Welcome to the First Quarter 2020 Arista Networks Financial Results Earnings Conference Call. During the call, all participants will be in a listen only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and will be available for I will now turn the call over to Mr.
Curtis McKee, Director of Corporate and Investor Development. Sir, you may begin.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on today's call are Jayshree Lal, Arista Networks' President and Chief Executive Officer and Ita Brennan, Arista's Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, Arista Networks issued a press release announcing the results for its fiscal Q1 ending March 31, 2020. If you would like a copy of the release, you can access it online at our website.
During the course of this conference call, Arista Networks Management will make forward looking statements, including those relating to our financial outlook for the Q2 of the 2020 fiscal year, longer term financial outlooks, the potential impact of COVID-nineteen on our business, industry innovation, our market opportunity, the benefits of recent acquisitions and the impact of litigation, which are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically in our most recent Form 10 Q and Form 10 ks, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. These forward looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call are expressed on a non GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. We have provided reconciliations of these non GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our earnings press release.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Jayshree.
Thank you, Curtis. Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon for our Q1 2020 earnings call. First, I would like to address the coronavirus global pandemic, the world's largest in 100 years. Clearly, this is unlike recessionary events, including the dotcom crash of 2,001 or the financial recession of 2,008, both of which were sector specific. At Arista, we are focused on the welfare of our employees, supporting our customers and helping the local community.
We recognize our role and responsibility in supporting global communications and cloud infrastructure during these mission critical times. We're adjusting to the new norm of real time audio and video communications. Our support caseload has doubled during the initial weeks, but has now stabilized as we help our customers in their time of need. Getting back to Q1 specifics, we delivered revenues of $523,000,000 for the quarter with a non GAAP earnings per share of $2.02 SABIC contributed approximately 21% of revenue, up from 19% last quarter. Our non GAAP gross margins were 65 0.6%, influenced by a healthy software and services mix.
We've registered solid number of $1,000,000 customers as a direct result of our enterprise traction. In Q1 2020, cloud titans was our largest vertical. The enterprise is now consistently the 2nd largest, followed by the Tier 2 specialty cloud providers and financials tied for 3rd place and the service provider at 4th place. Due to popular requests from our analyst friends, we are now providing more color into our annual trends across 3 main sectors: cloud titans, approximately 40% of our mix enterprise, including financial services, approximately 35% of our mix and providers, which includes both service provider and cloud specialty provider, approximately 25% of our mix. In terms of geographies, Q1 2020 mix had international contribution at 23% with the Americas at 77%.
In terms of mergers and acquisitions, we closed the acquisition of Big Switch Networks in February 2020. We are experiencing early traction and complementarity with Arista's data analyzer, DAN, offering and entering into the network packet broker space. We are expanding in the campus our cloud networking principles, introducing exciting cognitive Wi Fi suite of features with the support of Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, as well as open config based automation model. Arista's Cognitive Campus portfolio was launched last summer to address the explosion of clients, users and IoT devices with software driven automation. We are well on our way to meeting our 1st year's $100,000,000 target ending Q2 2020.
While we are pleased with this traction, we must all exercise patience as we cultivate this part of our business. It took us more than 7 years to build our cloud business to $500,000,000 and we believe that our enterprise prospects will take time, especially in this COVID-nineteen era. We are only just beginning our 1st year of a 5 to 7 year journey to disrupt 30 years of legacy and status quo. COVID-nineteen has required us to respond rapidly to changing events. In accordance with the country specific shelters and orders, we have closed all our offices to assure employee healthy health and safety.
We are consequently experiencing supply chain constraints and we are managing our global capacity with our contract manufacturers in San Jose, Mexico, Malaysia and coping with some inventory and component shortages. Lead times vary and have doubled recently for some of our popular products. Arista is working in lockstep with our customers supporting their business continuity and planning throughout 2020. Our visibility, especially into second half twenty twenty is pretty low. The number of confirmed COVID-nineteen cases has increased sharply in April.
Until the economic environment permits us to resume more normal routine, we have limited visibility to demand. It is clear that we live in uncertain times. And therefore with what we know at this time, it is prudent to assume our annual 2020 revenue may decline versus our 2019. We expect to manage our overall business this year at Arista's 2018 levels and we'll continue to monitor this closely. Arista together with the entire business sector and global supply chain is coping with multiple unknowns in the midst of a global pandemic.
We expect to see some short term strength in Cloud Titan offset by prolonged sales cycles with new prospects in the campus and enterprise sector. We remain confident that the combination of our product superiority, commitment to quality with the lowest critical vulnerabilities and the highest Net Promoter Score of 76 is very compelling in the network industry and of great value to our customers. Our recent market share gains, customer intimacy and operating leverage will navigate us through these unforeseen circumstances. We expect to emerge stronger than many of our industry peers as we migrate to modern networking. Before I turn it over to Ita for financial specifics, on behalf of Arista, I truly wish all of our listeners, employees and their families, customers and well wishers be safe and healthy.
