2/14/2023

speaker
Operator

Welcome to the fourth quarter 2022 Arista Network's Financial Results Earnings Conference Call. During the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star followed by zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Investor Relations section at the Arista website following this call. Ms. Liz Stein, Arista's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.

speaker
Liz Stein
Director of Investor Relations

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on today's call are Jay Shriulal, Arista Network's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ida Brennan, Arista's Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, ERISA Networks issued a press release announcing the results for its fiscal fourth quarter ending December 31st, 2022. If you would like a copy of this release, you can access it online at our website. During the course of this conference call, ERISA Networks management will make forward-looking statements, including those relating to our financial outlook for the first quarter of the 2023 fiscal year longer-term financial outlooks for 2023 and beyond, our total addressable market and strategy for addressing these market opportunities, supply chain constraints, component costs, manufacturing capacity, inventory purchases, and inflationary pressures on our business, extended lead times, product innovation, and the benefits of acquisitions, which are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC. specifically in our most recent Form 10Q and Form 10K, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our earnings press release. With that, I will turn the call over to Jay Shree.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Liz. And I'm glad we avoided Valentine's Day this time. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon on our fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. 2022 has certainly been a record year for Arista. You might recall in November 2021 analyst day, We had given you a guidance of 30% growth and instead have achieved well beyond that at 48% growth for the year, driving to an annual revenue of $4.38 billion with a non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.58, translating to an EPF growth of 58% for 2022. Indeed, a memorable year. Let's get back to some Q4 2022 specifics. We delivered 1.276 billion for the quarter with a non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.41. Services and software support renewals contributed approximately 15.8% of the revenue. Our non-GAAP gross margin was 61% influenced by our supply chain overhead and cloud tightening concentration. International contribution registered at 23.5% with the Americas at 76.5% in 2022. This was one of our strongest performing international quarters in recent history. In terms of Q4 2022 verticals, Cloud Titans was our largest and first, followed by Enterprise, and then specialty cloud providers at third place, financials at fourth, and service providers at fifth place. In 2023, we will report the three segment sectors instead of the verticals. Shifting to the segment sector revenue for 2022, Cloud Titans contributed significantly at approximately 46%, resulting in a triple-digit growth annually. Enterprise and financials together were strong at approximately 32%, while the providers were at approximately 22%. Both Meta and Microsoft are now far greater than 10% customers at 25.5% and 16% contribution, respectively. Clearly, we continue to enjoy a strong and strategic partnership with M&M. With that, I'd like to now invite Anshul Sadana, our Chief Operating Officer, to shed more light on our Cloud Titan performance.

