Arista Networks Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 30, 2023

There are 23 speakers on the call.

Operator

Welcome to the Third Quarter 2023 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 replay from the Investor Relations section at the Arista website following this call.

Operator

Ms. Liz Stein, Arista's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on today's call are Jayshree Ullwal, Arista Networks' President and Chief Executive Officer and Ida Brennan, Arista's Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, Arista Networks issued a press release announcing the results for its fiscal Q3 ending September 30, 2023. If you would like a copy of the release, You can access it online at our website.

Speaker 1

During the course of this conference call, Arista Networks Management will make forward looking statements, including those relating to our financial outlook for the Q4 of the 2023 fiscal year, longer term financial outlook for 2024 and beyond, Our total addressable market and strategy for addressing these market opportunities, including AI, customer demand trends, supply chain constraints, Component costs, manufacturing output, inventory management and inflationary pressures on our business, lead times, product innovation, Working capital optimization and the benefits of acquisitions, 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 Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on the 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.

Speaker 1

With that, I will turn the call over to Jayshree.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Liz, and happy Halloween, everyone. We delivered revenues of $1,510,000,000 for the quarter with a non GAAP earnings per share of $1.83 Services and software support renewals contributed approximately 16.8% of revenue. Our non GAAP gross margins of 63.1 percent was influenced by improving supply chain overheads and higher enterprise contribution. As we have said before, gross margins have consistently improved every quarter this year and will stabilize next year in 2024. International contribution registered at 21.5 percent with the Americas at 78.5%.

Speaker 2

As predicted, Arista's supply chain and lead times are improving steadily in 2023 and we expect it to normalize in 2024. We are now projecting 33% annual growth versus our prior Analyst Day forecast of 25% growth for the 2023 calendar year. During the past year, our Cloud Titan customers have been planning a different mix of AI networking and classic cloud networking for their compute and storage clusters. Our historic classification of our Cloud Titan customers has been based on industry definition of customers with or likely to attain Greater than 1,000,000 installed compute servers. Looking ahead, we will combine cloud and AI customer spend into one category called Cloud and AI Titan Sector.

Speaker 2

And as a result of this combination, Oracle OCI becomes a new member of the sector, while Apple shifts to cloud specialty providers. This new cloud and AI Titan sector is projected to represent greater than 40% of our total Arista continues to focus on multi domain modern software with architectural superiority based on our single EOS, extensible operating system and CloudVision Stack. This is truly a unique foundation and differentiator. We have demonstrated our strong execution and uncompromised quality with predictable release cadence that our customers have come to enjoy and appreciate. The power of our 1 consistent software stack across a breadth of use cases, be they WAN routing, campus, Branch or data center infrastructure is truly unmatched by our industry peers.

Speaker 2

Let me illustrate with a few customer wins. Our first customer win is an international one where the customer is providing services for the interconnect of high performance compute, HPC clusters, which are often its foundation for GPU as a service offering. Arista's Ethernet Modular Switch Coupled with EOS, created a perfect combination of a switching platform with real time telemetry, leveraging our EOS state driven publishedsubscribe model. Our next win showcases our expansion of Arista in the public sector with their AI initiative. This grant funded project utilizes Arista's simplified operational models with CloudVision.

Speaker 2

New AI workloads require high scale, high radix, High bandwidth and low latency as well as the need for granular visibility. This build out of a single EVPN DXLAN based 400 Gig Fabric is based on deep buffer finds and underscores the importance of a lossless architecture for AI networking. This last but not least customer is an example of a campus spend. Couple of years ago, the customer was looking to do a complete refresh of their aging campus network, which comprises of 4 major headquarter campuses and several remote sites. The customer was able to leverage the Arista validated design models, AVD, All the way from data center into the campus network, the customer chose Arista because we were able to offer best of breed operational excellence as well as security with our 0 Trust AVA Sensors for Threat Mitigation across the entire campus of wired switches.

