Extreme Networks Inc (EXTR) 2023 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Extreme Network's Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Mr. Stan Kovler, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Extreme Networks' Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year-End 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Stan Kovler, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations. With me today are Extreme Networks' President and CEO, Ed Meyercord; and CFO, Kevin Rhodes. We just distributed a press release and filed an 8-K detailing Extreme Networks' financial results for the quarter. For your convenience, a copy of the press release, which includes our GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at extremenetworks.com along with our earnings presentation.

Today's call and our discussion may include forward-looking statements based on our current expectations about Extreme's future business, financial and operational results, growth expectations and strategies. Our financial disclosures on this call will be on a non-GAAP basis unless stated otherwise. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they involve risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. These risks are described in our risk factors in our 10-K report for the period ended June 30, 2022, and subsequent 10-Q reports filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made on this call reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or duty to update them except as required by law. Following our prepared remarks, we will take your questions. And now I will take -- I will turn the call over to Extreme's President and CEO, Ed Meyercord.

Our performance, with revenue growth accelerating to 31% in the fourth quarter and 18% overall for the year. This is the second consecutive year of double-digit organic growth. We also delivered $1.09 a share in EPS, up 42% year-over-year, and we expect the bottom-line trends to continue with earnings growing faster than revenues. Our free cash flow doubled in fiscal '23, and we ended the year with a net cash position even after paying down $80 million in debt and buying back $100 million of our stock. We outperformed our original top line outlook for fiscal '23 and based on industry analyst estimates outgrew the market by 2x. This, combined with the increase in volume of larger deals and new logos is a clear indication that we're taking share from our largest competitors. Customers recognize that Extreme offers the simplest and easiest to manage end-to-end enterprise networking platform in the industry.

Our One Network, One Cloud, One Extreme Solution, enhanced with our AIOps capabilities excels relative to the complex and high total cost of ownership solutions of our competitors. With this differentiation, new growth vectors and the higher level of our team's execution, I am confident in our continued growth outlook. With today's modern network is a connected tissue and enterprise digital transformations, the demand for our advanced cloud-driven solutions remains strong. We continue to elevate both our competitive position and the awareness of the Extreme brand in the market resulting in funnel growth. Increasingly, customers are recognizing our value proposition and placing their trust in Extreme to deliver better outcomes for their mission-critical network deployments. Given our market share position, we're benefiting from being in such a large and growing market where small share gains have a big impact on Extreme's financial results.

In our fourth quarter, bookings grew mid-single digits sequentially and were in line with normal seasonality. We expect normal seasonal trends going forward as industry lead times returned to normal. Our U.S. business was particularly strong in Q4, partially offset by Germany and the APAC region. With this backdrop, we expect revenue growth to remain strong in fiscal '24 and to start the year with mid-teens growth in Q1. Our competitive differentiation and continued success is being driven by our One Network, One Cloud, One Extreme solution. At the core of our One Network promise is our universal hardware portfolio. This is the most flexible, highest performing end-to-end networking hardware in the industry. And with Extreme's unique and highly differentiated fabric, we make it simple to orchestrate applications and policy across the entire campus from the core to the wireless edge and across the wide area network.

We bring enhanced security, the ability to segment networks and zero-touch provisioning, eliminating confusion complexity and the need for additional IT staff. This is in stark contrast to our competitors' fabric solutions, which were designed for service provider and data center networks and not meant for campus. With One Cloud, we're the only provider to offer choice in how customers manage their networks, public, private, edge or hybrid cloud through a single interface. And we're the only vendor that can manage both Extreme and third-party hardware, providing enhanced visibility, flexibility and the ability to seamlessly upgrade to an Extreme network at your own pace. Finally, our copilot AIOps capabilities provide proactive insights and analytics to improve network availability and management.

