Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Siena Fiscal Q3 2026 Financial Results Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Gregg Lampf, Vice President, Investor Relations. Gregg, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning, and welcome to Ciena's 2026 fiscal third quarter conference call. On the call today is Gary Smith, President and CEO, and Marc Graff, CFO. Scott McFeely, Executive Advisor, is also with us for Q&A. In addition to this call and the press release, we've posted to the investor section of our website an accompanying investor presentation that reflects this discussion, as well as certain highlighted items from the quarter. Our comments today speak to our recent performance, our views on current market dynamics and drivers of our business, as well as a discussion of our financial outlook. Today's discussion includes certain adjusted or non-GAAP measures of Siena's results of operations. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP results is included in today's release. Before turning the call over to Gary, I'll remind you that during this call we'll be making certain forward-looking statements. Such statements, including our quarterly and annual guidance, commentary on market dynamics, and discussion of opportunities and strategy, are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions regarding the company and its markets, which include risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements discussed today. Assumptions relating to our outlook, whether mentioned on this call or included in the investor presentation that we posted earlier today, are an important part of such forward-looking statements and we encourage you to consider them. Our forward-looking statements should also be viewed in the context of the risk factors detailed in our most recent 10-K and our forthcoming 10-Q. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information discussed in this conference call, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. As always, we'll allow for as much Q&A as possible today, though we ask that you limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up. I'll hand the call over to Gary.

