Good afternoon. My name is David, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to Ciena's Next Gen Metro and Edge Investor Chalk Talk. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star 1 once again. Thank you. Gregg Lampf, Vice President of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, David. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We hope you've had the opportunity to take the roughly 30 minutes to listen to the recording we uploaded last week before today's Q&A call. If not, please do go and check it out on the events page at your convenience. There's a lot of great information there. We know a lot of you have been asking us questions on this topic that we certainly try to address there as well as during this call today. We're certainly excited to host this discussion about Ciena's Next Gen Metro and Edge journey and the expanding TAM opportunities we've been investing towards over the past several years. Today, we're gonna focus on your questions.
Leading the call today will be Scott McFeely, who many of you know, and he'll be joined by subject matter experts, Brodie Gage, Vice President of Product Line Marketing, and Joe Marsella, Vice President of Metro and Edge Product Line Management. Scott will take a couple of minutes to provide a high-level review of the presentation before we kick off the Q&A. Before handing it off to Scott, I just wanted to remind everyone that Ciena is in its quiet period. We won't be discussing current financial information, results, expectations, or economic conditions.
While we won't be discussing these items, we do expect to talk directionally about the technology market, and as such, please do take note of our safe harbor language from our most recent financial results call on March 7, 2022, as well as our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on March 9, 2022 for more details there. With that, I'll hand the call over to Scott.
Thanks, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. It's good to speak to you again, and thanks for your time today and your interest in this topic and in Ciena. Hopefully you had, as Greg said, a chance to listen to or watch the prepared video with the stars of the show, Brodie and Joe. I wanted to just for those that maybe haven't had a chance at a really high level, summarize some of the key points we were trying to get across in the video.
We absolutely see, you know, a significant amount of change happening at the edge of the network, that's driven by, you know, well-discussed attributes of how we live our lives, how enterprises, how consumers, are living their lives, and, you know, the drive for bandwidth at the edge of the network. The folks that provide those networks driving to a more cost-effective way to serve that bandwidth with the right performance attributes for the applications that they're trying to serve up. What's driving that is, you know, higher bandwidth per flow, fiber densification and fiber deeper into the network. In an attempt to drive down or bend the cost curve, the disaggregation of services that historically would have been integrated into routers into solutions that take advantage of commercial off-the-shelf compute capabilities.
What that means for us is, you know, there's a bunch of architectural change out there which gives us opportunity, and we fundamentally believe the key attributes for stepping into those opportunities are, you know, optical becomes more important part of the solution set, both in terms of the light sources, but also the optical layer, the photonics, and the intelligence around the optical layer for carrying those higher bandwidth flows. A next generation IP networking capability that is not, you know, tied down by the legacy services that were all integrated in these service edge routers in the past. A multilayer operational set of tools that allow our customers to instantiate these technology capabilities in their networks.
Those dimensions are things that we have been investing in for quite some time, and we've been sort of funneling those investments into primarily four different use cases that we think is a great growth opportunity for Ciena over, you know, the next number of years. Just to reiterate them, they're. We talked to them in some detail in the video, but wireless transport and everything from fronthaul, midhaul, and backhaul included in that. Enterprise networking. Next generation residential fiber access or XGS-PON. Backing off from those sort of more access parts of the network into deeper into the network, into a converged metro network that's capable of carrying all of the traffic coming at us from those different use cases.
We've had some early success in each of those use cases. We highlighted some of those in the video, but we're happy to get into it a bit more here in the Q&A. With that, sort of for those of you that maybe didn't have a chance, that's sort of the background, and we'll just jump right into it.
Thank you. At this time, I'd like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster. We'll take our first question from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Your line's open.
Thanks for taking the question. I guess my big takeaway from the session, the chalk talk, was Ciena's argument of why ZR would not be a big threat. You know, I guess some of the metrics we've heard suggest that ZR traction's been pretty good, ramping in the beginning of this year. I wanted to hear your latest takes on how you're sizing the ZR market in this year and then several years out. Thank you.
Yeah. Let me try that, Simon. By the way, good afternoon. How are you? The you know the ZR market specifically, and you've heard me talk about this before. Let me separate out ZR specifically from you know the extension of ZR+, ZR++, whatever label you wanna put to it, which is sort of pluggables beyond just the definition of ZR. When we're talking about next generation metro and edge, by the way, we kind of separate out the inter data center connectivity and the ZR piece, but I'll talk to it anyway. The ZR piece, well, we haven't changed our perspective on it, by the way. We think the you know the market size is you know around $500 million a year as this gets matured.
