Earnings Call
Arista Networks, Inc. (ANET)
Earnings Call Transcript - ANET Q1 2020
Operator, Operator
Welcome to the First Quarter 2020 Arista Networks' Financial Results Earnings Conference Call. During the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. Operator instructions. 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. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Curtis McKee, Director of Corporate & Investor Development. Sir, you may begin.
Curtis McKee, Director of Corporate & Investor Development
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on today’s call are Jayshree Ullal, Arista Networks’ President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ita Brennan, Arista’s Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, Arista Networks issued a press release announcing the results for its fiscal first quarter ending March 31st, 2020. If you would like a copy of the release, you can access it online at our website. During the course of this conference call, Arista Networks management will make forward-looking statements, including those relating to our financial outlook for the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year, longer term financial outlooks, potential impact of COVID-19 on our business, industry innovation, our market opportunity, the benefits of recent acquisitions, and the impact of litigations, 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-K, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis, and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our earnings press release. And with that, I will turn it over to Jayshree.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Curtis. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon for our first quarter 2020 earnings call. First, I would like to address the coronavirus global pandemic, the world's largest in 100 years. Clearly, this is unlike recessionary events including the dotcom crash of 2001 or the financial recession of 2008, both of which were sector-specific. At Arista, we are focused on the welfare of our employees, supporting our customers, and helping the local community. We recognize our role and responsibility in supporting global communications and cloud infrastructure during these mission-critical times. We’re adjusting to the new norm of real-time audio and video communication. Our support case load has doubled during the initial weeks, but has now stabilized as we help our customers in their time of need. Getting back to Q1 specifics, we delivered revenues of $523 million for the quarter, with a non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.02. Services contributed approximately 21% of revenue, up from 19% last quarter. Our non-GAAP gross margins were 65.6%, influenced by the healthy software and services mix. We registered a solid number of million-dollar customers as a direct result of our enterprise traction. In Q1 2020, cloud titans was our largest vertical. The enterprise segment is now consistently the second largest, followed by the Tier 2 specialty cloud providers and financials tied for third place and the service provider at fourth place. Due to popular requests from our analyst friends, we are now providing more color into our annual trends across three main sectors: cloud titans, approximately 40% of our mix; enterprise, including financial services, approximately 35% of our mix; and providers, which includes both service provider and cloud specialty provider, approximately 25% of our mix. In terms of geographies, Q1 2020 mix had international contribution at 23%, with the Americas at 77%. In terms of mergers and acquisitions, we closed the acquisition of Big Switch Networks in February 2020. We are experiencing early traction and complementarity with Arista's data analyzer and packet broker offering and entering into the network packet broker space. We are expanding in the campus, applying our cloud networking principles, introducing an exciting cognitive Wi‑Fi suite of features with the support of Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, as well as an open-config based automation model. Arista's cognitive campus portfolio was launched last summer to address the explosion of clients, users and IoT devices with software-driven automation. We are well on our way to meeting our first year's $100 million target ending Q2 2020. While we are pleased with traction, we must all exercise patience as we cultivate this part of our business. It took us more than seven years to build our cloud business to $500 million, and we believe that our enterprise prospects will take time, especially in this COVID-19 era. We are only just beginning our first year of a five to seven year journey to disrupt 30 years of legacy and status quo. COVID‑19 has required us to respond rapidly to changing events. In accordance with the country-specific shelter orders, we have closed all our offices to assure employee health and safety. We are consequently experiencing supply chain constraints, and we are managing our global capacity with our contract manufacturers in San Jose, Mexico and Malaysia and coping with some inventory and component shortages. Lead times vary and have doubled recently for some of our popular products. Arista is working in lockstep with our customers in supporting their business continuity and planning throughout 2020. Our visibility, especially into the second half of 2020, is pretty low. The number of confirmed COVID‑19 cases has increased sharply in April. Until the economic environment permits us to resume more normal routine, we have limited visibility to demand. It is clear that we live in uncertain times, and therefore, with what we know at this time, it is prudent to assume our annual 2020 revenue may decline versus our 2019. We expect to manage our overall business this year at Arista's 2018 levels, and we'll continue to monitor this closely. Arista, together with the entire business sector and global supply chain is coping with multiple unknowns in the midst of a global pandemic. We expect to see some short-term strength in cloud titans, offset by prolonged sales cycles with new prospects in the campus and enterprise sector. We remain confident that the combination of our product superiority, commitment to quality with the lowest critical vulnerabilities and the highest Net Promoter Score of 76 is very compelling in the network industry and of great value to our customers. Our recent market share gains, customer intimacy and operating leverage will navigate us through these unforeseen circumstances. We expect to emerge stronger than many of our industry peers as we migrate to modern networking. Before I turn it over to Ita for financial specifics, on behalf of Arista, I truly wish all of our listeners, employees and their families, customers and well-wishers be safe and healthy. Ita?