Speaker 2

Arista's innovative macro segmentation, MSS, combined with Leaf Access and CourseFind delivered a compelling 2 tier Cognitive Campus solution. These three customers illustrate our power of the platform and software innovations for a modern network model with a low total cost of operations. We are pleased with our trajectory, setting the gold standard in our industry with the lowest CVEs and vulnerabilities and the highest Net Promoter Score for cloud networking. And with that, I'd like to hand to Ita, our CFO for financial specifics.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Jayshree, and good afternoon. This analysis of our Q3 results and our guidance for Q4 'twenty three is based on non GAAP and excludes all non cash stock based compensation impacts, certain acquisition related charges and other non recurring items. A full reconciliation of our reflected GAAP to non GAAP results is provided in our earnings release. Total revenues in Q3 were $1,510,000,000 up 28.3% year over year and well above the upper end of our guidance of $1,450,000,000 to $1,500,000,000 Services and Subscription Software contributed approximately 16.8% of revenues in the 3rd quarter, up from 15.2% in Q2. International revenues for the quarter came in at $324,700,000 are 21.5 percent of total revenue, up from 20.9% last quarter.

Speaker 3

This quarter over quarter increase Margins reflected a healthy contribution from our enterprise customers in EMEA and APAC and some reduction in domestic shipments to our Cale Titan customers. Overall gross margin in Q3 was 63.1 percent, well above guidance of approximately 62% and up from 61.3% last quarter. We continue to see incremental improvements in gross margin quarter over quarter with higher enterprise shipments and better supply chain costs, somewhat offset by the need for additional inventory reserves as customers refine their forecast product mix. Operating expenses in the quarter were $255,600,000 or 16.9 percent of revenue, down from last quarter at 287,300,000 R and D spending came in at $164,400,000 or 10.9 percent of revenue, down from $188,500,000 last quarter. This primarily reflected increased headcount, more than offset by lower new product introduction costs in the period.

Speaker 3

Sales and marketing expense was 79,000,000 Our 5.2% of revenue consistent with last quarter with increased headcount and some reduction in product demo costs. Our G and A costs came in at $12,100,000 or 0.8 percent of revenue, down from last quarter and reflecting the recovery of some bad debt amounts recorded in prior periods. Our operating income for the quarter was $696,200,000 or 46.1 percent of revenue. Other income expense for the quarter was a favorable $42,300,000 and our effective tax rate was 21.3%. This resulted net income for the quarter of $581,400,000 or 38.5 percent of revenue.

Speaker 3

Our diluted share number was 317,600,000 shares, resulting in a diluted earnings per share number for the quarter The quarter at approximately $4,500,000,000 We did not repurchase shares of our common stock in the quarter. To recap our repurchase program to date, we have repurchased $855,500,000 or 8,000,000 shares at an average price of $107 per share under our current $1,000,000,000 Board authorization. This leaves $144,500,000 available for repurchase in future quarters. The actual timing and amount of future repurchases will be dependent on market and business conditions, stock price and other factors. Now turning to operating cash performance for the Q3.

Speaker 3

We generated approximately $699,000,000 of cash from operations in the period, reflecting strong earnings performance combined with some increase in deferred revenue and taxes payable. DSOs committed 51 days, Up from 49 days in Q2, reflecting the strong collections quarter and a good linearity of billings. Inventory turns were 1.1 times, Down to $1,200,000,000 last quarter. Inventory remained flat to last quarter at $1,900,000,000 reflecting the ongoing receipt and consumption Our purchase commitments and an increase in switch related finished goods. Our purchase commitments at the end of the quarter were 2,000,000,000 down from $2,200,000,000 at the end of Q2.

Speaker 3

We expect the overall purchase commitment number to continue to decline as we further optimize our supply position. However, we will maintain a healthy position related

Speaker 2

to key components, especially as

Speaker 3

we focus on new products. Our total deferred revenue balance is $1,195,000,000 up from $1,085,000,000 in Q2. The majority of the deferred revenue balance is services related and directly linked to the timing Our product deferred revenues balance increased by $47,000,000 from last quarter. Sales payable days were 44 days, down from 57 days in Q2, reflecting the timing of inventory receipt payments. Capital expenditures for the quarter were $11,200,000 Now turning to our outlook for the Q4.

Speaker 3

Customer planning horizons for new deployments have shortened in concert with steadily improving lead time.

Speaker 2

On the supply side, we expect to continue

Speaker 3

to shift against previously committed deployment plans for some time, Targeting supply improvements where most needed, but also careful not to create redundant customer inventory. As outlined in our guidance, we expect to make incremental improvements to our 2023 outlook, which now calls for year over year revenue growth of approximately 33%. On the gross margin front, we expect gross margin of approximately 63% in the 4th quarter, reflecting ongoing supply chain and manufacturing benefits while maintaining a reasonably healthy cloud contribution. Turning to spending and investments, we expect to monitor the overall macro environment On the cash front, while increases in working capital has begun to moderate in recent quarters, our year to date 2023 tax payments have been deferred to October. This will represent a significant incremental use of cash in the 4th quarter at approximately 352,000,000 With all of this as a backdrop, our guidance for the Q4, which is based on non GAAP results and excludes any non cash stock based compensation impacts Another non recurring item is as follows: revenue of approximately $1,500,000,000 to $1,550,000,000 gross margin of approximately 63 percent Operating margin is approximately 42%.

