Earnings Labs

Ciena Corporation (CIEN)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 3, 2016

$473.69

-7.22%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+1.71%

1 Week

+0.82%

1 Month

+7.89%

vs S&P

+5.68%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Ciena Corporation fiscal first quarter 2016 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Gregg Lampf, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Kaylee. Good morning and welcome to Ciena's 2016 first quarter review. With me today is Gary Smith, CEO and President; Jim Moylan, CFO; and Françoise Locoh-Donou, COO. This morning's press release is available on National Business Wire and Ciena.com. We also have posted in the Investors section of Ciena.com the company investor presentation, including certain highlighted items from the quarter being discussed today. In our prepared remarks today, Gary will discuss management's view on the market and our overall progress, and Jim will provide detail on our Q1 results and provide guidance. We'll then open the call to questions from the sell-side analysts, taking one question per person with follow-ups as time allows. Before turning the call over to Gary, I'll remind you that during this call, we will be making certain forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions regarding the company that include risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements discussed today. These statements should be viewed in the context of the risk factors detailed in our most recent 10-K filing. Our 10-Q is required to be filed with the SEC by March 10, and we expect to file by that date. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information discussed on this conference call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Today's discussion includes certain adjusted or non-GAAP measures of Ciena's results of operations. A detailed reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP results is included in today's press release available on Ciena.com. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Investors section of our website. Gary? Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Gregg, and good morning to everyone…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Tal Liani with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.

Tal Liani - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Hello, good morning. My question first is about the 22% customer this quarter. How much was it the same quarter last year? And the second question is around the same topic. If I remove Cyan – and maybe you can provide us with a number of how much it was – but last quarter it was $80 million. If I remove that, your revenues declined year over year. And we're looking also at optical component companies who are just doing great and having a great cycle now. And I look also at more direct competitors on the system side, and I just cannot reconcile why you're seeing such, let's say, declines year over year, if the math is right and the other parts of the market are seeing growth at the same time. Can you discuss the differences? Thanks. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: Actually, Tal, if you remove Cyan from our numbers in this quarter, remember they weren't in the quarter a year ago, our North American business is up around 8%. The $40 million for Cyan is a global number, not a North American number. So we're up about 8% in North America Q1 of last year versus Q1 of this year. One thing I'd say, we'll get the AT&T number for you. But one thing I'd say about the component guys is, as we've said many times in the past, their performance is increasingly less correlated with us. They sell a lot of components into China. We're not in China at all. We have a packet business, which doesn't really buy their gear. And I've just said many times that you can be in error if you expect an exact correlation between us and the vendor suppliers in any particular period. So on AT&T, AT&T last year was $117 million or 22%, which is 22% this year and up.

Tal Liani - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Got it, thank you. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: By the way, some of that – I will mention that AT&T – we did take some revenue from AT&T outside of North America for one of the few times that we've been able to do that. We're expanding our business with AT&T globally, and that's about $10 million.

Tal Liani - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Great.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Tal.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rod Hall with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I just had a couple. I wanted to see if you could give us some commentary on your thinking on market share and particularly in 100-gig Metro in the North American market this year. How are you feeling about that? Do you think you're likely to gain share? Just give us some idea of what you expect the share trajectory there to be. And then I wanted to circle back around, maybe Jim, to the guidance change for the full year. We get that there are a lot of negative things going on out there. I just wonder if you could give us a little bit more detail on what drove most of that change. Is it a reduction in your EMEA expectations? Is it mostly currency? Just give us some idea of where the quantum of difference is in that guidance, if you could. Thanks a lot. François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Thank you, Rod. It's François here. So on market share, specifically on the 100-gig, we've been doing very well on 100-gig shipments and 200-gig shipments across a broad base of customers around the world. We expect to continue to be taking share in the Metro market this year. In fact, in the second half of this year, we are ramping on a number of Metro projects, including Verizon. Verizon is on track on the next-gen Metro project that we were awarded a few months back to ramp on their milestones, and we've also met all the milestones we had with them, so we should be ramping up with them in the second half of the year. We also now have more visibility to our market share in the next-gen Metro at Verizon, and we expect to be getting at least half of the market share in that implementation. But we're also ramping on 100-gig with other Tier 1 carriers both in North America and outside of North America. So generally, we expect our share of the 100-gig Metro market to continue to go up in 2016.

Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open.

That's great. Thanks, François. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: And on the new guidance, what I'd say, Rod, is first of all, when you think about it, we've taken the midpoint of our guide down about two percentage points, which translates into roughly $50 million. And there are two very specific reasons for that, one of which is the currency issue. We think that's about $20 million for the rest of the year. We think that the EMEA downturn from our previous expectations is about $30 million. And there are a number of factors there, some of which are the macro and capital spending on the part of certain customers, and some of which, frankly, is our own performance in the region. So that's the story. One of the things I'd say is that we try to give at any point in time our best view of what the market looks like to us today. You'll recall that last year, as we went through the year, we changed our numbers as we saw certain things in the market change, and we'll continue to do that. Having said all that, we still see a great opportunity ahead for us. Our engagement with customers has never been better. Our win rate is exceptionally high. We have brought new platforms into the market. We believe that other than EMEA, we're still taking market share. So we still feel great about our opportunity going forward.

Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks, Jim, and I appreciate the detailed color there as well.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Rod.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Paul Silverstein with Cowen & Company. Your line is open. Paul Silverstein - Cowen & Co. LLC: Guys, is there any color you can give us on the Verizon 100-gig Metro rollout and beyond Verizon 100-gig Metro in general? What do you see in the marketplace? Why should we feel good about the outlook going forward over the next 12 months? Thanks a lot. François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Hi, Paul. It's François. As I said, on the Metro rollout at Verizon, things are progressing on track as per their plans. We now have better visibility into which markets are going to be deployed first, and we're in the planning stages of the rollout. We expected it to ramp in the second half of our fiscal year, and it's still the case. It is ramping on track. In terms of other 100-gig Metro deployments, again, we've had a clean sweep of the North American Tier 1 market for Metro 100-gig, and these programs are ramping as well. And basically, we're taking wallet share in these accounts with Metro 100-gig, largely because the combination of not just 100-gig capability, but packet and OTN [Optical Transport Network] switching in our platforms is really appealing to carriers who are trying to hone in multiple services in these Metro areas. So generally that's on track. That's progressing well, and we expect to take share in the second half. Paul Silverstein - Cowen & Co. LLC: Can you give any quantification what these opportunities look like from a 12-month timeframe? François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: I think these are, Paul, these are large programs. I wouldn't go into details of the – other numbers, but generally, if you look at the Metro market, it's a market that we expect to be growing faster than the long-haul market in 2016 and 2017. And within that market, we expect to be taking share relative to other players.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Clark with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Douglas Clark - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi, thanks and good morning, a few questions on my end. The first one is kind of from a margins and OpEx standpoint. Gross margins for the second quarter, mid-40%, is that – should we think about that as flat or up slightly sequentially and what are the factors that go into that for the outlook? And then secondarily, on OpEx, $225 million for the rest of the year is substantially above what you just put out for the quarter and factoring through benefit of FX on the Canadian dollar and perhaps some other things, why the ramp in OpEx towards the – or the increase in OpEx for the rest of the year? James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: On the OpEx question first, there is some impact from FX positives. We also bought TeraXion; that's going to cost us a little bit. We did our OpEx planning really with a long-term view based on what we see as the long-term opportunity in the market. We still see a long-term opportunity, and so we'll continue to invest in innovation and putting feet on the ground in places around the globe, so that's our plan for OpEx. With all that, our OpEx is going to be down this year from our earlier call. On the gross margin, we're not going to comment on the direction of it. We feel good about our gross margins, mid-40% is our call. We've done really well on gross margin now for six or so quarters and we expect to continue to do well. Douglas Clark - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Okay, and one additional follow-up. Now that you've started to break out the software and software-related revenues and presumably Blue Planet is a part of that as well. What is the outlook there? Just looking at the historicals, it's been growing modestly, but no substantial uptick. Is there at some point an inflection that we should see? Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: This is Gary. I would say I would continue to have the same expectation for the rest of the year I think this stuff always takes longer than everybody thinks to get into market. We're really delighted with the traction and the wins that we've got, but I would expect more of the same this year, frankly, and then I'd start to see the uptick towards the end of the year as we come into 2017 in terms of really monetizing all of these wins and then that will drop to the bottom line.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Doug.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Your line is open. Simon M. Leopold - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Great, thank you very much. I just wanted to get two quick clarifications and then discuss a trend in particular. In terms of clarification, Jim, you talked about the FX headwind on revenues. Just wondering if you could talk to FX as a tailwind on your operating expenses given the significant portion of the sales force that's based in Canada. And also in terms of a little bit more detail, if we could get in terms of old segmentation, it was nice of you to give us the Cyan number. It would also help to get Packet Networking, so we can understand what that business is doing. And then just in terms of the trending question, I wanted to see if you could give us some sense of your expectations for this web-scale business. You gave us the 5% to 10% range, but it sounds like that pipeline is strong. You mentioned new submarine wins. So where should we think of web-scale as a customer base, let's say, by year-end or maybe even fiscal 2017? Thank you. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: That's more than one question, Simon. Simon M. Leopold - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Two clarifications and a question. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: That's like six. Okay. I'll start with the OpEx point. We've talked about this before, but what we have is we don't have a big sales force in Canada. We do have a big R&D force in Canada, and because it's a big exposure to us, we try to look at the expected revenues in Canada and the expected…