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Jayshree. And good afternoon. This analysis of our Q1 results and our guidance for Q2 2020 is based on non-GAAP and excludes all non-cash, stock-based compensation impacts, certain acquisition-related charges and other nonrecurring items. A full reconciliation of our selected GAAP to non-GAAP results is provided in our earnings release. Total revenues in Q1 were $523 million, down 12% year-over-year and just above the lower end of our guidance of $522 million to $532 million. As discussed previously, this decline on a year-over-year basis was in part related to the recognition of approximately $83 million of deferred revenue in the first quarter of 2019. In addition, while demand in Q1 2020 was reasonably healthy, we did experience some COVID-19-related component supply and manufacturing challenges, which resulted in extended lead times and somewhat constrained shipments for the quarter. Service revenues represented approximately 21% of total revenue, up from 19% last quarter, reflecting strong service renewal activity in the period, coupled with a lower product revenue number. International revenues for the quarter came in at $122.4 million, or 23.5% of total revenue, down from 25% in Q4. Shifts in geographical mix on a quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year basis were largely driven by the level of revenue and the location of deployments by our cloud titan customers. Overall, gross margin in Q1 was 65.6%, well above our guidance of approximately 63% and up from 65.2% last quarter. As expected, we saw strength in our cloud business in the period with the related lower gross margin impact more than offset by some one-time constrained supply-related sales of previously reserved inventory and a healthy mix of software and services. Operating expenses for the quarter were $149.3 million or 28.5% of revenue, down from last quarter's $154.3 million. R&D spending came in at $91 million or 17.4% of revenue, down from $96.2 million last quarter. This decline largely reflected lower engineering and prototype costs in the period. Sales and marketing expense was consistent with last quarter at approximately $46 million or 8.8% of revenue, with increased headcount costs somewhat offset by lower marketing and travel-related spending. Our G&A costs were flat to last quarter at approximately $12 million or 2.3% of revenue. Our operating income for the quarter was $194 million or 37.1% of revenue. Other income expense for the quarter was a favorable $12.2 million, and our effective tax rate was approximately 21.6%. This resulted in net income for the quarter of $161.7 million or 30.9% of revenue. Our diluted share number was 79.94 million shares, resulting in diluted earnings per share for the quarter of $2.02, down 12.6% from the prior year. We completed the purchase accounting for the Big Switch acquisition in the period, with immaterial amounts of revenue and expense included in our non-GAAP results in the first quarter. For those of you focused on our GAAP results, we recorded $11.9 million of acquisition-related expenses in the period, which we consider to be one-time in nature, and which together with $4.9 million of amortization of acquired intangibles have been excluded from our non-GAAP results. A full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP results has been provided in our earnings release. Now turning to the balance sheet. Cash, cash equivalents and investments ended the quarter at approximately $2.6 billion. We repurchased $228 million of our common stock during the quarter at a weighted average price of $189 per share. This brings our total repurchases to date to $494 million or 2.4 million shares over a four-quarter period. As a reminder, our Board of Directors has authorized a three-year $1 billion stock repurchase program commencing in Q2 2019. The program allows us to repurchase shares of our common stock opportunistically and is funded from operating cash flows. We generated $195 million of cash from operations in the first quarter, reflecting solid net income performance and a slight increase in working capital requirements. DSOs came in at 61 days, down from 65 days in Q4, reflecting the timing of billings in the period. Inventory turns were 2.5 times, down from 2.9 last quarter. Inventory increased to $262 million in the quarter, up from $244 million in the prior period. Our total deferred revenue balance was $597 million, up from $575 million in Q4. As a reminder, our deferred revenue balance is now almost exclusively services related. Accounts payable days were 43 days, down from 44 days in Q4, reflecting the timing of inventory receipts and payments. Capital expenditure for the quarter was $3.1 million. Now, turning to our outlook for the second quarter and beyond. As Jayshree mentioned, we continue to closely monitor the impact of COVID-19 around the world. We, our customers, and our supply chain partners continue to operate under various local restrictions, and it is unclear when and how these restrictions will be lifted. While we’re not in a position to predict these outcomes and provide longer-term guidance, we did want to provide some color on how we are managing and framing the business in the interim. While we expect demand from our cloud businesses to remain stable, we believe a number of other verticals could see some pause or slowing of IT spending pending clarity on the economic outlook. Given this uncertainty, we believe it's prudent to manage our investments carefully and in a range closer to 2018 levels. We are prioritizing key projects and customer engagements, while benefiting from a natural reduction in travel, marketing, and other variable expenses. On the gross margin front, we would reiterate our overall gross margin outlook of 63% to 65% with customer mix being the key driver. Now, for a couple of additional housekeeping items. We have continued to see some upward pressure on the effective tax rate and have increased the forecasted rate to 21.8%. In addition, we expect the current lower interest rate environment to negatively impact our other income amounts in the future. Finally, our guidance for Q2 reflects our current understanding of COVID-19 and its impact on our business and supply chain. This is, however, an inherently uncertain situation, and we will need to continue to monitor and attempt to mitigate new challenges as the situation unfolds. With all of this as a backdrop, our guidance for the second quarter, which is based on non-GAAP results and excludes any non-cash stock-based compensation impacts and other non-recurring items is as follows: revenues of approximately $520 million to $540 million, gross margin of 63% to 65%, operating margins of approximately 35%. Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 21.8% with diluted shares of approximately 79.7 million shares. I will now turn the call back to Curtis.