Ita? Thanks, Jayshree, and good afternoon. This analysis of
our Q1 results and our guidance for Q2 'twenty is based on non GAAP and excludes our non cash stock based compensation impacts, certain acquisition related charges and other non recurring items. Full reconciliation of our selected GAAP to non GAAP results is provided in our earnings release. Total revenues in Q1 were 523,000,000 dollars down 12% year over year and just above the lower end of our guidance of $522,000,000 to 532,000,000 As discussed previously, this decline on a year over year basis was in part related to the recognition of approximately $83,000,000 of deferred revenue in the Q1 of 2019. In addition, while demand in Q1 2020 was reasonably healthy, we did experience some COVID-nineteen related component supply and manufacturing challenges, which resulted in extended lead times and somewhat constrained shipments for the quarter. Service revenues represented approximately 21% of total revenues, up from 19% last quarter, reflecting strong service renewal activity in the period, coupled with a lower product revenue number.
International revenues for the quarter came in at 122,400,000 dollars or 23.5 percent of total revenue, down from 25% in Q4. Shifts in geographical mix on a quarter over quarter and year over year basis were largely driven by the level of revenue and the location of deployments by our cloud titan customers. Overall gross margin in Q1 was 65.6%, well above our guidance of approximately 63% and up from 65.2% last quarter. As expected, we saw strength in our cloud business in the period with the related lower gross margin impact more than offset by some onetime constrained supply related sales of previously reserved inventory and a healthy mix of software and services mix. Operating expenses for the quarter were $149,300,000 or 28.5 percent of revenue, down from last quarter to 154,300,000 dollars R and D spending came in at $91,000,000 or 17.4 percent of revenue, down from $96,200,000 last quarter.
This decline largely reflected lower engineering and prototype costs in the period. Sales and marketing expenses was consistent with last quarter at approximately $46,000,000 or 8.8 percent of revenue, with increased headcount costs, somewhat offset by lower marketing and travel related spending. Our G and A costs were flat to last quarter at approximately $12,000,000 or 2.3 percent of revenue. Our operating income for the quarter was $194,000,000 or 37.1 percent of revenue. Other income and expense for the quarter was a favorable 12,200,000 dollars and our effective tax rate was approximately 21.6%.
This resulted in net income for the quarter of $161,700,000 or 30.9 percent of revenue. Our diluted share number was 79,940,000 shares, resulting in a diluted earnings per share number for the quarter of $2.02 down 12.6% from the prior year. We completed the purchase accounting for Big Switch acquisition in the period with immaterial amounts of revenue and expense included in our non GAAP results in the Q1. For those of you focused on our GAAP results, we recorded $11,900,000 of acquisition related expenses in the period, which we consider to be one time in nature, and which together with $4,900,000 of amortization of acquired intangibles have been excluded from our non GAAP results. A full reconciliation of our GAAP to non GAAP results has been provided in our earnings release.
Now turning to the balance sheet. Cash, cash equivalents and investments ended the quarter at approximately $2,600,000,000 We repurchased $228,000,000 of our common stock during the quarter at a weighted average price of $189 per share. This brings our total repurchases to date to $494,000,000 or 2,400,000 shares over a 4 quarter period. As a reminder, our Board of Directors has authorized a 3 year $1,000,000,000 stock repurchase program commencing in Q2 2019. The program allows us to repurchase shares of our common stock opportunistically and is funded from operating cash flows.
We generated $195,000,000 of cash from operations in the Q1, affecting solid net income performance and a slight increase in working capital requirements. DSOs came in at 61 days, down from 65 days in Q4, reflecting the timing of billings in the period. Inventory turns were 2.5 times, down from 2.9 last quarter. Inventory increased to $262,000,000 in the quarter, up from $244,000,000 in the prior period. Our total deferred revenue balance was $597,000,000 up from $575,000,000 in Q4.
As a reminder, our deferred revenue balance is now almost exclusively services related. Accounts payable days were 43 days, down from 44 days in Q4, reflecting the timing of inventory receipts and payments. Capital expenditure for the quarter was 3,100,000
dollars Now turning to our outlook for
the Q2 and beyond. As Jayshree mentioned, we continue to closely monitor the impact of COVID-nineteen around the world. We, our customers and our supply chain partners continue to operate under various local restrictions, and it is unclear when and how these restrictions will be lifted. While we're not in a position to predict these outcomes and provide longer term guidance, we did want to provide some color on how we are managing and framing the business in the interim. While we expect demand from our cloud businesses to remain stable, we believe a number of other verticals could see some pause or slowing of IT spending, spending clarity on the economic outlook.
Given this uncertainty, we believe it prudent to manage our investments carefully and in a range closer to 2018 levels. We are prioritizing key projects and customer engagements, while benefiting from a natural reduction in travel, marketing and other variable expenses. On the gross margin front, we would reiterate our overall gross margin outlook of 63% to 65%, with customer mix being the key driver. Now for a couple of additional housekeeping items. We have continued to see some upward pressure on the effective tax rate and have increased the forecasted rate to 21.8%.
In addition, we expect the current lower interest rate environment to negatively impact our other income amounts in the future. Finally, our guidance for Q2 reflects our current understanding of COVID-nineteen and its impact on our business and supply chain. This is, however, an inherently uncertain situation, and we will need to continue to monitor and attempt to mitigate new challenges as the situation unfolds. With all of this as a backdrop, our guidance for the Q2, which is based on non GAAP results and excludes any non cash stock based compensation impact and other nonrecurring items is as follows: revenues of approximately $520,000,000 to $540,000,000 gross margin of 63% to 65%, operating margins of approximately 35%. Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 21.8% with diluted shares of approximately 79,700,000 shares.