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Thank you, Jayashree. Our partnership with Microsoft and Meta grew even stronger last year. Both of these titans are in the midst of deploying our next-gen 100, 200, and 400 gig products at several key tiers of their networks. The cloud is reshaping the internet with their massive footprint, global backbone, and edge partnerships. We are proud to have our products designed into pretty much all of these use cases. In addition, our business with the other titans continue to grow as well. We had additional design wins in backbone, WAN, and edge roles. This past year, we ramped our 7800R3 series high density 400 gig near lossless spine. We also introduced several new products based on Tomahawk 4 and our DeepBuffer virtual output queue systems based on Jericho 2, the 7280 and the 7800R3 modular systems. While we will continue to add 100 and 400 gig products to our portfolio, We also launched our first one-rack unit, 25 terabit product with 800 gig ports that can be broken out as 2 by 400 gig. These products have good use cases in high-speed applications, such as artificial intelligence. EOS, our high-quality, resilient network data lake-based operating system, has also matured and now supports cloud-scale with multiple copies of the internet routing table. We co-develop with our cloud customers who greatly appreciate Arista engineering expertise. This past year, we thought about our partnership with Microsoft with Sonic support on many of our high volume switches. Our work with them on automation and monitoring our skills is very well received for Azure and Bing deployments. At Meta, we have our co-developed platforms, such as the Tomahawk Base 7368 and 7388, which help them improve throughput and data center power efficiency. FPOS and EOS are deployed with very high reliability in the cluster fabrics using these products. Our deployments in the backbone and in generative AI and recommendation engines with the 7800 series are now smoothly deployed in production. We don't control macro. We don't control our customers' CapEx plans. But when they do spend, we are there with them to make these next generation cloud networks successful. AI is a good example where we are continuing to grow into next generation architectures with our cloud customers. The use cases we are involved in are generally core to their business and not an optional spend. Our cloud journey has come a long way over the last decade. This is still a very exciting market segment given the pace of innovation and our partnerships here. Back to you, Jayashree.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Anshul. Wow, 2022 was indeed a phenomenal year with the cloud cyclies. And these partnerships have been nurtured for well over a decade with expanded use cases such as these AI workloads. We remain confident of our meaningful share with both Microsoft and Meta and we expect both of them to once again contribute greater than 10% of our total revenue in 2023. In the non-cloud category, we have registered a solid number of million-dollar customers as a direct result of our momentum in the enterprise and campus throughout the year. We have now surpassed 9,000 cumulative customers. In terms of 2022 product lines, we have three categories. One, our core cloud and data center products built upon a highly differentiated Arista EOS stack that is successfully deployed across 10, 25, 100, 200, and 400 gig speeds. This drove approximately 68% of our revenue with strong cloud and enterprise spending cycles. We believe that we will continue to gain market share in the high-performance switching and have already grown from the teens to the 20s. In the 100 and 400 gig port category, we have now earned the number one position according to industry analysts. We have also doubled our 400 gig customers from 300 in 2021 to over 600 in 2022. Our second market is network adjacencies comprised of routing, replacing routers, and our cognitive campus. We doubled our campus orders to exceed 400 million in 2022. But we did fall short of our revenue due to extreme supply chain shortages. We maintain our campus momentum and are aiming for $750 million in revenue by 2025. Our investments in cognitive campus, fines, clients, wired and wireless, have generated significant customer interest and demand based on Cloud Vision and Cloud Vision Q. Considering this is only our third full year of shipping, versus incumbents who've been in the market for 15 to 30 years, we are very proud of our execution. Our vision for a cognitive campus with network as a service and edge as a service based on NetDL is resonating extremely well and being embraced by our campus customers. We have also successfully deployed in many routing edge and peering use cases, such as securing data in transit with tunnel set encryption, precision and performance for mobile networks, cloud exchanges, and Metro Ethernet. Enterprise customers can now deploy EOS with a single EVPN protocol, whether it's for data center, data center interconnect, or WAN delivering multiple profiles. Just in 2022 alone, we introduced six EOS software releases, 600 new features across 50 new platforms. Stay tuned for more in 2023 as we will be introducing new WAN transit functionality. The campus and routing adjacencies together contribute approximately 14% of revenue. Our third category is network software and services, based on subscription models such as Arista ACARE, Cloud Vision, DMF Observability, Advanced NDR with AVA sensors for security. Arista's subscription-based network services and software contributed approximately 18% of our total product line. We are proud to note that Cloud Vision exceeded 2,000 cumulative customers up from 1,500 the prior year, and is really a compelling data-driven platform delivering network agility, continuous integration, and operational excellence. Arista's non-cloud wins continue as well. While Arista's 2022 headline has been the massive contribution from our cloud customers, we are pleased with the momentum of our enterprise and provider customers as well. Arista continues to diversify its business globally with multiple use cases. Helping our prospects and customers realize these operational benefits with modern software and automation has been a recurring theme. And so let me share a few examples that we have earned