Thanks, Gregg. and good morning everybody. Today we reported record financial results across the board. We demonstrated outstanding third quarter performance, including revenues of 1.7 billion, another quarterly record, and up 37% year on year. Adjusted operating margin of 22.5, exceeding guidance was more than doubling year on year and the highest ever achieved for the company. Our adjusted earnings per share are up 215% year-on-year to a record $2.11. We delivered results in the context of an extraordinary industry demand environment that continues to accelerate. We continue to see strong momentum in customer demand and order flow, with a Q3 book-to-bill ratio that was significantly greater than 1%, which resulted in a substantial quarterly increase in our backlog. And we also expect backlog to grow at an even greater rate in Q4. In fact, just one quarter, sorry, one month into this quarter, we are approaching a level of orders booked equal to the entirety of Q3. As a result, we are currently projecting to exit fiscal 2026 with over $10 billion in backlog. Overall, our outstanding Q3 performance reflects Siena's essential role in the fundamental re-architecting of network infrastructure. And looking at these industry dynamics, I would remind everybody that we remain in the very early stages of a multi-year, highly durable network investment era. This is springboarding and caused by the large and growing investments in data center infrastructure. AI is starting to build on the previous eras of communications, including those driven first by the internet and then by the cloud. But it is doing so at a massive scale. As a result, AI is currently driving and will continue to drive significant increases in both bandwidth connectivity demand and network traffic growth. In that context, high speed, low latency optical connectivity has become a critical enabler to not only operationalizing the AI driven investments in the network and the data center, but also monetizing those investments over time. And because of the increasing demands for higher capacity, faster speed, greater density, improved reliability, reduced space, and lower power and cost, optics have become the indispensable element for next generation AI architectures. And this is manifesting across all three of our primary markets. First, you call it the traditional network or the wide area network, the WAN, encompasses the network backbone, network edge, and network operations. It includes optical connectivity for long-haul, subsea, metro, regional applications that people are familiar with. And it has also been impacted by AI in a number of ways, from challenges of fiber availability in the backbone to quality of service demands at the edge. to the requirements of automation to address the increasing complexity of network operations. Second is a market that we are referring to as AI WAN. It includes both data center interconnect, or DCI, for the WAN backbone, and scale across, currently used for distributed training across data centers and subsequently to be used for inferencing. Here the fundamental challenges are related to power caused by the increasing GPU compute capacity and energy load required to train large language models at scale and the high volume low price demands of deploying modems at much greater scale. The third is of course the data center themselves which includes the fabric connectivity domains of scale up and scale out as well as data center operations. and as AI continues to drive up the data rates and bandwidth requirements inside the data center, new optical technologies and applications are required to provide the needed improvements in capacity and density for short reach, low power connections. Given the acceleration and projected increase in the compounding waves of spend on network infrastructure across these markets, We continue to believe that the total addressable market for our business will effectively double over the next three years, growing from approximately 25 billion today to approximately 50 billion by 2029. Moreover, given our growing competitive advantages, we expect our share of that TAM to continue to increase over that time frame. More specifically, Ciena's long established technology leadership in optical networking positions us to capture a growing share of wallet as optical connectivity expands its role throughout the WAN and inside the data center. Across generations of coherent technology, Ciena's first to market benchmarks have set the bar for the industry and continue to do so. Ciena was the first to commercialize coherent optics decades ago. and we continue to lead the industry in optical innovation backed by very focused R&D, deep expertise and proven deployment at scale. Moving forward, performance gains will increasingly depend on precisely these capabilities. Because of our leadership position and value proposition, we've developed a high degree of competitive differentiation across our portfolio. with the clearest proof being the customer adoption that we're seeing across our portfolio in each of the primary market segments. So starting with both the traditional WAN market, as I outlined, and the AI WAN, today's market dynamics are driving higher adoption rates for our WaveLogic 6 Extreme platform, which after 18 months is still the only 1.6 terabit high-performance modem on the market today. Notably, its ramp has already exceeded that of our prior generation WaveLogic 5E. Separately, customer adoption and scaling of our intelligent line systems remains exceptionally strong. RLS is basically the industry standard in disaggregated optical line systems, where Ciena's first mover advantage has driven a leading installed base where roughly we have 70% market share. In addition to serving cloud providers and service providers in the network backbone and cloud providers for DCI in the AI WAN, RLS is the industry's first system deployed for scale across applications. And the next generation of RLS, HyperRail, is our second generation of RLS and represents our sixth generation of photonic line systems leadership. Co-created with the hyperscalers, it dramatically increases the density of existing optical amplifier infrastructure and as such is purpose-built to address the needs to distribute AI training workloads in data centers across greater distances. With customer orders ramping, we remain on track for initial customer standardization for RLS HyperRail by the end of 2026. and scaling to material revenue as we move throughout 2027. Turning to our interconnects portfolio, we're applying our optical leadership to a growing portfolio of connectivity solutions that address surging bandwidth demands inside and around the data center and the performance limitations, of course, of today's short-reach technologies. Starting with our WaveLogic 5 nano-pluggable optics, We are seeing strong market adoption as we continue to ramp into production volume. In fact, in Q3, we shipped more than twice the volume of 800 ZR plugs than in the previous quarter. In addition, during the quarter, we made strong progress with the components portion of our interconnects portfolio. We are seeing strong market receptivity to Nitro, a linear re-driver for active copper cable solutions. And I'm pleased to report that we received sample orders from several anchor customers in the ecosystem for Vesta, our open co-packaged optical or CPX solution. This represents another important step towards the commercialization of our open ecosystem approach towards short-reach data center optics. And we believe this is gaining meaningful industry momentum, most importantly with potential customers. As any new growth sector, our CPX business will continue to strengthen over time, with revenue expected to begin in 2027 and ramping into 2028. And finally, it's worth noting that last quarter we announced a significant win with a major hyperscaler that integrates our WaveLogic 6E coherent technology into their own platform. This solution goes well beyond the modem and combines our DSP, drivers, TIAs, and coherent expertise into a complete module that will be deployed broadly across the customer's global optical network via their own optical platform. I think this win demonstrates our ability to deliver for our customers across multiple consumption models with our best-in-class portfolio and this represents a significant takeaway from a component competitor. At the highest level, the current and future waves of AI-driven demands on bandwidth and network traffic will require industry-leading high-speed optical connectivity. We remain focused on managing the business with this long-term view supported by durable demand, a broad set