Radware Ltd (RDWR) 2015 Q1 法說會逐字稿

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  • Operator

  • Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode, later we will conduct a question and answer session, instructions will be given at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Mr. Roy Zisapel, President and CEO.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to Radware's First Quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Meir Moshe, Chief Financial Officer. Meir will start the call by reviewing the financial results and afterwards I will discuss the business highlights of the first quarter result. After my comment, we'll open the discussion for Q&A. Meir?

  • Meir Moshe - CFO

  • Thank you, Roy and welcome everyone to our first quarter conference call. First, I'd like to review the safe harbor language. During the course of this conference call, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. We wish to caution you that such statements are just predictions and that actual events or results may differ materially, including but are not limited to general business conditions and our ability to address changes in our industry, changes in demand for products, the timing and amount of orders and other risks detailed from time-to-time in Radware's filing. We refer you to documents the company files from time-to-time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the company's last Form 20-F filed on April 27 this year. And now ladies and gentlemen for the financials.

  • Revenues for the first quarter totaled to $57.2 million representing 12% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin remained at 83%. The non-GAAP net income this quarter was $10.5 million or $0.22 per diluted share, compared to net income of $7.8 million or $0.17 per share in the first quarter of 2014.

  • GAAP income. $2.2 million of stock-based compensation expenses, $350,000 of amortization of intangible assets, $800,000 of litigation cost associated with IP litigation and $630,000 of exchange rate expenses bring the GAAP net income this quarter to $6.5 million or $0.14 per diluted share compared to net income of $4.1 million or $0.09 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2014.

  • Non-GAAP operating expenses reached $36.6 million in the first quarter bringing our non-GAAP operating margin to 19%. The head count for the end of this quarter was 925 employees. Following the buyback of $19.7 million this quarter, our overall cash position, including cash short-term and long-term bank deposits and marketable securities amounted to $322 million and we have no debt. Shareholders' equity amounted to $325 million.

  • The revenue split between regions this quarter. Americas accounted for 43% of total sales this quarter, representing 15% year-over-year growth. EMEA 26% of total sales this quarter, representing 17% year-over-year growth and Asia Pac 31% of total sales this quarter, representing 5% year-over-year growth.

  • Revenue split between carrier and enterprise. Enterprise contributed 72% revenues and carrier 28%. In addition, as announced earlier today, our Board of Directors has authorized a new share purchase plan of up to $40 million of our ordinary shares. The plan is for the period of 12 months. Guidance for the second quarter. We expect revenues to range between $58 million to $60 million. Gross margin at 83%, operating expenses will range between $37 million to $37.5 million, financial income at $1.3 million to $1.4 million, tax rate 13% to 14%, share count 47.5 million shares and non-GAAP EPS to range between $0.23 to $0.25.

  • As you can see ladies and gentlemen, we continued our year-over-year double digit growth and we expect higher and better results in the following quarters of 2015. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Roy.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Thank you. Meir. We are pleased with the results of our first quarter, demonstrating consistent growth in both revenues and profitability. We continue to execute on our strategy with the following key points. First, continue to be very focused on providing a comprehensive integrated solution for data center application delivery and security. Second, lead innovation in the market, as it relates to data center Attack Mitigation, secure hybrid cloud and SDN and NFV applications for secure networking. Third, we have increased our market footprint through traditional channels OEMs and alliances, as well as cloud and CDN channels.

  • The first quarter was very busy for us, in terms of new product and solution introduction, clearly demonstrating our progress in executing our strategy. I will cover some of the key announcements later all in my remarks, however, the new DefensePro high-end Attack Mitigation Platform, our latest addition to our cloud security offerings, the Cloud WAF, our announced integration of both applications security and application delivery with Cisco ACI and our alliance with Lockheed Martin, around cyber security are all significant examples of the progress we made.

  • On the business side, the Americas' continued to grow with double-digit growth, also with a lower growth rate than we've experienced in the past. We continue to see North American revenues growing above market growth in 2015, which will be (inaudible) strong market share expansion in this market. In the past quarter, we did not perform well in South America, which weighed down the overall performance of the Americas.

  • EMEA posted very good performance and we continue to believe our execution there is improving, and are encouraged by the results, especially given the foreign exchange headwinds. One of the announcements we made was the integration of our Alteon and DefensePro product into Cisco ACI. This integration to Cisco ACI fabric provides our customers with a fully automated ADC and DDoS service controlled and managed by Cisco Application Policy infrastructure controller. We are seeing a high level of interest from Cisco customers on these integrated solutions and are expanding the use cases we can serve, together with Cisco.