And with One Extreme, we deliver the industry's most simple commercial terms for licensing with one price for all devices. Our licenses are portable and poolable, providing unmatched value and simplicity. Again, this is in stark contrast with our competitors who have complex tiered licensing models that are notorious for hidden costs. Customers increasingly view their network as a strategic asset to streamline operations, power and scale new services and reduce business risk. Our AIF solutions are getting traction with customers as they look for new ways to leverage the network to drive better business outcomes. This is evidenced by the 182 customers that spent over $1 million with Extreme in fiscal '23. Some highlights from our fourth quarter include wins with the University of Mount Union. They upgraded their network with our end-to-end wired and wireless solution. The new network provides seamless AI and fabric powered automation and optimization across the campus, which improves IT productivity.

Northampton, NHS Trust, a leading hospital in the U.K. needed to upgrade its network to keep pace with increasing bandwidth demands generated by IoT medical devices, AI in medical applications and WiFi in patient rooms. With the new WiFi 6 network, they are simplifying IT operations and improving patient care. One of the world's largest ski mountain conglomerates with 5 resorts across 15 states and 3 countries chose Extreme after deep frustration with one of our largest competitors. Our value proposition of creating one network managed by one cloud was essential to the customer in order to conduct a seamless migration with visibility and management capability to both the legacy and new network environments from our cloud, eliminating the risk of rip and replace. We extended success in retail with a key win with a leading grocery chain in Mexico with nearly 900 locations, the company is upgrading its network with analytics and cloud management capabilities to support a better retail experience. They're also leaning into AIOps with our copilot solution to help augment their IT staff.

And lastly, we expanded our footprint within MLB and the NHL, winning new deals with the Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Flyers, cementing our leadership position in sports and entertainment venue. Extreme was once again recognized by Gartner Peer Insights as the customer's choice for enterprise networking for the sixth consecutive year. We're recognized for our strength in product innovation, ease of deployment and outstanding customer support. We're also named one of the best places to work based on our Flex First remote work policy, our culture of inclusivity and employee satisfaction. This quarter, we were able to bring our product lead times down again as our supply chain environment continues to improve. We have the benefit of a healthy backlog of customer orders with request dates that spread fairly evenly through the end of our fiscal year. End customer orders remain firm and distributor orders have normalized, giving us confidence in our outlook for this fiscal year.

We continue to expect our backlog to settle in a range of $75 million to $100 million in Q1 '25. Our exposure to the fastest-growing areas of the networking market, share gains, new go-to-market partnerships provide ample growth opportunities to drive double-digit growth long term. We are forecasting market share gains with channel partners, leveraging the strength of our unique solutions in the enterprise market. We also have an opportunity to expand our subscription business to our entire hardware portfolio in fiscal '24. And we introduced a disruptive managed services platform that will expand our go-to-market footprint and add a new growth vector for Extreme as we progress through the year. I'm looking forward to our Investor Day currently scheduled for November 7 at the NHL headquarters in New York City. We will provide details soon, and we hope to see you there. And with that, I'd like to welcome our new CFO, Kevin Rhodes, and ask him to cover the financials and he's in all your earnings call with Extreme. Kevin?

Thanks, Ed. Let me say it's been a pleasure for me to join Extreme at a time when its financial position has never been stronger. I'm encouraged not only by our financial performance, but also our competitive differentiation in this large market with great opportunities to take share. In my first couple of months on the job, I'm impressed with the company's culture and the level of talent we have in this organization at all levels in our company, I see strong sense of urgency, ownership, curiosity and commitment and a real desire to win. During fiscal '23, we once again demonstrated the level of execution this management team expects, and we are committed to continuing that in the future.

Let me get into the numbers. First, I'll start with the fourth quarter. Revenue was $363.9 million and grew 31% year-over-year and 9% quarter-over-quarter, exceeding the high end of our expectations entering the quarter. Product revenue accelerated to $261.7 million or 40% growth year-over-year and 9% sequentially, reflecting continued improvement in our supply chain environment. We achieved strong double-digit growth in both campus switching and wireless LAN partially offset by a decline in data center revenue. Our SaaS ARR grew 25% year-over-year to $129 million, up from $103 million in the year ago quarter. Driven by the strength of our renewals, subscription deferred revenue was up 38% year-over-year to $217 million. Total services and subscription revenue was $102.2 million, up 12% year-over-year. This growth was largely driven by the strength of our cloud subscription revenue, which was up 27% year-over-year.

