Ciena Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
June 4, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Ciena posted a record Q2 with revenue of $1.57 billion, up 40% year over year, adjusted gross margin of 44.9%, and adjusted EPS of $1.64, nearly quadrupling from last year.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company raised its full-year FY2026 outlook, now expecting $6.3 billion in revenue at the midpoint and 19% adjusted operating margin, citing strong demand and confidence in continued execution despite supply constraints.
  • Positive Sentiment: Backlog increased by more than $600 million sequentially to $7.7 billion, giving management strong visibility into the rest of 2026 and into 2027.
  • Positive Sentiment: Ciena announced its first multi-rail Hyper-Rail order from a leading hyperscaler, with management saying the platform could begin ramping in 2027 and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars over multiple years.
  • Positive Sentiment: Demand remained robust across key growth areas, including Routing and Switching revenue up 88% on DCOM, strong 400G/800G pluggables, and service provider revenue up 28%, driven by MOFN and broader network reinvestment.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Ciena Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

I will now hand the conference over to Gregg Lampf, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
VP of Investor Relations at Ciena

Thank you, Tracy. Good morning, and welcome to Ciena's 2026 fiscal second quarter conference call. On the call today is Gary Smith, President and CEO, and Marc Graff, CFO. Scott McFeely, Executive Advisor, is also with us for Q&A. In addition to this call and the press release, we've posted to the Investors section of our website an accompanying investor presentation that reflects this discussion, as well as certain highlighted items from the quarter. Our comments today speak to our recent performance, our view on current market dynamics and drivers of our business, as well as discussions of our financial outlook. Today's discussion includes certain adjusted or non-GAAP measures of Ciena's results of operations. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP results is included in today's press release. Before turning the call over to Gary, I'll remind you that during this call, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
VP of Investor Relations at Ciena

Such statements, including our quarterly and annual guidance, commentary on market dynamics, and the discussion of our opportunities and strategy are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions regarding the company and its markets. Which include risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements discussed today. Assumptions relating to our outlook, whether mentioned on this call or included in the investor presentation that we posted earlier, are an important part of such forward-looking statements, and we encourage you to consider them. Our forward-looking statements should also be viewed in the context of risk factors detailed in our most recent 10-K and our forthcoming 10-Q. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information discussed in this conference call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
VP of Investor Relations at Ciena

As always, we'll allow for as much Q&A as possible today, though we do ask that you limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up. With that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thanks, Gregg, good morning, everyone. Our Q2 performance was, once again, very strong, reflecting our continued technology leadership, our deep customer relationships, and the strength of our business model. In the quarter, we grew the business 40% year-on-year with revenues of $1.57 billion. We expanded adjusted gross margin to 44.9%, we nearly quadrupled the year-ago adjusted earnings per share to $1.64. I'd remind everybody that we delivered these results while navigating unprecedented demand and a constrained supply environment. With the combination of a strong and growing backlog driving strong visibility, fueled by AI-led demand from both cloud and service providers, coupled with our leading technology portfolio, we are well-positioned to gain share and deliver long-term value to our customers and our owners.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

The breadth and depth of our portfolio positions us to intersect this market growth as AI drives new opportunities across the WAN and in and around the data center. Our portfolio spans systems, interconnects, software, and of course, services. Specifically, systems includes our optical systems as well as our Routing and Switching platforms. Interconnects is comprised of modules for inter and intra data center connectivity, inclusive of our WaveLogic modems and pluggables, as well as co-packaged optics and critical technology components that serve as foundational network building blocks. Of course, our software and services which help customers install, automate, operate, and optimize their networks at scale. Taken together, Ciena's portfolio delivers our customers innovative products to meet a wide variety of high-speed connectivity solutions in the WAN and in and around the data center with an unmatched competitive offering.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Since we spoke to you last in March, the largest hyperscalers have increased their 2026 capital expenditures, with indications of continued expansion into 2027 and beyond. Given the priority to monetize somewhat constrained compute investments, we expect an increasingly larger proportion of that spend will be directed towards network infrastructure. Importantly, service providers are also reinvesting in network infrastructure after several years. This is creating net new opportunities with service providers across long-haul metro and managed optical fiber networks or MOFN. In fact, they were up 28% for us year-on-year. Simply put, all customers are prioritizing high capacity, low latency, and high-speed connectivity, underpinned by the need to transport data for AI, including model training, data ingestion, and inference. To that end, our latest view is that the addressable market will approximately double over the next several years to roughly $50 billion by 2029.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

To be clear, this significant market growth includes our traditional WAN markets and the high growth markets in and around the data center, both of which we've been strategically investing into in recent years. With that, let me add some color on how these dynamics are driving the demand for our line systems specifically. The first generation of our intelligent line system, our RLS platform, set the standard for high speed, low latency, and power-efficient connectivity. The large global installed base of RLS have given us years of deep insights into technology requirements, as well as significant operational expertise and integration experience across both cloud and service provider environments. The resulting collaboration from these experiences has directly informed the development of our next generation intelligent line system, the RLS Hyper-Rail