a seat at the table at. Our first example highlights the universal cloud network wind in the travel industry. Like many conversations, the customer's initial ask was to gain more visibility into their infrastructure. We presented our DMF, Dance Monitoring Fabric Solution, but it quickly transitioned to a general data center for all of Arista's platform offerings. The customer chose our layer three leaf spine EVPN design for their critical VDI environment. The customer also leveraged cloud vision for their day zero, day one, day two operations using our chassis spine, our three leafs, and out-of-band management to reduce their operational risk. Our second win highlights the financial customer's choice to proceed with Arista's best-in-class cognitive campus with wired and wireless solutions. As with every campus opportunity, it was competitive. Cloud Vision once again was a key differentiator for us as we quickly became their trusted advisor. Our virtual training environment, such as Arista's Cloud Test, gave architects a relevant hands-on experience. Our low CVE count and commitment to single EOS with high quality was unmatched by our peers. Arista continues to make inroads on regional Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers. Regional service providers are in the middle of expanding and looking for reliable, compressed routing footprint. This third win highlights the evolution of our EOS routing stack, where customers are now deploying EVPN services on top of their MPLS segment core network. Arista's high-density, 100-gig MPLS routing, together with long-range optics and a fully automated deployment using Cloud Vision and Zero Touch provisioning delivered that cloud-like operating model. Our next win is an international one in the education sector for high-performance computing. HPC demands low latency, deep buffers, and real-time visibility. This customer chose Avista for providing a highly elastic BXLAN-based leaf spine pod with best-in-class performance. Consistent technology between our spine and edge leaf anchored by our flagship 7800 chassis and combined with cloud vision-based real-time telemetry, compliance, and automation really created a lasting impression. Our final win for this quarter's announcement is an exciting international one in the government sector, where Arista's 400-gig Ethernet was selected instead of Incinaband for big data Hadoop cluster deployments. In this case, the customer chose us for a 100, 400-gig solution with built-in encryption capability. The customer saw clear differentiation in our automated operations, hitless upgrade, and full real-time telemetry, ensuring comprehensive visibility of workloads in the fabric. As we enter 2023, Arista is well positioned as a game changer in data-driven client-to-cloud networking. A key part of this transformation is to make our cloud-first principles and bring that to every aspect of the data network. Software functions such as routing for WAN, zero trust security, and observability are moving into the Arista US path. We are building upon our cloud network heritage to bring proactive platform, predictive operation, and a complete prescriptive experience, unifying data sets from multiple sources. Our NetDL architecture and ABA, our autonomous virtual assist, using AI and ML and natural language processing techniques is a very compelling combination. Together, this architecture can gather, store, and process multiple modalities of network data. And this way, network operators can reconcile all their different silos. 2023 is the start of Arista's 2.0 journey. Arista 2.0 is our migration from best of breed products to best of breed platforms as we address our expanded TAM of 50 billion ahead. We are uniquely qualified to bring modern software principles to build that world-class data center and data-driven networking. It is based on that foundational focus on quality, availability, AI-driven deployments with top-notch support. And as we undertake this 2.0 journey, we are excited to work with a collaborative ecosystem of our partners and customers worldwide to realize this vision. In summary, I'm so proud of our team's execution across multiple dimensions despite one of the worst supply chain backdrops ever witnessed. A special thank you to our customers for their patience and support to us last year and to all the residents for their hard work and peculiar efforts. Our tireless mission taught us valuable lessons and we expect to emerge stronger. We reiterate our 25% annual growth outlook that we mentioned in the November 2022 analyst day as we now aim for $5.47 billion in 2023 in terms of revenue. Now I will turn it over to Ika for financial specifics.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jayshree, and good afternoon. This analysis of our Q4 and full year 2022 results and our guidance for Q1 2023 is based on non-GAAP and excludes all non-cash stock-based compensation impacts, certain acquisition-related charges, and other non-recurring items. A full reconciliation of our selected GAAP to non-GAAP results provided in our earnings release. Total revenues in Q4 were $1.276 billion, up 54.7% year over year, and well above the upper end of our guidance of $1.175 to $1.2 billion. While we experienced some improvement in overall component supply in the quarter, shipments remained somewhat constrained with lingering shortages on a handful of parts. Services and subscription software contributed approximately 15.8% of revenue in the fourth quarter, down from 16.3% in Q3. This has largely reflected growth in product revenues, while services and software continue to grow on a more consistent basis. International revenues for the quarter came in at 300 million, or 23.7% of total revenue, up from 17% in the third quarter. This quarter-over-quarter increase largely reflected improved contributions from our EMEA and region customers in the quarter. Overall, however, 2022 was a year of outsized growth in the U.S., up 61% year-over-year, largely due to domestic strength from our cloud-tightening customers. Overall growth margin in Q4 was 61%, at the midpoint of our guidance range, approximately 60% to 62%. We continue to recognize incremental supply chain costs in the period, combined with a healthy cloud mix. Operating expenses for the quarter were $235.3 million, or 18.4% of revenue, up from last