The growth of cloud subscriptions and maintenance drove the total deferred revenue to $501 million, up 25% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. Our gross margin came in at 60.2%, up 110 basis points sequentially and 320 basis points from the year ago quarter. We attribute this to improvements in product gross margin due to higher revenue and an improvement in the supply chain and distribution costs as well as product mix. Fourth quarter operating expenses were $156 million, up from $132 million in the year ago quarter and up from $144 million in the third quarter of '23, reflecting higher investment in R&D and sales and marketing expenses to support our higher revenue growth. Our strong revenue growth, gross margin expansion and operating leverage contributed to another record quarter for operating margin at 17.4%, up from 9.6% in the year ago quarter and up from 15.6% in the prior quarter.

To that end, fourth quarter earnings per share were $0.33 at the high end of our guidance entering the quarter. For the full year, fiscal '23, revenue of $1.3 billion grew 18% from the prior year on product revenue growth of 22%. During fiscal year '24, we expect continued strong product revenue growth, given the growing interest in our solutions by customers and the ongoing normalization of our backlog. Wireless product revenue grew at over twice the rate of our switching product revenue during the year. Recurring revenue is another positive story here at Extreme. We generated $380 million of subscription, maintenance and a small amount of professional services revenue. This is highly predictable and visible revenue for our company, and we continue to drive more recurring revenue over time as we ship products from backlog and is generating a tail wind for SaaS growth.

Gross margin for fiscal '23 ended the year at 58.9%, up 50 basis points year-over-year based upon improvements in supply chain-related costs, price increases and cost absorption owing to higher revenue and larger scale. Operating margin of 15.2% grew 290 basis points from a year ago and operating expenses as a percentage of revenue improved to 43.7%, which is better than our Investor Day guidance. GAAP EPS grew 76% from a year ago and non-GAAP EPS of $1.09 per share grew 42%, representing the significant operating leverage we have in our model. We also strengthened our balance sheet with strong cash generation and the refinancing of our debt. We ended the quarter -- the end of the year with net cash position of $10 million after repurchasing $25 million worth of our shares at the average price of $17.32 per share.

The $235 million of free cash flow we generated during the year represents an 18% free cash flow margin at the high end of our long-term model. Of this amount, $75.5 million was generated in the fourth quarter, driven by higher gross margins and EBITDA. Lastly, at the end of fiscal '23, we refinanced our long-term facility with a $200 million term loan and $150 million of available revolving credit. The interest rate is currently just over 7% annually. Our balance sheet remains in excellent condition with a leverage ratio well below 0.5 a turn.

Now turning to guidance. We remain optimistic about the enterprise networking spending environment and our ability to take share. Customer spending trends are reverting back to normal seasonal patterns given the improvements in our networking supply chain. As a reminder, the fourth quarter tends to be a seasonally higher quarter than the first quarter. Our gross margin outlook is also benefiting from an improved supply chain and expedite fees and shipping costs continue to improve. For the first quarter, we expect the following: revenue to be in the range of $342 million to $352 million, gross margin to be in a range of 59.5% to 61.5%. Operating margin to be in a range of 15.3% to 17.6% and earnings to be in a range of $0.28 to $0.33 per diluted share. All in, I see tremendous opportunity for Extreme to grow our business, accelerate our revenue contribution from SaaS and improve our margins and cash flow. I look forward to laying out some of our plans at our Investor Day later this year.

And with that, I will now turn it over to the operator to begin the question-and-answer session.

(Operator Instructions) Now, first question coming from the line of Alex Anderson with Needham.