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

This is a multi-rail solution developed for both the leading hyperscalers and service providers to specifically address the growing capacity and efficiency demands for data center interconnect, scale across architectures, and inferencing. Co-created with multiple hyperscalers and built on an innovative photonic design, RLS Hyper-Rail supports multiple fiber pairs in parallel over hundreds of kilometers using advanced amplification. The result is significantly higher density with materially improved space and power efficiency, which is particularly important at intermediary amplifier sites where space and power is limited. Notably, this morning, I am pleased to announce that we've been awarded the industry's first multi-rail order from a leading hyperscaler, validating early market demand for our RLS Hyper-Rail platform and cementing Ciena's position as the industry standard.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

We are also engaged in discussions with multiple additional hyperscalers, neoscalers, and service providers, both domestically and internationally, who continue to lean in and show a level of interest which is exceeding our expectations. I also want to touch on our Data Center Out-of-Band Management solution or DCOM, which combines products from our Routing and Switching portfolio with our industry-leading PON technology. DCOM, as you can see, is ramping extremely well, which contributed to the 88% year-over-year revenue growth in our Routing and Switching segment. We are also expanding the customer base. In addition to Meta, we've received initial orders from a second hyperscaler customer, and lab qualifications are progressing well with a third hyperscaler customer. As AI is driving demand for our systems, it is also creating momentum across our interconnects portfolio.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

We are pleased to share with you that we recently secured a new win with a major hyperscaler for our high-performance coherent modules. These will be deployed in scale across in both metro and long-haul DCI networks, supporting both WAN and in and around the data center applications. This technology solution was developed in close collaboration with the customer and marks a competitive takeaway win. I also believe it is evidence of our strategy to leverage our systems capability into modules and component forms and addresses the broad range of consumption models that our technology can address. We also continue to see strong demand from hyperscalers for our 400G and 800G pluggables, and we remain on track to more than double our pluggable revenue from 2025. Additionally, we have another first win with a major switch OEM to use our market-leading WaveLogic 5 and 6 Nano plugs.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

This, again, is a demonstrable further proof point of extending go-to-market and consumption models for our technology. We will continue expanding our interconnects portfolio with strong momentum behind our Nubis assets across both scale-up and scale-out use cases. First Nitro, our linear redriver. We received the final chip back, and it is performing extremely well, and therefore, we are on track for general availability this summer. Turning to Vesta 200 6.4T, the optical engine for CPO use cases. Over the past 90 days, we've seen increased industry momentum and demand for open ecosystems, reinforcing our hypothesis and the strategic value of the Nubis acquisition. Given the breadth and depth of our portfolio, Ciena is uniquely positioned as the only focused supplier of high-speed connectivity solutions, enabling our customers to deploy across multiple use cases with best-in-class technology, software, and services, from complete systems to modules to components.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Before I close, I want to touch briefly on customer co-creation, which we've talked about in the last few quarters and referenced several times today. It is a meaningful differentiator for Ciena, exemplifying the trust that customers place in both our innovation leadership and our ability to execute complex programs across multiple technology generations. Customers bring us in early on new requirements and architectures. They trust us for engineering systems insights and to innovate new approaches that help evolve their networks. The resulting solutions are fit for purpose and deployable both at scale and upon pace on launch. For Ciena, it sharpens our roadmap decisions, increases win rates, gives us visibility into demand, and builds highly differentiated expertise, people, processes, and capabilities. That's reflected in our growing market momentum.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