quarter at 227.7 million. R&D spending came in at 153.2 million, or 12% of revenue, up from 150.1 million last quarter. This primarily reflected increased headcount and new product introduction costs of the period. Sales and marketing expenses were 67.4 million, or 5.3% of revenue, compared to 62.8 million last quarter, WITH INCREASED HEAD COUNTS AND HIGHER VARIABLE COMPENSATION EXPENSES. OUR G&A COST CAME IN AT 14.6 MILLION OR 1.1% OF REVENUE CONSISTENT WITH LAST QUARTER. OUR OPERATING INCOME FOR THE QUARTER WAS 543.2 MILLION OR 42.6% OF REVENUE. OTHER INCOME AND EXPENSE FOR THE QUARTER WAS A FAVORABLE 13.6 MILLION AND OUR EFFECTIVE TAX RATE WAS 20%. THIS RESULTED IN NET INCOME FOR THE QUARTER OF 445.1 MILLION ARE 34.9% OF REVENUE. OUR DELUGED SHARE NUMBER WAS 315.2 MILLION SHARES, RESULTING IN A DELUGED EARNINGS PER SHARE NUMBER FOR THE QUARTER OF $1.41, UP 72% FROM THE PRIOR YEAR. NOW TURNING TO THE BALANCE SHEET. CASH, CASH EQUIVALENTS AND INVESTMENTS ENTERED THE QUARTER AT APPROXIMATELY 3.024 BILLION. IN THE QUARTER, WE REPURCHASED $2.8 MILLION OF OUR COMMON STOCK. AS A REMINDER FOR THE YEAR, we've repurchased $670 million, or 6.5 million shares, at an average price of $104 per share. This leaves us with $257 million available for repurchase under our existing billion-dollar board authorization. The actual timing and amount of future repurchases will be dependent on market and business conditions, stock price, and other factors. Now turning to operating cash performance for the fourth quarter. GENERATED APPROXIMATELY 40 MILLION OF CASH FROM OPERATIONS IN THE PERIOD RESULTING STRONG EARNINGS PERFORMANCE MOSTLY OFFSET BY A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN WORKING CAPITAL WE EXPERIENCE GROWTH IN INVENTORY WITH THE RECEIPT OF COMPONENTS FOR FUTURE SHIPMENTS INCLUDING SHIPMENTS DELETE TO DISPLAYER DECOMMITS WE ALSO EXPERIENCE GROWTH IN ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE AND DSOs IN THE QUARTER WITH A SIGNIFICANT RAMP IN SERVICE RENEWALS AND PRODUCT SHIPMENTS TOWARDS THE END OF THE QUARTER DSOs came in at 67 days, up from 51 days in Q3, reflecting the linearity of billing and growth and service renewals in the period. Inventory turns were 1.6 times, down from 1.7 last quarter. Inventory increased to $1.3 billion in the quarter, up from $1.1 billion in the prior period, reflecting hierarchy component and peripherals inventory and an increase in switch-related finished goods. Our purchase commitments at the end of the quarter are $3.7 billion. down from 4.3 billion at the end of Q3. We expect this number to continue to decline in future quarters as component lead times improve, and we work to optimize our supply positions. As a reminder, we have focused this extended purchase commitment strategy on early lifecycle products to help mitigate the risk of excess or obsolescence. Our total deferred revenue balance was 1.041 billion, up from 941 million in Q3. The majority of the deferred revenue balance is services-related and directly linked to the timing and term of service contracts, which can vary on a quarter-by-quarter basis. Approximately $125 million of this balance, down from $165 last quarter, represents product deferred revenue, largely related to acceptance clauses for new products, most recently with our large cloud-type customers. For clarification, this represents a reduction in product-related deferred revenue for the year of approximately $40 million. Counts payable days were 43 days, down from 56 days in Q3, reflecting the timing of inventory receipts and payments. Capital expenditures per quarter were 10.5 million. Now turning to our outlook for the first quarter and beyond. 2022 was a year of outstanding revenue and earnings growth, driven by an acceleration in demand from our Cloud Titan customers, coupled with healthy contributions across the other areas of the business. Supply remained constrained throughout the year, and somewhat limited our ability to ramp product shipment in response to this demand. As we head into 2023, we look forward to resolving the final kinks on the supply side and reducing lead times for our customers. As outlined at our analyst day, we expect to achieve year-over-year revenue growth for 2023 of approximately 25%. This reflects continued healthy demand across all our market sectors, but recognizing that as lead times improve, we should expect to see some reduction in visibility. In terms of quarterly trends, you should expect accelerated year-over-year growth in Q1, moderating as the year progresses versus more difficult year-over-year comps. On the gross margin front, we expect to continue consuming broker parts and other inflated cost items in the first quarter. And this, combined with a continuing healthy cloud contribution, will pressure gross margins. Beyond that, we should see some steady improvement as we move through the year with fewer broker parts and the opportunity to optimize the manufacturing round. Now turn to spending and investments. We remain cognizant of the overall macro environment and will be prudent in making investments as we move through the year. You should, however, expect us to make targeted hires in R&D and go to market as the team sees the opportunity to secure talent. On the cash front, FY 2022 was a year where much of the 1.4 billion net income generated by the business was consumed by incremental working capital needs and additional cash tax payments under Section 174, which defers the deductibility of R&D spending. As we head into 2023, we should expect to focus on supply chains and working capital optimization while recognizing the need for balance in areas of higher supply risk or where lead times remain extended. Interest income should continue to increase as we move through the year, with $20 million in Q1 growing towards a quarterly contribution of $40 million exiting the year. With all of this as a backdrop, our guidance for the first quarter, which is based on non-GAAP results and excludes any non-cash stock-based compensation impacts and other non-recurring items, is as follows. Revenue is approximately $1.275 to $1.325 billion. Gross margin of approximately 60%. Operating margin at approximately 40%. Our effective tax rate is expected to be 21.5%, which eluded shares on a post-bid basis of approximately 316 million shares. I will now turn the call back to Liz.