Curtis McKee, Director of Corporate & Investor Development
Thank you, Ita. We are now going to move to the Q&A portion of the Arista earnings call. Due to time constraints, I’d like to request that everyone please limit themselves to a single question if possible. Thank you for your understanding. Operator, please take it away.
Operator, Operator
We will now begin the Q&A portion of the Arista earnings call. Operator instructions. Your first question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Samik Chatterjee, Analyst, JPMorgan
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Jayshree mentioned the short-term benefit you are expecting from some of the cloud companies. So maybe if you can elaborate on that a bit, how much of this is the cloud titans? What are you seeing from the specialty cloud providers? Are you expecting similar upside there? And why isn't there more confidence in the sustainability of this kind of upside as we look a bit more longer term? Thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Thanks, Samik. Well, as you know, Arista's cloud titan performance is consistent with the cloud CapEx reporting. In other words, some are experiencing strong spend, some are declining and others are cautious. So, given all the pluses and minuses, I think it's safe to say that for the year, we expect a flattish cloud titan spend. And this is actually an improvement because we've been saying flat to down. So of course, we’ll monitor this closely. As you know, we never have long-term visibility on cloud titans. It's quarter-by-quarter. So we'll inspect more closely, especially for the second half. Now in terms of the cloud specialty providers, they were actually a stronger trend for us in Q1. It's pretty cyclical in nature. It depends on different tier 2 cloud providers. Each one has a unique architecture. We had a somewhat weak specialty cloud provider segment in 2019, but they’ve started off well for us in Q1 and Q2. And over time, it will be a matter of economics and what makes the most business sense for them. I believe some of them will succeed in specialized use cases. But once again, we're going to keep a watch and monitor this closely in the second half.
Samik Chatterjee, Analyst, JPMorgan
All right. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Tim Long with Barclays. Your line is open.
Tim Long, Analyst, Barclays
Jayshree, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the enterprise vertical and maybe on two different vectors. Could you give us a little color on what you're seeing on large enterprises? And then as it relates to the campus move, you talked about a longer process. Could you talk a little bit about the moving parts near-term given that, obviously, a lot of people are working from home, so it's difficult to sell on-prem equipment? If you could give us a little more color there, thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Sure, Tim. So to answer your broad question on the enterprise sector, I think Arista's brand is very well recognized for data center. And with our 6,000-plus customers, we've got very good recognition there from a differentiated product. And we've already been very engaged with them. So, customers we’ve been engaged with, in fact, we had most recently in February, just a little before all the doors got shut down on us, we were engaged with over 100 to 150 enterprise customers. And we had a global advisory and Arista innovate. So our intimacy with enterprise customers is very high, and we continue to do well with them with both existing and new projects. I think where we will be challenged in the enterprise and also in the campus is new prospects. We're not going to get enough face time with them. We're doing a lot of virtual webinars, virtual events, virtual EBCs; it's a virtual world we're certainly living in. But the level of contact for both product capability conversations, relationship, partnership and in fact, even testing, for both new prospects and enterprise and campus will be challenging. And nobody is in the building to upgrade their campus either. So this COVID‑19 will definitely delay our enterprise cycles for new prospects, but it should be okay for new projects with familiar customers.
Tim Long, Analyst, Barclays
Okay. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Alex Kurtz with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Alex Kurtz, Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Yeah. Thanks. And well everyone stay healthy. I just wanted to follow-up, Jayshree, on your commentary from the beginning of the call you said you're planning to run the business versus 2018 levels. I assume that's an OpEx comment? Or is it an OpEx comment that also maybe relates to where you think revenue could kind of trend, towards the end of the year?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. No, Alex, first of all, I think we understand the first half better than the second half. So, please take this with a grain of unknown and uncertainty in everything. And I know CEOs are supposed to know everything, but I can honestly tell you, we don't know much about the second half. So, what we’re doing is controlling what we can control. And what Ita and I can control is the business and the expense more than the top line for the year. Ita, you want to add more to that?
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. I mean, Alex, it's a focus on just OpEx and investment levels, until we understand better how the rest of the year plays out, right? And so, you should expect to see us kind of cut back on some of the variable expenses, et cetera, and come back to spending that looks similar to where we were for 2018. And then, as things unfold, we can change that, right? But for now, that's the focus.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
And Ita and I want to reiterate something: we will absolutely continue to invest heavily in key R&D and customer support. We will reduce marketing travel, obviously, since we can't travel and perhaps some IT spending. And so we will work on what we can control and manage the business. And if it improves, we'll certainly recalibrate and invest more.