Speaker 3

Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 21.5% with diluted shares of approximately 319,000,000 shares. I will now turn the call back to Liz. Liz?

Speaker 1

Thank you, Ita.

Operator

We will now begin the Q and A portion of the Arista earnings call. In order to ensure optimal sound quality. Your first question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Hi. Thank you for the question and congrats on the results. I guess just to Keep it simple, Jayshree, if you can give us an update on when we think about the last 90 days, how have the 2 sort of verticals, Cloud Titan Enterprise sort of shown up in terms of momentum of autos and demand relative to where your expectations were 90 days ago. I know Some of the cloud companies have talked about their CapEx outlook for next year as well. So an update on that would be helpful.

Speaker 4

And on the last call, you did talk about a target for double digit growth Next year, so how are you thinking on in relation to that number still going into the Investor Day? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Okay. Thanks, Samik. First of all, we are looking forward to sharing more detail on Analyst Day. But just to reiterate, Our team has always projected at least a double digit growth for next year and years beyond. So that goal remains unchanged And we'll share more with you.

Speaker 2

Coming back to the last 90 days, as you know, as our lead times improve, our visibility declines, But we don't see significant change in improvements or declines in the last 90 days. We continue to see good momentum on enterprise and we continue to see a good expected Thanks, Samir.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Antoine Chikoban with New Street Research. Your line is

Speaker 5

open. Thanks very much for taking my question. So accelerated AI cluster deployment It's clearly waiting on traditional infrastructure deployment this year, and I'm keen to hear how sustainable you think this is because The vast majority of workloads still run-in traditional infrastructure, right? So is it fair to expect a rebound in traditional infrastructure spend next year?

Speaker 2

Yes. Thank you, Antoine. I'll share some of my thoughts and I'd like to hand it over to Anshul for further thoughts. We've always looked at the cloud network as a front end and a back end. And as we said last year, many of our cloud customers are favoring spending more on the back end with AI, which doesn't mean they stop spending on front end, but they've clearly prioritized and doubled down on AI this year.

Speaker 2

My guess is as we look at the next few years, we'll continue to double down on AI, but you cannot build an AI backend So without thinking of the front end, so we'll see a full cycle here where while today the focus is greatly on AI

Speaker 3

and the back end of

Speaker 2

the network, In the future, we expect to see more investments in the front end as well.

Speaker 6

Keshi, that's right. You said it's spot on. AI is

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Hey, thank you for taking the question. One question, very simple one on services. Pretty nice improvement, about 13% sequential improvement in the quarter. Seasonally, I think we've seen low single digits, mid single digits. Anything you would call out?

Speaker 7

And how are we thinking about that for the Q4? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. Look, I think every

Speaker 3

now and again you see kind of a pop on the services line. It's usually Either somebody has consumed services faster than they intended to or we've been negotiating a contract and then when we do actually finally sign the renewals contract, there's some flush of prior periods into the quarter. So if you look back historically, you'll see that happens from time to time. I don't think it changes the kind of fundamental growth in services we've talked about It's maybe a little bit higher teens growth on an ongoing basis year over year. I don't think it changes that.

Speaker 3

It's just we do have these little spikes from time to time.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Yes, thank you. I suppose this is a question for Ita, but is the upside in the quarter and outlook coming from a combination of better bookings and working Some of your prior backlog, just any thoughts in terms of maybe where your backlog may end up relative to normal levels Pre pandemic could be super helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes, Carl, we don't talk about backlog specifically. I think what we have said is As lead times improve, you expect to see some reduction in visibility to customers, the time where they have to place orders Changes over time, right? So I think that we are seeing that dynamic. We've talked about that dynamic that we are as the lead times get better, we are seeing kind of customer planning horizons Our shortening. We will be still deploying, if you listen to my prepared remarks, I mean, we are still deploying Equipment into next year from plans that we made some time ago and that's just kind of again working with customers and laying out their plans.

Speaker 3

But in terms of giving specific numbers, we haven't done that.