The bottom line is our deep customer relationships and our sustainable technology leadership support our confidence in continued share gains, durable growth, and increasing profitability over the next several years. With that, I'll turn it over to Marc to walk through the quarter's financial results and our outlook. Marc?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Thank you, Gary, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us this morning. As Gary noted, Q2 was another testament to strong execution meeting robust demand. Consistent with industry views that demand will remain strong for at least the next few years, we are focusing our resources to secure supply and manufacturing capacity to deliver for both our customers and our owners. Our Q2 results demonstrate the progress made against our financial priorities while simultaneously growing the business. First, to gross margin. We achieved an adjusted gross margin of 44.9% in Q2 due to focused efforts on engineering cost reductions, mix, and price optimizations. We continue to see a path towards margin expansion based in part on our technology leadership in Hyper-Rail and DCOM, the ramp of our interconnects and components business, and value exchange opportunities. Our discipline in managing working capital has also borne fruit.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Most notably, our cash conversion cycle has improved by 20 days since Q1 on faster inventory turns and better payables execution. This helped contribute to free cash flow of $219 million, or 13.9% of revenue, and a cash balance of $1.4 billion. Finally, we are deliberately and responsibly allocating our owners' capital. We continue to invest in the business organically to capture new opportunities, such as developing RLS Hyper-Rail We're also extending our product line to different customer use cases, such as Data Center Out-of-Band Management with our PON technology. Lastly, we are making key investments, both with capital and operating expenses, to secure supply for the future demand. We remain on track to spend $250 million-$275 million with CapEx. All this while we continue to return capital to our shareholders through our stock buyback, returning $83 million in Q2 at an average price of $371 per share.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Going into more details on our Q2 results, as Gary noted at the top of the call, revenue reached $1.57 billion, up 40% year-on-year and $71 million over our guidance, setting another quarterly record. Our optical networking business grew 42% over Q2 2025, driven by strong demand for our RLS and Waveserver product lines, both up over 55% year-on-year. Our Routing and Switching business grew 88%, primarily due to the ramp of DCOM, as Gary mentioned earlier, and deployment continues at pace. Our direct cloud customer revenue grew 70% over the year-ago period, with service providers growing 28%. Of particular note, our India service provider revenue more than doubled year-on-year, reflecting strong demand for MOFN deployments. We had two customers, both cloud providers, contribute more than 10% of our revenue.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

As I noted earlier, Q2 adjusted gross margin was 44.9%, exceeding our guidance by 90 basis points and up four full percentage points from a year-ago period. Q2 adjusted operating expense was $398 million, driving an adjusted operating margin of 19.5%, exceeding the midpoint of our guide by over 100 basis points. OpEx was elevated in Q2 on higher variable compensation due to strong year-to-date performance on revenues and orders. Otherwise, OpEx is meeting our expectations. Adjusted EPS was $1.64, nearly 4x the year-ago figure, demonstrating the strong profit-generating capability of our business model. Before I provide our updated full year and Q3 2026 guidance, I'd like to take a moment to comment on the demand and supply environment. In Q2, our backlog increased more than $600 million sequentially to $7.7 billion, reflecting strong demand for our products and our leadership in the market.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We expect to exit the year with even higher backlog. The combination of customer collaboration, a growing services business, robust order flows, and high-quality backlog provides us with excellent visibility into 2027. Against this demand backdrop, which has been noted across the industry, we continue to see an imbalance of supply not keeping pace with demand. We are navigating these challenges well, as evidenced by our strong performance and ability to increase our outlook over the past couple of quarters. We are working with both our supply partners and customers to ensure we can serve our large and growing backlog. Specifically, we are driving to achieve a greater balance as we make the investments with our suppliers needed to ensure supply security while focusing on economic optimization opportunities with our customers. On to guidance.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

In Q3 2026, we expect to deliver revenue of approximately $1.625 billion, ±$50 million, and an adjusted gross margin of 45%, ±50 basis points, and adjusted operating expenses of approximately $410 million, ±$10 million, resulting in an operating margin of 19%-20%. Based on our first half performance and continued ability to manage through a supply-constrained environment, we are once again in a position to raise our guidance for fiscal 2026. We now expect to deliver revenue for the fiscal year of $6.3 billion, ±$100 million, raising our midpoint growth to 32% year-on-year. We expect our fiscal 2026 gross margin to be between 44.5% and 45%. We expect fiscal 2026 operating expenses of approximately $1.61 billion, ±$20 million, due to higher variable compensation and additional investments in supply security.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We now expect 2026 operating margin of 19%, ±50 basis points. In conclusion, we had another record quarter as market dynamics continue in Ciena's favor. Visibility remains strong, well beyond our historical norms, supported by significant backlog, multi-phase customer programs, and our co-creation activities, and we are confident that strength will continue into 2027. We see durable and robust demand underscored by the network's critical role in enabling AI and supported by the doubling of our TAM by 2029. We have proven success translating increased demand into higher earnings per share on the back of a strong business model and operational execution. We are confident in our ability to bring value to our customers and drive EPS growth for our owners over the next several quarters. Before I turn it over to questions, I'd like to take a moment to recognize a meaningful milestone.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

This call marks Gary's 100th earnings call and 25th year as CEO. With passion, a relentless customer focus, and a deep belief in Ciena's team members, he's guided Ciena through significant industry transformations. As a result, today we find ourselves in the enviable position of leading the industry in high-speed connectivity at exactly the moment the world needs it most. On behalf of Ciena's employees around the globe, congratulations, Gary, and thank you for your continued leadership. With that, we'll take questions from our sell-side analysts.

