guys? So keep in mind, Mist, when we acquired the company in 2019, started out as a pure Wi-Fi solution. Mist today is a cloud-managed, AI-driven Wi-Fi, wired switching, wide area networking, and we've added security to that with our NAC solution, our network access control. So you can see our strategy here. We are deliberately, thoughtfully increasing the breadth of the Mist platform, and it's working. Our wired switching sales have taken off because we have attached the AIOps capabilities of Mist to it. We are now starting to see solid momentum in the wide area network, and we've only started selling our NAC solution, NAC security solution, like for less than two quarters or so, and we already have, you know, well over 50 customers on that solution. So taking that Mist secret sauce and expanding it across more and more layers of the network is definitely part of the strategy. Apstra is in and of itself a differentiated solution for the data center, but we are now taking the Mist platform and expanding it to include the data center in Apstra. We haven't completed that, but we started to communicate that to our customers, and they love the idea. So it's a matter of execution, delivering on that solution. I think it'll work very well for us. Okay, great. Great. Maybe let's talk service provider a little bit. It's been a rough time for most vendors in the space. You guys are kind of holding your own in there. What are you, what are you hearing from the large mobile customers? Are we at the point where we're going to start to see a bounce back in that business? Maybe high-level views on service provider start. Yeah, it's tough. The service provider market is right now definitely going through a period of digestion. Also, they're, you know, exposed to their own sort of macro challenges that they have to deal with. You know, having said that, I don't think this is a permanent state of affairs. We've never had very lofty ambitions for the SP market because we've always known that this is a segment that has its set of challenges. You know, our expectations for SP over the last few years has been sort of flattish, -2 to +2 type of revenue growth. Growth in the last couple of years has done actually a little bit better than that. That said, it remains an extremely important segment for us. The way for us to achieve success in SP is by expanding the layers of the market or the layers of the network that we address. In the past, it's mostly been about networking, edge networking. We have, as you know, started to add more and more capabilities in the metro space. Why is the metro so important to us? I think for a couple of reasons. One, it's right up our alley. We've got the operating system. We know how to build the products that our customers want. Two, it happens to be the fastest growing subsegment of the service provider vertical. So I think those investments, coupled with just solid execution, especially in the Tier 1 service provider space, has enabled us to perform relatively well, all things considered, in the service provider space. The last thing I'll just say on this is, right now, Tim, our superpower is the diversity of, of our business. It used to be, several years back, you know, when the service provider customers would sneeze, we'd catch a cold, right? And right now, our enterprise business is the bulk of our revenue. In the Q3 timeframe, it was over 50% of our revenue, which has given us a resilience to weather storms or weather, some level of headwinds when they occur in some of these segments like the service provider space. Okay, maybe let's drill down a little on the metro routing. It seems like a good growth opportunity. Where is Juniper in that, you know, ramp? How much opportunity do you see? And is that something that can move, you said, I think you're -2, +2 service providers. Yeah. Can success there kind of move you towards upper ends of your expectations for service provider? Yeah, I mean, from a multi-year standpoint, it can move us to the upper end of that range. Where are we? We have sort of been very, like, methodical in delivering more and more of the metro components necessary to work more completely in the domain, and we've made great progress. We have already delivered a host of new small, cost-optimized, power-optimized platforms that run our operating system. We have been increasingly increasing the capability of our automation solution that's also necessary to compete effectively in the space. We've won accounts, including tier one service provider opportunities that have the potential of becoming much larger in time. But having said that, I think we're still early days. We believe that, you know, we can see more meaningful traction and grow this to a more meaningful component of our total service provider business in the years to come, you know, starting next year, really. Okay, great. Maybe if we switch over to the cloud, cloud business. You know, largely, that vertical seemed like a little bit of a digestion year this year, and now we're getting back to spending next year. So maybe talk a little bit high level, how you see that client base doing for over the next year or two. So it goes without saying that the cloud vertical is very important to Juniper. We've always done well here, but we've always known that, you know, this is the cloud business in general, just because of the concentration of CapEx investments, will have good quarters and bad quarters, will have ebbs and flows. Definitely right now, name of the game in the cloud provider space is digestion. They have purchased a pretty massive amount of infrastructure over the last couple of years that they need to consume, they need to test and deploy, and that just takes some time. We're not calling the exact time frame of a rebound, but I will say that I'm very confident there will be a recovery. We're investing with complete confidence that there will be recovery, and that's just because I'm not betting against the cloud businesses. Mm-hmm. Their businesses are doing well. They're doing well even in their existing applications. But generative AI and all of the host of applications that are going to result from generative AI, in my view, are going to be even more of a reason to invest in the cloud provider space, because it's going to put pressure on their networks, and they're going to need to keep ahead of that pressure by