I was hoping you could give us some sense of what your expectation is as we look out at the full year. You had talked about 15% plus growth over the 3-year period. I think earlier, obviously, you've outperformed that in '23. Is it reasonable to think that you're still on track given the backlog for another 15% plus type year in '24. And just operationally, can you give us a little bit of a guidance on the interest and tax line for the FY '24 period?

Thanks, Alex. Kevin, as far as outlook for the year. Do you want to -- do you want to take that one?

Yes, I'm happy to. I would say, Alex, we're very much on track with what we laid out already from fiscal '23 to '25 outlook. We feel good about that. And I would say, yes, we feel that we are still going to be in the mid-teens growth for the full year.

And then on trade -- interest rate?

Yes. On the interest rate, let me just pull that up, and we can certainly talk through that. We believe that we're feeling comfortable. So taxes for the year, we believe, are going to be somewhere, again, looking for the full year at around 22% on full year tax rate.

Non-GAAP?

Non-GAAP, yes. And then when we think -- yes, that's what I'm talking about, non-GAAP. And then when we're thinking about interest, we have $200 million outstanding. We've got about 7% cost of debt, but then we've got about 5% generation against that sort of 2% spread, but not all $200 million all the debts outstanding. And then we -- I'd say we generally think that we'll probably have about $150 million to $200 million of investment income of that 5%. So, I think they're going to somewhat breakeven or be slightly interest expense, but not a tremendous one.

So last year in 2023, you did $12.7 million in interest expense and other income. Is it reasonable to think that, that will come down very slightly?

Yes, I think it will. I think it will come down.

And our next question the line of Dimitra with Oppenheimer.

2 questions, if you don't mind. And I'm getting a lot of the same questions. But why are you doing so well with bookings at this point with very large customers, why the success in large deals? And can you talk about your new Extreme Cloud Edge product? Has that been launched maybe some of the learnings from that?

Thanks, Tim. And I think what's happened -- we talked about it in my comments, I talked about the volume of large deals. I have deals through over $1 million growing. And I think this is really about the up-leveling of Extreme in the marketplace. We've been in the leadership quadrant at Gartner now for 5 years running and our position only strengthened. It was last year that we actually went in front of Cisco.

And as enterprise customers are looking to upgrade their networks, they're considering Extreme now more than ever before. And people are surprised to learn that the kinds of customer relationships that we have. So when we win Kroger, which is the world's largest grocer, and we are building out the world's largest cloud managed network, that was a hotly contested piece of business. All the major competitors were there and Extreme one out. When we win one of the world's largest cruise lines where each ship is $4 million or $5 million, and we win the first ship and a fleet of 43 and the customer is thrilled with the difference in experience in dealing with Extreme versus dealing with one of the largest competitors. That just opens up the door for more.

And then we can take these reference accounts and enterprise customers are surprised to learn that every time you get a FedEx package, it's run through an Extreme network or every time you fly in the U.S. aerospace that you're flying on an Extreme network technically because the FAA runs on Extreme. And these kinds of stories are becoming more and more known out in the industry. And so our reputation has gone up. And what it's doing is it's giving us more opportunities.

And then when we come in with our One Network, One Cloud, One Extreme Solution, which is really about the seamless end-to-end hardware, super flexible, high-performance hardware, all managed within one cloud end to end. Our competitors don't have that. And when you look at the commercial terms and the simplicity of our licensing, the quality of our service and especially the performance of our fabric, which is truly the only campus grade fabric in the industry, it really turns heads, and so it's just -- it's creating a lot more opportunities.

So here, it's about success -- getting success. I mentioned Kroger, they're in the middle of a large acquisition. That initial deal was for wireless. We have a larger switching opportunity there. And then when they close that acquisition, they standardized on our technology. So just some examples of kind of what's happening in the market. Our competitive position is truly differentiated and then our brand, we've up-leveled our brands. So that's really helping us get the attention. And by the way, that also plays into the channel community because partners realize that they see that we're winning these larger deals, and it allows us to gain more mind share within the channel. So that's been a big part of it. In terms of Cloud Edge, Tim, we know you were over in Berlin at our user conference. This is a big deal, especially aware sovereign data becomes more and more important. And we have begun to sell our Cloud Edge, not surprisingly to European customers.