Speaker 2

Great. Thanks, Kyle.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Amit Dariannani with Evercore. Your line is open.

Speaker 10

Good afternoon, everyone, and congrats on a nice set of numbers here. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more on the enterprise side. You're seeing some really good strength over here clearly, but Maybe you can talk about, is the strength more coming from campus versus the data center side, maybe just qualitatively where you're seeing better trends? And really the context of this is I think a lot of your peers are seeing a very severe drop in their growth rates as their backlogs have gone away. You don't seem to be having that issue.

Speaker 10

So I'm wondering like what is the offset to that and what's enabling the growth? And to the extent you can talk about campus versus the data center, that would be really helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Okay, Amit. Again, I'll share a few words and I'd love for Anshul to step in and say some too. Look, if you look back 3 years ago, we started seriously investing in the enterprise. And back in 2020, we had a small enterprise business and it was largely comprised of, as you rightly pointed out, data center and Some high performance compute and low latency HFT, can't ever forget our original heritage. But in the last 3 years, we have made an investment and seen a significant uptick in enterprise customers wanting to do business with Arista.

Speaker 2

Historically, it's been the high-tech enterprise and the financials. And today we're seeing a much better cross section of verticals, including healthcare, Education, we expect to see more and more distributed enterprises. And to your question on data center versus campus, the answer is yes to both. We actually see 1 uniform architecture where you can have a universal spine that connects into a wired leaf, a wireless leaf, A storage cluster, a compute cluster, a border lease for routing and WAN transit. It's pretty exciting that Arista is truly And remarkably setting the tone for a 2 tier, deep spine architecture across the enterprise and building that modern operating model based on CloudVision.

Speaker 6

Amit, this is Anshul here. We have a great team being led by Chris Smith and Ashwin Coley In this space, we sell in many, many countries around the world. And as Jeshi mentioned, both data center and campus, Customers are coming to us for the automation for the higher quality, for the visibility, not able to bring to them across the board in 1 architecture, Sure, OneOS and OneCloudVision. That message resonates with every CIO today and they are no longer worried about Arista being this new kid on the block that's Risky move for them. We are in fact becoming the de facto and they like it.

Speaker 6

So which is why the momentum just continues. It's good execution by the team And getting to more and more customers around the world.

Speaker 1

Thank you Amit.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Thanks for taking the question. Good evening, everyone. Jayshree

Speaker 6

and Anshul, I was hoping you might be

Speaker 9

able to comment a little bit about your thoughts as you make progress In the back end network around GPU cluster opportunity, how you see that developing versus what you've shared with us previously? And any color in particular around both pre existing and the opportunity for net new wins would be helpful. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Sure. Again, this is an area that Anshul lives and breathes more than I do. So I'll give you some executive comments. But Ben, as I see The back end network was something we didn't even see a few months or years ago and was largely dominated by InfiniBand. Today, if I look at the 5 major designs for AI networking, one of them is still very InfiniBand dominated.

Speaker 2

All the others we're looking at is are adopting a dual strategy of both Ethernet and InfiniBand. So I think AI networking is going to become more and more Favorable to Ethernet, particularly with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and the work they're doing to define a spec, You're going to see more products based on UEC. You're going to see more of a connection between the back end and the front end using IP as a singular protocol. And so we're feeling very encouraged that especially in 2025, there will be a lot of production rollout of back end and of course front end based on Ethernet. Over to you, Anshul.

Speaker 6

Sure. Thanks Jayshree. Ben, our cloud titan customers as well as the special data providers I've been great partners of ours. So the level of partnership and co development that's going on in this space is high. It's just like in previous cycles, previous Products that we've done with them.

Speaker 6

There's a lot of fine tuning needed in these back end networks to get the maximum utilization of GPUs. And as you know, we are good at these adjuvant projects. So the teams are enjoying it. The activity is much, much higher than before. And the goal is to scale these clusters as quickly as possible so our customers can run their jobs faster.

Speaker 6

We're feeling good about it. You've heard comments from Deshp as well in the past and you hear more on the analysts here on this topic too, but all good on the activity front over here. Thanks, Alisa.

Speaker 11

I

Speaker 2

think one thing to just add is the entropy and efficiency of these large language models and the job completion time is becoming so critical It's not just about packet latency, it's really about end to end latency. And this is something our team, especially our engineers know a lot about from the early days. We're really working this end to end. Thanks, Ben.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Speaker 12

Yes. Thanks for taking the question. I just want to kind of dovetail off that last question a little bit. I know, Jayshree, last I think it was you commented that you'd expect to see pilot deployments for these AI opportunities in 2024 and then meaningful volume in 2025. First of all, do you reaffirm that view or has that changed at all?