investing in their network. Okay. You mentioned AI. Let's, you know, it wouldn't be a tech session if we didn't talk about it. You know, obviously, it's working well in the Mist business. Yeah. But talk a little bit about the switching routing side. Where does Juniper fit in, with what's going on in these larger, AI type, data centers? Yeah, so obviously a good question, and it's very timely. Everybody is asking about this. You mentioned Mist. Mist is, in fact, a wonderful example of something we've been doing for five years, of the power of AI. Like, for us, the value of AI is not a something to be tested or evaluated in the future. We have seen it, like, it's incredible the value that we're delivering with AI, and we've been doing so for the last several years. Yes, you're absolutely right. New opportunity in the AI domain is our AI clusters, AI data centers. I think this is a solution, and a problem that's right up our alley. We've got the silicon, the software, we've got the Apstra capability that will provide the visibility, the real-time health checking, the operational capabilities to run large clusters. Now, today, most of our AI data center presence is in what's called the front-end networks. These are sort of what connects GPUs to the outer world. But the real big opportunity is in the back-end networks that connect the GPUs to each other, and the traffic in this back-end network is immense. It's like maybe 5-10 times what it would be in the front-end network. That's an emerging opportunity. Today, the technology that's prevalent in back-end networks is InfiniBand. It's offered, you know, mostly by NVIDIA, but more and more customers and prospects that we talk to are convinced that the future is going to be about Ethernet. So we're investing in it. We have a great solution already. We've already had success in a few back-end network opportunities where we have been chosen, but this is just scratching the surface of what's possible in the future. It's a... I mean, you know, analysts are predicting this is going to go from, like, $1 -1.5 billion markets today to over $6 billion by, I believe, 2025 or 2026. I mean, that's very few markets grow at that kind of rate, so it makes a lot of sense for us to pursue it. Okay. And then, you know, just where are we with Ethernet versus InfiniBand from a technology standpoint? How close are we? And then, you know, talk a little bit about kind of competitive landscape, because in addition to Cisco and Arista, you actually have NVIDIA also in Ethernet. Yeah. Maybe talk about, like, how that landscape will evolve and the new opportunities. Yeah, it's a good question. You know, where we are in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet is everybody's talking about Ethernet. I think the vast majority of people are convinced that Ethernet is the future, but the market is still mostly InfiniBand, and it will take some time for people to build the confidence that Ethernet can actually do it. Now, we've built a lab. We're doing our own testing, and honestly, the results we're getting with Ethernet in backend networks are great. So, it will only get better with some of these sort of additional features and capabilities, like backend pressure, the ability to run RDMA traffic on Ethernet, et cetera, get tweaked and refined over the coming months and years. So early days for Ethernet, but confidence that it will grow. On competitive landscape, this will be a competitive space. I will, you know, I don't think there's any denying that, and from the usual players as well as from NVIDIA. The most important thing is that this becomes an open ecosystem, meaning that it shouldn't be a tied-in, locked-in solution between the NIC and the network. The vast majority of data center cluster builder want that openness. As long as it's that openness becomes the norm, and which I believe it will, it gives us an opportunity and to compete for our fair share or even more of it than our fair share is. That growth rate I just provided, even a relatively small portion of that growth rate would be meaningful for our overall data center business. Right. Right. Okay. Yes, the topic is topical and a big, big opportunity for you guys. Ken, let's get you involved here. Sure. Talk a little bit about where we are with the whole backlog orders. I mean, obviously, this industry went from largely book and ship to a lot of backlog, and now we're heading in the other direction. So where are we on that curve, and what does that do for kind of visibility and your ability to, to plan, you know, say, heading into, to a new year? Yeah. So as you mentioned, backlog to an unprecedented level in the last couple of years, really due to the lead time. So lead time, typically 30 days to our customers, and they, they ballooned up to 12 months, in some cases longer. So customers were buying products in longer time horizons. They were buying more product, they didn't want to get left behind, et cetera. So we did see a big bulge of backlog. Lead times have effectively gone back to normal, and that happened in the H1 of this year. So the lead time that caused the backlog bloat has now resolved itself. We're now seeing backlog come down pretty, pretty steadily, and I expect to exit the year on an elevated level, but a little bit less than 2x. 2x is about $800 million. It used to be at about a $400 million backlog number, ballooned all the way up to over $2 billion. I think we'll exit the year, you know, under $800 million, and we'll get back to the new normal, which I think might be bigger than the old normal, 100, call it 500, something in that neighborhood. Sometime I would guess by the H1 of next year. So we're getting back to normal. That's good for our customers, right? More predictability for them. Clearly, from our side, the additional visibility the backlog provides did have some positives, but the majority of that disruption was a net negative, right? Customers aren't satisfied with our ability to deliver. Now that we can deliver within that 30-day time horizon, it's just a smoother, you know, smoother operation for us. Okay. Now, does this change anything on visibility or sales force that is now more, you know, thing that's happening? So how does, how does the sales force and the go-to-market adapt to back to the old, old normal? I think it's back to the old, right? So it's back to the new normal. If