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Meta A. Marshall - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi. Two quick questions. One, I wanted to ask whether you still thought Metro could be kind of a double-digit grower exiting fiscal year 2016 and kind of looking forward to fiscal year 2017? And then the second question is on EMEA and just is the competitive environment getting stiffer just on currency? Is it getting more competitive based on new entrance into that market? Just a little bit on the execution issues in EMEA. Thanks. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. So on the Metro, the short answer is yes. We do believe that it can and will be a double-digit growth market for us going into 2017, largely because we're still in the early stages of deployment of some of the largest programs, but we've won in North America and outside. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: And we expect that Verizon is going to roll out this year and it's right according to our expectations. We believe based on what we hear so far, we're going to get at least 50% of that rollout. François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Meta, let me take the European question. I would say from a competitive environment, it's not particularly changed. I think what we have seen in the last couple of years and I think this is widely understood, I think, particularly around Alcatel being very, very aggressive on their home turf prior to their acquisition by Nokia, and I think they have been very aggressive. That's something we've seen for the last couple of years, particularly in continental Europe. We'll…

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Meta.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Vijay Bhagavath with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Yes, thanks. Hey, good morning, Gary, Jim. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: Hi, Vijay.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Yes, hi. My question is on OpEx. I mean you've kind of maintained a $225 million OpEx number. You have guided on the full-year target in terms of top line. So help us understand the $225 million OpEx in the context of a lower expectation for top line. Thanks. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: Personally, I'd say, Vijay, as I said earlier, is that with $225 million a quarter for the next three quarters and what we did in Q1, our OpEx number will be lower this year than our original plan and the expectations that we guided to. The other thing I'd say is that we do our OpEx planning, which is driven by what we're planning to do on the innovation side and what we're planning to do with respect to our sales force, looking at the prospects for our business not just this year but for years into the future. And knowing what our customers are talking about and wanting, we think that it's very appropriate for us to continue the investment at the level we're talking about. We still think we've got a good long-term opportunity for growth and taking market share. And reducing OpEx today would impede our ability to get at that opportunity. That's our thought process. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Vijay, I would also add that we see very good opportunities going forward and we want to fund that. But I would also say that on the balance of probabilities, we'll improve our financial performance at the bottom line as well this year. And what we're saying is this is a snapshot in time, which is basically eight months out from completion. And as Jim said earlier on, it's our best view of the business right now, and one thing for sure is the only real certainty is that will change as we go through the course of the year. And we're not about to change OpEx and things based on what we think is steady as she goes in terms of opportunity.