I'll now turn the call back to Curtis.
Thank you, Ita. We are now going to move to the Q and A portion of the Arista earnings call. Due to time constraints, I'd like to request that everyone please limit themselves to a single question if possible. Thank you for your understanding. Operator, please take it away.
We will now begin the Q and A portion of the Arista earnings Your first question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Shashri, you mentioned the short term benefit you're expecting from some of the cloud companies. So maybe if you can elaborate on that a bit. How much of this is from the cloud titans? Titans?
What are you seeing from the specialty cloud providers? Are you expecting some of your upside there? And why isn't there more confidence in the sustainability of this kind of upside as we look a bit more longer term? Thank you.
Sure. Thanks, Sameet. Well, as you know, Arista's cloud tightened performance is consistent with the cloud CapEx reporting. In other words, some are experiencing strong spend, some are declining and others are cautious. So given all the pluses and minuses, I think it's safe to say that for the year, we expect a flattish cloud titan spend.
And this is actually an improvement because we've been saying flat to down. So, of course, we monitor this closely. As you know, we never have long term visibility on cloud titans. It's quarter by quarter. So we'll inspect more closely, especially for the second half.
Now in terms of the cloud specialty providers, they were actually stronger trend for us in Q1. It's pretty cyclical in nature and depends on different Tier 2 cloud providers. Each one has a unique architecture. We had a somewhat weak specialty cloud providers in 2019, but they've started off well for us in Q1 and Q2. And over time, it will be a matter of economics and what makes most business sense for them.
I believe some of them will succeed in specialized use cases. But once again, we're going to keep a watch and monitor this closely in the second half.
Great. Thank you.
Your next
question comes
from Ken Wong with Barclays. Your line is open.
Jayshree, I was hoping you could talk
a little bit about the enterprise vertical and maybe on 2 different vectors. If you can just kind of give us a little color on what you're seeing on large enterprises? And then as it relates to you talked about a longer process for the campus move. Could you just talk a little bit about the moving parts near term given that obviously a lot of people are working from home, so it's difficult to sell on prem equipment. So if
you could just give us
a little more color there. Thank you.
Yes. Sure, Tim. So to answer your broad question on enterprise sector, I think Arista's brand is very well recognized for data center. And with our 6,000 plus customers, we've got very good recognition there from a differentiated product and we've already been very engaged with them. So customers we've been engaged with, in fact, we had most recently in February, just a little before all the doors got shut down on us, we were engaged with over 100, 150 enterprise customers.
And we had a global advisory and Arista Innovate. So our intimacy with enterprise customers is very high. And we continue to do well with them with both existing and new projects. I think where we will be challenged in the enterprise and also in the campus is new prospects. We're not going to get enough face time with them.
We're doing a lot of virtual webinars, virtual events, virtual EBCs. It's a virtual world we're certainly living in. But the level of contact for both product capability, conversation, relationship, partnership and in fact even testing for both new prospects in enterprise and campus will be challenging. Nobody is in the building to upgrade their campus either. So this COVID-nineteen will definitely delay our enterprise cycles for new prospects, but should be okay for new projects with familiar customers.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Tim.
Your next question comes from Alex Kurtz with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Yes. Thanks. And I'm glad everyone is safe and healthy over at Arista. I just wanted to follow-up, Jayshree, on your commentary from the beginning of the call. You said you're planning to run the business versus 2018 levels.
I assume that's an OpEx comment or is it an OpEx comment that also maybe relates to where you think revenue could kind of pencil out at the end of the year?
Yes. No, Alex, first of all, I think we have we understand the first half better than the second half. So please take this with a grain of unknown and uncertainty in everything. And I know CEOs are supposed to know everything, but I can honestly tell you we don't know much about the second half. So what we're doing is controlling what we can control.
And what Ida and I can control is the business and the expense more than the top line for the year. And Ida, you want to add more to that?
Yes. I mean, I think, Alex, it's a focus on just OpEx and investment levels until we understand better kind of what the rest of the year how the rest of the year plays out, right? And so you should expect to see us kind of cut back on some of these variable expenses, etcetera, and come back to spending that looks similar to where we were for 2018. And then as things unfold, we can change that, right? But for now, that's the focus.
And I and Ita and I want to reiterate something. We will absolutely continue pedal to the metal, invest in key R and D and customer support. We will reduce marketing travel, obviously, since we can't travel and perhaps some IT spending. And so we work on what we can control and manage the business. And if it improves, we'll certainly recalibrate and invest more.
I appreciate that. And Ita, just on the 40% comment on cloud titan mix year to date, obviously, it would be helpful to have the year over year comp if you're willing to give that?
Yes. So I think in
the investor deck, we've put some trends around what the split has been and how it's looked. Can we put a range in there for kind of how it played out during the year, right, during the past year, right? So the Investor Day is looking at a trend over the prior year and then J. C. Commentary is more short term.
So I think that gives you a range to work with.
And we put a special slide for you guys, slide 15, I think it is Curtis, right?
So
that's in your honor.