Speaker 12

And then on that, can you give us some context of how you see network spend Intensity for these AI fabrics relative to I think in the past it's been kind of high single digit percent of compute spend on networking In classical cloud infrastructure environments?

Speaker 2

Yes. Well, first of all, Aaron, the first question is easy. I reaffirm that view and more later on November 9th So if I tell you everything now, you may not attend that session. Coming back to this networking spend versus The rest of the GPUs and etcetera, I would say it started to get higher and higher with 100 gig, 400 gig, 800 gig, where the optics And the switches are more than 10%, perhaps even 15%, in some cases 20%, a lot of it's governed by the cables and optics too. But the percentage hasn't changed a lot in high speed networking.

Speaker 2

In other words, it's not too different between 10, 100, 200, 400, 800. So you'll continue to see that 10% to 15% range.

Speaker 8

Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Ariane.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tal Liani with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Speaker 13

Hi. Jayshree,

Speaker 2

your tone is definitely better this quarter than last quarter.

Speaker 13

And you sound more confident in the numbers. And I want to understand if Change in the last 3 months that made you more optimistic. I'm looking at the consensus estimates And it looks like the growth rate has been declining for 4 quarters from like 54% to about 20% next quarter. And then it troughs at Q1, stays there and recovers after that. Do you agree that we are nearing kind of the end of the Down adjustment to the growth rates and then it's going to stabilize and go up from there or how do you look at the risks of that not materializing?

Speaker 2

What do you think, Quita? This is Atal. I think, look, we've

Speaker 3

been talking about kind of the growth decelerating as we move through the year, just because the comps We're so high. I think if you look at the discussion we've had so far about 2024 and obviously there's more to come next week, We've talked about double digit growth, but again, we are expecting that there is some moderation on the cloud side of the business Next year. So I think within the bounds of kind of the plans that we've laid out and discussions that we've laid out, I think we're executing well, right? We're giving you some upside On the in the guide for 2023 and by default almost, that is upside on 24, Right. So I think we're executing well.

Speaker 3

But within the bounds of what we talked about, we do believe that there's moderation of time spending as we

Speaker 2

head into And Tal, I think I need to focus on my tone and maybe sing a song or something,

Speaker 3

because that sounds really

Speaker 11

interesting last

Speaker 2

This quarter and this quarter. She was pretty happy last quarter. I'm a happy kind of gal at the moment.

Speaker 13

We read in between the lines, you know.

Speaker 1

Thanks,

Speaker 11

Change in revenue breakdown and the inclusion of OCI in this new Cloud Titan and AI segment. Was this the result The material change in Arista's wallet share at Oracle or is that business becoming a larger portion of revenue, anything you can provide there?

Speaker 2

Yes. No, we don't do it based on wallet share of Arista. We do it based on definition. So I think OCI has become a meaningful Top tier cloud customer and they belong in the cloud titan category and in addition to their AI investments as well. So for reasons of classification and definition, the change is very warranted.

Speaker 2

And yes, they happen to be a good customer of Arista. That's nice as well.

Speaker 3

Got it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Speaker 14

Great. Thanks. Jayshree or Anshul, maybe just some commentary on the Tier 2 and specialty providers and just what you're seeing in terms of other people kind of building out some of these AI clusters. You classify some of those customers as largely focused on back end today and those represent opportunities going forward or just kind of what the discussion Outside of the cloud titans amongst some of these other guys that are building very large networks. Thanks.

Speaker 6

Sure. Meta, this is Anshul. The Tier 2 cloud providers are doing exactly what the Tier 1 is doing, just at a smaller scale. So the activity is out there. Many companies are trying to build these clusters, maybe not hundreds of thousands of GPUs, but Thousands of GPUs together in the real estate, if they can get them.

Speaker 6

But the designs that we're working on with them, the type of Features fine tuning is actually very, very similar to the cloud, just at a smaller scale. So we're very happy with that activity and this is across the board. It's Very positive to see this in the ecosystem that it's not primarily just 4 or 5 customers.

Speaker 2

I think they're also waiting for GPUs like everyone else's. So there's that common problem that we're not the only one with lead time issues. But just to clarify the comment on scale, Akshay and I are also seeing some very interesting enterprise projects against smaller scale. So a lot of customers are trying AI for small clusters, not too different from what we saw with HPC clusters back in the day.