  • Furthermore, Cisco press release from yesterday on ACI and PCI compliance, mentions Radware as one of the six security ecosystem partner alongside Symantec, inter security and Check Point. On the product front, we believe a very important and exciting announcement for us was the release of our new high-end attack integration platform. The new DefensePro platforms offer up to 300Gbps mitigation capacity and handles 230 million packets-per-second of attack traffic, while allowing customers to enjoy the widest range of data center cyber-attack to the industry.

  • Beyond being the fastest and most scalable mitigation platform in the industry, the first dedicated attack mitigation product to offer 100-gigabit interfaces. We specifically designed this platform for multi-tenant environments, providing the ability to support up to one thousand active policies or tenants, with separate processing capabilities and reporting for each one.

  • The new DefensePro is an excellent answer to address fast growing volumetric attack sizes, while at the same time, it enables our carrier customers to monetize their investment in security, through a managed cyber protection service for their customer. We're seeing a lot of interest in the market from carriers and cloud providers on monetizing these services. A good example is our latest announcement from BlackMesh.

  • In the past BlackMesh, which is a hosting and cloud provider implemented various tools and techniques to repel attacks, such as access controlling, caching, filtering et cetera. Despite these efforts, they still experience service degradation, as well as downtime that lasted between 45 to 60 minutes during each cyber-attack.

  • Our attack litigation system proved again its superiority in blocking live attacks without customer downtime. The strengths of the solution comes from our patent protected real time behavioral signature technology that detects and mitigates emerging networks attacks, all without the need for human intervention and without blocking legitimate user traffic. Our security algorithm are far superior to the thresholds that limit our competition users, as the primary means to detect and block attacks, a method that is strong to force positives by design and require constant manual intervention. Another important announcement was our hybrid cloud web application firewall. As part of our strategy to expand our cloud services, we released a new cloud security offering that provides always on WAF, IPS and DDoS protection for our customers. As integration to the cloud continues and expands, companies today face some more distributed networking infrastructure. This transition of web-based application to the cloud require organizations to protect their applications, both on premise and in the cloud.

  • Our new offering the Hybrid Cloud WAF service is an industry first that provides fully managed enterprise grade web application firewall IPS and DDoS that protects both on premise and cloud-based applications using a single technology.

  • In addition, and leveraging the strength of our Attack Mitigation System, our Hybrid Cloud WAF takes advantage of our auto policy and behavioral security technology, dramatically reducing the amount of human intervention required to provide effective cloud security.

  • In the first quarter, we saw record booking from our cloud and product subscription offerings. We believe we are progressing well on creating a new revenue stream for Radware, complementing and expanding our existing product and maintenance revenue strengths.

  • On the ADC side, we announced our LinkProof NG, a new enterprise gateway solution that extends service level assurance for on-premise and cloud application access, over the one or Internet connectivity. The LinkProof NG builds on the success of our patent protected LinkProof family of multi-homing load balances that allow our customers to ensure 24X7 availability of the WAN connectivity with optimized performance for accessing enterprise and cloud application.

  • Our NG family of Alteon ADC switches provides full application SLA insurance, by offering dedicated virtual ADC instances per application, complete isolation between instances and innovative application services such FastView application acceleration and APM application performance monitoring. These services, which are offered as subscription services are further expanding the potential revenue stream of our offering.

  • To summarize, we continue to execute on our strategy, we continue to deliver innovative solutions for a constantly evolving cyber security landscape and evolving datacenter requirements. And we continue to steadily grow our revenues and profitability. We believe that our strong focus on cyber security and Cloud Solutions will enable us to continue this trend throughout 2015.