Alex Kurtz, Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
I appreciate that. And Ita, just on the 40% comment, on cloud titan mix year-to-date. Obviously, it would be helpful to have the year-over-year comp, if you're willing to give that.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
I think in the investor deck, we've put some trends around what the split has been and how it's looked and we put a range in there for how it played out during the past year. So the investor deck is looking at the past year's trend over the prior year. And then, Jayshree's commentary is more short-term. So I think that gives you a range to work with.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
And it is on slide 15. That's a useful reference.
Alex Kurtz, Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair. Your line is open.
Jason Ader, Analyst, William Blair
Yeah. Hi. Just really two quick ones, I promise are going to be very quick. Number one, is it correct that cloud outperformed in Q1 versus expectations and enterprise underperformed? And then secondly, Jayshree, can you comment on your campus timeline of the $100 million? Is that pushed out now?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Okay, Jason, I think both cloud and enterprise performed as we expected in Q1. If there was a theme in Q1, which becomes a stronger theme in Q2, I would say it is supply constraints in the supply chain. Our verticals were pretty normal as expected. In terms of campus timelines, we are on target. We are committed to $100 million revenue in the first four quarters that ends Q2 2020. No change there. But we do expect that the acceleration I would personally like to see beyond that in the second and third year, we now have to wait and see due to COVID.
Jason Ader, Analyst, William Blair
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Next from Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Ittai Kidron, Analyst, Oppenheimer
Thanks. Hello, ladies. Congrats, and I must say you're very brave to offer our second quarter guidance. So I hope it works out. Let me see. A couple of questions for me. First of all, on the supply chain, can you tell us how much revenues spilled over from Q1 into Q2 because of that? So we can understand the true run rate of your business in Q2? And again, going back to Alex's question on the 2018 investment levels, Ita just to fine-tune this, does that mean total OpEx 2020 equals total OpEx in 2018? Or is this a run rate comment? I just want to make sure I appropriately capture that modeling wise.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. I mean, as we sit here today, we would say we're managing it to an overall plus or minus 2018 total OpEx number. And again, obviously, as we know more, Ittai, as we go through the year, we will continue to address that further. But for now, that's how we're seeing it.
Ittai Kidron, Analyst, Oppenheimer
And as far as the push out?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. So to answer that question, Ittai, we did our best in Q1, but we got supply-constrained in March. I think we will be really supply-constrained in Q2. So I do think Q2 is a case of less about demand and more about supply constraints.
Ittai Kidron, Analyst, Oppenheimer
Thank you, Jayshree. Thank you, Ita.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Simon Leopold, Analyst, Raymond James
Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. I wanted to sort of revisit the question or comment you made regarding the COVID crisis making it more challenging to sell new products. I guess what I'm looking for is a better understanding of how much of your business comes from new customers/new products, and I certainly appreciate you’ve got 400-gig products in the pipeline, campus in the pipeline. But I guess, what I'm struggling with is the sense that a lot of the campus that you're targeting comes from new customers. So just trying to understand that comment and how to quantify how that fits into the overall guidance? Thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Thanks, Simon. First of all, it's important to understand that our $100 million campus target is $100 million. It's small compared to our overall business. We do believe that we can naturally sell into our existing customers, who already know EOS and CloudVision. But as I said last year, we were pleasantly surprised by the new prospects and interest in campus. So in a non-COVID environment, I would have expected 60% existing customers and 40% new prospects. In the current environment, I think we're going to go back to a comfort level where our familiar customers are more likely to spend with us. And our new prospects will take time. So it will probably be 70%, maybe even higher on familiar and existing customers in 2020, which was not the trend we were on Q4 last year.
Simon Leopold, Analyst, Raymond James
And the implications for 400-gig, has that split out as well?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
No. Okay. So I was answering your campus question. What was your question on 400-gig again?
Simon Leopold, Analyst, Raymond James
Well, I guess, broadly speaking, I think of new, including campus and 400-gig. So I just want to get a sense of how you see the timing of the 400-gig market, if that has slid out versus your prior expectation? And if so when?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Okay. So first of all, 400-gig, we believe, is truly for our high-end enterprises, some providers, cloud and very, very high-end enterprise uses, quite the opposite of campus. And as we said before, we expect early 400-gig trials will be in the late 2020 time frame. And material production and general availability, due to lack of cost-effective 400-gig optics and even some of the COVID issues, will be in 2021. Nothing has really changed there, but we continue to see that. Now we did have some exciting product announcements in 400-gig: we introduced the Arista OSFP line card, which is a low power, highly compact, pluggable OSFP form factor for simplifying DWDM for distances up to higher than 20 kilometers. We also demonstrated interoperability with Ciena with their most dense and spectrally efficient 400-gig optics and Arista switches. So our 400-gig trials definitely are continuing with existing customers and cloud titans. But as we've always said, to put this in context for you, in Q4, the number of 400-gig ports according to market researchers was about 5,000 ports. However, 100-gig ports were several millions, so there's a 1,000x magnitude difference between the two. And I don't think that's going to change in the near term.
Simon Leopold, Analyst, Raymond James
Thank you for taking the questions.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Jeff Kvaal with Nomura Instinet. Your line is open.