We actually do believe that it will be a consumption model that will have a place to play in the sort of campus/metro data center interconnect. That's the, you know, single span, less than 80 km, very, you know, simple network in between. We think we have a great offer there, and we will participate in that. And as you say, it's starting to get going, but it's still in front of us in terms of, you know, being a significant part of anybody's spend. Even that $500 million when you're talking about, you know, a, an overall addressable optical market of whatever, $12 or $13 billion, depending on who you look at to count it, you know, it's still a relatively niche application in the ZR context.
For Ciena, just remind you that our exposure to the folks that will roll this out, which is the web scalers, is largely dominated by, you know, core infrastructure and submarine. We have some exposure on the metro, but for the metro, it's as much an upside opportunity for us than it is a threat. Now let me take it to the part of the question I think that does apply to the next generation metro and edge piece of it, which is, you know, will pluggables have a play in the technology piece? Not necessarily ZR to the spec, but you know, coherent in a pluggable form factor, lower power footprint than maybe say, you know, a submarine solution. We believe absolutely they will.
It's an important part of the winning hand. The winning hand also includes, you know, sophisticated photonics, you know, an IP forwarding and routing capability, and the management tools for the folks that deploy these type of networks, which is the service providers for the most part, to be able to operationalize this. Just because it may be quote-unquote, "a pluggable solution," we still think the dominant consumption model is going to be buying, you know, that from an end-to-end system vendor. You know, Brodie, I'd if you wanted to add anything to that, please feel free to jump in.
No, that's exactly right. ZR is gonna be for metro DCI use cases almost solely. That's a net opportunity for us. In service provider metro, ZR does not play there. Higher performance pluggable optics play there, but you need to have that end-to-end handoff of photonics, modems, IP platforms, NOS, off-box software, automation intelligence that sits on top of it, for it to be successful in the service provider space.
Yeah. Maybe just a quick follow-up that you're sort of alluding to here is I think folks understand one of the limitations of ZR is the reach, typically about 80 km. What are some of the other limitations that would dissuade an operator from using ZR besides range?
Yeah. ZR optics are optimized for the metro DCI use case. Things like the tunable optical filter, the EDFA that provides high performance output power, the linear and nonlinear compensation has all been pulled out of it to make it cost effective and low power for that DCI use case. Those optics are not relevant for metro service provider or regional applications because they can't go through ROADM, and they can't meet the applications that the service providers want to deploy in.
Thanks for taking the questions.
Thanks, Simon.
You're welcome.
I'd like to remind everyone it's star one if you'd like to ask a question. Next, we'll go to Fahad Najam with Loop Capital. Your line is now open.
Thank you for taking my question. You know, my question is more on the software-related opportunity in the edge. To give you a bit of a context on what I'm talking about, I recently attended a conference which is primarily enterprise IT, so nothing to do with telecom. I was pleasantly surprised to see Ciena there making presentations to CIOs about orchestrating and managing their SD-WAN deployments. To the extent that coherent technology further penetrates potentially in the campus environment at 1.6 terabit or even higher speeds, what is the related software opportunity, and how are you thinking about that opportunity overall?
Brodie, do you wanna talk through some of our thought process on high-speed enterprise cloud connect?
Sure. A couple things.
Oh, what happened?
Go ahead, Joe. Brodie, your line's open.
Can you hear us okay now? We're having technical problems with the phone.
There you are. Yep.
Yeah.
Can hear you okay now.
We can hear you.
Here we go.
Okay. Yeah. There was a couple things in that question. Number one, with regards to higher speed connectivity within the data center, as you move. Can you still hear us okay?
No, you're choppy.
You're clipping. Okay.
Yeah, audio's breaking up.
Okay, we'll try again. There's a couple things in that question. As data centers move to higher capacities within the data center, so as you move from 400 gig gray optics to 800 gig to 1.6 T and 3.2 T, etc., there is absolutely an opportunity going forward for coherent implementations for those, what we call coherent light implementations. For
Brodie, we're gonna have to.
That's number one.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're gonna switch rooms to a different phone. We'll be back.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
Patience.