One of the things I mentioned in our notes is that we're building -- and we've just come out with our managed services platform, which is a brand-new growth vector for Extreme. More on this later to come. But here again, this is where having an edge cloud that could be part of an MSP service offering can be very powerful. So, I'd say early innings on Cloud Edge, we have a lot of interest. And then it's going to be an important part of our platform and managed services going forward.

And just on Cloud Edge. Could you -- are you getting much interest in doing AI inferencing or even some maybe training on this infrastructure?

Tim, I think it's early innings, and it's a little too soon to call. I think right now, the major interest is around the cloud sovereignty and keeping data in market, if you will. Obviously, with European countries is actually important. And so there's a lot of examination going on right now. And our teams are actively working a lot of opportunities in markets. Japan is another market where maintaining the data in market becomes really important. And I'd say that's the primary interest today, but I think more to come on that.

Next question. And our next question coming from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lextar Capital Markets.

Yes. I'm looking for a little bit more detail. You talked about -- I think it was weakness in Germany and APAC. Is that something that you expect to get resolved in the relatively near term?

Eric, yes, we do. And actually, we're seeing it happen now. Germany went into a recession, and it was the first time that the country went into a recession since World War II. And so it definitely created a bit of a shock. It slowed down some of the buying cycles. And that has impacted us for the last 6 months or so. But we've seen encouraging signs. We've seen the funnel pick up. We've seen larger deals come back into the funnel, and we see that strengthening. The other key driver is what we call a run rate business. This is really coming from the channel. The run rate business dried up with supply chain constraints, and we're seeing that come back. And that also plays a big role in EMEA and in German markets where we have a very deep channel and partner community where we see a lot of that run rate business. So the signs are encouraging for us. We feel like we bottomed out there, but we're coming back.

With Asia Pacific, I would say the same thing. In last quarter, we saw the run rate business as well as some of the larger project deals go away. And now we're seeing them come back with strength. So Asia Pacific is usually one of the first markets to come back, and we're seeing that happen, and we're also seeing it happen in Germany. Interestingly, in EMEA and the rest of the markets, they remain very strong, and the demand in the U.S. market remains very strong. Got it.

You talked about share gains. And I'm wondering if you're doing anything different this fiscal year with regard to channel partner engagement or incentive to really capitalize on what you characterize as your rising reputation to continue to expand those gains?

Absolutely, Eric. So what we've done is we put in place -- we've got named partners, which are just over 200 partners that are our target and more strategic partners where we put in place specific business plans with them, with quarterly business reviews. And I can tell you the growth targets there are significantly higher than what we're calling for the company. And the interest level is quite high. I think with the supply constrained environment and some of the macro challenges, they've been pinched by some of the larger players, and they're excited about the opportunity to work with Extreme. And for us, it's a big opportunity to expand wallet share. So there's our name partners.

There are new partner opportunities that we've -- that we're looking at. I mentioned the MSP platform that we're building. We will attract new partners, higher volume partners with our platform. And finally, with non-name partners or the larger base of what we call authorized partners, when the run rate business comes back with supply chain loosening, we'll see more volumes out of those partners as well. So the answer is yes, we see a huge opportunity in the channel. There is clearly channel fatigue with some of the larger players and some of the issues with their solutions in the marketplace and then some of the issues with their commercial practices.

And our next question coming from the line of Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum.

So Ed, I'm just wondering if you could go through the puts and takes of upside or potential risk of the 50% guidance for this year. We have supply chain normalizing. We kind of have a mixed geographical situation. We have tremendous shown success in market share gains and we kind of have a mixed geographical outlook for the year by people other than myself. So I'm just wondering as we have a conversation this time next year, what are the 1 or 2 things that would make that 15%, 20%? And what would be the 1 or 2 things that may be put in at risk?