Jeff Kvaal, Analyst, Nomura Instinet
Yes. Thank you. I was wondering if you could help us understand the nature of the demand change over the course of the quarter and into April, just so that we get a little better sense of how you were thinking about the second quarter developing? Is it going to end strongly? Or is it improving through the quarter, that type of thing?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Okay. So I think we have yet to experience the full impact of COVID‑19; I think we'll see much more of that in the second half. So if I look at Q1, we experienced it at the tail end, mostly in terms of our supply chain. And if I look at Q2, we'll still be very supply chain constrained. So I think we understand Q1 and Q2 better, and both of them were — Q1, as you know, is a seasonally slow quarter for us. It really picks up theme in March, and we couldn't pick up enough momentum because we couldn't ship enough. And that momentum is going to continue into Q2. So Q2 is all about shipments. We do see good strength in the cloud titans, and we see reasonable demand in Q2, but I think our real worry is the second half.
Jeff Kvaal, Analyst, Nomura Instinet
Okay. Are you able to share with us kind of a loose dollar range for how in either the first or the second quarter?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, I think the first quarter is done, but you can tell we guided slightly lower and you can account for how much of that was supply chain related. I'm not going to give you a more precise split into dollars at this stage.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
Yes. I mean I think, Jeff, if you look at where we came out for the first quarter on revenue versus our guidance, that gives you some idea of the magnitude of that. I'm not going to try to do that from Q2 at this stage.
Jeff Kvaal, Analyst, Nomura Instinet
Okay. Thank you both very much.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Aaron Rakers, Analyst, Wells Fargo
Thanks a lot for taking the question. Kind of a different way of maybe asking the same question again. But I'm curious how you think about the demand profile from the cloud guys. We're seeing industry reports talking about pretty healthy server demand at several of these public cloud vendors. We've seen the numbers from Microsoft and others. What kind of lag effect do you see between server footprint deployments or expansion versus actually pulling more network bandwidth and obviously a benefit for Arista?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
First of all, we do see cloud titan use case demand in basically three areas. Either our customers are adding additional core or spine capability, or they're expanding racks to increase their server density, or in some cases, we're also seeing some geo expansion for their international needs, although some of them have been ordered from the United States, increasing our U.S. titans contribution. So I think the use cases for us are very clear. What we also see is that because they have long lead times, Anshul and the team are working very closely on really understanding and sharpening their forecast and timing and working with us on scenarios and contingencies. So I think when they start to look at their 2020 deployments, they're not just looking at Q1 and Q2; they try to give us visibility for the second half as well. And so while we have not factored any of that into our Q1 or Q2 forecast, we are seeing them doing some very prudent planning for business continuity in their 2020 time frame.
Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Engineering
No, absolutely. I know there's been a lot of commentary about other components that go into the cloud where there's compute and other pieces and so on. And it's hard to correlate one-for-one, especially in this time frame because some of the spike in those other components is coming because of shortages in previous quarters. So as a result of that there might be some volatility and you will see some spike up on compute. Networking has been stable. As Jayshree mentioned, we saw constraints towards the end of Q1 but prior to that things were stable. They were not short on networking gear and so on. I do want to comment on traffic needs. There's a lot of commentary on the street about how traffic is growing and spiking up due to work-from-home and so on. We have to keep those trends in mind relative to the overall cloud capacity. And yes, working from home means more videoconferencing or phone calls or edge connectivity. But that's a very small fraction of the overall cloud spend in the broader markets. So yes, sometimes traffic quadrupled or grew 7x in certain regions, but that's less than a 1% impact to the overall spend. So I would say there's some hype there rather than a material impact to us. But as mentioned, things in the cloud are stable and now we'll focus on the second half with them.
Aaron Rakers, Analyst, Wells Fargo
And that's a great answer. It's a stable meaning. You expect the full year to be stable for cloud versus previously saying it would be meaningfully down?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Like we said, Aaron, we expect the cloud to be flattish year-over-year. And just to clarify before we get all wrapped on the deferred revenue thing again, when we're talking about the commentaries around the business and the trends of the business, and then obviously, we still have to deal with the deferred after that, right? But it is an improvement — we had talked about the business being flat to down, and now we're saying we think it's stable in that context. And then the deferred is additive to that afterwards, right?
Aaron Rakers, Analyst, Wells Fargo
Thank you very much.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Ryan Koontz with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open.
Ryan Koontz, Analyst, Rosenblatt Securities
Great. Thanks. I asked about the service provider segment being somewhat of a laggard. Are there any new strategies or products that you guys are rolling out? Or is there a different sales motion that you think is going to invigorate that segment? Thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. No, thank you for that. We have been marching toward more and more product capability. In fact, we just introduced EOS software release 4.20.4, very targeted towards cloud-grade routing and service provider peering use cases with a single EVPN control plane and segment routing and MPLS on the data plane, just a chalk full of features: BGP, flow aware transport label, MPLS, segment routing, traffic engineering. What I can tell you is we're getting richer and richer in our product capability. But service providers take time to operationalize these things in their network. We are doing okay in our already existing service provider customers, and we are starting to win some small Tier 2 and Tier 3 ones, small ones, but too early to call and too early to say much more about it.