speaker
Liz Stein
Director of Investor Relations

Thank you, Ida. We will now move to the Q&A portion of the Arista earnings call. To allow for greater participation, I'd like to request that everyone please limit themselves to a single question. Thank you for your understanding. Operator, take it away.

speaker
Operator

We will now begin the Q&A portion of the Arista earnings call. In order to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset before asking questions in order to ensure optimal sound quality. Our first question comes from the line of Jason Ader with William Blair. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Jason Ader
William Blair

Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I just wanted to ask, I guess, Ader, for you on the order trend. We all know that the revenue is incredibly strong right now because of all the lead time. supply chain issues, but maybe some visibility on how orders are trending versus revenue.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Jason, you know, we don't really talk about orders and backlog. I think we did talk about kind of healthy demand, you know, across the various pieces of the business. And obviously, you know, we're reaffirming the guidance for 2023. So there is good support for that. Jayshree, I don't know if you want to add anything to that or not.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

No, I think you said it well. Order trends in 2022 were good. We'll wait, watch, and see if the macro has broader effects in 2023. But our guide and our tone affects that we are pretty positive at the moment.

speaker
Jason Ader
William Blair

So no impact from macro of significance thus far on orders?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

When we have something to state, we will, Jason. So far, we don't.

speaker
Jason Ader
William Blair

Okay. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Amit Daryanani
Evercore