Speaker 14

Yes. Great.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Speaker 15

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you very much for the question. I just had one on the OpEx outperformance in the quarter. We saw an unseasonal decline quarter on quarter. And I think you mentioned lower product introduction costs that may have helped R and D.

Speaker 15

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that aspect of it. Any way we should think about product introductions going forward to help us understand the trajectory of OpEx? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, a lot of

Speaker 3

it is timing, right? We've got a lot of Different projects, a lot of different products kind of going through the R and D Labs right now. So there is going to be some kind of volatility In terms of when the spend shows up, when the produce spend happens, etcetera. So I think we were lower this quarter in Q3 than maybe we even anticipated coming into the quarter. I expect that to come back in kind of the guide for Q4.

Speaker 3

And again, there may be some volatility in that even going forward Just because it's all about timing, nothing unusual in that. There's just a lot of products got to go into the R and D labs.

Speaker 2

So Michael, when the chips are down, our spending is down. But when the chips Come on hot. Our spending gets hot too. So expect our prototype to have some high variability. And we've got a lot, a lot of new products in the pipeline that Andy, Anshul, Ken, you are all working on.

Speaker 2

So we expect that number to go up over the next 4 quarters.

Speaker 15

Great. Very helpful.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Atif Malik with Citi. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Jayshi at the recent Open Compute Project Conference, Marvell and Broadcom leading Ethernet switch merchant ship providers sounded very confident in terms of Ethernet adoption At hyperscalers like Meta and Oracle as well. And then one of your peers has talked about $500,000,000 in AI orders Whether it's custom chip, so I was curious about your thoughts on the dynamics between custom chip and merchant So it's your provider and how does that help Arista? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Atif, we have been strong proponents in our last 15, 17 years of Arista Korea on merchant silicon. We look for the best of breed chips. It's something my team, engineering team has built a lot of chips in their past Before, we've decided to work with the best of breed companies, Broadcom being one of our favorite and major suppliers. Of course, in the past we worked with Intel, Cavium and we don't rule out other suppliers as well.

Speaker 2

But this is clearly an area where you can't just build 1 chip. We have to build a portfolio of silicon and what Broadcom has done in building that portfolio not only for cloud networking, but for campus and AI is impressive. And you have to not just look at performance, you have to look at price, density, power. These are all very important metrics as we look ahead. The root issue here and we'll share this more with you going forward as well.

Speaker 2

It's not just the merchant silicon, but How you can enable the merchant silicon with the right software and drivers and this is an area that really Arista excels in. If you just have chips, you can build a system. But our system wide features, whether it's in dynamic load balancing or latency analyzer to really improve the job completion time And deal with that frequent communication and generative AI is also fundamentally important. You're going to hear a lot more about this next week, so stay tuned.

Speaker 16

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Reitz with Melius Research. Your line is open.

Speaker 17

Yes. Hey, thanks for the question. Jayshree, Anita, can you discuss a little more your gross margin commentary That it should moderate next year from the 63 levels in the back half. I mean, are we talking about it going to the first half 'twenty three kind of levels or Just a little bit of a degradation next year and what would be the reason behind it, other than lead times? Is there any other Could mix or other issues that would cause it to go down?

Speaker 17

Thanks.

Speaker 3

And so Ben, I think, well, Jayshree's commentary, my commentary is, We have been seeing it incrementally improve as we've gone through the year. We expect it to stabilize. So not that we expect it to go down next year, but more that it will stabilize. And then it will become more dependent on customer mix and other things again, similar to where we've been before. We'll obviously provide some more outlook on Discussion on this next week too.

Speaker 3

But the intention was not to say that we think it starts to decline again. It was more that we think it will stabilize after a period where we've been seeing these incremental improvements.

Speaker 17

Okay. Thanks a lot. Appreciate the color.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Ben.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tim Long with Barclays. Your line is

Speaker 18

open. Thank you. Just wanted to hit on the Cloud Titan vertical or Cloud Titan AI vertical now, I think, Ita, one of your comments was down a little or something in the quarter. Could you just Two parts here. Talk a little bit about that comment.