Ryan Koontz, Analyst, Rosenblatt Securities
Great. Thanks, Jayshree.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Erik Suppiger with JMP. Your line is open.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, JMP
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Can you just discuss how the large enterprise accounts are getting impacted by COVID-19? Is it a sales execution issue where calling on the customer is the challenge or is it actually a personnel issue where they've got people staying at home and not in the data centers, deploying servers and switches? Or where is the disruption most impacting?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
So Erik, I would classify it in two ways. I think the large enterprises that are already intimate with Arista and need to make incremental enhancements — we're okay. They are familiar with us. They know how to work with us. We are supporting them. Our systems engineering team, led by Ashwin, and our sales team led by Chris Schmidt have tremendous amount of engagement with our existing customers. So I don't see a dramatic change yet in sales engagement or product differentiation. Where I do see difficulty is prospects. We're having a tremendous amount — we have been having a tremendous amount of new customer logos. Our new customer logos continue to be healthy and we gain steam, especially internationally, where we have 60% of our new customer logos come in. However, to convert them, especially into large deals and large enterprises, requires a large group of on-sites and network design clinics and obviously we're slowed due to the lack of face-to-face. So we're spending more time with them training, educating than we are able to do in deployment, whereas with our own existing familiar enterprise customers, we can march forward with more progress.
Erik Suppiger, Analyst, JMP
Okay. Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Meta Marshall, Analyst, Morgan Stanley
Great. Thanks. Maybe just one for me. You noted kind of strong behavior out of some of the Tier 2 clouds. Has there been any change in thought or is it just too early as the Tier 2s go forward, whether they will continue to kind of build their own data centers or leverage the public cloud more? Do you expect that to have any change to that behavior? Thanks.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Meta, that's a good question. And I said before, it depends on the Tier 2. We know some of the larger Tier 2s have paused, and it's not that they're going to the public cloud, but they're just pausing their spending. Others are expanding their data centers and some of the smaller ones are continuing for their specialized applications. So it's my belief that they will continue to succeed in their special use cases and complement the public cloud, but it will be cyclical. They didn't do much of it last year and I think some of them are coming back this year. And what we are seeing is the specialty clouds are realizing that some of the workload they can control better and some belong in the public cloud. So I don't think they'll disappear — I think they'll continue to have a place. A good example of that was content delivery networks: we saw improved traction with CDN customers, and there's some real-time streaming and content delivery, particularly with work from home with the millions of users and the aggregates of 4K and 8K flows, so you can see why they would make some important investments there.
Meta Marshall, Analyst, Morgan Stanley
Got it. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Pierre Ferragu with New Street. Your line is open.
Pierre Ferragu, Analyst, New Street
Hey. Thank you for taking my question. One more on cloud. On this perspective that you'll have flat revenues between this year and last year, I was wondering how your mix is going to evolve? A couple of things I have in mind is, what you sell at the lower end of the hierarchy in server access versus things you sell higher for DCI, for universal spine. Or maybe another way to look at the split is Tomahawk-based products versus Jericho-based products. Do you see a significant evolution in that mix between this year and last year? Thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Pierre. I would say in short answer: no. We've always had a very nice mix of volume products with the Tomahawk and Trident family connecting to servers and then higher-performance products with the Jericho family like the 7280 and 7500 flagship. Depending on the use cases, customers opt for both. They're both very popular products, and both are currently facing lead time challenges as well. It's not so much that we're seeing a change in product mix. I would say the biggest change we're seeing is customers are doubling down on 100-gig and 400-gig is getting pushed out to next year in the cloud.
Pierre Ferragu, Analyst, New Street
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from John Marchetti with Stifel. Your line is open.
John Marchetti, Analyst, Stifel
Thanks very much. Jayshree, I'm curious with the supply constraints that are going on right now, if it impacts any one of the verticals a little bit more than any of the others, or it's broad enough that it's kind of having an even impact across the group. And then Ita, just sort of as a follow-up to that, you sold a bit out of inventory, I'm guessing because you couldn't bring some other stuff in. Is that something that likely occurs again this quarter?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Maybe let me take that first. That was kind of a one-time thing where when things are constrained, it's a good opportunity to go look at what you have in inventory and sell some stuff that maybe we hadn't planned to. But I think we're through most of that now. So that's why I think the guide for gross margin comes back to the typical 63% to 65%, and then it will just be driven more by customer mix than anything else.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
And John, to answer your question on extended lead times, I didn't see a trend by vertical. What we did see is that our key customers worked very closely with Anshul and Chris and Ashwin to really sharpen their forecast and timing and work closely with us on their network designs and what products are available, what's not, when can we ship, what to them? The team is really working hard to overcome this. Should we improve this in Q3, I think we will have a chance to fulfill a lot of our key customers’ needs and factor that into their 2020 deployment considerations. But I didn't see anything by vertical. I saw it more by top customers.