Yep. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the quarter. You know, I guess when I think about this 25% growth in calendar 23, how do you think it stacks up across the three verticals for you folks? That would be really helpful to understand kind of where do you see the strongest versus weaker growth. And then on the cloud titan side, as you think about growth in 23 and maybe even beyond, do you think that's really a function of what their CapEx plans look like on the networking side? Or do you think there's a bigger narrative around the share gain potential against white box solutions, especially as workloads get more complicated, that could help you as well? Thank you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Okay. Well, I'll take the first one, and I'm sure Anshul will have a few words on the second. How does this break? If you look at 20, let me go back to 2021. We had a very nice even split, and Cloud Titans was actually kind of on the low side. It was 30%, if I remember right, 30, 30, 40. And if you look at 2022, Cloud Titans was outsized, where the 30 went to 46. If I had to guess, I would say we'd be between those two numbers. I still think we'll have a very healthy Cloud Titan mix. but enterprise momentum continues to be strong, and you'll see a contribution from that, as well as the tier two specialty cloud providers and service providers as well. So I think it'll, my guess is it'll look somewhere between 21 and 22 in terms of split. We'll see as the quarters progress. In terms of the CapEx and the impact of that on cloud titans, look, we don't exactly and equivalently track the CapEx, but eventually, you know, CapEx is an indicator of future of our future Cloud Titan progress. I don't believe at this point that our progress is coming from white box or specific things like commodity, things like that. It's really coming from, as Anshu pointed out, a very strategic seat at the table on new use cases like AI workloads, which has a multiplicative factor on our bandwidth. So I believe we'll have a real seat at the table, especially with Microsoft and Meta. and we'll continue to see what the use cases are that imagine that that we can imagine beyond 23 but we we've been working on this for 10 years and i think it'll continue to be strong thank you thank you ahmed we can take our next question operator your next question comes from the line of paul silverstein with cowan please go ahead your line is open thanks i hope you'll indulge a clarification i just want to make sure

speaker
Paul Silverstein
Cowan

You said Microsoft was 16 and META was 25 or do I have that backwards?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, 25.5 on META and Microsoft 16.

speaker
Paul Silverstein
Cowan

Okay, now for the question. What portion of your Cloud Titan revenue in general and how much of growth in Microsoft and META was, if you know it, what's your sense for how much of that was AI driven? Any visibility as to the growth in AI and its impact on demand for your switches and various use cases? over the course of the next two years with your CloudTitan customers in general, including Microsoft and Meta?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, we see AI as a very, very important use case and workload for all our CloudTitan customers. Clearly, it's in the first inning. We're just beginning. So very much like cloud networking 10 years ago, we see AI as an additional use case. It is a very, very small portion of our use cases so far, so a lot of upside ahead.

speaker
Paul Silverstein
Cowan

Is it possible to quantify, Tushari?

speaker
James

Too early to quantify. It's not material.

speaker
Paul Silverstein
Cowan

That's what I figured.

speaker
Aaron

Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.

speaker
Operator

Your next question will come from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Aaron Rakers
Wells Fargo

Yeah. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the quarter as well. I guess maybe this is for Anshul building on the last two questions is that You know, as you look at kind of adding up the meta and Microsoft contribution and you compare that to 46% total Cloud Titan, your other Cloud Titan contribution is still pretty small. So, Anshul, when you're engaging with other cloud opportunities, maybe you can unpack that a little bit. What's opening up the opportunities for you? Is it AI or is it something else that you're starting to see? And how do we start to think about that as an incremental growth driver?

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Sure, Aaron. First of all, we are proud of our achievement for the first two M&Ms with the contributions there. On the other titans, we have been engaged fairly well with them. That business is also growing. It pays in comparison to Microsoft and Meta, but it is not insignificant compared to other opportunities in the market. And we continue to achieve those. Those partnerships are very, very strong as well. At some point in the future, if the opportunity is materialized, many of these customers decide to go big in the market and buy switches from the industry like us, I think we'll perform very well. We just have to wait out and get to that opportunity. It's not clear yet whether it's happening in a year or two or three. I don't know. When it happens, we'll be there. And we will do well in where we are today with them, which is essentially routing use cases or DCI use cases or WAN or EDGE. And we touched on this other topic before too, but if they ever shift buying more from the outside, I think we'll be ready.

speaker
Aaron

Yes. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jim Suva with Citigroup. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Jim Suva
Citigroup