Yeah. Maybe I'll jump in and tell you where we have offers today and where we see this going in terms of the. I'll just call it the virtual edge. Today, if I look at our offers there, we've built capability on top of our physical managed service infrastructure, basically, where you know you can drop a one of our network terminating equipments and run integrated in there you know the software infrastructure to run various different VNF, and we've pre-integrated a number of VNF, and we take that to market through a number of service providers. That's sort of the networking offer.
Above and beyond that, within our Blue Planet orchestration, we have the capability to offer orchestration of, you know, those virtual assets, including bundled, of course, with, you know, our networking offer. Going forward, the other incremental piece of that that we see is as you start where you started with your question, we start to see higher bandwidth going into those enterprises and, you know, that bandwidth being cloud connect services. We do see an opportunity to actually sort of have a programmable, if you like, you know, virtual wave service that would be offered as a cloud connect service, either via a service provider or via one of the hosting companies. That's the future.
The other ones I talked about are existing offers today.
Scott, if I can follow up. To the extent that we talk about 5G and private 5G and the potential for edge cloud to be as much an enterprise-driven initiative as much as it is a service provider-led initiative or a cloud provider-led initiative. Just I'm trying to understand in terms of the fact that if coherent gets pushed deeper into the network, that is obviously the transport opportunity for you. But my real question is more on what emerging software opportunities do you guys see from the edge cloud and the metro edge overall, and especially as it pertains to enterprise opportunity and 'cause I think that's something that, you know, I wasn't privy to that you guys have meaningful exposure to. Maybe if you can just dive a little bit deeper on that.
Yeah, I think you know on the software piece, so first of all, you mentioned 5G and you mentioned the software piece, so I'll talk to both. On the 5G piece of it today, you know, we've had you know significant success in two domains. One is on the transport part of it. If you look at your next generation xHaul to meet architectures that are looking at you know C-RAN, et cetera, that's one. We talked to some of that in the Chalk Talk. Second one actually is as you know an end-to-end orchestrator for 5G services with the demand for slicing capabilities and whatnot. That's today on a classic 5G/LTE mobility network.
You mentioned, you know, private 5G and lots of talk about that, and people are sort of starting to, I'll say, work on proof of concepts and thinking about how they go to market with that. We are participating there with, you know, a couple of different partners on that, you know, have radio link compute pieces, and we are providing sort of the networking infrastructure and some SI services around that as well. We think that's an opportunity, but it's more of a future opportunity than people actually making buying decisions today.
In terms of the software assets that could fit into that or a broader enterprise play, obviously, we talked about the orchestration capabilities of Blue Planet, but we also have, as you know, picked up some assets with the Vyatta acquisition that we did. You know, they're in here right now. They're pretty much focused on satisfying existing commitments within their installed base customers, but we are getting our mind around how do we take that to a broader market as well.
Appreciate the answers. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott. Okay. Next, we're gonna go to, Timothy Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Hi there. Wanted to ask a question kind of breaking down the TAM increase that you guys talked about in the Chalk Talk in next-gen metro edge going from $6 billion-$14 billion. Is most of that kind of the, you know, global GPON, you know, residential PON market, if you will? Or are there other pieces worth calling out? You know, should we be looking at Ciena as, you know, as much of a candidate to pursue, you know, 10G PON business for a lot of these fiber builds that are going on in the U.S. and globally as, you know, as much as the incumbent players such as Nokia, someone like that?
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for the question. Brodie, do you want to take a crack at that one?
Sure.
If you're back.
Sounds good. Yeah. Can you hear me okay, Scott?
We can now, yeah.
Sorry about that. Earlier challenges. With regards to the TAM expansion, we stated that in the next gen metro and edge, we're going from $6 billion to $14 billion. The current $6 billion or the historical $6 billion that we had is the L2 and L3 access and aggregation business and the metro WDM market. The additional TAM is based on the service edge routing market that will move to an IP optical convergence play, as well as a portion of the PON market, specifically the 10G XGS-PON portion of that market. Those are the two major things that drive the TAM expansion for Ciena.
Should I think about that as a 50/50, or does that bias one way or the other between the two?
At least initially, it's more biased towards the heavier portion of it is the edge routing market.
Yep.