anything, the last couple of years have been the anomaly, right? Where it's been a combination of demand and supply, is what takes the ability to hit a revenue number. Now we're back to demand really driving our overall results, right? We entered the quarter with roughly a third of our quarter in backlog. We have to go book, ship the remaining two thirds. That lines up with our everyday lead time. That's really how this business has run for a couple of decades. Mm-hmm. We'll get back to that. We're, you know, we're moving that direction as we speak, and I think we'll get back to that, you know, sometime next year, and, you know, that's how we've done business for a while. Is it as comfortable as having the Q4 in the backlog? No. But is it something that, you know, we're, you know, not used to? No. I mean, we'll, we'll adapt, and we're pretty much adapting as we speak. Okay. Ken, maybe talk a little bit about kind of gross and operating margin progression. I think the goal is to continue to, you know, grow both of those. Mm-hmm. Maybe talk a little bit about the levers there. Yeah, gross margin, we've got a great year this year, but we're seeing some great improvement in gross margin. I expect next year to also be an up year for gross margin. There's a couple levers there. One of the big ones is we have been experiencing over the last couple of years, these extraordinary costs, we call these mandatory costs, whether it's expedite fees or revenue paid to component manufacturers, just to get our hands on the precious supply. When supply was short, logistics went up as well. So those fees are starting to normalize. We're seeing the benefit of that this year, and I think there'll be additional benefit next year. So that's going to be a tailwind with gross margin. In addition to that, we have some positive mix dynamics. Our services team has done a phenomenal job. That revenue is growing and the margin is expanding. I think there's still opportunity for that to expand and grow next year. Software is a big part of our margin story as well. You know, every time we sell a Mist solution, for example, which is our fastest growing product, it comes with a lot of software, SaaS delivered software. That, that doesn't show up as margin day one. A lot of that shows up on our balance sheet. We, our, our ARR, our annual recurring revenue, is up to $357 million and growing quite nicely to 37% year-on-year last quarter. So we're seeing a big growth in our SaaS business, which is, you know, better for revenue visibility, great for margin as it gets recognized, but actually kind of hurts margin day one, as we're deferring a good chunk of that revenue. That will continue to grow margin as well. So there's some good mix dynamics on that side. The one headwind is hardware mix. If you just isolate hardware to hardware and ignore software for a second, you know, our higher margin products or our router products, especially our high-end routers for service providers, as an example, versus more of a campus or branch appliance, that's lower margin day one, but again, once you add the software, it starts to normalize those margins. Okay, great. Maybe for both of you to talk a little bit about capital allocation, and you guys have been pretty successful with M&A. So maybe any thoughts? It seems like now you're at the stage of kinda still integrating and moving some of these acquired assets across the portfolio more. So kind of capital allocation and maybe where you might be thinking more investment might happen. I'll start. So you're right, we've made some really smart acquisitions, but as maybe less appreciated is, it's not enough just to choose the right companies, the integration is just key. And we've learned a lot about how to successfully integrate companies to reap the value. We've done that with Mist, we're doing it with Apstra, we're doing it with 128 Technology as well. Right now, when I look at our portfolio, when I look at solutions, honestly, I don't feel like there is a burning gap in our solutions that's preventing us from selling. So we will be opportunistic. You know, I asked Ken to just sort of leave the next slide better for us to act in the event that we come across something that we feel is really gonna accelerate our strategy. Most likely, it would be in the enterprise domain. It would have a large software component, very similar to the kinds of acquisitions that we've done over the last couple years. Yeah, on the capital return front, we still remain committed to our dividend program, and from a buyback perspective, you know, we've been doing much greater than our commitment of greater than 50% return to shareholders. I'd be remiss to say that you can expect we'll be opportunistic when it comes to the buyback road. Okay. And then maybe just last one, just looking out longer term, when you think about growth, you know, you got some different end markets, probably different, you know, dynamics in them, but, you know, how are you thinking about getting more sustainable growth across the verticals? Yeah. So I think, you know, things are going to normalize. It's been kind of an unprecedented last couple of years when it comes to bookings, getting ahead of revenue, and our rev department stepped up, and you've had a little bit of an anomaly. But one way I would look at our business is kind of try to see through that noise and look at the behavior from 2020 to 2024, and you'll see a mid-single digit, you know, maybe 6%-7% kind of revenue grower in that timeframe. And I expect our ability to continue to grow faster than a long-term model of at least low single digits is going to be there. The reason why it'll be there is not just our success we've had, but take that success by vertical and apply it to the new distribution, where half of our business last quarter is greater than in enterprise, like Rami mentioned. So when your fastest-growing vertical is growing the fastest, the math just works out for the aggregate company to actually have an opportunity to do better. So while we're not updating the long model here today, Tim, the old model of at least low digits, we've been outperforming, and I think our mix has only gotten better, which gives me optimism for the future. Okay. So I won't update the long term. I'll leave that out. Okay, Rami, Ken, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, everybody, for joining. Thank you.