Thank you, Jayshree and Ida and everyone. Congratulations on great results. My question is, I think it was Ida made the comment of expect a, deceleration in revenues as we progress throughout the year just to get to the 25% revenue growth. I want to make sure I heard that right because that would then also mean that even with very, very stiff, difficult year-over-year comps for revenues, you wouldn't expect them to go negative at all. And I guess when we look at that deceleration, it kind of seems like a steep decline to get to an average of 25%. So can you help me with my math there or the missing pieces or is it some conservatism or I'm just kind of wondering, but it definitely doesn't seem like negative growth is in the works.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, no, no, we didn't talk about negative growth. If you look at the trend last year, you'll see, you know, it really accelerated post Q1, right? So that's why you're seeing, you know, a much stronger growth rate year over year with our Q1 guide than you will as you move through the year. So I think after Q1, it's better to start to look at it as a quarter by quarter, on a quarter by quarter basis and kind of, you know, grow your revenues quarter by quarter. But certainly no kind of negative, growth in that. And I think you'll get a better answer if you kind of just grow kind of quarter over quarter from there on out. Q1 was a much lower revenue number last year, back on the trend.

speaker
Jim Suva
Citigroup

Great. Thank you for the details and congratulations and happy Valentine's to all of you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Jim. It's all about comps, isn't it?

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sonic Chatterjee with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Sonic Chatterjee
JP Morgan

Hi, thanks for taking my question and congrats on the results as well. I guess I have a quick one. Can you speak louder? Yeah, hopefully you can hear me now. Is this better? Can you hear me now?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, much better. Thank you.

speaker
Sonic Chatterjee
JP Morgan

So I was just going to ask you on your large cloud customer meta and the recent announcement around architecture changes relative to data centers and trying to run AI workloads and non-AI workloads together on the same data centers. And some of those related announcements, if you've been able to dissect that and sort of have any thoughts about how that might impact their spending in relation to switching and routing equipment, particularly as it relates to your portfolio. Thank you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So, Sunika, I'll say some few words and obviously Anshul can get into detail. We don't foresee any major architectural changes in the build-out of the AI clusters. Clearly, we continue to work with them on the front end of the network, and on the back end, these have been based on the flagship 7800 spines, the AI spine, where you can have a distributed AI leaf where it can be going straight into the spine. And when you have the hundreds and thousands of GPUs, you need a lossless fabric that has all of the congestion control and bandwidth management required. So in the short term, no major change in architecture. In the long term, as these customers look for efficiency, we look for these AI fabrics to get larger or more distributed, but there will naturally be an evolution as the market grows. But no dramatic shift or change, just more of the same. Anshul, say a few words.

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Samik, just keep in mind, meta slowed down spending a few years ago. So there's some catching up to do to sort of the spend that got missed out. So you have to sort of go backwards and average it out to understand the trend. And second, as Cheshri mentioned, from what we know so far, we don't believe there's any change in the networking spend. The CapEx optimizations they are discussing are either tied to how the buildings are built, facilities, or letting go of nights to have projects. Okay. Got it.

speaker
Aaron

Thank you. Thanks for taking my question.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Sami. Your next question comes from the line of Tao Liani with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Tao Liani
Bank of America

Hi. I want to ask about the other part that no one is asking about the non-cloud titans. So if I back out cloud titans, non-cloud grew 14.6%. And the question is, first of all, on last year, did you allocate components to cloud titans and was this area more pressured than Cloud Titans when it comes to allocation? So if that's the case, or what is the answer about what happens this year, this coming year, or this year on the non-Cloud Titan portion, what drives it to accelerate from the 14.5% growth of last year? Thanks.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Got it, Tal. So first of all, absolutely not. We don't do any allocation. It's very much a first-in, first-out algorithm. and many of the cloud titans clearly were the first in, so therefore they're the first out. Our enterprise customers and the momentum and the demand is very high, and we fully expect that they will get their turn this year in 2023. But given how constrained we were in supply, this is the way it worked out in terms of revenue.

speaker
Tao Liani
Bank of America

What are the underlying driver for growth acceleration, the driver outside of components, better component supplies? What are the underlying growth drivers for 2023 versus 2022?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

I think they're very similar. You heard me talk about some of the enterprise momentum. Customers are really looking for consolidation of their data centers in terms of a better automation, better telemetry, better consolidation of their operational advantages in the data center. Campus is a huge use case. Routing and bringing all of the routing features that we've been working on for over five years to bear has been a third one. Observability and security is another use case. Telemetry with cloud vision. So very similar themes to 2022 that we're seeing in 23. Great.