Versus the 10G XGS-PON. Over time, 10G XGS-PON will grow to be a substantial part of the overall PON market, but that'll take a few years.
Okay.
Brodie, I think the other dimension that, you know, you have to factor into the addressable piece of it is if you go to the wireless use case that we talked about in the Chalk Talk, historically, we've had great success in parts of the world where there has been a, you know, a layer two wholesale service for wireless, but we've been cut out of, you know, the cell site router domain because we didn't, you know, when those decisions were made 10 years ago, we didn't have an IP offer. You know, we've been building purpose-built portfolio for that opportunity set that's going to present itself, and it's starting to present itself as people start to look at their architecture changes to 5G.
Whether it's numerically in those numbers or not is a significant part of, you know, the opportunity expansion for us.
Right. Maybe that's a piece of what you might call the edge router market, but a very specialized piece.
Yeah.
around 5G and cell site.
Exactly.
Got it.
Correct.
To follow up, you know, to the extent that you're moving closer to the edge, I wonder if there are any kind of meaningful margin implications as you move out in that direction. You know, historically, you know, the PON market, in particular, could see a little bit lower margins. I know you're approaching it differently, with a pluggable, not a coherent pluggable, but, you know, and kinda IP capability. Any thoughts on how this increasing presence in metro and access might impact on gross margins over time?
Yeah, I think, look, I think from you know, the solution sets will be picked on as our primary focus, Tim. Net, net across all those four use cases we talked about, I think the margins will be at or better than corporate average. The specifics you're talking about as you get closer to the edge, I think will probably be at the corporate average in terms of the approach that we're taking at it. I don't see we're gonna see a you know, a significant delta to our corporate average. As this comes, I'll say, more routing and switching revenue for us, as we've talked about in the past, you know, routing and switching is a slightly higher margin rate than our corporate averages.
Got it. Thanks. I'll pass it on.
Once again, it's star 1 if you have a question. Next, we'll go to Tal Liani with Bank of America. Your line's open.
Hey, I wanna go to the basics. What's the advantage of going with Ciena routers? I see that Juniper, for example, is addressing the same market. Again, to my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, but addressing the same market with their own routers, access routers, and Ciena is coming from the other side. What's the advantage of using Ciena versus using an existing routing vendor that is already probably providing other routing needs in the network?
Yeah. I'll paraphrase the question, and I'm gonna ask Joe to speak to it because Joe is at the coal face of just about every competitive engagement that we have around this part of the portfolio. He's the perfect guy to speak to it. Joe, why do we win in the different use cases that we got?
That's a good question, and one I probably get asked quite a lot these days. At a high level, it gets back to the approach that we've taken, right? I mean, we've come at it from a slightly different approach. It's not just about protocols and speeds and feeds. You know, those are certainly important and table stakes to be in the IP game, and I don't wanna discount those by any means. We've taken a more operational approach, and this approach we've defined Adaptive IP, which is built around the idea of closed-loop automation and creating a multi-vendor capable IP network, that's more about how you manage and the life cycle of the IP network than the day one protocol.
not to speak about, you know, specific vendors as you mentioned, but you know, that story is resonating pretty well. I think the combination with the optical side of things as IP and optical converges with the intelligent controller that we talked about, all of that adds to, I think our bullishness in this space and our belief that we can be successful.
So-
And-
Sorry.
Maybe if I could add to that. It's also dependent on the use case. In 5G, the reason that we've already had wins and been very successful in that space is, one, we had incumbency on the wholesale backhaul portion of it, so we had incumbency there. And two, we built a set of purpose-built routers for that application that knowing that 5G was gonna drive more towers and more capacity per tower, we kinda got ahead of the curve and built routers specific for that use case. In PON, we've been successful already with multiple accounts because we've combined the routing function together with the OLT. The headend of the PON function are combined into the router, whereas historical architectures has the OLT and router as separate devices. We've been successful there.
We've been successful in the metro core because we can solve all aspects of the winning hand, photonics, coherent modems, IP platforms, NOS, off-box software, including automation and control that allows the customers to manage that entire architecture. That's why we've been successful in these areas already.
A carrier that comes to Ciena for these solutions, they need to subscribe to your holistic view of how to manage the IP network, or are they buying it as a point product to do aggregation of cell sites?