John Marchetti, Analyst, Stifel
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Sami Badri with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Sami Badri, Analyst, Credit Suisse
Hi. Thank you. I was a little curious if you could give us a little bit more of maybe an idea on dynamics or just maybe some observations you've had in Q1 2020, what's going on in Europe. Are you competing against different companies? Or are they offering different types of products, at least in the European region versus what Arista has to offer? I know you've made comments that a lot of your customers in the U.S. want to take you to Europe as well. But have you seen dynamics change, either pre or post COVID or anything going on in 2020 that you can shed light on as an observation?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
No, I think for Arista, because our presence internationally is somewhat newer, we are feeling stronger in terms of our investment in sales and different countries. So country-by-country, we feel better about Europe now than we did, say, even a year or two ago. The difference between Europe and the United States is they don't have the equivalent of cloud titans. We don't have the same scale of titans there, and we haven't won major service provider titans. So we tend to have smaller wins, but many customers. Country-by-country, the level of engagement in developed countries like Germany, the U.K., France, the Middle East and Israel has been very strong. So I think the European customer base is embracing Arista for its differentiation and value add. But we just don't have the size of customers we do in the U.S.
Sami Badri, Analyst, Credit Suisse
Got it. And then maybe competitors a little bit different in Europe? Or are you seeing similar competitors in both regions?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
That's similar — very similar. We don't see a major difference, at least not in Europe. In Asia we tend to see some differences, but not in Europe.
Sami Badri, Analyst, Credit Suisse
Got it. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Your line is open.
Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore
Thanks for taking my question. I guess perhaps you could elaborate on what specifics?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Amit, we can't hear you clearly. You're choppy. Please repeat.
Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore
If you did not have the supply chain issues or bottlenecks you are dealing with, in theory what would the June quarter guide have looked like? Would it be towards the high end or something different? And is there a gross margin impact you're dealing with because of the supply chain constraints? Is there a way to quantify that in the first half of the year?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Well, it's difficult to speculate since we have supply chain issues. The reality is different than theory.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
Obviously, there are constraints, but I don't know that we can precisely quantify those at this point. There's a lot of movement to improve the situation. We saw a little bit of incremental spending in Q1, but it was very small. We will see some in Q2. But again, we think it's manageable at this stage. Our 63% to 65% gross margin guidance reflects our view and the midpoint of that range is a good starting point.
Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Alex Henderson with Needham. Your line is open.
Alex Henderson, Analyst, Needham
Thank you very much. Jayshree, I was hoping you could give us some insight into the way enterprise executives are thinking about conditions, how they're approaching spending. You made a comment that I think is probably accurate, which is you're more concerned about COVID in the back half. I assume that’s not supply chain related. It's more demand related. I assume you've done a lot of calls with top executives at firms. What are they saying to you about the business in process, the programs that are already in place are getting completed, but maybe the pipeline is falling off as you exit the second quarter and their expectations for spending in the back half may be sharply constrained?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Right. So Alex, that's a good question. Our enterprise decision-makers and key executives are struggling with this once-in-100-year phenomenon, just the way we are. They all do have 2020 plans and deadlines and they would very much like to work with Arista and overcome the supply constraints to meet them. I believe they will. Many of them will also take not just a 2020 horizon but a multiyear horizon, and start thinking about how to plan projects in this virtual world. So we do see some systematic prudent planning. While we don't have full visibility to that demand, we don't think demand will be challenged significantly if they plan prudently. Where we think demand will be challenged is new projects. People who are familiar with Arista and need upgrades will likely proceed; new prospects who need extensive testing may delay.
Alex Henderson, Analyst, Needham
Great. Thank you very much.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Paul Silverstein with Cowen. Your line is open.
Paul Silverstein, Analyst, Cowen
Can you hear me, Ita, Jayshree?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Yes, I can, Paul.
Paul Silverstein, Analyst, Cowen
So as much as I’d like to ask here again, for how much of the weakness is supply chain versus demand, I want to say it's a different question which is interesting: you have come up with — may be not try only this quarter, but I’ve got sort of in terms of the classic question risk of displacement for the cloud titans that the investment community worried about for quite some time. Given the background in the current macroeconomic environment, has anything changed in your view of Microsoft in particular or in general with respect to that displacement concern?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Okay, I will try and answer the question. If I understood correctly, you're asking about the competitive landscape with cloud titans. Our fundamental thesis is unchanged. We're not seeing major competitive issues or architectural shifts. In fact, if you look at recent market data from various researchers, it validates our number one position in 100 gig. For the third consecutive year, we're number one in 100 gig and continue to increase market share into the high teens for high-performance data center switching. We are pleased with our progress year after year, including 2019. Anshul, would you like to add anything specific about titans?
Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Engineering
No, Jayshree. As we've said before, the level of joint development we continue to do with these customers including Microsoft is still pretty intense. So we're not overly worried. These are competitive environments that will continue to be so, but there's no major shift.