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Yes, thanks. And a quick follow-on on Blue Planet. I was at MWC, impressive to see the demo. The claim is it could work with other people's gear, not just Ciena. Are you seeing that playing out in the field, Blue Planet really looking to orchestrate, automate, for example, a Cisco, Ciena, Infinera, other vendors' equipment? Thanks. François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Vijay, it's François. Yes, absolutely. A key pain point for a lot of service providers is they have these heterogeneous networks. And the operations at these multivendor networks are extremely complicated and slow them down and drive their operations expenses up. Blue Planet addresses that pain point because it's an open platform, it's completely open architecture. And more than that, it gives them flexibility in terms of how much of their own software resources they want to put into integration versus how much resources they want to get from Ciena or from an integrator to go and implement a multivendor controlled environment. So that's a key proposition of Blue Planet, and we are expanding every week the number of vendors that are in the Blue Orbit ecosystem. And you may have seen an announcement from us around integrating four or five other vendors in this ecosystem most recently, so absolutely a key pain point that we are addressing at the right time. The other pain point is or aspiration is and you probably will have seen that at Barcelona in Mobile Congress is number of service providers want to introduce new services in the marketplace, NAV-type services to differentiate and to move faster specifically in the enterprise marketplace, and we're seeing a number of opportunities related to that. And that's another area where we're winning because of the orchestration capabilities of Blue Planet for virtual services. So overall we're really, really pleased with the traction and momentum in the market for the platform.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Great, thanks, Vijay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Tim Savageaux - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Sorry about that. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hey, Tim.

Tim Savageaux - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Can you hear me? Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes.

Tim Savageaux - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Okay, great. Good morning. I have a question that I want to focus on Europe here, the EMEA region, and really the extent of the decline you expect for the year. You mentioned you do expect a decline in bracketed range of $30 million, though, if you look at Q1 revenues down I think around 27% year over year. I wonder if you could talk about the magnitude of the decline you expect, and also maybe sharpen the focus on the drivers there. Given you have direct competitors describing the European CapEx environment as "rock solid" last week and really reports from the major carriers supporting that, I wonder exactly what you're referring to with regards to broader macro issues driving spending and whether we are really looking at a pretty specific market share and execution situation for Ciena in EMEA in 2016. Thanks. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Tim, let me take that. The quick summary to it, it's more the latter comment that you made, frankly. Let me go back to the overall numbers. We expect it to be about $30 million down from where we'd originally thought for the year. And again, I would stress that's a photograph in time. We've got eight months through this, but that's our best perspective on the balance of probabilities right now. So overall, last year we did about $400 million in EMEA, I would expect it to be flat to down from that number by the time we get to the end of the year. My overall view of the market, I would concur with some of the other commentaries that you've heard from other players frankly. I'm reasonably positive about Europe and I think it is growing, and it will grow in 2016. And I think in absolute terms, we will probably lose a little bit of share this year based on the pure math, if that is the outcome. Specific to us are really two issues, Tim. One, the particular large carriers that we have there are having some CapEx issues this year, predominantly related to things like M&A. I expect that to be somewhat short term, but that is overly impacting us as opposed to potentially some others. And secondly, there are some opportunities around coverage into some of these new opportunities that I think we can do better at, and we've addressed that as an issue. I'm pleased with the plan that we have in place and we're executing on that, and we're seeing some good positive increase in opportunities and engagement. But frankly, I don't think it will come quickly enough into the second half. Now that being said, I do think you will see improvement in Europe in our performance in the second half. So we are confident that we'll see revenue growth in the second half on the first half.