  • Before concluding I would like to also thank our customers and partners for their continued support and trust. I would like to thank the Radware team for all their efforts and commitment in growing our business. With that, I would like to open the discussion for Q&A.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from the line of Alex Henderson with Needham. Please go ahead.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • Hey, guys. So, I guess the first question I'd like to ask is, can you give us some commentary on what the rate of growth was within your security business?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Not -- we're not breaking it out still. But, if you assume that the ADC market is a single-digit, mid-single-digit grower and, I think -- and you see our average growth, I think you can see that we're growing quite strongly in security.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • So reasonable to think it's well over 20%?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • I would guess so given an average of 12% for the company.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • Great. And second question, I'm looking at the security, the enterprise service provider split and it seems apparent to -- you had a pretty tough comp in 1Q and service provider and have -- and even a tougher comp in 2Q. Can you talk a little bit about the relative business opportunity in the service provider space, whether that's a function of demand conditions or just the comp. I mean your enterprise business is up 19%, very good result, but service provider obviously wasn't.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We had some weakness in service provider in North America. We are obviously given the low number of customers who were dependent -- and the relative large size of orders, we can quite depend on timing of some orders. In general, we continue to believe there's a great opportunity there, both for ADC as they move their networks now to NAV concepts, LTE, the mobile traffic growth and all those are very strong drivers for ADC, as well on the security side with the -- they definitely need to protect their own network and of course their customers against the large volume attack. So, we're definitely involved in very interesting opportunities in the carrier space and in North America in particular. And in this domain, I believe this number might fluctuate in the coming quarters. I would not read too much to a single quarter figure it carriers, I would rather average days over 12 months or 6 months period.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • And then third question, can you give us some sense of what the book-to-bill was on the cloud offering, still running in the four to five range?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Yes, we are not giving the book-to-bill, but we are enjoying a very strong and we might start breaking it out in future quarters, we didn't make our mind yet on this. But we are still, our booking trends are way over 100% growth year-over-year.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • Is it reasonable to say it's consistent with prior quarters?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Yes, the growth yes.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • Okay and then one last question. The US business or North American business, I guess we hadn't taken into account South America weakness. Can you talk a little bit about how much of a drag that was and whether you -- I assume you expect that to persist, that wasn't in our thinking . Can you help us out with the scaling of that?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Yes, it's not a big portion of the overall Americas, but it was very weak in Q1, which by the way l am not -- we don't forecast it to persist, although there are currency issues and so on. it was, I think some execution pulling from our -- on our own end. So I guess it's weighed down three, four points out of the total growth maybe, if this was a normal behavior.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • I see. Okay, well, great job in Europe. Thank you.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • NA

  • Operator

  • We have a question from the line of Michael Kim, Imperial Capital.

  • Michael Kim - Analyst

  • Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Just on attack mitigation. Are you seeing a shift towards higher end and higher capacity platforms and is that primarily coming from carriers and cloud providers and how is that driving overall deal sizes?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • I think we're definitely seeing strong demand for the higher-end platforms and it's coming from two areas. First carriers definitely, they are seeing bigger attacks, they want to be in bigger scrubbing centers, so they gravitate immediately to the bigger boxes. But also enterprises, as they integrate their networks to 10 gig, as they increase the connectivity et cetera, we're seeing most of the large enterprises now looking a 10 gig and above devices, at least the large enterprises, we are focused on with our direct touch sales team. So definitely we're seeing an increase in that. If you add to that not only that the -- they're are looking for larger boxes, we are start -- we are selling them a more comprehensive Attack Mitigation solution, meaning not only the mitigation at the edge of the data center, but also a cloud service, accompanying that web application file and other security capabilities like SSL encryption and decryption with our ADCs. So we're seeing the enterprise looking not only on a product or an appliance, fix for cyber security, but for a complete architecture. And this definitely drives our deal sizes up and also over strategic position within the account is becoming very, very strong.

  • Michael Kim - Analyst

  • Great. And then also can you provide an update on how the progress of Cisco ACI is moving? Any commentary, or color you can provide on the integration of ADC and DDoS?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We've integrated both with Cisco ACI and I think, we have now press releases, both on the ADC side and on the security side. We're seeing customers, customers that are deploying the Cisco ACI, they are looking or the reason they are deploying it is that they want to enhance the application services over the network and control it in a fully integrated and single pane of glass manner. And that's what our integration provides them. So what we provide to those data center customers are excellent use cases, for the Power of the ACI architecture and bring it to a reality both on low balancing server from front ending as well as on security.

  • So we are seeing Cisco ACI customers' very interested. We are running several POCs now and the list is growing strongly and we are very excited by that. The second point is that, we're seeing more interest from -- I would say traditional Cisco customers that we did not move yet to ACI, but given the type integration and alignment, I think they are much more receptive to our solution and hearing the combined story and now our solutions are playing in a Cisco architecture. So we're definitely encouraged by that. We have very strong wins, this week we've received a large win from a very famous European airline that migrated Cisco ACE deployment to a hardware. Alteon VADC fully integrated with a new Cisco infrastructure. So we are definitely seeing good traction there.