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Right. Your next
question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi. Just really two quick ones. I promise you're going to be very quick. Number 1, is it correct that cloud outperformed in Q1 versus expectations and enterprise underperformed?
And then secondly, Jayshree, can you comment on your campus timeline of the $100,000,000 is that pushed out now?
Okay, Jason. I think both cloud and enterprise performed as we expected in Q1. We if there was a theme in Q1, which becomes a stronger theme in Q2, I would say supply constraints in supply chain. Our verticals were pretty normal as expected. In terms of campus timelines, we are on target.
We are committed to $100,000,000 revenue in the 1st 4 quarters that ends Q2 2020. No change there. But we do expect that the acceleration I would have personally like to see beyond that in the 2nd 3rd year, we now have to wait and see due to COVID.
Thank you. Thank
you. Our next question
comes from Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Thanks. Hello, ladies. Congrats. And I must say you're very brave to offer a second quarter guidance. So I hope it works out.
Let me see. A couple of questions for me. First of all, on the supply chain, can you tell us how much revenue spilled over from 1Q into 2Q because of that, so we can understand the true run rate of your business in 2Q? And again, going back to Alex's question on the 2018 investment levels. Ita, just to fine tune this, does that mean total OpEx 2020 equals total OpEx in 2018?
Or is this a run rate comment? I just want to make sure I appropriately capture that modeling wise.
Yes. I mean, I think as we
sit here today, we would say we're managing it to an overall plus or minus 2018 total OpEx number. And again, obviously, as we know more Itay, as we go through the year, we'll continue to address that further. But for now, that's how we're seeing it.
And as far as the push out? Yes.
So to answer that question, Ittai, we did our best in Q1, but we got supply constrained in March. I think we will be really supply constrained in Q2. So I do think Q2 is a case of less about demand and more about supply constraints.
Your next question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Your line is open.
I wanted to sort of visit the question or comment you made regarding the COVID crisis, making it more challenging to sell new products. I guess what I'm looking for is a better understanding of how much of your business comes from new customersnew products? And I certainly appreciate you've got 400 gig products in the pipeline, campus in the pipeline. But I guess what I'm struggling with is the sense that a lot of the campus was targeting existing customers. So just trying to understand that comment and how to quantify how that fits into the overall guidance.
Thank you.
Yes. Thanks, Simon. First of all, it's important to understand that a $100,000,000 campus target is 100,000,000 dollars It's small compared to our overall business. We do believe that we can naturally go into our existing customers who already know EOS and CloudVision. But as I said last year, we were pleasantly surprised by the new prospects and interest in campus.
So in a non COVID environment, I would have expected a 50% existing customers and 40% new prospects. In the current environment, I think we're going to go back to a comfort level where our familiar customers are more likely to spend with us and our new prospects will take time. So it will probably be 70%, maybe even higher on familiar and existing customers in 2020, which was not the trend we were on in Q4 last year.
And the implications for 400 gig, has that slid out as well?
No. Okay. So I was answering your cancer question. What was your question on 400 gig again?
Well, I guess broadly speaking, I think of new including campus and 400 gig. So I just want to get
a sense of how you
see the timing of the 400 gig market if that has slid out versus your prior expectation? And if so, when?
Okay. So first of all, 400 gig, we believe is truly for our high end enterprises, service providers, cloud and very, very high end enterprise, quite the opposite of campus. And as we said before, we expect early 400 gig trials will be in the late 2020 time trend and actually material production general availability due to low cost, lack of cost effective 400 gig optics and even some of the COVID issues will be in 2021. Nothing has really changed there, but we continue to see that. Now we did have some exciting product announcements.
In 400 gig, we introduced the Arista Osepce line card, which is really a low power, highly compact, pluggable OSF form factor for simplifying DWDM for distances up to 120 kilometers. We also demonstrated interoperability with Ciena with their most dense and spectrally efficient 400 gig and Arista Swift. So our 400 gig trials definitely are continuing with existing customers and cloud titans. But as we've always said, we expect, just to put this in context for you, in Q4, the number of 400 gig ports according to market researchers is 5,000 ports. However, the 100 gig ports was several 1,000,000.
So there's a 1000x magnitude difference between the two And I don't think that's going to change in the near term.
Thank you for taking the questions. Absolutely.
Your next question comes from Jeff Kvaal with Nomura Instinet. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you. I was wondering if you could help us understand the nature of the demand change over the course of the quarter and into April, just so that we get a little better sense of how you are thinking about the 2nd quarter developing? Is it going to end strongly? Or is it improving through the quarter, that type of thing?
Okay. So I think we have yet to experience the full impact of COVID-nineteen. I think we'll see much more of that in the second half. So if I look at Q1, we experienced it at the tail end, mostly in terms of our supply chain. And if I look at Q2, we'll still be very supply chain constrained.
So I think we understand Q1 and Q2 better and both of them were Q1, as you know, is seasonably slow quarter for us. It really picks up steam in March, and we couldn't pick up enough steam because we couldn't ship enough. And that steam is going to continue into Q2. So Q2 is all about shipments. We do see, as we said, good strength in the cloud titans.
And we see reasonable demand in Q2, but I think our real worry is second half.
Okay. Are you able to share with us kind of a loose dollar range for how much the supply constraints do you think are affecting you in either the 1st or the second quarter?