of co-creation opportunities and customer design wins, Robust Orders, and a backlog that extends well into fiscal 2028. Looking forward, the strength of our market position and the breadth of our portfolio provide us with growing confidence and visibility into a multi-year runway of growth, operating leverage, and increasing profitability. As a result, and to add to this level of confidence, We recently secured a significant increase in customer commitments that extend through 2029. At the same time, as Marc will discuss in a few moments, we've also secured incremental supply capacity for critical components, optical components, to service that multi-year demand. So in summary, Sienna's unmatched combination of leading optical technologies, incumbency, portfolio breadth, and deep expertise across systems, components, software, and services gives us a powerful and sustainable competitive advantage. And really is the only pure play optical systems and interconnects vendor operating at scale We are uniquely positioned to convert AI-driven demand into durable top-line growth with increasing operating leverage and earnings power over multiple years, delivering differentiated value for our customers and our shareholders. With that, I'll hand the call over to Marc for an update on our financials and our outlook.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone. As Gary just discussed, our focus is on delivering strong financial performance while ensuring security of supply and manufacturing capacity necessary to support the significant multi-year demand in front of us. Within that context, we continue to make excellent progress against our three financial priorities. First, let me discuss our progress on gross margins. We achieved 46.4% adjusted gross margin this quarter, which was positively impacted by the treatment of tariff refunds by about 70 basis points. Even without the tariff impact, gross margin achieved the top end of guidance, reflecting discipline at cost execution, favorable mix, and pricing discipline. Our midterm goal was to structurally position the company to achieve mid-40s gross margins. With our results over the past several quarters, we are confident that we have reset our margin baseline to this mid 40s goal. But as we've said over the past year, the mid 40s goal was a waypoint, not the final destination. We have the cost structure and leadership portfolio to expand gross margins further over the next few years. Second, as we balance the investments to support the growth of our business, Working capital remains a focus. While our cash conversion has taken a step back quarter on quarter, the overall trend is positive relative to the year-ago results. We've invested working capital to support slightly higher inventory levels and to increase revenue through the quarter. Even with these investments, we've generated $116 million in free cash flow. Third is capital allocations. We continued to take meaningful steps to improve the operational and financial efficiency of the business. Our June convertible debt issuance achieved two specific goals. First, it lowered our cost of capital with a five-year zero coupon instrument at an economic conversion premium of 114%, from which we retired our 5.5% interest term loan. have provided the capital to help secure supply over the next three years. We maintain strategic flexibility as a result and have $2.8 billion in cash and equivalents at the end of Q3. Our capital investments this year have increased capacity sufficient to support RLS, plug, and wave server revenue growth all over 60% year to date. Additionally, we continue to return capital to our shareholders in Q3. We repurchased 356,000 shares for an aggregate price of $172 million, reflecting the acceleration associated with the convert deal. Lastly, we expect to be on the high end of our capital expenditure range of $250 to $275 million. Now let's move to the quarterly results in more detail. As Gary noted in his opening remarks, revenue achieved $1.67 billion at the top end of our guidance, an increase of 37% year-on-year, and another quarterly record. Our total combined optical networks revenue, including interconnects, grew over 45% year-on-year, supported by over 55% growth for both our RLS and Wave server systems. Our interconnects more than doubled year on year, while our direct cloud provider revenue grew over 80%. Our in and around the data center percent of revenue has quadrupled year to date well ahead of our committed 3X growth from the beginning of the year. We had two customers that each contributed more than 10% of revenue. And lastly, we exited Q3 with an $800 million increase in backlog to $8.5 billion. Orders continue to accelerate. As Gary noted, one month into the quarter, we have booked nearly as much demand as all of Q3 and expect to end the year with more than $10 billion in backlog. As I noted earlier, adjusted gross margin was 46.4%, exceeding the top end of our guidance by 90 basis points and up 450 basis points year on year. Q3 adjusted operating expense was $400 million, coming in at the low end of our guide and driving a record adjusted operating margin of 22.5%. 250 basis points over our guide and more than doubling the year ago result. Adjusted EPS reached $2.11, more than triple the year ago figure and achieving a new record level for the company. Now let's move to guidance for the last quarter of the year. In Q426, we expect to deliver revenue of $1.75 billion, plus or minus $50 million, raising the full year midpoint to $6.42 billion, up $120 million from last quarter. With this revenue guide, we expect to increase our market share in the combined optical systems and plug market by about four points to approximately 30%. We expect adjusted gross margins of 45%, plus or minus 50 basis points, bringing the year to a similar range, a raise of 50 basis points from last quarter. Adjusted operating expense will be roughly $415 million, plus or minus 10 million, with our annual OpEx at 1.6, slightly down from the June guide. All told, we expect to drive an adjusted operating margin of approximately 20% plus or minus 50 basis points, bringing the full year to between 20% and 21% and exceeding the 20% annual figure for the first time in the company's history. Now let me address the topic of supply more closely. Gary described an unprecedented durable demand environment with backlog now into 2028. To ensure our ability to service this demand, we've taken decisive steps to strengthen our supply security and to increase our output. In recent weeks, we finalized long-term agreements that secure supply of certain key components through 2029, including incremental capacity for those key components that will enable us to support growing customer demand. This extends the investments we've made for this year to drive 35% revenue growth. We continue to invest upstream to drive security of supply to meet and eventually bring into balance the demand backlog. As a result, we expect to see a reduction in cash from operations in Q4 as investments are dispersed to support these agreements. At the same time, we continue to make progress in the value exchange discussions with our customers. In addition to price discussions, these conversations are increasingly focused on the alignment of various demand terms and conditions with the capacity required to support them. With this ongoing momentum and improved visibility into future demand, we believe it's prudent to provide early direction for fiscal 2027. As we see it today, we expect to deliver another record year with revenue growing a minimum of 30% year-on-year yielding at least $8.3 to $8.4 billion in revenue with supply-driven upsides. Our investments in capacity and supply allow us to accelerate absolute revenue growth from 25 to 26 and now into 27. At these levels, we expect to again increase our market share in optical systems and plugs in fiscal 2027. We expect gross margins to be at least between 45 and 46 percent. And we expect to achieve fiscal 2027 adjusted operating margin between 25 and 27 percent, posting yet another record in profitability and serving as yet another proof point for the earnings potential of Sienna's model. Again, this is our preliminary view of 2027. and we'll provide an update when we report our Q4 results in December. In the interim, we look forward to continuing the dialogue in a few weeks' time in Ottawa at our investor forum, the content from which will be posted on our investor website afterwards. To close out, Q3 was a testament to the strength of Sanda's technology leadership, customer engagement and supply resiliency in the face of unprecedented multi-year demand. Thank you.