  • Michael Kim - Analyst

  • Great. One real quick question from me here. Can you give us some color around the currency headwinds, especially as you look in second half and the mix of exposure to the euro, both on revenue and expense.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay in the revenue, this is actually its billed in our forecast and on the expense side, for this quarter that means the March quarter, we enjoyed for about $400,000 benefit of the currencies, specifically the euro went down. And the next quarter that means on the June quarter, we planned that currencies are at the same level, stays all over the quarter. So there is no further impact on that.

  • Jess Lubert - Analyst

  • okay, great. Thank you very much.

  • Operator

  • And we have a question from the line of Jess Lubert with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

  • Jess Lubert - Analyst

  • Hey, Roy and hey, Meir, thanks for taking my question. Can you talk a little bit about the pipeline of large multi-million dollar deals that the company has captured over the last several quarters. How these pipelines have been progressing and is there a reason to believe these deals may drive the business to strengthen during the second half of the year?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • So, we continued to be engaged in very large deals, not only from the carrier side but also on the enterprise side. And so far, our closure rate on those deals and our ability to progress them relatively quickly is quite satisfying on our end. I don't think we've seen in the last quarter more multi-million dollar deals than we used to, I would say in Q4 or Q3 last year. But definitely, if you look a year ago or two years ago, we definitely see a significant growth in the large deals, and not only their dollar value, but also the amount of those deals that are running in parallel. I cannot tell you now if I see this trend strengthening beyond the current level in the second half. Although we are increasing our sales force and we are increasing our footprint in the market, so OEMs and other channels, so hopefully this increased footprint will get us also more visibility. But I cannot tell you now that I see a clear trend on this.

  • Jess Lubert - Analyst

  • Okay. And then secondly, you talked about the potential of adding another OEM partner, it sounds like you're making some good progress from a technology integration standpoint with Cisco ACI. Just wondering if you could offer any additional updates with respect to the OEM.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We continued to progress on this front, and I would expect an official announcement by our partners probably around Q4 at this point of time. But, we're progressing well, we continue to invest, they continue to invest and we feel it's a great potential for Radware, if we will execute the way we think it will.

  • Operator

  • And then we have a question from the line of Ittai Kidron, Oppenheimer & Co.

  • Ittai Kidron - Analyst

  • Thank you. Roy, can you comment a little bit about Europe with the exchange rate. How did that impact deal flow pricing and things exactly, you did well, but was it your expectation to do even better over there?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • So, definitely it impacts us. I would split it to two period. When the euro went from, I don't know 135, 130 to the 120, definitely, it didn't impact us much because between end customer, the channel and distributor they were figuring it out, given a budget in euro, how to execute the deal. But as the euro fell below 110, between the end customer budget and our partners change, there's no longer the ability to overcome, which is also true by to some countries in South America. There is no way to overcome the difference anymore.

  • And then they ask us obviously to participate, but our participation is unfortunately not limited to the 120 to the 107 or 108 range. They are asking us to participate all the way from the 130, 135 to 107. So definitely obviously, we're not covering all, we are not taking the currency exchange issue enough. But we need to sometimes provide a discount, sometimes to provide more content and you know you can assume it's anywhere between 5% to 10% in the deals that the budget was pre-allocated in euros, especially that will relate to government segment to carrier, some financial market. So definitely I think we could have done even better and we had to align ourselves in some of the deals. But it is what it is.

  • Ittai Kidron - Analyst

  • Okay. Can you comment about the share count? I think Meir mentioned that you bought approximately $20 million of shares in the quarter. The share count actually went up quarter-on-quarter, is this the time of the year you had the employee awards? I'm just trying to understand why with all the buyback activity you have share count is still not coming down.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay. This is from mainly two reasons, one of them you mentioned, this is the exercise of options by employees. Number two, as the share price is going up, the share count is going up as well. So it's reflect of those factors

  • Ittai Kidron - Analyst

  • Okay and then lastly from me, can you give us an update on your, the negotiations with the OEM progress over there, your -- the level of optimism, that this is still on track to be concluded at a time frame you think it should be concluded?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • There is no negotiation anymore, we concluded the agreement, it's now the execution.

  • Ittai Kidron - Analyst

  • Yes, well, when will it go to live in the market, I mean?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • As I said, I would expect the announcement in Q4 by the partner and we -- obviously the timeline is their timeline and they go-to-market with the offering, but I would expect that to start in Q4.

  • Ittai Kidron - Analyst

  • Okay. Very good. Good luck, guys.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Thank you.