Well, I think the Q1 is done, but you can tell we projected lower than consensus. You can count all of that and more as supply chain related. Yes. I mean, I
think, Jeff, if you look at where we came out for the Q1 on revenue versus our guidance, that gives you some idea of the magnitude of that, right? I'm not going to try to do that for Q2 at this stage. Yes.
Okay. Thank you both very much.
Thank you. Question comes from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking the question.
Kind of a
different way of maybe asking the same question again. But I'm curious of how you think about the demand profile from the cloud guys. We're seeing industry reports talking about pretty healthy server demand at several of these public cloud vendors. We've seen the numbers from Microsoft and others. And what kind of the lag effect you see between server footprint deployment or expansion versus actually pulling more network bandwidth needs and obviously a benefit for Arista?
First of all, we do see Cloud Titan use case demand in basically three areas. Either our customers are adding additional core or spine capability or they're expanding racks to increase the server density or in some cases, we're also seeing some geo expansion for the international needs, although some of them have been ordered from the United States increasing our U. S. Titan contribution. So I think the use cases for us is very, very clear.
What we also see is that because we have long lead times that Anshul and the team are working very closely on really understanding and sharpening their forecast and timing and working with us on scenarios and contingencies. So I think when they are starting to look at their 2020 deployments, they're not just looking at Q1, Q2, they try to give us visibility for the second half as well. And so while we have not factored any of that into our Q1 or Q2 forecast, we are seeing them doing some very prudent planning and for business continuity in their 2020 timeframe.
And if I heard you
Sorry, go ahead. Ashu, would you like to add some more to that?
Absolutely. I know there's been a lot of commentary about other components that go into the cloud, whether it's compute, other pieces and so on. And it's hard to correlate 1 for 1, especially in this timeframe, because some of the spike in those other components is coming because of shortages in previous quarters, if you remember that. As a result of that, there might be some volatility and you will see some spike up on compute and so on. Networking has been stable.
As Jesher mentioned, we saw constraints towards the end of Q1, but prior to that things were stable. So they were not short on networking gear and so on. I do want to add one last comment on the traffic needs and there's a lot of commentary on the street on how traffic is growing and spiking up and work from home and so on. We have to keep those trends in mind relative to the overall cloud capacity. And yes, working from home means we need video conferencing or phone calls or edge connectivity.
But that's a very small fraction of the overall cloud spend in the broader market. So yes, sometimes traffic quadrupled or grew 7x in certain regions, but that's less than a 1% impact to the overall spend. So I would say there's some hype around that rather than material impact to us. But as everyone mentioned, things in the cloud are stable and now we'll focus on second half rhythm.
That's a great answer. Stable meaning you expect the full year to be stable for cloud versus previously saying it would be meaningfully down?
Like we said, Aaron, we said, we expect the cloud to be flat year over year flattish year over year.
And then just to clarify before we get all wrapped on the revenue deferred thing again.
When we're
talking about this commentary is around the business and the trends of the business. And then obviously, we still have to deal with the deferred after that, right? But it is an improvement from we had talked the business being flat to down and now we're saying we think it's stable in that context and then the deferred is additive to that afterwards.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Aaron.
Thanks, Aaron. Thank you, Aaron.
Your next question comes from Ryan Coons with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open.
Great, thanks. I was going
to ask about the service provider segment.
It's been somewhat of a laggard. And are there any kind of new strategies or products that you guys are rolling out? Or is
there different sales motion that you think can invigorate that segment? Thank you.
Yes. No, thank you for that. We have been marching towards more and more product capability. In fact, we just introduced EOS software release 4.204, very targeted towards cloud rig routing and service provider peering use cases with a single EVPN control plane and segment routing and MPLS on the data plane, just a chock full of features, BGP, Flow Aware Transport Label, MPLS, segment routing, traffic engineering. What I can tell you is they're getting richer and richer in our product capability.
But what I can also tell you is service providers take time to operationalize these things in their network. We are doing okay in our already existing service provider customers And we are starting to win some small Tier 2 and Tier 3 ones, small ones. But too early to call and too early to say much more about it.
Okay, great. Thanks Jayshree.
Thank you, Ryan.
Thanks, Ryan.
Your next question comes from Erik Suppiger with JMP. Your line is open.
Yes, thanks for taking the question. Can you just discuss how the large enterprise accounts are getting impacted by COVID-nineteen? Is it a sales execution issue where falling on the customer is the challenge? Or is it actually a personnel issue where they've got people staying at home and not in the data centers deploying servers and switches or where is the disruption most impacting?
So Eric, I would classify it in 2 ways. I think the large enterprises that are already intimate with the risk test and need to make incremental enhancements were okay. They're familiar with us. They know how to work with us. We're supporting them.
Our systems engineering team led by Ashwin, our sales team led by Krishmit have tremendous amount of engagement with our existing customers, right? So I don't see a dramatic change yet in sales engagement or product differentiation. Where I do see the difficulty is prospects. So we're having a tremendous amount we have been having a tremendous amount of new customer logos. And our new customer logos continue to be healthy.
And we gather steam especially internationally where we have 60% of our new customer logos come in. However, to convert them especially into large deals and large enterprises, requires large proof of concept, number of network design clinics, and obviously were slowed down due to the lack of face to face. So we're spending more time with them training, educating than we are able to do in deployment. Whereas with our own existing familiar enterprise customers, we can march forward with more progress.
Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Eric.
Your next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Great. Thanks. Maybe just one for me.
You noted kind of strong behavior out of some of the Tier 2 clouds, but has there been any change in thought or is it just too early as the Tier 2s go forward, whether they will continue to kind of build their own data centers or leverage the public cloud more? Do you expect kind of this to have any
change to that behavior? Thanks. Meta, that's a good question. And I said before, it depends on the Tier 2. We know some of the larger Tier 2s have paused.
And it's not that they're going to the public cloud, but they're just pausing their spending. Others are expanding their data centers and some of the smaller ones are continuing for their specialized applications. So it's my belief that they will continue to succeed in their special use cases and complement the public cloud. But it will be cyclical. They didn't do much of it last year and I think some of them are coming back this year.
And what we are seeing is the specialty clouds are realizing that some of the workloads they can control better and some belong in the public cloud. So I don't I think they'll continue to have a place. And in fact, a good example of that was the content delivery network guys. You saw on Zoom traction within CDN customers and there's some real time streaming and content delivery, particularly with work from home, with the millions of users and the aggregates of 4 ks and 8 ks flows, you can see why they would make some important investments there.
Got it. Thank you.
Thanks, Meta.
Your next question comes from Pierre Ferragu with New Street. Your line is open.
Hey, thank you for taking my question. One more on cloud. So on this perspective that you'll have flat revenues between this year and last year. I was wondering how your mix is going to did you see your mix evolving? And a couple of things I have in mind is what you sell at the lower end of the hierarchy in access, server access at the lease level versus things you sell higher in for DCI, for the Universal Spine?
And also or maybe another way to look at the split would be thermowoc based products versus Jericho based product. Do you see a significant evolution in that mix between this year and last year? Thank you.
Thank you, Pierre. I would say, the short answer is no. We've always had a very nice mix of value products with the Tomahawk and Trident family connecting to servers sorry, the volume products and then the value products with the Jericho family with the 7,280 and 7,500 flagship. So depending on the use cases, customers opt for both. They're both very, very popular products and both are currently challenging the lead times as well.
It's not so much that we're seeing a change in product mix. I would say the biggest change we're seeing is people are doubling down on 100 gig and 400 gig is getting pushed out next year in the cloud. That's probably the biggest shift.
Thank you. Thank you, Pierre.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from John Marchetti with Stifel. Your line is open.
Thanks very much. Jayshir, I'm curious with the supply constraints that
are going on right now.
If it impacts any one
others or it's broadened up that it's kind of having an EBIT impact across the group?
And then EBITDA just sort of
as a follow-up to that, you sold a bit out of inventory.
I'm guessing because
you couldn't bring some other stuff in. Is that something that likely occurs again here in the second quarter?
Yes. Maybe let me take that first. I mean that's a one time thing where when things are constrained, it's a good opportunity to go look at what you have in inventory and sell some stuff that maybe we hadn't thought we would. But I think we're through most of that now. So that's why I think the guide for gross margin comes back to the typical 63% to 65% and then it will just be driven more by customer mix than anything else.
Yes. And John, to answer your question on our extended lead times, I'm not sure we saw a trend on verticals. What we did see is that our key customers worked very closely with Anshul and Chris and Ashwin to really sharpen their forecast and timing and work closely with us on their network designs and what products available, what's not, when can we ship what to them. And this is I hope these are famous last words, but I hope we can John McColl and Christoph and the team are really working hard to overcome this. And should we improve this in Q3, I think we will have a chance to fulfill a lot of our key customers' needs and factor that into their 2020 deployment considerations.
But I didn't see anything by vertical. I saw it more by top customers.
Thank you.
Thank you, John.
Question comes from Sami Badri with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Hi, thank you. I was a little bit curious if you could give us
a little bit more of
maybe an idea on dynamics or just maybe some observations you've had in 1Q 2020, what's going on in Europe? And are you competing against different companies? Or are they offering different types of products, at least in the European region versus what Arista has to offer? And I know you made comments that a lot of your customers in the U. S.
Want to take you on also in Europe, but have you seen dynamics change either pre or post COVID or at least anything going on in 2020 that you could shed light on as an observation?
I think for Arista, because our presence internationally is somewhat new, we are feeling stronger in terms of our investment in sales and different countries. So country by country, we feel better about Europe now than we did say even a year or 2 ago. What I think is the difference between Europe and the United States is they don't have the equivalent of cloud titans and we haven't won major service provider titans. So we tend to have smaller wins, but many customers. And I think that's but country by country, the level of engagement, in fact, my our entire executive team was at a Europe customer session last was it last November?
We were all there. It seems like forever, but it wasn't that long ago. And the level of intimacy that the team has developed with our customers, especially in the developed countries, Germany, U. K, France, Middle East, even Israel has been very strong. So I think the European customer base is embracing Arista for its differentiation and value add.
But we just don't have the size of
customers we do in the U. S.
Got it. And then just maybe competitors, are competitors a little bit different in Europe or are you seeing similar competitors in both regions?
Similar, similar. We don't see any difference. At least not in Europe. In Asia, we tend to see some, but not in Europe.
Got it. Thank you.