Sure. Thanks, Christian. And there -- I mentioned, if I go through -- you mentioned GOs. We have considerable strength in Americas. The growth was very strong throughout the year in Americas and in Q4, and we see that continuing. And I made the comment on the call earlier, and you're familiar with this. But again, given our relative market size as a, call it, 6%, 7% share player in the industry, there are these large crumbs, small share gains for us have a big impact on our financial statement. So it doesn't take a lot of market share for us to grow our top line and hit that target that we've laid out there. In terms of GOs, EMEA is our second largest GO market, and it is very healthy. The challenge for us was specifically in Germany there. And as I mentioned earlier, we are seeing them start to come out, and we're seeing strengthening in the funnel and the forecast with Germany. And then importantly, there is this run rate business. And I'll come back to that in a second.

Finally, APAC, we have new leadership and strengthen relationships with distribution as well as channel there. And again, I think if I look at the health of our funnel globally relative to what we're calling, I'd say we have the strongest funnel in that region today. And so that's changed pretty quickly. So we're very bullish on Asia Pacific and a sharp rebound, I'd say, at a higher growth rate. I'd say with EMEA, we think the other markets are going to pick up the slack in Germany, and then we'll see that recover. And then we see continued strength in the U.S. market. One of the things we're doing is we're doubling down on our certification investment. We are opening up fairly large opportunities that we haven't had in the past in the federal space and also our commitment to certifications are helping out what's happening in SLED with state and local governments as they look more and more to federal search. So this is providing some wind in our sales and opening up some new opportunities.

The run rate business is important to mention because if we look at run rate at its peak, generating, call it, between $15 million to $20 million a quarter, we saw that cut in half or more with the slowdown of supply chain. So as that returns to normal, that's going to provide us with some tailwinds. And then -- we do have, I mentioned some new growth vectors with commercial terms. MSP is really us packaging our existing portfolio and creating a very simple platform. And it's really about commercial simplicity and then the strength of our One Network, One Cloud, One Extreme that generated a lot of interest out there with some of our existing partners as well as some new partners that are a lot larger than the traditional profile of an Extreme partner. So we're guardedly optimistic. We've just launched the platform, and that will ramp throughout the year as we turn the corner to 25. I mentioned that we're enabling the entire portfolio at Extreme to be run and managed from the cloud, and this is going to open up growth in subscription. This will happen at the beginning of our calendar year, and you'll see us build momentum there.

And then we also have some other initiatives that we believe will be disruptive and create high growth with some very large partners like Verizon, for example, very excited to run with Extreme. And so we're being added to their selling list. So that -- I mean these are the upside opportunities. Obviously, from a macro perspective, there are always macroeconomic risks. And I think we've seen that. We've heard about that. There's always something unforeseen that kind of comes around the corner. But at this stage of the game, I've just been -- we've just gone through regional director reviews going around the world, examining and scrubbing pipeline and funnel. And at this stage of the game, we feel very confident in the demand outlook.

Next question our next question coming from the line of Dave Kang with B. Riley.

My first question is regarding your competitive landscape. Just wondering if you're seeing much of a Juniper in various -- in the enterprise segment, it seems like they've been very vocal about their success in enterprise segments.

Yes, Dave, thanks. And good question. And I would say, if we had to pick a competitor where we go toe to toe that it is most competitive out there. It's probably Juniper and their enterprise solution today. Juniper and Extreme are about the same size in the enterprise space. We don't see them as much as we see Cisco and HPE 60% and 15%. So 75% of the market that we run into is with Cisco and HPE and then to a much lesser extent, Juniper but they're out in the market. So we are seeing them more, and I think they're experiencing some of the same success that we are. And we do have competitive differentiation with Juniper, as you know, and the market knows Juniper has been a service provider company first. They acquired Mist, which is a WiFi was a WiFi only, a cloud WiFi-only company. And now they're trying to migrate their switching solutions and they're trying to push that into the NIST framework. It's more complicated than Extreme. We have advantages with respect to our cloud, in One Cloud, where -- versus a multi-cloud environment. We have advantages around Cloud Choice. And we also have advantages with our network and our universal hardware platform that's end-to-end.