  • Operator

  • And we have a question from the line of Joseph Wolf with Barclays. Please go ahead.

  • Joseph Wolf - Analyst

  • Hey guys, this is Brian Farnon for Joe. I just wanted to actually ask about the buyback and sort of how you're prioritizing it versus M&A potential. Are you guys seeing any interesting yields of security and kind of how large of a deal would you kind of consider in the security space to boost your position and sort of focus the business on the security segment?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We're looking on M&A in general, I would not limit it to the security area specifically. And we are looking for deals that will make a business impact on the company, we rather speak in terms of business impacted in dollar value. Having said that, you can see our track record in acquisitions. We are very conservative and we're looking for very strong ROI for our shareholders and not only on a -- I would say high flying technology acquisition, but it will be questionable how can we translate that to revenue and profits. So within these high level guidance, we are obviously very active in the market, we think we have a very good platform that we can leverage, given that we find the right candidate for an acquisition and we are active in that front.

  • Joseph Wolf - Analyst

  • Okay, great. And then just on DDoS, is your strongest vertical still in financials? And if so, also where is there kind of the significant growth potential on that? Thanks.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Our largest segment is carriers for the whole company. Then you know we have financial government and online as the next segment. Across security also we are seeing those four segments as the prime segments for our business.

  • Operator

  • And we have a question from the line of with the Rohit Chopra with Buckingham Research Group. Please go ahead.

  • Rohit Chopra - Analyst

  • Thanks very much. Meir and Roy, couple of questions. One, last quarter you ramped some investments to work on that OEM, that's now a Q4 event. Has the bulk of the work been done there or is there more to do? And then the second question is, just an update on CheckPoint and whether that is meeting expectations or does that require additional work in the channel, what's actually happening with CheckPoint?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We continue to invest in the OEM activity. And also as you can see from past quarter, we constantly increased our investment back in the business as the revenues are growing, but definitely we are -- I would say weigh in our investment in the joint development. And all of that you are already seeing in the numbers. Regarding CheckPoint, we continue to be satisfied with the revenues and the opportunities in large customers that we are winning together with them. There's definitely room for improvement and we are working on that. For example, there is now a CheckPoint experience event in Europe in Amsterdam. Our team is there presenting together with CheckPoint, the joint solution. So we are constantly trying to improve the channel penetration, the customer penetration. But so far we are progressing well with this OEM partners.

  • Rohit Chopra - Analyst

  • Roy, can I ask you a quick follow-up just -- but the bulk of your comments when you speak were related to security. I know Alex asked about growth rates for the business, but is there any way to start providing some type of clearer metrics around security, perhaps deal sizes. What areas that you're growing in or even just some type of rough split on a yearly basis. Is there anything you can do going forward?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Yes. We are looking how to give more visibility around that. Just regarding Alex's question. Alex asked me on the subscription revenues, which is relating to our cloud offering or product subscriptions and those are not including all our obviously security revenues, which is -- the vast majority of it still today is comprised of our appliances business, be them physical or virtual. So I just want to make sure my answer on this point was clear to you all, but I hear you and we get this feedback and we're thinking what will be the right metrics or right metrics to show.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions) Catharine Trebnick, Dougherty & Company

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • Thank you for taking my question. Could you talk a little bit about your, how you plan to get to 15% year-over-year growth and what things it would take to get to overall 15% year-over-year growth? Thanks.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay currently -- we are guiding where we feel the business is. We finished Q1 with 12% and we've provided guidance for Q2. Obviously, we are looking all the time, both organically and inorganically to accelerate our growth rate. There are opportunities organically and I mentioned some of the channel expansion that we are working on. I mentioned some of our new solutions, so there're opportunities there, but at this point, I would like to be very specific to our guidance and the middle point of our guidance that's where we came out in Q1 and that's where I would like everyone to look at the most probable case. And going forward -- and on top of that we're obviously trying all the initiatives I've mentioned to accelerate beyond that. Given that we were in 12% in Q1 and given also our performance last year, you can see that 15 accelerating to 15% is not out of scope, but at this point I'd rather speak to the guidance we've provided.