Question comes from Amit Daryani with Evercore. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking my question, guys. I guess, Fusil, could you perhaps elaborate on what specifics
Amit, we can't hear you. You're choppy. We love you.
We love you. You love
the entire line?
We love you. Fred, on one hand, is it
like supply chain issues or bottlenecks that you were dealing with? And if you did not have these supply chain issues in theory, what would the June quarter guide have looked like? Would it be towards the high end or something different?
Well, it's difficult to speculate since we have supply chain issues. But the reality is different than the theory.
Yes. I think, obviously, there are constraints, right? But I don't know that we can size those at this point, There's a lot of moving things. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we have constraints.
I guess I was more trying to think, could this help you and maybe size how much is helping in the back half of the year when these supply chain bottlenecks alleviate and lead times normalize? But maybe another way, I guess, if you could help us, is there a gross margin impact you're dealing with because of these supply chain constraints? Is there a way to quantify that in the first half of
the year? Thank you.
I mean, we saw a little bit of incremental spending in Q1, but it
was very small. We will see some in Q2. But again, I
think it's manageable at this stage, right? Again, I'd go back to
the $63,000,000 to $65,000,000 And we'll be the midpoint of that range is a good place to start and then we'll see how we go. So there is some incremental cost because you are you're prioritizing supply over some other things. But at least in the first half, we don't see something that's really significant.
Thank you.
Thanks, Amit. Thanks, Amit.
Your next question comes from Alex Henderson with Needham. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. Jayshree, I was hoping you could give us some insight into the way enterprise executives are thinking about conditions, what they're thinking about in terms of how they're approaching spending. You made a comment that I think is probably accurate, which is you're more concerned about COVID in the back half. And I assume that's not supply chain related, it's more demand related. I would assume that you've done a lot of calls with top executives at firms.
What are they saying to you about the business in process, the programs that are already in place are getting completed, but maybe the pipeline is falling off as you exit the Q2 and that their expectations for spending in the back half maybe hard to put it any other way, sharply constrained?
Right. So, Alex, that's a good question. I think our enterprise decision makers and key executives are struggling with this once in a 100 year phenomenon just the way we are, right? They all do have 2020 plans and deadlines and they would very much like to work with Arista and overcome the supply constraints to meet them. And I believe they will.
I believe they'll also take many of them will also take a not just the 2020 horizon, but a multi year horizon and start thinking about how to plan for projects in this virtual world. So we do see some systematic prudent planning. And while we don't have visibility to that demand, we don't think demand will be challenged significantly if they plan prudently. Where we think demand will be challenged, like I said before, is new projects. People are familiar with Arista, people who have to do a lot more testing with Arista, people who love Arista but haven't had a chance yet to get their hands on it.
So that's part of enterprise customers may be more comfortable with doing nothing or being as is. But certainly the 6,000 plus customers we engage with really, really want to work with us and will continue to plan their projects this year or next year. Great.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Alex.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Paul Silverstein with Cowen. Your line is open.
Can you hear me okay, Jayshree?
Yes, I can, Paul.
So as much as I'd like to ask you yet again about how much of the weakness of supply chain versus demand, I will actually ask a different question, which is it just may have come up, but maybe not surprisingly this quarter. But I've got to ask in terms of the classic question of the risk of displacement or the cloud titan that the investment community is worried about for quite some time. Again, it's not perhaps a year or 2 ago given the background, given the current macroeconomic environment. But in terms of your thinking about the latest position with Facebook and Microsoft in particular top items in general relative to that ongoing concern?
Okay. I'll try and answer the question. You're sounding very muffled, Paul. Maybe you're wearing a mask. But if I understood the question, it's what does the competitive landscape look like with cloud titans?
And I would just sort of generically say that our fundamental thesis is unchanged. We're not seeing major competitive issues or architectural shifts. In fact, if you look at the recently released market data from both De Loro and CREEHEN, it validates our number one spot in 100 gig. And for the 3rd consecutive year, we're doing that. We are the number one market share in 100 gig.
And we continue to increase market share into the high teens for high performance data center switching. So we are pleased with our progress year after year, including 2019. Anshul, I'd like to call you to see if there's any specific cloud pricing issues you want to highlight?
No, Jayshree. And as we've said before, Paul, the level of sort of joint development we continue to do with these customers, including Microsoft, it is still pretty intense. So we're not overly worried. If these are competitive environments, that will continue to be so. But there's no major shift there.
Paul, this is a good time for me to highlight some of the work Anshul has been doing. As you know, we have a rich long history in open networking. And today, Arista just introduced a switch abstraction interface, working so that we can work with our Vesterbreed platforms and an abstraction layer for cloud titans and who can now use Sonic on top of our Arista SAI. And this is another example of the close collaboration Anshul is mentioning.
And Jayshree, if I could just follow-up, I appreciate the market share comments, but obviously market share is exactly looking phenomenon. And so with respect to forward looking and the risk of displacement, you all haven't seen or heard anything from those cloud titan that would cause you incremental concern relative to where you've been historically?
Yes. On one hand, we are always paranoid and concerned. That's our nature, and we should be that way, and we want to continue to deliver the best of the best. On the other hand, we have no particular concern or no change in concern or no radical shift in the competitive landscape.