Tim Savageaux - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Great. And if I might follow up just real briefly, I assume that implies no change or maybe who knows, maybe a positive change with regard to your expectations for growth in North America, just working through that math a little bit. But in general, has your expectation for – and assuming, again, that Canada is going to be down in a few of the other regions along the lines of your commentary, have your expectations for North American growth – or sorry, U.S. growth changed at all? Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I would say it has improved slightly since the beginning of the year. We feel pretty good around North America, we think we're going to grow faster than we did last year in North America, and we think we're going to grow faster than the market in North America. It's interesting the actual market rate of growth, according to people like Ovum, is about 3% in North America. So we think we can grow obviously probably double that. So North America, we feel good about. CALA, despite some of the challenges on the macro side in Brazil, we still think that we'll have good growth out of CALA for the year, and Asia-Pacific as well driven by a lot of submarine activity, and also India is particularly strong for us. As you know, we've invested heavily over the last 10 years in India and that's really beginning to move. So, Tim, if you look at really all of the other regions, we actually see faster-than-market growth in, all of them, including, critically, given our size of it, North America.

Tim Savageaux - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Northland Capital. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute.

Okay, thanks for letting me sneak that in there.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Tim Long with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Timothy Patrick Long - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hi, thank you. Just one two-parter on the competitive landscape. Can you just give us an update on what you're thinking with regard to Ericsson now that Cisco has this partnership with them and Cisco seems to be trying to get a little bit more aggressive in optical. So what do you think that means to the partnership and the opportunity through Ericsson? And then, Gary, you mentioned something about Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent. I know it's early stages. Are you expecting any disruption there? Are you expecting maybe any changes to the market given that Nokia, historically over the last few years, has been very margin-focused? Do think that could provide some incremental opportunities for Ciena? Thank you. François Locoh-Donou - Chief Operating Officer & Senior Vice President: Hi. It's François. I'll take the first part of the question on Ericsson. Largely, we don't see an impact on our relationship. As you know, the focus of the Cisco-Ericsson alliance is really around the IT and routing space, and we are the best-of-breed optical partner for Ericsson and we're continuing to do well. In fact, we have won more business with them this quarter. And generally, our pipeline with Ericsson is growing, and frankly meeting or exceeding the expectations we had for this year in terms of opportunity and revenue contribution from this relationship. So generally, we don't see an impact and we continue to be focused on the optical space with Ericsson and continue to do well there. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: On the dynamics around the Alcatel-Lucent's merger with Nokia Siemens, it's obviously very early days for that. But judging by sort of history from when they spun off their optical unit about three years ago as a diversification under the sort of disposal of non-strategic assets, I think they called it, into the private equity world, it's clear that their motivation is primarily around mobile infrastructure and RAM, which places them number two in the world. I think it makes a lot of sense from that perspective, and also, I think the IP, the TiMetra platform, was also another key – a key driver of that. Frankly, I'm not – I think the jury is out on optical. We don't – given their other priorities, probably believe that that's sort of strategic to them based on their history and the other things that they're dealing with. But again, the jury is out on that. I think on any integration, there's always a challenge and an opportunity particularly when you're essentially putting a number of these large players together and particularly if the context of that is Europe, which has its challenges as well from a flexibility point of view. So we'll see how that goes, but early signs are that optical is not a strategic focus for them.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Tim. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jess Lubert with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Jess I. Lubert - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Two quick ones. But following up on an earlier line of questions, to get to your revised full-year forecast, it still implies a fairly strong second half. So, I'd love to just get a sense of your visibility and if you could rank-order some of the opportunities beyond Verizon driving your confidence, we'll see better trends beyond the April quarter. You mentioned things in the cloud, the submarine market. If you can just help us understand how those stack up and your visibility there. And then for Jim, I was hoping you could touch on what drove the drop in the deferred. It looks like the short-term portion was down quite a bit relative to last quarter. Any kind of insight there would be helpful. Thanks. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Why don't I start with the broader perspective around what are we thinking in the second half, Jess? I think first of all, we've got the largest backlog that we've ever had going into this time of year as we look into the second half. So obviously, that gives us confidence. Q1 orders were higher than revenue as well, as Jim mentioned, so that added to that backlog. We've got a disproportionate amount of the backlog being international, which can be longer term, but we have pretty good visibility into the revenue recognition and project completion of those things in the second half, so that gives us confidence. The overall pipeline in every region has grown and the engagement levels are very strong. And obviously when we look at the forecast process, it includes all of those elements. So – and I think as Jim said earlier on, whilst we're mindful around the other sort of macro uncertainties and I think we're…