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We do ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you're muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

On 25 years. Maybe just for the first one, can you talk about the multi-rail win that you are announcing with the first hyperscaler customer? What are you seeing in terms of deal size or deployment intent from them? How is that tracking relative to expectations, and are there other discussions or engagements you have of a similar nature relative to the first hyperscaler? Maybe anything you can share in terms of how should we think about materiality of revenue in the near term as well on that front? I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thank you, Samik. Appreciate that. Let me take the first part of that. I think getting an early win on this, which with the co-collaboration that we had with these hyperscalers, it's a strategic decision for them given the nature of the deployment. It really enables specifically very high-intensity training across much greater distances with greater amplification and density. Therefore, it is a very strategic decision on their part to standardize on Hyper-Rail, and that will begin to be rolled out as we go through 2027. Obviously, in terms of sizings, they vary, but given the nature of them, they are all hundreds of millions over multiple years. We are engaged with most of the major players and hyperscalers on discussions for this. Progressing extremely well, and we're a little ahead of where we thought we'd be from an adoption point of view.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Got it. A quick one for Marc. Marc, maybe from an OpEx perspective, operating expense perspective, you did start the year thinking it's more flat with some of the actions that you had taken last year. The increase in the operating expense outlook for the year, which is going hand in hand with the increase with your revenue outlooks as well. Can you just parse through that? How much of that is variable compensation versus maybe investments of some sort, and how does that change how you're thinking about a long-term OpEx trajectory for the company as well?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Thanks, Samik. I would say 90% of that increase is really driven by the higher performance than we were expecting at the beginning of the year of both orders and revenue. If that scales, then I would expect variable compensation to scale as well. All that said, the strength of our model continues to deliver that operating leverage. If you compare where we were at the beginning of the year to where we are now, we're increasing that operating leverage even with the increase in variable comp. The rest of that delta is really around making sure that we're increasing the supply security for the demand that we're seeing. I would say that's 10%-ish of that spend. Moving forward, I would expect us to continue to generate operating leverage and grow revenue significantly faster than OpEx, and you'll see that in further strengthening of EPS over time.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Okay. Great. Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yep. Thanks, Samik.

Operator

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

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Simon, you may be on mute.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Analyst at Raymond James

You hear me?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We can hear you now.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Analyst at Raymond James

Can you hear me? Okay.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yes, we do.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Analyst at Raymond James

Sorry. I wasn't on mute. I swear. Just a quick one. If you could just give us the double-click on the 10% customers, the question I wanted to ask is a little bit of elaboration on your pricing strategy in that you've got substantial backlog. I'm wondering, one, are you able to raise price in the backlog, how are you juggling your rising input costs versus your ability to raise product price, how does your price hike factor into your growth? Anything, any insight we could get there in this kind of inflationary environment, I'd appreciate that. Thank you.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. No, I appreciate it, Simon. Firstly, on your question around the 2% or the two 10% customers. As I said in the remarks, both cloud providers, together, they're about a third of the revenue for Q2. We can't get into the names, but I'll leave you guys to hypothesize on who those are. On the gross margin and the pricing piece, we purposely are using this term value exchange, because as we think through the supply-demand dynamics, we're trying to balance a couple of things. One is obviously how do we continue to expand our margin? How do we make sure we're driving the right investment into securing that supply? I also want to make sure that the other working capital activities are being taken care of, and you saw the improvement in cash conversion. As we think about that, nothing is off the table.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We are having conversations with all of our customers around how do we balance this supply chain risk, because we are making additional commitments with our suppliers to ensure that's a secure supply. We're working with them to optimize which products they take out of our portfolio, and making sure we've got good fill rates, and we're driving what they require. Yeah, we're looking at pricing opportunities across all of our products. I think the team has done a phenomenal job of taking what we see as some inflationary inputs and being able to, through really good engineering work, cost reduce those to mitigate the impacts. You're seeing that in, I think this is our third guide for the year. We've raised gross margin each of the three quarters, I think you're seeing the fruits of that.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

I expect as we continue to go through time, we have increasing confidence in being able to expand our margin, both at the gross level and at the operating level for the reasons I talked about in the script.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Analyst at Raymond James

Thank you.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Amit Daryanani with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Amit Daryanani
Amit Daryanani
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Perfect. Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. I guess first one, Gary, I think you spoke about in the opening comments about how the TAM could double essentially by fiscal 2029, or get to at least $50 billion, I think. I think that would imply a 25%-26% CAGR from where we are right now, roughly. Could you just maybe break out and talk about how much of that TAM expansion is in and around the data center versus traditional WAN, and then how do we think about Ciena's ability to pick up share in that scenario?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Thank you, Amit. If you look at the sort of doubling of it, you're right about the overall growth rate, and you think about that as being scale across is driving a lot of that. Probably by the time we get to 2029, we expect that to be about an $8 billion-$10 billion market. That would be part of an overall long-haul metro, optical transport, WAN type market of probably in excess of about $20 billion. You can see that is a large part of it. You've got things like the interconnects market, which obviously is opening up and our various offerings into there. It's obviously a confluence of those, and again, I would stress that's TAM.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

That's evolving very quickly, as we're all seeing. We obviously think in our areas, particularly like across, we can continue to take share with things like Hyper-Rail and the technologies we have from a modem point of view, and then deploying them inside and around the data center. As we go into inside the data center, you've got some large markets there where we are the new entrants. We believe that we can take share with our technology, and we're seeing evidence of that.