Paul Silverstein, Analyst, Cowen
And Jayshree, if I could just follow-up, I appreciate the market share comments. But obviously, market share is the exact booking phenomenon and so with respect to forward-looking and the risk of displacement, you haven't seen or heard anything from those cloud titans that would cause you incremental concern relative to where you've been historically?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
On one hand, we are always paranoid — that's our nature and we want to continue to deliver the best of the best. On the other hand, we have no particular change in concern or no radical shift in the competitive landscape at this time.
Paul Silverstein, Analyst, Cowen
Appreciate it.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Ben Bollin with Cleveland Research. Your line is open.
Ben Bollin, Analyst, Cleveland Research
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I was hoping you could step back a little bit and tell us your thoughts, bigger picture about broader hyperscale investment. I'm not looking for guidance. I'm just interested how you think about these customers longer term. The framing for that near term: we're seeing material demand drivers — migration to SaaS, adoption of cloud, need for elastic capacity addition — and in the interim, not seeing a big change in those growth rates. So I'm interested how you think about it longer term, what are the material drivers that could accelerate growth rates? Any specific factors that you think could be meaningful for an acceleration in broader investment? Thank you.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Ben. I think the greatest acceleration for Arista came when the cloud titans made a huge migration to leaf-spine architecture and standardized on Arista's EOS for 100 gigabit universal spine. The next acceleration comes from more use cases with 400-gig and 100-gig as they extend data centers and increase server density and storage capabilities. That may not be this year, but could be in the next three years. We will need to repeat the success we had in 100-gig at the 400-gig level. Anshul, do you want to add?
Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Engineering
Yes. The way to look at the cloud: they started with large data centers with compute and storage and then moved to different types of apps. The next phase of investment will be more at the edge — by edge I don't just mean edge computing, but many different distributed locations such as telecom operators building out thousands of smaller sites. Then connecting that back into tenant spaces in large data centers. These networks of different kinds being built will continue in the next few years with overlays, encryption and mapping from one tenant space to another. This is significant because in five to ten years we'll look back and see how cloud companies re-stitched the Internet. Those are some of the most strategic projects in the next few years.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Anshul. The DCI and routing use cases cannot be underestimated and they truly redefine the Internet.
Operator, Operator
Our next question comes from Woo Jin Ho with Bloomberg. Your line is open.
Woo Jin Ho, Analyst, Bloomberg
Great thanks for squeezing me in. A longer-term question as it relates to the enterprise. Has the nature of your conversations with your close enterprise customers changed at all? This may be a little bit premature. The reason I ask is, given that we're at a stay-home, zero-touch environment, one would have to think that the network automation thesis should start playing out a little bit faster given that no one can get to their networks anymore. How does that fit into customer conversations today? Do you think that will evolve? Especially given that you do have Big Switch that provides that enterprise hyperscale cloud-like environment to the enterprise that might be a positive to you guys in the long-term.
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
No, Woo Jin, you bring up a very good point. We tend to talk about data center and campus use cases, but customers are thinking more operationally. It's great to have a box, but how to ignite that box with the right operational capabilities is very important. Day-zero, day-one, day-two zero-touch automation for campus and data center is a huge topic. The other reason we bought Big Switch is not only are we igniting real-time streaming telemetry with CloudVision, but we're really extending that into observability and network packet broker capabilities. We're pleased with the sum of Data Analyzer, CloudVision and now the packet broker capabilities to extend our monitoring fabric. So our enterprise conversations are going beyond the box to much more operational automation, analytics, availability and in the future security and segmentation as well.
Woo Jin Ho, Analyst, Bloomberg
Just a quick follow-up on that: are these conversations ongoing for quite some time now or has the pandemic accelerated that and potentially forced customers to make a change and hasten purchasing decisions or does it cause delays?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
I think these conversations were happening anyway, but the importance of them increases if the pandemic continues longer. Right now, we're getting impacted by supply chain, but if we overcome that, I think automation and analytics will become even more central.
Operator, Operator
Your next question comes from Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Ittai Kidron, Analyst, Oppenheimer
Again just a couple. One for you, Jayshree, and one for you, Ita. Jayshree, do you get a sense if there was any business activity in the quarter that was just a pull-in from second half plans into the first half given the effects of work from home that some customers had to respond to quickly and did it by pulling in budgets? And for you, Ita, on the 2018 OpEx comment, I understand T&E, you're clearly saving a lot of money there. But are there headcount reductions planned as well? Or is this just less marketing, less travel; you're not flying business anymore? How do I think about that?
Jayshree Ullal, President and Chief Executive Officer
I'll take that one first. Yes, we're preserving employee talent; that's our most important resource and we're focused on doing that. We're looking at other areas, more variable expenses and one-time type expenses we can manage in the near-term window and preserve employees and the talent base.
Ita Brennan, Chief Financial Officer
And the short answer, Ittai, is we did not experience pull-ins in Q1.
Ittai Kidron, Analyst, Oppenheimer
Very good. Good luck, ladies.
Curtis McKee, Director of Corporate & Investor Development
Okay. This concludes the Arista Q1 2020 Earnings Call. We have posted a presentation, which provides additional information on our fiscal results, which you can access on the Investors section of our website. Thank you for joining us today, and please be safe everybody.
Operator, Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.