We will now begin the question and answer session. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of George Nodder with Wolf Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi guys, thanks very much for the question. I guess I, and congrats on the terrific results here. I guess I wanted to start just by, you know, you mentioned value exchange on the call. You know, certainly, I think you mentioned prices as well as alignment of demand terms and conditions. Could you just talk a little bit more about, you know, what's going on there? Any sense for what price increases might look like? Any sense for what terms and conditions might be? looking like in terms of the context of value exchange. Thanks.

Yeah. Hey, George. It's Marc. Thanks for the question. You know, I'll take it kind of in two parts. You know, on the pricing piece, we've had conversations with, you know, customers across different product lines. And, you know, we've gotten to a space where we would expect, depending on the customer and the product line, anywhere between You know, high single digits types of price increases to something in the range of high teens, low 20s type of price increases. You know, and what's remarkable, and I think you'll appreciate this, George, is, you know, some of that will selectively hit backlog, right? So, you know, I think we've made really good progress there. You know, the second pillar in terms of conditions is really a two-way discussion. You know, the first is, We're on the hook to make sure that we deliver what we say we're going to deliver, but we expect the reciprocity of that from the customer side as well. And so we've covered those aspects. We've talked a little bit about payment terms. We've talked a little bit about fill rates and things like that. So we're trying to make it a pretty holistic conversation in terms of that value exchange and not just have a conversation about price. because just like we're looking for supply security, our customers are looking for supply security from us as well. And it's something that we feel pretty confident that with these supply agreements that we can fulfill.

Got it.

Super. And then I know that there were some price increases I think earlier in the year, last year, just around tariffs. Is that something that's flowing into the model now? I know that In the past, you guys weren't, you know, you were not repricing backlogs, certainly, but is that something that's helping the gross margin now? Any sense there? Thanks.

Yeah, it's a real, again, this is Marc again, George. It's relatively neutral. You know, we're not putting margin on top of tariffs, right? If we get 10 bucks of tariffs, we kind of pass on that 10 bucks of tariffs. What we saw in Q1 was kind of, or I'm sorry, in Q3, was kind of a one-time accounting adjustment for those tariff refunds that we don't expect to continue moving forward. And that gave us about 70 basis points of uplift. But moving forward, I would say the tariff impact, again, under today's current regime, is relatively neutral. We're monitoring pretty closely some of the impacts that are coming out of the new Canadian tariff regime. That could have an impact of, you know, call it $10-ish million a quarter. But again, we're still trying to work through the mitigation actions that we've got associated with that.

Super. I'll pass it on. Thanks a lot, guys.

Yep. Thanks, George.

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

Hello. Good morning. Gary, if I told you three years ago that you're going to grow 30%, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you loud and clear.

Perfect.

If I told you three years ago you're going to grow 30% with 26% margin, you would have asked to drink the same thing I'm drinking. So the question I have is about backlog. So your backlog is doubling this year. And It grows even faster than revenues. Your revenues are growing fast and it grows even faster than revenues. I'm trying to understand the early ordering portion of the backlog. Maybe customers are buying ahead just because of supply constraints. It's not a concern. I just want to get understanding of how backlog could behave in 2027. That's the reason for my question.

Okay. I think it's almost entirely just driven by a function of lead times. You know, the demand is absolutely there. And, you know, just to sort of illustrate that, you know, Marc gave an early indication of what we think our guidance is, you know, for the year as just an early directional indication for next year. It would be greater than that if supply was greater. I mean, that sort of, you know, I think summarizes it. We've got, you know, we think at least a $10 billion backlog as we leave this year. And in the midpoint of what Marc was talking about, you're looking at revenues of, you know, 8.3, 8.4 as sort of baseline for us for next year. It would be greater than that if we had more supply. And so, you know, the demand is absolutely there. You look at our installation services, they're up, you know, 35% for the year. and as soon as we can ship it, it's installed and carrying traffic.

Yeah, Hatal, maybe I'll just add, you know, maybe a little bit more context here. You know, if you look back, all the way back to 2024, our orders, you know, call that demand, doubled from 24 to 25. From 25 to 26, we're expecting another 50% increase and as you rightly noted, backlogs doubling across all three of those years. From 24 to 25 was a double, from 25 to 26 is a double. And so what we're really constrained with is the industry needs to add a significant amount of capacity to keep up with that demand. And so we think it's gonna be a multi-year journey before we see that supply and demand get back into balance. And yeah, multi-year, so we don't see that happening before 28 at all. And so I think you'll see a very similar constrained dynamic going into 27 and likely into 28.