Speaker 18

Is this just timing or are there some different market share dynamics there? And then secondly, if you could talk a little bit about opportunities at other hyperscalers. I know that's Something where there's been trial activity and potential and it sounds like it might take a little while, but any updates on other Cloud titans that could become larger customers. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes. Just in terms of cloud,

Speaker 2

I mean, it's going to be

Speaker 3

a good Cloud year again in 2023 for us. I think, but we did come into the year saying we wanted if we could to balance supply a little bit towards enterprise and we have been doing that. There's been some you'll see it, it's not a huge mix shift, but there has been some mix shift towards enterprise when we can and we're pleased that we've been able to do that. Anshulay, I don't know if you want to take the

Speaker 6

Sure. Tim, the engagement with other cloud titans who are customers, but small customers is still very positive. They're good customers as many of you know in Routed levels, backbone, WAN use cases as well. The next week we'll touch a little bit more on the whole build versus buy topic.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Tim.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Speaker 19

Hey, ladies and Anshul, great quarter. Just on the product side, you guys released a new 25 gig offering recently, I guess what's been the early feedback? What kind of differentiates down there? And Jayshree, Just to clarify here, when you talk about that double digit growth rate for next year and years beyond, are you talking about a multiyear CAGR or for 24 specifically and then for 2025 and 26 and beyond, just trying to clarify here. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Okay. Well, Anshul, you want to answer the product question first?

Speaker 6

Sure. James, the recent announcement was the launch of our 25 gig ultra low latency switches. These are the 7,130 series. And now the whole world can upgrade the high frequency trading infrastructure going from 10 to 25 At very, very low latency, you're talking about with Crosspoint Technology, you're talking about 7 nanoseconds, but we also now introduced Layer 2 and Layer 3 features at about 100 to 130 Ananshu, just

Speaker 2

to put this in perspective, back in the day, it used to be 500 nanoseconds, right? Right.

Speaker 6

It only keeps going down.

Speaker 2

Yes, faster than the speed of light. And James, just to give you a clarification, I was saying as a company, myself, Anshul, we're aiming for at least double digits in 2024 and years beyond, but I wasn't making any forecasts for exact numbers.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Speaker 20

Thanks, Ladies, quick question on gross margin, nice improvements there. Itau, maybe you can Going to the details of how much room is there more to go and I'm just kind of wondering with your customers now looking at your Financials and your recovering gross margins. What are the odds that pricing pressures start coming back, something you probably have not seen Much in the last couple of years since COVID, now that margins are normalizing, what are Could prices come down potentially perhaps even for the more specifically to the larger customers of yours?

Speaker 2

Yes. I'll just start by saying prices are always coming down. As we go from one feed factor to another Between the SerDes technology and the density, the dollar per gigabit bit is always coming down. So pricing pressure doesn't change independent of our gross margin. Always in competitive deals.

Speaker 2

Where the value really comes in and again, as I alluded to this is CapEx versus OpEx. We expect pricing to be reasonably stable, but We expect the operational cost to be significantly advantageous with the Arista technology. The total the TCO because of singular cloud vision, because of our software driven Because of the fact that we have single digit vulnerabilities while our industry peers have 100 to 500 of them in a given 5 year factor. These are all now paying customers and enterprises especially are very fatigued with the poor quality of our competitors and are paying a lot of attention to that and willing to pay for that quality.

Speaker 6

Ittai, as Jayshree mentioned, but I want to emphasize this. The market is very competitive and it has been ever since we started. The gross margin that we report is not the reason why customers try to negotiate pricing. The gross margin is simply a result of what we've been executing on. And I think we can't execute these so.

Speaker 20

Very good. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, guys.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Speaker 21

Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to see if you would be able, willing to comment On your customer concentration year to date, I appreciate it can be lumpy quarter to quarter, but given sort of where you were in 2022, I'd just like to get a better understanding of what essentially the progress has been in 2023. And In that context, how big is enterprise as a percent of revenue this year to date versus where it was last year? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Simon, we're very proud of our customers even if they're concentrated. We love it. And as you know, the last year we had some outsized concentration. If I recall the numbers, Meta was at 26%. And what was Microsoft either?

Speaker 2

Microsoft 16%. 16% or 17%. While we expect due to many of the CapEx news you've seen and shift in AI spending that it's possible they come down, but there's still going to be very strong And we continue to even as the denominator may get larger in the forthcoming years,

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Vogt with UBS. Your line is open.