And I'd say the big differentiator for us in the market today is our fabric. So it's cloud differentiation and fabric. We are the only player that has a truly differentiated campus fabric. Juniper has an IP fabric designed for data center, it just doesn't work well in a campus environment. When customers see our fabric and if we do a comparison head-to-head, we're really blowing away our competitors, and that's kind of a secret sought for us right now. As people learn about the ease of provisioning network, the ease of deploying policy into a fabric that automatically updates the entire campus environment. Most of the data center fabrics are static by definition, ours is dynamic and flexible. And customers really don't believe it when it's pitch and PowerPoint, but when they see it and then they experience it, they're blown away. So this has been a huge factor for us winning. And it's one of our -- for us, it's a big competitive advantage for us against.

But I guess, my follow-up question is, they've been very vocal about their AI capability. What is your strategy -- AI strategy going forward?

Yes. I mean, look, we -- Extreme and Juniper are the leaders in the space in terms of AIOps. And so we have different capabilities. But this is -- I go to Kroger, right? I mean we won Kroger. And obviously, they want to build the grocery store of the future, and that hinges on AI capabilities and AIOps. They're looking to automate their environments. They're looking for unique insights, actionable insights. When we look at our differentiation versus Juniper, I'd say, it's about the quality of actionable insights from our AIML tool. But yes, this is where we're focused, Dave. And I would say Juniper is very good at marketing their capabilities here.

And our next question coming from the line Greg Mesniaeff with Westpark Capital.

Ed, just a high-level question for you. If just for argument's sake, one of your strategic goals were to come true in its entirety and your entire subscription base transition to a subscription model, how would that impact product revenue and revenue growth and the timing of revenues?

Thanks, Greg. It's a good question. If you look at -- if you look at today, if you look at our portfolio and what we can manage from the cloud, it's about -- it's less than 50% of our installed base. But in terms of what we're selling, it's probably in the 60% range. So the idea that we could increase the volume from 60% to 100% is obviously a big deal for us. There will also be an opportunity for migrations of our existing base, which would accelerate the subscription revenue as well. And our solutions, the current solutions that we're offering today where we have our subscriptions being tied to hardware, some of the new growth initiatives we have, we are untethering the hardware in a way where we'll be able to sell subscription, cloud subscriptions and software subscriptions that are untethered to our hardware. And that obviously will create a unique growth opportunity.

But as the sales mix continues to transition to software and subscription, would the impact on hardware revenue be in any way impacted negatively?

Well, for us, it's -- you still need hardware in the network. And so I think it's our subscription differentiation, our cloud differentiation, our fabric capabilities that when we win because of our cloud story and our AIOps tools and our AIOps stories, it pulls through the hardware. So as people are looking at building the network of the future and modernizing their infrastructure and they consider our capabilities as it relates to software and what we can do with our cloud. It helps us take share and it helps us in winning that business that pulls through hardware. So I would say, no, this is really about us picking up share. We can lead with our software capabilities, our cloud capabilities, AIOps and then when we win, we pull through the hardware.

And our next question coming from the line of Mike Genovese with Rosenblatt Securities.

Can we get just an update on the backlog. Last quarter, you said 5x normal. Do we have a metric for this quarter?