Got it. If I can just ask a follow-up, any color on customer composition, meaning hyperscalers, I understand. What about smaller hyperscalers, meaning smaller Neoclouds and new hyperscalers like Oracle. So without names of customers, but can you discuss your ability to kind of grow the customer list over time and where is the demand?

About 50% of our business is now hyperscalers directly. But increasingly, I think to your point, we're seeing this sort of neoscalers, umbrella of neoscalers, which covers a multitude of different business models, etc. We are very focused on that space. They are leaning very much into networking now. and they are securing networks on Mofin deals. They're beginning to put their own fiber in when they can get it and we are taking more than our fair share of that market as it grows. So we are very focused on addressing that market both in the US and globally. We're seeing that in certain parts of the world where these neo scalers are investing in the networking. I think as we go through 27 and 28, that will become an increasingly important part of our business. Got it. Thank you. Thanks, Tal.

Your next question comes from the line of Mayta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks.

A couple of questions, maybe just following up on on George's question, just in terms of some of these new arrangements that you guys are having with or discussions that you're having with with customers. If some of those are some of those pricing adjustments dependent on timeline of delivery, like in terms of you know, if you can deliver six months earlier you can capture you know high single digits versus a mid single digit price adjustment just trying to get a sense of whether there's any kind of escalators in there and then second question just as you guys look to assure more supply have you qualified additional suppliers at this point or is this largely reaching long-term agreements with existing suppliers thanks

Yeah, thanks, Mita. It's Marc. So your first question in terms of escalators, we really haven't built those in. Like the price increases that we've talked about aren't necessarily performance-based per se. They will cut in, you know, as more and more backlog from those orders becomes a bigger part of our revenue. So I wouldn't say that it's, you know, performance-related. Once we agree to those to those price increases, it's really around when we deliver it, they'll pay for it. In terms of qualifying new suppliers, yes, that is part of our supply resiliency strategy that we're driving. We've got our typical providers that are in the stable that you know of very well, but we are looking at expanding Thank you. Great, thanks. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, and I'll share my congrats as well on the results and guidance here. and thanks for the question. Maybe another backlog question and more on the composition of it. As we think about the portfolio offerings that you guys have and maybe the raw irons in the fire that you guys are trying to address, where are you seeing this strong demand inflection as we're entering the back half of the fiscal year And as a second part to that, you know, it's great to hear that you're seeing visibility now into 28. But any color you can provide on the weighting of orders coming in for 27 versus 28, you know, essentially just trying to get a better understanding of how much of 27 is already covered versus what is building for 28 now. And then I have a follow up. Thank you.

So the first part of that question, Joe, is really we're seeing broad demand across the portfolio, and you'd say, you know, characterized as being blind systems, both in terms of the existing RLS and hyper rail. We've got a number of new wins for hyper rail that we're beginning to, will begin to ramp up during 27. So there's a lot of infrastructure going in for that. I mean, and think scale across, not entirely, but predominantly, you know, the deployments for that that's driving it. And then on the modem side, you know, we shared some of the statistics that you've seen for WaveLogic 6. You know, we doubled output. It's already, you know, at this point, exceeding 5E. in terms of its adoption. And I think that, again, just talks to the need for high-speed distance for these kinds of applications. So we're seeing it on the modem side. And of course, we're seeing it on the infrastructure of line systems. We're also seeing that both in terms of MOFIN deals globally as well to support this expansion, particularly markets like India and the Middle East. and certain parts of Asia where the hyperscalers are leaning into provisioning of extension of their networks. Submarine as well, you know, massive build-outs going on across the global submarine market where we have number one market share in the world. So, you know, we're seeing that across it, Joe. And in terms of the profile of the backlog, you know, we've got, as you said, you know, we'll probably have about 10 billion plus Backlog as we go into 2027. You know, we cannot satisfy basically all of the requirements that they would take to deliver all of that in 27.

Joseph, the vast majority of that $10 billion comes with a customer request date that's actually in 27, meaning that they would take it if we could give it to them. So to your question, the backlog covers most of the 27 guide.

Got it. That's exactly what I was getting at with that. Thanks for the call there.

Thanks, Joe.

Your next question comes from the line of Ruben Roy with Stiefel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Gary, for the first question, I wanted to maybe drill into the performance optics discussion and sort of the consumption model compared to the systems model. Is that a bespoke arrangement with one customer? Are you productizing this consumption model as you go forward? And I guess as you think about that longer term and how that sits in the interconnect family, if you could talk a little bit about the margin structure as that consumption model starts to build. Thank you.