All right. I'll take that. Thank you, Paul.
Thanks, Paul.
Our next question comes from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research. Your line is open.
Good evening. Thank you for taking the question. I was hoping you could step back a little bit and tell us your thoughts, bigger picture about broader hyperscale investments. I'm not looking for guidance. I'm just interested how you think about these customers longer term.
The framing for that, near term, we're seeing these kind of material demand drivers, migration to SaaS, adoption of cloud, need for elastic capacity additions. And in the interim, not seeing a big change in the growth rates, the demand drivers themselves. So I'm interested how you think about it longer term. What are the material drivers that kind of accelerate growth rates? Any specific factors that you think could be meaningful for an acceleration in the broader investment?
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben. Well, look, I think the greatest acceleration for Arista came when the cloud titans made a huge migration to our leaf spine architecture and especially standardized on Arista's EOS for 100 gigabits universal spine. So and then on top of that acceleration, a number of our titans co developed with us a joint development focus that allowed them to scale this to distributed data centers all over the region and all over the cloud. So I think the next acceleration comes from more use cases with 400 gig and 100 gig in tandem with the possibility of expanding their data centers and their server density and their storage capabilities. And I don't think that's necessarily this year, but it could be in the next 3 years.
So it would have to be a repeat of how we succeeded in 100 gig at 400 gig levels. Anshul, do you want to add something more to that?
Yes. Then the way to look at the cloud and the cloud titans is, it started with data centers with computer and storage and then moved on to different types of apps and are continuing that journey. And the next phase of investment in this space in our view, there will be more at the edge. By edge, I don't mean directly just edge computing, but think of it as an Equinix type of meet me place. So the cloud companies I think will continue to invest in that area and then connect that back into the tenant space in their large data centers.
And these networks of different kinds are being built or will continue to build in the next few years with different types of overlays and encryption and mapping from one tenant space to the other and so on. I think that's very significant because in a longer picture, if you look at it 5, 10 years from now, we will look back and say, well, this is how the cloud companies restitched the Internet. And I think those are some of the most strategic projects in the next few years.
That's great. The DCI and routing use cases cannot be underestimated and it's really truly redefine the Internet.
Thank you, Ben.
Our next question comes from Woo Jin Ho with Bloomberg. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. Longer term question as it relates to the enterprise. Has the nature of your conversation with either our close enterprise customers changed at all? This may be a little bit premature.
And the reason why I ask is, given that we're at a stay at home zero touch environment, one would have to think that the network automation thesis should start playing out a little bit faster given that no one can get to their networks anymore. How does that fit into customer conversations today? Do you think that will evolve? And especially given that you do have big switch that provides that enterprise hyperscalecloudlikeenvironment to the enterprise that might be a positive to you guys in the long term?
Yes. No, I Worten, you really bring up a good point here. We tend to talk about data center and campus and all of these different use cases, but our customers are thinking more and more operationally. It's great to have a box, but how they ignite that box with the right operational capabilities is very, very important. And so when you look at it, you're absolutely right.
Day 0, day 1, day 2, 0 touch automation, one click for the campus, data center, huge topic. The other one, and this is why we got Big Switch, is not only are we igniting real time streaming telemetry and cloud vision, but we're really extending that into the observability and upper packet broker space. And we're very pleased with the sort of sum of data analyzer, cloud vision and now fixed switch to extend our DAN's monitoring fabric. So that trial or combination is going to be very important for deeper telemetry. So our enterprise conversations are going beyond best of breed platforms to much more operational automation, analytics availability and in the future security and segmentation as well.
So just a follow on on that.
Are these conversations that you've been having that's been ongoing for quite some time now? Or does the, I guess, the pandemic crisis accelerate that and potentially force customers to make a left turn in their purchasing decisions or their architectural decisions causing purchasing delays?
Yes. I think it's too early to say it's because of the pandemic. They were going on anyway. But I think the importance of them becomes greater if the pandemic continues longer. Right now, I think we're getting more hammered on supply chain.
But if we overcome that, I think we'll get much more on automation and analytics.
Okay. Understood. Thanks guys. Thank
you.
From Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Yes, of course. Again, just a couple, one for you Jayshree and one for you, Yirang. Jayshree, do you get a sense of if there was any business activity in the quarter that was just a pull in from second half plants into the first half, given the effects of work from home that some customers saw pressure that they had to respond to quickly and did it by pulling in budgets? And for you, Itau, on the 2018 OpEx comment, I understand T and E, you're clearly saving a lot of money there. But are there headcount reductions planned as well?
Or this is just less marketing, less travel, you're not flying business anymore? How do I think about that?
Yes. I mean, I'll take that
one first, maybe just that. Yes. No, I think we are preserving kind of employee talent. That's probably our most important resource and we're definitely focused on doing that. And really, we're looking at other areas and other more variable expenses, one time type expenses that we can manage, hopefully, in the near term window and preserve kind of employees and the town base.
And the short answer, in fact, to your question is we did not experience pull ins in Q1.
Very good. Good luck, ladies.
All right. Thank you. Thank you.
Okay. This concludes the Arista Q1 2020 earnings call. We have posted a presentation which provides additional information on our fiscal results which you can access on the Investors section of our website. Thank you for joining us today and please be safe everybody.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.