Jess I. Lubert - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Are some of the other Metro opportunities in the second half, of those, is Verizon the biggest? Are there others that could be as impactful as Verizon as we look in the second half? Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think in terms of order of magnitude, Verizon is pretty important, but there are others that are going to contribute meaningfully as well. James E. Moylan - Chief Financial Officer & SVP-Finance: Jess, on the deferred revenue piece, deferred revenue arises when we get paid before we can recognize revenue, and that typically occurs in two places: one is in maintenance contracts; and the second is in long-term projects, particularly submarine in which there's a payment schedule which extends during the period of deployment and then we recognize revenue at the end. I frankly couldn't give you the exact breakdown of each of those pieces, but I'm sure it's both of them. We didn't – Q1 is going to be a somewhat lighter order intake quarter than other quarters, and so I'm sure that the maintenance deferred revenue went down in the quarter than probably a couple of longer-term projects. I would not read anything into that. It's going to fluctuate depending upon our order intake on the maintenance side as well as what's happening with big projects. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks Jess.

Jess I. Lubert - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Stanley Kovler with Citi Research. Your line is open.

Stanley Kovler - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi Research. Your line is open.

Thanks very much, and good morning. I just wanted to follow up just a little bit more on the Verizon project and some of the guidance, if I take the guidance and back out Verizon, the second half versus the second half of 2015 looks pretty flattish. And I know you outlined some of the trends there, but Verizon specifically looks like a $50 million to $60 million a quarter opportunity or so, and that lasts probably into the first half of 2017. So I just wanted to make sure that I'm thinking about that correctly, and then I have a follow-up. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Stan, this is Gary. I don't think it would be appropriate for us to get into that degree of detail around a specific customer. But I would say – and I think François gave context to it, and I know everybody is very focused on Verizon and it is a very large deal, multi-year deal for sure, it begins to ramp in the second half. It's probably not the biggest ramp for us, of the other engagements that we've got overall. So whilst it's meaningful, I wouldn't just look to that. And I think the numbers you've probably got there are a little high, frankly. This is going to be a multiyear ramp up, it's on track, absolutely on plan, but there are a lot of other factors taken into consideration there. And we think that our second half in North America is going to be strong; Verizon is a part of that. And bear in mind, we have a lot of other things that we do with Verizon as well outside of this next-gen Metro. But we do see good growth across a wider range of markets in the second half in North America including government, MSOs, Tier 2, the ICP guys. We actually see a very good second half, and that's pretty consistent. The second half is always better than the first half.

Stanley Kovler - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi Research. Your line is open.

Thanks. That's great detail. And then a separate follow-up just on the software and services business, you're at about $100 million run rate contributing low single-digit percentage of revenue. How do you think that ramps over the next few years? 2017 – it sounds like that's more of when we get a lot of that Cyan revenue actually when – after the customer wins come this year. Could we see that creep up to 10% revenue exiting 2017? Thank you very much. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Stan, I think it's early days for us on the Blue Planet obviously. I would expect, as I said, sort of earlier, I think more of the same this year in terms of percentage. It may pick up a little bit towards the end. And then I think we start to see some movement in Blue Planet revenues being a contributor to the bottom line. We haven't given guidance about that and obviously that's over a year out. It's still a nascent market and the monetization model of that still has work to be done on it. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Stan.

Stanley Kovler - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi Research. Your line is open.

Thanks very much.

Gregg M. Lampf - Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, everybody. We appreciate your attendance today. We look forward to speaking with you and meeting with you over the next few weeks. Gary has a few words to close. Gary B. Smith - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'd just like to close the call, just to summarize some of the elements that we've talked about today. Very solid Q1 revenue with a strong bottom line. We do expect even at the midpoint of our guidance for the year to have organic growth faster than last year. We are increasing our order intake and our backlog continues to grow as does our engagement with our customers and our pipeline. We're growing in every region for the year is our forecast, excepting EMEA. And overall, we expect to have a very strong financial performance this year. We appreciate your time and look forward to talking with you. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program and you may all disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.