Amit Daryanani
Amit Daryanani
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Got it. Perfect. Maybe we just follow up on the DCOM side. If I think about this 88% growth you folks had in Routing Switching, is that really all DCOM driven, or maybe there's a way to think about DCOM versus what the baseline Routing Switching business did? Really, when you think of the DCOM opportunity, do you think it's a durable multi-year attached business or it's more of a one-time out-of-band refresh that you're benefiting from? Just kind of maybe frame up how big it is and how durable this could be. Thank you very much.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Again, I would say that DCOM is a large part of the growth in Routing and Switching, but even if you took that out, Routing and Switching had pretty good growth as well outside of the DCOM piece. We think that DCOM is a multi-year, multifaceted application within the hyperscalers and potentially outside of the hyperscalers as well. We're obviously seeing that with our anchor customer in Meta. It's proving to be much larger and much wider, broader expansion than we'd anticipated. We're actually engaged with a couple of other hyperscalers. We got orders from another hyperscaler. They all have slightly different applications for it, but it's certainly not one and done. It's going to be an evolving application that we see growing.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

We think, again, it's very early days, but maybe $1 billion-$3 billion by the time we get to 2029 is the total TAM. This is a very important part of the inside the data center strategy for Ciena.

Amit Daryanani
Amit Daryanani
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Perfect. Thank you, and congrats on some nice numbers here.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thank you, Amit.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sean O'Loughlin with TD Cowen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Sean O'Loughlin
Sean O'Loughlin
Analyst at TD Cowen

Hey, guys. First time, long time. Thanks for letting me jump in here. Wanted to ask one on the competitive environment for both scale across and maybe the more traditional WAN. I think your share position's well established, do you see any of these tech transitions coming up, whether it's the more true GPU to GPU connections on the scale across or whether it's Hyper-Rail? Does any of that change the competitive landscape with either the traditional competitors in that market or from the sort of bottoms-up side where component vendors are potentially moving up into systems?

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

First of all, Sean, welcome to the party. Nice to hear your voice. It's Scott here. In the short term, looking back in the rearview mirror, we've certainly seen consolidation on the system competitor landscape. That's been successfully happening at a pace slower than we would've liked, but certainly has been happening consistently over the last decade. It's really gotten down to a few folks that have the capability and scale to address the needs of these large customers. In terms of the other side of the coin, which is sort of folks coming into or trying to come into the system space from the component vendor, there are certain folks that have done that and tried to do that in the past. It's a very difficult journey, in our opinion.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

I mean, the moat that's there from a system vendor perspective, people think of technology components, but it's a lot deeper than that. It's how do you put those individual components together into an end-to-end system that spans thousands of kilometers and make it sing in an economic way for our customers. It's the software that goes around the control of that. It's the integration in the back office systems. It's the services to be able to service these networks 24/7, 365 days a year around the world. It's a big step function, and we've been doing that for decades, and we think it's a significant competitive advantage against that segment.

Sean O'Loughlin
Sean O'Loughlin
Analyst at TD Cowen

Great. Thanks for that. Then just a quick follow-up on the gross margin side. The full year guide, 44.5-45. To get to that, in my model at least, I have to downtick a little bit in the fourth quarter. Is there a message there, or am I reading a tea leaves too closely there?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Hey, Sean, it's Marc. Yeah, I think you might be reading a little too much into that. As we think through Q4, there's still 90 days to go before we get there, and we're really paying attention to a couple of things in the supply chain, right? Obviously, one is mix. The other is as the industry continues to be constrained, we're trying to be prudent about some inflationary pressures. I wouldn't read too much into the implied Q4 yet. Let's get through Q3, and then we can talk more specifically about that here in 90 days.

Sean O'Loughlin
Sean O'Loughlin
Analyst at TD Cowen

Yep. Loud and clear. Thanks a lot, guys, and congrats, Gary.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Thank you, Sean.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of George Notter with Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Analyst at Wolfe Research

Hey, guys. It's [Chirankat] on for George. I was just curious about any traction you're seeing on the coherent lite side, maybe any incremental use cases. Would love to hear anything there.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

First of all, coherent lite is an opportunity we still see in the future as the need for high bandwidth communications increases, the distances of the current technology shrink and shrink and shrink. Coherent is going to find its way closer to the four walls of the data center, and in our belief system, actually, is ultimately inside the data center. The vehicle for doing that would be a lighter version of coherent. The industry has called it, as you said, coherent lite. We still see that as an opportunity that's going to intersect the marketplace, we believe late 2027 into 2028 at data rates of 1.6 Tb-3.2 Tb. Our portfolio roadmap reflects that as shaped by our conversations with the lead cloud providers. We can talk more about the technology in future.