So Mike, we said last quarter that we were not going to give -- we were going to move away from giving a specific backlog number each and every quarter. I think what Ed said in his prepared remarks is that our backlog is now -- we feel like it will start to normalize throughout 2024 and into Q1 of 2025. We feel good about the level of backlog we have. For instance, it's primarily, I'd say, 90-plus percent is all end customer orders at this point. And so the distribution orders that we had in the past have basically worked themselves through the system, especially with supply chain getting better. And so we feel good about those end customer orders and the timing of when those orders need to be shipped to those customers based on their own, I'll call it, like upgrade cycle and whatnot, we feel like it will come down fairly evenly throughout the year and into Q1 of '25. So feeling good about the level of backlog that we have and the timing of that coming out.

Okay. That's helpful. What's not an expectation since we're 3 months later here, and just an expectation for when orders might turn positive year-over-year. Do you have a view there?

So orders turning positive year-over-year. I think we expect that as a growing company, we expect orders to continue to grow throughout the year in 2024. So I would say each quarter, we are expecting continued improvement in growth year-over-year. And I think, Mike, for pointing to the -- if you recall last September quarter, we had a price in October 1, price increase that we put in place. And that pulled in a huge amount of order volume literally in the last 2 weeks of the quarter to create somewhat of a lopsided quarter -- a record quarter, if you will, for bookings last year in September. We do not have a price increase on the Board for this year. But we have, as Kevin said, as we look out at the year, we are looking at bookings growth throughout the year.

Okay. Fantastic. And then last question for me. I mean, you guys have just reiterated, I think, '24 and '25, so at least mid-teens revenue growth. And you obviously have a ton of competitive and product momentum there. I'm kind of wondering in '26, '27, even '28, do you think that the basis of competition in the industry is going to be sort of the same as it is now? Or is there more work to be done in the corporate development and product development areas? My question really is, what do you have to do now to ensure that the momentum continues in '26, '27, '28?

Yes. And that really goes back to some of the investments that we're making. I mentioned that we are doing a lot of work in -- with some of our growth with some of our new growth vectors. Managed Services, the industry is moving more towards managed services. And we are building, I mentioned in my comments, a very disruptive platform, and it's disruptive in the simplicity of how it operates commercially. The fact that you can have the entire network that you can have complete visibility through a cloud and that you can orchestrate services from the cloud and that you have a workspace that you can use to manage -- it makes it very easy for you to deliver a managed service. And it's -- the managed service model falls down because of the complexity of the commercial terms and then the execution and the operation of delivering all of these services in a way that can be managed.

And so what we're providing will be, by far, the industry's most simplest platform for delivering this, and we see a massive growth opportunity here. It's early innings. We're not calling a forecast there, but that is clearly a growth vector. We're also branching out into new large more -- it's more of a service provider type relationship with large customers that have potential to spend a significant volumes relative to our traditional partner base, and we're creating a very -- a private offer that will be very compelling that we believe will be an opportunity for us to take share and it provides significant value to these large players relative to the current arrangements they currently have with some of the largest players in the industry.

So there is a share shift. We have some big ideas about being disruptive and share shift there. The final thing I'll mention is our federal investment. We have been underinvested in federal. Our investment now is really proving to be timely with some of the large opportunities that we have. And so with the certs that we're investing in, it will truly open up other investments. There's also the convergence of networking with cloud and security. We bring a lot of security elements. If you look at technology that we have that's very mature, we'll also be introducing access security technologies in the future that will be announced in the future that can also be somewhat disruptive.

Now I'm not showing any further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Ed Meyercord for any closing remarks.

Thanks, Olivia, and thanks, everybody, for your participation on the call. Obviously, for the investors that joined in today. And also, we have our employees that dial in, and we have partners and distributors who listen in as well and maybe some customers, so we appreciate that. I'd say -- I'd reiterate, there's never been a better time to be at Extreme. Kevin mentioned it in his remarks, we are in an incredibly strong financial position, and we have very interesting and unique growth opportunities that we believe will sustain this -- the growth levels that we mentioned. So I would encourage investors to please attend the upcoming investor conference. And then over the next several months coming up in New York, details to follow, and we hope to see you there. Thanks, everybody, and have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, that does end our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.