So first of all, I'm going to ask the question from two different angles, or that's how I heard it anyway. So first of all, the performance modem portfolio, the Xtreme family, if you like, WaveLogic 5 and then WaveLogic 6, is obviously a very broadly deployed solution within our systems business. So we have a lot of deployments out there on Xtreme modems. The specific opportunity you're referring to, though, of taking that and Offering it up in a different consumption model is bespoke relationships with individual customers. We have two examples of that today. One that was a recent announcement last quarter. It's certainly something that we don't shy away from. We've made the technology available however our customers want to consume it. but in those examples, those are very, very unique in terms of how those customers want to deploy them. So they're kind of custom development for them. And, you know, the relationship we have with those customers reflects that.

Okay. Thank you, Scott. And then as a quick follow-up for Marc, sorry if I missed this, Marc, but with the 25 to 27% operating margin guidance for 27 or first look at 27, that implies, I think, roughly flat to maybe up a little bit operating expenses. If you could just walk us through, you know, sort of the mechanics around operating expense as you look out into fiscal 27, that'd be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, no problem, Joe. You know, we haven't really closed in yet. We're kind of in the middle of our annual planning process. But, you know, the puts and takes that you should kind of be thinking about is, you know, this year we'll spend roughly, call it, you know, $1.6 billion. Keep in mind that $1.6 billion includes a bunch of one-time variable compensation that a year ago we were telling you was going to be about $1.5 billion. We're at $1.6 billion mostly because of that variable comp. We're going to reinvest that one time so that when you say it's about flat, all the folks sitting around the table here are looking at $100 million more of investment that they get regardless of the performance of the company. So we are reinvesting those one-time things. And I think you'll also see there'll be a little bit more investment in some of the activities, particularly around line systems as we continue to grow that business and invest in our interconnects portfolio.

Great. Thank you, Marc.

Yep, you bet, Joe.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Kuntz with Needham & Co., your line is open, please go ahead.

Great, good morning, thanks for the question. In light of some of the politics around data center construction and the like, which I know weighs on investor minds a lot and whips a lot of the broader sector around, how do you feel about the pace of catch up of your WAN projects relative to data center construction? Do you feel like you've got Visibility, independent of pacing of data centers in that light. Maybe you can comment on that, Gary.

Yeah, no, listen, it's a great topical question. I would say that as we talk to the hyperscalers and we talk about durability of demand and their long-term view and the rest of it and getting long-term agreements with them and commitments, So part of that, one of the comments that was made to me was basically that if they stopped building data centers tomorrow, Gary, you probably wouldn't notice for two years. Meaning they've already got these data centers out there and they need connectivity and they're not going to strand the assets. And secondly, they've got data centers that they must increase the network capacity to. and so largely what we've got in backlog here and what we've got visibility to going forward is really the data centers that are already there. And particularly you've got a lot of international expansion as well. And it's really the refresh of the GPUs in these data centers that are already there that require massive amounts of additional connectivity. and you know bear in mind we have a unique insight into this because we've got number one market share in data center connectivity before all of this AI expansion began. So we have got the connection to most of the data centers around the world. A lot of what we're seeing is the expansion and increasing of that capacity and connectivity to enable you know the refreshing of the GPUs, et cetera. And you've also got all of the inference and agentic stuff in front of us. So, you know, Ryan, certainly for the next couple of years, we think we're, you know, largely immune from what may or may not happen with the pacing of new data centers.

That's great. Thank you for that. And maybe as a follow-up, any commentary on the product mix here? You know, as you've seen, like, in the most recent quarter or maybe recent bookings, in terms of shifts of line systems versus plugables and transponders. Any commentary there?

Yeah, maybe I'll jump in and others can add color, Brian. So, you know, as I think through what we've seen, you know, particularly over the last 12 months, I think we've seen our plugs and our line systems, particularly RLS, really grow at much higher than corporate average growth rates. I think I mentioned plugs and RLS together as part of our optical piece growing 45%. So you kind of see how that's becoming a bigger piece of the pie. One of the things that, from a margin perspective, that we're seeing is as our decom solution really starts to increase over the last year, that's really driven a pretty accretive dynamic for us moving forward. We expect that to continue, and then obviously as we add HyperRail, that's going to be another accretive motion for us. And so I think what you're seeing is the optical piece of our portfolio really driving a bunch of the growth for the company and then obviously we've got the DCOM piece which is shown in route and switch, really in the early part of its ramp as well.