It can do both, right? I mean, the holistic view is an architecture, but we've built it from a set of disaggregated principles, which means you can select some, all, or none of those principles to build a network off of. So it's very open from that perspective.
What's the reality? How do you see customers deploying it?
I mean, it depends on whether you're talking about tier one or the rest of the world. I mean, tier ones typically buy point products 'cause, you know, they have more people, they have more, they can do more analysis. They do RFPs per product. If you get into the tier twos, tier threes, rest of the world, they typically like to buy more holistically from, you know, a complete solution perspective from a single vendor.
Got it. Just my last question. Sorry, I'm taking too much time, but I wanna finish this topic. When you look at your revenue so far, your order book, et cetera, give us some, maybe not even data, just qualitatively talk about the breakdown between tier one and tier twos, threes, and so on.
Can you repeat the question? I apologize.
Yes. You said that there are different use cases, different kind of deployment cases for tier 1, that they're buying more point solutions, and then tier 3, tier 4 that are doing more holistic view of their IP network, and they're taking Ciena for higher level reasons. When you look at your revenue so far, your order book so far, how is the exposure that you have on the tier ones who are buying it as a point solution versus someone who's subscribing more to your more holistic view on IP networks?
I think it's pretty evenly split, is the best answer I can probably give you.
Got it. Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Tal Liani.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, it's star one if you have a question. Next, we'll have a follow-up from Fahad Najam with Loop Capital. Your line's open. Fahad, your line's open.
Thank you for squeezing me back in. Scott, I wanted to ask you, in terms of as you push deeper into the network, closer to the edge, at some point, I'm assuming the access or the transport technology really becomes agnostic. Because I've heard of trials at large tier one operators in North America, where they were using these pluggable OLTs from a company called Tibit Communications and your routing platform. It almost sounds like you can start to plug in the transport technology into these more IP software-enabled platform. Is that something resonating with customers? Is that something that's kind of like, you know, as you push deeper in the network, you essentially become more agnostic to the transport?
You're absolutely right, Fahad. I mean, if you look at the XGS-PON offer, what's kind of unique about this is, you know, we've brought XGS-PON to a routing platform. On a sort of port-by-port basis, you can, you know, configure whether or not you want that to be a PON interface or activate that interface, etc. That has a value proposition to our customers that are serving, you know, multi-use cases from a universal, what we call a universal aggregation device.
What's important to them as well, though, is 100% consistent software stack, our next generation IP NOS. The fact that OLT and the whole PON data path is operationally integrated into our networking capabilities and that we manage this for them from our domain controller. Brodie and Joe, you guys can jump in because you guys are, I guess, as I said, every day talking about the solution in front of customers, so.
Yeah. I mean, I would say there are two main reasons we're being successful in this space and in 10G XGS-PON in particular. Number 1, it's I think Brodie touched on it earlier. In majority of architectures out there's an OLT and a router sitting next to each other, and we've integrated the two together to simplify how that gets deployed. That really resonates, particularly, you know, back to my point earlier with the tier 2 and tier 3 space, less equipment, less things to manage, less CapEx, et cetera. The second big reason that I think we're having success, to the point Scott was getting at, is we've been able to better optimize the footprint at these locations.
Our architectural approach from a product perspective is not about putting big chassis out in these sites. It's about more of scalable, both up and down pizza box plug-based model, which has quite significant power space thermal advantages that have played well into a number of opportunities. That combination of power space thermal savings coupled with the ability to combine functionality into a single platform has really resonated against the traditional PON incumbents so far.
I guess, Joe, the other thing is that, you know, when it makes sense, the fact that they can integrate on, you know, the more the networking facing side versus the access side, you know, the world's best coherent optics, is another part of the value proposition.
Yeah. Keep in mind, you know, we talk a lot about IP optical. I mean, PON is effectively another form of IP optical. It's just the optical technology is slightly different underneath the cover. It's very well aligned to our strategy and our core competency, and we fully intend to be successful in this space.
Like coherent, it's not just about plugging the plugs in. There's an integration aspect of it. Like we've done on coherent, we're doing the same thing on 10G XGS-PON, which is integrating it into the platform, having an end-to-end winning hand, including the out-of-box software and automation control and the services to support that.
Yeah. I mean, it's a good point, both from the coherent plug perspective as well as the OLT plug perspective. It's not just about sticking a plug in a box. It's a lot of software that has to happen behind the scenes to implement all the functionality. I think we've done a pretty good job of doing that integration on both sides.