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • Okay, that's fair. And then the other question is, when you recently announced the relationship with Cisco that it was an integrated ADC and security, were there other vendors that were in contention for this and why were you selected above anybody else?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • So in ACI specifically, it's an open architecture. So they are integrating with many vendors. We are not the only vendor in ADC, there are other vendors in ADC, but we are the only vendor in ADC in security. So we are providing a complete solution. In security specifically, I've mentioned there are other vendors they've mentioned in the press release yesterday six vendors, we are the only one in DDoS and Attack Mitigation. So I think we have uniqueness in several aspects. One is the comprehensive integration, which is very important, load balancing, acceleration and security for data centers that's one. Second, being the only one in Attack Mitigation, and third, I think we have also advantage in that way we've integrated and how deep integration goes, how a well the use cases work and so on.

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • So how meaningful do you think that the revenue from Cisco could be in the next 12 months?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay. So ACI is not revenues from Cisco.

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • Right I know it's your product. I'm just saying how meaningful of revenues can you achieve through the partnership?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay. So we think Cisco ACI pushes the major push they're doing on datacenters and assuming that's the case , we believe that we're going to see many customers immigrating the current network, the current datacenters to an ACI infrastructure. When they do that they can continue to use their current load balancing or security devices as they were, but then they don't leverage the investments that they've done in ACI.

  • The question is, how many of the Cisco customers will insist on leveraging ACI versus just run it as a regular switch. And I believe Cisco is pushing them for complete ACI leverage. In that case, I think that opens up a complete offering cycle in datacenters and for that I believe we are well positioned to grow faster than the overall market. There's a lot of -- it's still very early in the fiscal ACI life cycle. I think the last call they've mentioned 2,500 customers worldwide, some using it as a legacy switch and as a complete ACI architecture. But we are definitely already involved in I think over 20 proof of concept and engagements around ACI. So we're definitely seeing that as a driver at least of interest and PLC activity with large customers.

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • Okay one final question. Are you working with VMware on the same thing, the NFX?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We announced already full integrations in it, we're already GI with that.

  • Catharine Trebnick - Analyst

  • All right any opportunities there and I'll (inaudible) the floor?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Same. It's still you know alliance. We are seeing less customers in NFX, then we're seeing currently at Cisco ACI but that might change also.

  • Operator

  • We have a question from the line of Alex Henderson Needham & Company. Please go ahead.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • Yeah. Actually two questions, both on pretty much the same subject, which is the geographics play. Can you just talk about the APAC business, is kind of continuing softness there, still a function of the weakness in China with better results in Japan and other geographies offsetting the declines or weakness in China. And then you made a comment earlier about you expected the South American business weakness. You don't expect that to persist. I was wondering what makes you think that?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Regarding Asia Pacific, it was -- we're still not growing at the rate that we expected to grow. It's the combination of China weakness and not enough strength off setting it from the other markets. Regarding South America, I think our performance was very bad this quarter. I cannot see it going dramatically lower than where it was and even coming back to what we normally were booking, even without a lot of growth will obviously contribute some to the Americas.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • I guess, I don't understand is, do you mean sequentially or you are talking about year-over-year. I would think the year-over-year, South America would still persist as a headwind even if it comes back a little bit from the depressed levels of 1Q. Is that -- I'm just trying to get some clarity what you mean.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • I think in Q1, it took us back the growth rates, because of the lack of performance both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. If it comes back to normal, even not a fast-growing 30%, 40%. Like with our average of 20 to 25, like with our average on the complete Americas, if it just come to a flat performance, it already will expose more growth in the US and in Canada market.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • I see, I got it. And then the China stuff is that starting to diminish? I mean, it's been going on for a long time, has it started to diminish to a size where it's becoming a less and less, and small enough drag that ceases to be an offset to improvements in these other geographies or are we going to be looking at that persistent all year along at similar kind of mid-single-digit rates because of that pressure?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Yes. I don't know if it will -- if it will clear itself this year. At this point I think that's the most probable, we are not satisfied with it. But in terms of guidance, that I would say is the most probable assumption.

  • Alex Henderson - Analyst

  • And one last question on the geographies. Could you just remind me what you said about what you expect in Europe, do you expect a continuation of the strong results or the results to moderate?

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • We believe, we can continue to grow nicely. We are not -- I'm not taking the current growth rate in guiding for that, but we're definitely seeing continued improvement there. So we definitely see, just two years ago, it was a drag last year we didn't know, it was not double-digit. This year we feel confident that we can do double-digit. I am not sure that we can repeat Q1 performance although we have very strong momentum there.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions). I don't see any other participants who have a question at this point. Please continue.

  • Roy Zisapel - President and CEO

  • Okay. Thank you very much everyone for attending the call and have a great day.

  • Operator

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