I think Ryan, the dynamic that's been going on since 2024, we're just seeing more and more demand for line systems, meaning more fibers are getting lit. And those are getting lit with coherent optics of all flavors, whether it be plugs or performance optics consumed in wave server. and all those to Marc's point are up well north of the 35 or 37% that we're reporting as a corporate average. And that's going to continue, we think, going into the foreseeable future. The DCOM piece is a great adder, but it's a bit lumpy because of the concentration of the customers. So from quarter to quarter, DCOM will come and go. But it's a new add for us.

That's great. Thanks so much. Thanks, Ryan.

Your next question comes from the line of Tim Long with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Two for me as well. Maybe first, if we could dig a little deeper into HyperL. I mentioned it a few times here on the value-add side and ramp. Just kind of update us on, it sounds like a few customers, but where are we in in the demand profile and how quickly could we see the ramp of this product and kind of just to remind us on the economics versus like did more of the RLS prior generation. And then the follow-up would be on just the pure telco business, maybe X Molson, if you could just talk a little bit about the durability of that business. In the past, that's been a little bit more cyclical. So just curious to the outlook on just the pure telco piece. Thanks.

Yeah, I'll start on HyperRail, Tim, and then others can jump in. You know, we're on track for, you know, getting that product to standardization by the end of, you know, this calendar year. And you'll see the ramp starting in 27. And that ramp in 27 will be to several hundred million dollars, right? So we're looking at that as a pretty meaningful ramp for us. Yes. The back story on that is it probably could be faster if we could get more components, right? So obviously we're working day and night on that. From an economics perspective, relative to RLS, I think the team's done a fantastic job of improving the margins over the last four to eight quarters on RLS to get us to a pretty decent margin profile. HyperRail will be a step function on top of that. And with the size of the ramp and the opportunity that we think that is coming through with HyperRail and the economics of that, it's going to be a creative to the company as a whole once we get into 27, 28, 29. So we're really looking forward to getting HyperRail out there. And I think our customers are placing quite a few orders that's represented in that $10 billion of backlog that we expect at the end of the year.

and on service provider growth, it's actually quite difficult to separate it from a lot of the motion activity that's going on. And we know the motion activity is high. But I'd say there's two things going on with the service provider piece. One, it is growing anyway because I think there's been underinvestment in optical infrastructure in the last five years. And you've got the service providers returning to drive out infrastructure for optical infrastructure. and you've also got this Mofin piece. And you're seeing that phenomenon now certainly in North America. You know, if you go back about 18 months, it was very much an international phenomenon. But now with training and the rest of it, we're seeing that very much so in North America. And that is driving a lot of the, particularly the wholesale market in the US and the wholesale carriers that specialize in that. We're seeing very strong growth in that space. And we expect that to continue. Markets like India, particularly for MOFIN, we're seeing explosive growth in provisioning of MOFIN networks for multiple hyper-railers in places like India. Japan, I would also highlight. And then certain parts of the Middle East. So we expect... to see good, steady service provider growth continue over the next few years, irrespective of the moment. Phenomenal. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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

Hey, thanks, guys. Jeff Kochi in for Simon. Really wanted to ask on First question on the software business. It doesn't really appear like the web scale RLS deployments are driver here. Is that kind of the right interpretation? Is that because they have their own solutions into that? And how do you win the RLS deals if it's not like a management platform type play? Thank you. I have a follow-up.

Jeff Scott here. Yeah, can you hear us back? We can hear you.

Yes.

Thanks. Okay. Yeah, I mean, your hypothesis that there's less off-box software components in a web-scale deal in general, not just an AI deal, is valid. That's a fair statement. However, having said that, to your second question, don't take that comment to mean that the only thing these guys are buying is merchant hardware from us because... The value that they get is much broader than that. And whether it's submarine networks, their existing backbone, their DCI networks, or their scale across networks, the statement is true across the piece. They're getting, yes, a hardware platform, but some very sophisticated on-box software capabilities that is embedded into their back office system that has an awful lot of intelligence in it, protection mechanisms, et cetera, to allow them to deliver to their SLAs. They're getting planning tools and deployment tools. They're getting link engineering tools. They're getting a global, across-the-world service capability to turn these things on, preposition them, preconfigure them, and turn them on. A set of skills that we've developed with them and their relationships for more than a decade now. So just because we're not selling as much off-box software components to service providers don't conclude, therefore, it's just a commodity hardware sale. It's far from that.

Great. Great answer. So maybe just with that in mind, can you maybe give a little bit of color on how the gross margins are for that business and maybe how they're changing, maybe even just relative to the average?

You're talking about the software, the off-box software?

No, the RLS, sorry, for the line systems.