If I can, maybe, ask the question in a more high-level way. The more value differentiation now becomes increasingly in the software as you push deeper into the edge and the fact that your Blue Planet software has incumbency and you know how to do service chaining, orchestration, it plays to your benefit and the barrier to entry from other traditional routing suppliers, why have they not been able to crack this, opportunity?
Yeah, I mean, software is a key part all the way from the network up to the orchestration layer, as you said. I mean, in the metro and edge, there's typically more technology types, more vendor types, more things to worry about. Our ability to layer Blue Planet over top of that has been a key contributor as well. It's sort of our one plus one equals three to couple with the underlying network solutions.
Appreciate the answers. Thank you.
Next, we have a follow-up from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on, you know, kind of the competitive landscape here. I think you'd mentioned that, you know, capability across both the kind of photonic area as well as IP be critical to kind of making the most of this edge opportunity. I might argue also that some, you know, incumbency or stronger presence at the edge or in the access network might be a factor as well. Maybe it's a two-variable equation, maybe it's three. You know, as I look across that, actually, it seems like Nokia, you know, might be your most formidable competitor as we're talking about these opportunities, perhaps Cisco as well.
I'd be interested in your comments on kind of the, you know, broader competitive landscape, whether you might agree with that given, you know, the combination of, you know, strong IP and optical technology of both of those players and what you're seeing in the market currently from a competitive standpoint.
Yeah. Tim, I think at a high level, you're right in terms of who has the, you know, some aspects of the winning hand. You can debate the relative strengths and whatnot between, you know, optics, the photonics, you know, the next generation IP and a set of off-box software tools to be able to operationalize that new network. I think it's important though to maybe refine the answer a little bit by use case, and maybe I'll let Brodie sort of walk around the use cases to give a little bit more insight.
Yeah. If we just go, I think it's great to go through the different use cases. On the 5G side, who do we compete against? It's the traditional router vendors as well as the RAN vendors that have a CSR or routing portfolio. You might know who that is. Again, we've been successful there because we've optimized our routing platforms for 5G and beyond, and we've gotten the time-to-market advantage to be successful there. The other thing I'll point out, and then we include it in our deck, is we do have a Samsung partnership. The Samsung partnership, it does give us go-to-market benefit, but it also gives us technology benefit in building together solutions that are relevant for 5G and beyond, wireless networks. We've been successful there by being first to market.
On the PON side, if you look at the competitive dynamics, you have two major players, Nokia, you mentioned, Huawei's the other, that have, you know, greater than two-thirds of that market. If you look at who else is in that market, you have DZS, Calix, and ADTRAN, relatively small players. Huawei's fallen out of favor in the Western world, and we think there's a great opportunity, together with Nokia to grow our market share there, and we're taking a differentiated approach by combining routing and the pluggable optics as part of that. In the IP optical space, we believe that the winning hand, again, is the photonics, the modems, the platforms, the NOS, and the Blue Planet software.
If you look at that, the traditional optical players that just have an optical portfolio will lack IP routing expertise and multi-layer control and automation. The traditional routing players outside of Nokia either have no optical capabilities or have coherent modems but don't have the photonics or the controller, the multi-layer orchestration and automation. We really like our competitive position there 'cause we have all aspects of the winning hand. There are very few other companies that have all aspect of the winning hand. I think you mentioned one of them. That's how I would break it down.
Thanks for the color. Really appreciate that.
Thank you.
I show we have no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back over to Gregg Lampf for any additional or closing remarks.
Great. Thank you. Again, we really do appreciate you taking the time. You know, it's a busy time of the quarter for everybody. This was an important topic for us to cover. We wanted to make sure we covered it comprehensively between the presentation that, again, hopefully you all will have a chance to listen to if you haven't already on the website. We certainly will be continuing to talk about this going forward. We're excited, really excited about leveraging the investments we've made over the past several years. We've talked about that in the past, how it's coming, really coming to fruition and building on the wins we've already developed and the momentum that we have, et cetera. Please listen up for more information on this, and we'll continue this series of Chalk Talks over time.
Thanks again for your interest. If you have any other questions, please do feel free to reach out to Patty or myself, and we'll be happy to answer them. Thank you, and have a good day, everybody.