Analyst at Wolfe Research

Great. What are you seeing on the neo cloud side in terms of demand? How should we think about sizing that opportunity? It sounds like you guys are starting to see more traction there as well.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yeah. Let me take that. I mean, the neoscaler piece covers a very wide range of different kinds of organizations and customers. We are leaning into that. We're seeing great opportunities around them leaning into the network piece. Clearly, the neoscalers are looking to invest in the network piece, and they're doing that through either shared networks, MOFN, some of them, they're driving themselves. We have significant wins in most of the major neoscalers, so we are rolling out networks for them. Difficult to size that right now, but we think that's a particularly good growth for us over the next two to three years, for sure.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

One of the interesting dynamics and engagements that we've had with them also is that they're trying to go fast, and they're trying to go fast, not necessarily staffed up to some of their larger folks that have gone before them. We're seeing great services opportunities there as well, which is nice business for us.

Analyst at Wolfe Research

Great. Thank you guys so much.

Operator

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

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Ruben? Ruben? Tracy, we may want to move on and come back to Ruben.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Analyst at Stifel

Hi. Sorry. Can you hear me?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Oh, there we go.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Now we can. Yep.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Analyst at Stifel

Okay. Yeah. Hi, thanks, Gary. I've got a bunch of questions on Hyper-Rail. I wanted to come back to something you said about hundreds of millions of dollars over multiple years. I think you're saying that you're a bit ahead of adoption expectations, but can you help us understand the deployment pace, especially, sort of how I think about sort of co-development with some of the hyperscalers, et cetera? Is this sort of lumpy project-based type of revenue track, or do you think it'll be sort of more linear as you think about the next couple of years on multi-rail or Hyper-Rail specifically?

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

On multi-rail specifically, yeah. We think it starts in 2027. We think it'll be linear. We think by that point, we'll be doing it with multiple Hyper-Railers and also service providers, too. There's some very large service providers, particularly those that are exposed to the wholesale MOFN type market, where this kind of technology is absolutely transformative for them. We think starting in 2027, that will provide nice linear growth for us for the next few years, frankly. Given the scale that you're talking about. This is not just training. That is obviously the sort of killer app for this. What it enables is greater density over greater distances. It enables different training models. When you think about the constraint that is on compute right now, generally speaking, the networks have to go to the compute.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

You're seeing, in addition to the demand that we've seen so far, I think we're beginning to see even an increased demand because the network's got to go to compute. When you think about that in the training context, the timing of us coming out with this Hyper-Rail co-created with the hyperscalers, it could not be better. In addition to the training, you're just talking about very long distance, high density, low latency, super intelligent line systems for cloud, for connecting data centers. We've obviously talked about the training piece. You're seeing the beginning of all the inference and agentic AI, which will drive essentially cloud growth as well. That infrastructure right now is based on RLS. That is the industry standard. We're leveraging our expertise and technology there into Hyper-Rail.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Maybe just to add on, Ruben, this is Marc. Obviously, we're at $0 of revenue for Hyper-Rail until we introduce that later this year. You'll see a meaningful uptick in revenue in 2027 as a result of Hyper-Rail.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Analyst at Stifel

Great. Thanks for all that detail. Maybe as a quick follow-up, Marc, on the commentary on OpEx growth, you're already at 19.5% adjusted operating margin. On the revenue guide, can you maybe talk about longer-term signposts, maybe how you're thinking about potential upside from there on operating margins as you continue to see some of this new revenue coming to the model starting next year?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. I'm not going to really get into 2027, or maybe beyond that at this point, Ruben. How I dimension this is, we've got pretty strong backlog. We're leaving Q2 at 7.7. I said we're going to increase that throughout the rest of this year going into 2027. We've got a pretty good map in terms of how we're going to expand gross margins in front of us. I think what you'll see is continued operating leverage as we go into 2027 and beyond. I think when you put all that together, the power of our business model, you're going to see a pretty meaningful EPS acceleration as we go through the next several years. As we get closer to the end of the year, we'll give you a little more dimensioning on what we think that OpEx is going to be.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Again, I would count on more operating leverage.

Ruben Roy
Ruben Roy
Analyst at Stifel

Got it. Thank you.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Thank you.