Speaker 11

Great. Thanks guys for taking the question. I just want to follow-up Simon's question, maybe put it a little bit differently. So if I think about your market sector trend update, How much of the shift to that 40% to 45% cloud and AI titans reflects the inclusion of New AI use cases going forward and the shift of Oracle combined with maybe some normalization at Meta and Microsoft can kind of help us you for the dynamics there. And if it

Speaker 3

looks like share is going

Speaker 11

to be unchanged with Enterprise and Financials, does that suggest to you That those markets are going to grow comparably over the long term across the cycle. Is that the right way to look at it? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes, David, your analysis is really deep on this one. Let me just say how innocently we reported this, which is Oracle is a greater than $1,000,000 installed server company right now and both their cloud spend as OCI and AI is significant, both as a company and for Arista. But we're not making any assumptions and that will vary every year of course On the mix of Meta, Microsoft or Oracle or any other for that matter, we're simply saying AI is going to become such an important component of all our cloud typeies That is now a combined vertical. So don't read too much

Speaker 3

more into it. Yes. It's more of a forward looking impact, to be honest, right? Because historically, this doesn't really change the Trends that we've been talking about previously. It's really more about the future and how do you think AI will impact these numbers going forward?

Speaker 2

Yes, AIS is not

Speaker 11

going to back up

Speaker 2

much right now, that's right, you know that. But as it starts to become important, then this combined will go north of the 39% we have normally forecast.

Speaker 11

Great. Understood. Thank you. Your

Operator

next question comes from the line of Eric Supekar with JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 16

Yes. Thanks for taking the question and congrats. I know you don't want to talk about backlog, but can you give us a sense at what point or what time you think your book to bill We'll return back to 1 or greater than 1, or when will your lead times reach normalized level? And then I have a quick follow-up after that.

Speaker 3

Yes, we're not going to talk about book to bill if we don't talk about backlog, Harry. So I think honestly, we're making improvements on that. Jayshree talked about how these times are much improved, right? So we'll continue to do that. That's a positive thing for the customers and for the business.

Speaker 3

And we're still not back to kind of the turn business that we had some time ago. We're making progress, but we're still out there.

Speaker 2

I just want to add that I'm very proud of the progress the team has made. When you look back few years ago, we were short of components, we were making multiyear purchases. There was a risk of a very large exposure, but you can't get all these forecasts right. And then obviously the mix changes from time to time, especially with the cloud and AI. So it's very hard to measure our business on book to bill and backlog at a given time, but if you look at it as an overall multiyear trend.

Speaker 16

Can you comment then on just when will the lead times be at a normalized level?

Speaker 2

Yes. And I think we said this, it's been improving consistently and we expect it to be normalized, just like our gross margins in 2024.

Speaker 16

All right. Very good. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Operator, we have time for one last question.

Operator

Your last question today comes from the line of Woo Jin Ho with Bloomberg. Your line is open.

Speaker 22

Yes. Great. Thanks. I made the cut. Happy Halloween folks.

Speaker 22

So I think it was a mention on merchant silicon earlier in the Q and A. And one of your merchant Partners has actually moved up the stack towards the service provider routing. I'm just curious if there's any intention on going after that piece if that chip is made available to you?

Speaker 6

Sure. Wojin, I believe you're referring to the latest announcement at Broadcom on their 25.60 See, Jericho, Chip. That was announced recently. Yes, Corporate3D. Corporate3D, exactly.

Speaker 6

So It's the same family, same features. And as you know, we've been a great partner of Broadcom for a long time and we continue to build new products. This is not a new entry, so to speak. We've been building these products that can be used as switches or orders for a while And the bandwidth just doubled going to now 25.60. So you can expect some products from us in the future with those variants as well.

Speaker 6

But really Nothing really changes, just innovation continues and merchant silicon continues to succeed.

Speaker 2

And the investments, Surajun, we have made in our routing stack over the last 10 years, I want to say, has just gotten better and stronger. Powering the Internet, powering the cloud, powering the AI, these are hard problems And they require thousands of engineers of investment to build the right VXLAN, BGP routing, EVPN, etcetera. So it's not just the chip, it's how we enable the chip to do these complicated routing algorithms.

Speaker 3

Thanks Ajay. Thank you. This concludes

Speaker 1

the Arista Networks' 3rd quarter 2023 earnings call. We have posted a presentation, which We'll be hosting our 2023 Cloud and AI Innovators Analyst Day on Thursday, November 9. If you are interested in attending virtually, You may register from the Investors section of our website. Thank you for joining us today and thank you for your interest in Arista.

Operator

Thank you for joining. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

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Earnings Conference Call
Arista Networks Q3 2023
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