Yeah, so as I said previously with Tim, we've seen really good improvements in the RLS gross margins over the last two, three years. and, you know, I expect that to continue and those are approaching, you know, what I would call the corporate average. You know, as we move into the next generation, hyper rail, the economics get significantly better, right? And so those will be above the current corporate average and I would expect, you know, with the size of opportunity that we have with hyper rail over the next couple of years, that that will be, you know, How creative.

Terrific, terrific. And then if I could just do another follow-up on the interconnect business and really just inside the data center. You know, we know that Google, we hear that Google's, you know, looking to deploy 2.4 terabit coherent light solution for CPUs. You know, maybe talk about are you in those deals? Are you being evaluated? What's your take there? And what's your take on optical circuit switching? Is that a product that Santa would explore? Thank you.

Yeah, so a couple things. There's a couple questions there. The coherent moving inside the data center, we said for a long time now that we think that's a trend that is inevitable and it's going to happen and we're committed to that. We absolutely believe in... The coherent light market, we think the right intercept for that for the general market is 3.2 terabits. And we think we'll be in a great position to be a leader in that market. In terms of OCS, we love OCS because it is part of the continuation of more optics inside the data center. And it will drive actually the adoption of coherent inside that data center faster than We're gonna move on to one last question.

Your last question comes from the line of Tim Savigo with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, and congrats on the results and especially the guide. That's kind of the focus of my question, which is, you know, along several lines, the case for accelerating revenue growth in fiscal 27 looks particularly strong. whether we're talking about anecdotal commentaries, backlog, hyper rail, scale across, which will be my focus on my follow-up. And I know you sort of termed this as an initial guide, but I'd be interested in your commentary on the prospects for delivering accelerating revenue growth in fiscal 27. I know you mentioned supply as a constraint and maybe what things might look like if that constraint were relaxed a bit.

Yeah, hey, Tim, it's Marc. I think you kind of answered your own question. You know, as we look at it, and you're right, we are early, right? And typically we wouldn't do this. But, you know, as we look at the demand or the dynamics that we're seeing in the market, we thought it was prudent to give, you know, our owners and the investment community at least some initial thoughts on what we think the floor will be going into 2027. But as you rightly pointed out, all of our focus right now is on how do we get more supply to get more of that demand. And as Gary said, and Scott said as well, if we could get more demand, we would unwind that $10 billion of backlog faster. and that, you know, that 8.3 to 8.4 that we talked about as the floor, you know, would be higher. And so, you know, from an absolute dollar terms, we think we are accelerating the growth from 24 to 25 to 26 and it's 27, excuse me. But it's really going to be dependent on that supply. You know, and A year ago, when we did this for the first time, we said we thought 26 would grow 17%, and here we are at 35%. Now, I'm not suggesting that my 30% in a year is going to be 60%, because we're in, obviously, a different supply environment. But we want to make sure that we give you guys a floor and make sure that we can achieve at least that number that we give you while we continue to work on supply. Okay.

Great. And as a quick follow-up, on scale across, I mean, to what extent is that, you know, maybe even the primary driver of growth in 27? And I'd be interested in your reaction to some pretty extraordinary comments from suppliers and competitors about dynamics and scale across. I think Cisco talking about 14x the port count versus traditional DCI and some pretty spectacular comments from Lumensum as well. You know, maybe we can sharpen the focus on the scale across opportunity, how you see that, Tam, having maybe increased in recent quarters. And thanks again.

Yeah, Tam, I think it is, you know, it's a major driver of demand. You know, when we were the first out there with the first scale across piece that came out of the data center, So we've got good visibility to it. You know, I concur with most of the industry comments that's gone on to it. I think it's, you know, excuse the pun, it is at a massive scale and it's just beginning. That's the point I would make is, you know, we're just beginning to roll out the first connectivity between these data centers. It is almost entirely North American, U.S.-based. and we're just beginning to link the first few data centers for a couple of hyperscalers to it. And that's all in front of us. So yeah, it's a massive driver to it. But I also, you know, we're also seeing, you know, just the general increase in connectivity around the data centers as well. The agentic stuff's beginning to flow, particularly on the submarine cables and, you know, the inference Thank you for joining us. which is really predominantly now on training. Started off with synchronous training. You're going to get asynchronous training as well. You're also going to get large amounts of inference cascading into that as well. So massive amounts of connectivity between these data centers in front of us. And we're only just at the early innings of that. and we are incredibly well positioned to it having, you know, the leading platform for hyper rail. You know, RLS was an industry standard. We have about 70% of that market share and we expect that, you know, to continue with hyper rail and this next generation and the leading modem technology. We can basically move bits faster and longer than anybody else in the world and that's a super valued critical element that will enable this.

Thanks, Tim, for the question. Thanks, Gary. We look forward to seeing everyone over the next several weeks. We have a very busy schedule. Thanks for your time this morning.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.