Operator

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

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great, congratulations. Just in terms of a couple of questions for me. First is just on supply chain. I think in the past you've had more availability on the pluggable side versus the system side, but if you could just give any update into where you're seeing the greatest tightness. Then just on the gross margin leverage, you obviously spoke to the steps that are being taken to work around designs, but just in terms of the ramp of the pluggables business, just how much of that is contributing to the gross margin pickup we saw? Thanks.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Hey, Meta, it's Marc. On the supply chain piece, again, the team's doing a wonderful job, I think, of using our engineering prowess to cost reduce some of that. As we think about those things that are probably most constrained, we do have some constraints on modems, so typically like CDMs. What's really helping us on the modem side of the business is we're the most vertically integrated supplier in the industry, and so we're able to buffer some of those supply chain challenges on the modem side. On the system side, you've heard a lot of people talk about the pump lasers that go into our amplifiers and into the line systems. That's something that we continue to work on a daily basis across our supply chain.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Those are things as we make those investments and we put capacity in place and we're thinking about the longer term discussions we're having with those suppliers, that's a lot of where we're spending our time. Again, I would say the team's doing a wonderful job even on just getting more units into the door so that we can sell them. As soon as we get them, they're going out the door, which has allowed us to meet and beat the revenue expectations for the year. On the gross margin leverage, I think there's a couple of things that are going on here. One is you've heard me talk a lot about the engineering cost reductions, which I think, again, the team's doing a great job on.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We are having conversations, both with the supply chain on how we optimize those costs, as well as with our customers on how we do that value exchange that I talked about earlier. It's beyond just price, although obviously that's on the table. We're also looking at how do we balance the supply risk with our customers and our suppliers. How do we make sure we get terms so that we can manage our working capital a little more tightly? I think we're looking across the entire scope of not just price in terms of gross margin, but how do we improve the foundation of the entirety of the business.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Got it. Thanks.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Sorry. I totally skipped your plug question. Sorry about that.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Yes.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Sorry. I got so excited about gross margin. On the plug piece, as we said, we expect to double our total plug revenue. At this point in time, I don't think we're seeing plugs have either a hugely negative or a hugely positive impact on our gross margin. It's obviously a component as we think about mix, but I'm not too hung up right now on the impacts of our plugs. Although I am pretty pleased with the trajectory of the business.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you so much.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Sorry about that.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Adrienne Colby with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Analyst at Citi

Thank you for the question. I was hoping you could provide some more color on the service provider side. You're clearly seeing some strength in the MOFN business. I'm interested what you're seeing outside of India. In the past, you've had a greater than 10% customer that was a service provider. I'm interested if that's just dropped off because of the strength in hyperscalers or if there's some other dynamics you'd call out with service provider.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Yes. Thank you, Adrienne. As we talked about, service providers overall were about 28% up year-on-year. I think what you're seeing there is two dynamics. One is they basically have underinvested in their optical infrastructure for, frankly, the last five years. They've been very preoccupied with 5G investments. That's obviously now tailing off. They are looking at putting their optical infrastructure up to date. That's a development that we're seeing across the service provider landscape across the globe. The second dynamic we're seeing is really the sort of MOFN piece, which is managed optical fiber networks built explicitly for hyperscalers and for cloud players in various countries. We're seeing both of those dynamics come into play. We think it's multi-year and very durable.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

As omnipotent as some of the hyperscalers are, it's tough for them to be everywhere across the globe and also the last mile in various countries, and there's regulatory issues around that as well. That ecosystem of partnership and opportunity for service providers, I think they are leaning into, and we are the beneficiary of that. When you step back from all of this, it's really about the network. Generally speaking, in the context of AI and what needs to happen, it's actually under-invested in for the last few years. Across the service provider landscape, you're seeing that cascade through as well.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Maybe just to add on to that, Adrienne. You mentioned the MOFN piece. I would say across all of our service providers, that 28% growth is a pretty fair representation on average of what that group is doing, both the wholesale guys who are very exposed to MOFN and those that aren't necessarily exposed to MOFN. On your question about the 10% customer, it's just math, right? Those hyperscalers are just growing at such a huge rate that it kind of crowds out the others that aren't growing at that pace.

Adrienne Colby
Adrienne Colby
Analyst at Citi

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Tim Long with Barclays. Your line is open.

Tim Long
Tim Long
Analyst at Barclays

Thank you.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Tim Long
Tim Long
Analyst at Barclays

Thank you. Yeah. One question and a follow-up. Maybe on the question, I don't know, Marc, you want to handle this one. Backlog orders continue to be really strong. It sounds like they're going to be strong through the rest of the year. Maybe just talk a little bit about how you see that backlog playing out over the next few years in the context of, we saw this post-COVID, and it wasn't necessarily the most smooth downtick in backlog and recognition of revenues for a lot of the companies in the industry. Maybe if you can just touch on that. Second, this is definitely to Marc, if you could touch on multi-rail. Thanks for all the commentary there. I think this is something in the past you've talked about being one of the really key areas for value exchange.

Tim Long
Tim Long
Analyst at Barclays

Now that you're getting this to the contract level, can you talk a little bit about the profitability gross margin profile? It sounds like this is adding a lot of value for the customers, so it might be one of the products that could have a bigger step function up in profitability for Ciena. Thank you.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah. Hey, Tim. Thanks for the questions. First on backlog. I think I would first say it's a pretty different dynamic than we've seen after the COVID hangover. What we're seeing right now is a couple of things. One is because of the service engagements that we have and the co-collaboration that we have with each of these hyperscalers, we've got really good insight into what's going in the ground. These things are going into the ground. They're not going into warehouses, which I think was part of the issue that we saw during the COVID era. First and foremost, we know it's being deployed. I think the second thing I would tell you is if we could deliver that backlog in 2026, they would take it. Right?

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We sometimes get questions of, "Oh, hey, is this forward ordering?" I actually think it's the exact opposite, right? It's actually pushing out, and if they could get that product in 2026, this year, they would, and they'd turn that into revenue. In fact, we get quite a bit of feedback from our customers, as you can imagine, that if we could deliver more networking capability, they'd be able to increase their revenue. I think the dynamic is very different. Just to kind of dimension that $7.7, about $6.4 of that is hardware, roughly. We would expect about 80% of that to be delivered in the next 12 months. Right? Just to kind of thinking through our confidence in the delivery and how that turns into bookable revenue.

Gary Smith
Gary Smith
President and CEO at Ciena

Tim, just looking in the rear-view mirror and the lessons from the COVID experience, signs that we were seeing during COVID of inventory buildup in our customers' warehouses, requests for pushing out their desired delivery dates or order cancellations, we are seeing absolutely none of that right now. In fact, quite the opposite.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

On your second question, Tim, around multi-rail. A couple of things. If you start with RLS, the single rail product, over the last couple of years, we've made amazing strides in improving the margin accretion of RLS, the single rail. As we go into Hyper-Rail, it is a step function elevation in what we think the accretion's going to be from Hyper-Rail. You've got two things that are happening. We think Hyper-Rail is going to be a bigger component of our revenue, and we think that component of revenue is going to be a much better margin for us. I would expect as this thing ramps in 2027 and beyond, that it's going to provide good margin expansion at the company level.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Which is why we keep talking about that as part of our roadmap to get past that waypoint we've been talking about in terms of gross margin.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

I'd say the early commercial conversations, including the orders that we've taken, have proven to be consistent with our expectations about that value exchange.

Tim Long
Tim Long
Analyst at Barclays

Right.

Tim Long
Tim Long
Analyst at Barclays

Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Karl Ackerman
Karl Ackerman
Analyst at BNP Paribas

Yes, thank you for including me. Two questions, if I may. First, to follow up on the multi-rail. As cloud providers transition to multi-rail, does that continue to tilt the TAM towards two-thirds line systems versus pluggables where you have a more entrenched position? Second, is there a way to size the linear drive opportunity for you with Nubis as demand for active copper cables expands? Thank you.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yeah, let me take the first one, Karl. As you think about multi-rail, and again, I'll do the comparison with the single rail RLS. If you think about single rail RLS in a scale across environment, that's about, call it a hundred kilometers. As you extend that, and you use a Hyper-Rail that has the intermediary amplifier sites, I would expect the photonics component of that 1,000 km to be 4x-5x of the photonics component of that 100 km radius. I think we are going to see a shift in photonics mix as you get to longer distances for scale across an AI backbone and long haul. Yeah, I think your intuition is right. On the Nubis, on the redriver piece, we do think that there's some competitive advantages that being in the active copper cable gives us over AEC.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

We've talked about that in terms of 4x, the distance or getting up to 4 m and being about 90% of the power consumption. In terms of sizing that, for 2026, it's not going to be meaningful. As we get into 2027 and into 2028, you'll start to see that product ramp. We're not getting into exactly how big we think that is right now. We expect that to be accretive going into 2027 and 2028.

Scott McFeely
Scott McFeely
Executive Advisor at Ciena

Just a reminder on the Nitro piece to that. The analogy is it's a silicon model. It's a chip model. The revenue is interesting, but what's more interesting actually is the margin levels on that in terms of the business model.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Okay.

Karl Ackerman
Karl Ackerman
Analyst at BNP Paribas

Thanks, guys.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
VP of Investor Relations at Ciena

With that, we will end.

Marc Graff
Marc Graff
SVP and CFO at Ciena

Yep, you bet.

Gregg Lampf
Gregg Lampf
VP of Investor Relations at Ciena

Thank you all. We appreciate you all joining us this morning. Look forward to catching up over the coming days and weeks. Thank you all, and we'll see you soon.

Operator

This concludes our conference. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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