speaker
Aaron

Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Thanks, all. Your next question comes from the line of Bahad Najam with Loop Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Bahad Najam
Loop Capital

Thank you for taking my question. I had a couple of clarifications. Cognitive adjacencies that were, I think, 14% of revenue, is it fair to assume it's fairly split evenly between campus switching and routing?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Sorry, Fahad, can you repeat the question?

speaker
Bahad Najam
Loop Capital

The cognitive adjacency revenue that you gave, I think, was 14% of revenue, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm just wondering, is the split even between campus and routing?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Approximately. Both of them were large contributors. So I don't have the exact percentages, but we think campus over time will become larger. But at the moment, I would say it's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

speaker
Bahad Najam
Loop Capital

Got it. For my question, how should we be thinking about, you know, with AI and machine learning becoming more pervasive in cloud-tied and architectures and this prospective displacement of InfiniBand, with Ethernet, how should we be thinking about the TAM opportunity? Because, you know, how big is this InfiniBand replacement opportunity, so to speak?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, no, I think the InfiniBand TAM to date has a very, you know, one to one and a half billion dollar TAM. And it didn't address AI workloads. I think the advent of this new application is going to open up the whole AI networking and fabric TAM to much greater than InfiniBand. So not only do we have an opportunity to replace InfiniBand, but we have a greenfield opportunity for new AI fabrics and clusters. So it's both, not just a legacy InfiniBand opportunity.

speaker
Bahad Najam
Loop Capital

So roughly how big do you think the opportunity is?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

I don't think there have been some market studies on this. Some people say $2 billion a year. Some people say $4 billion. Some say it's going to $8 billion. So I think it's still too early to call. It depends on how quickly the adoption of AI fabric happens in all of our large customers.

speaker
Bahad Najam
Loop Capital

Thank you. Appreciate the answer.

speaker
James

Thanks, Farah.

speaker
Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Pierre Faragu with New Street Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Pierre Faragu
New Street Research

Thank you, good evening. I wanted to catch up on what you say, Jeffrey, about edge routing and peering. And this opportunity still comes back as an interesting and intriguing area. And so my question would be, anything you can give us in terms of sizing or how significant it is today? And then beyond that, Could you give us a sense of how you understand the long-term market dynamics in there? So it's a market where all the legacy routing players are very strong, have a very strong existing ecosystem. And I'm still not exactly clear on what market dynamics create the opportunity for Arista and how we should think about it in the long run. Is there an opportunity to replace incumbents in large peering markets? And if that's the case, how does that work? Is that like operators buying from you? Is that coming from other types of clients like cloud players? So how does the opportunity shape up over time?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Anshul, I love your perspective on it. Let me kick it off. We think the router market is much bigger than the routing market. The router market is the more legacy market that's been served by a number of traditional industry experts for 20 years and mostly servicing the service provider market. And that's a very traditional market that Arista has been participating some in, but we don't expect to be a major player in traditional service providers. However, you know, we've added so much routing features. Routing is not now part of our switching system. It's sometimes hard to separate it. It's the same hardware, different software. If you just look at the last year, we've added Ethernet OEM capability, VPLS, timing with Syncy, EVPN, MPLS gateway, multi-cap VPN, edge services, routing scale you heard Anshul talk about that can go over 4 million routes. So our portfolio is really transitioning to supporting 400 gig deployments. And routing in the cloud scale is something we are very successful in. So on one hand, we're not super successful in the traditional service providers. On the other hand, we are hugely successful on the cloud. And then in between, we are finding ourselves moderately successful in a lot of the enterprise and specialty cloud providers. Anshul, you want to add a few words?

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Sure. Another angle here, if you look at how we started to enter this market, is through some of the CDN companies like Netflix and Spotify. And these companies have an SDN approach to Edge. It's a scale-out architecture. You can take a simple router from Arista and scale it out, and the automation and the SDK we provide allows our customers to do that, which is why we do very well in these use cases versus the legacy full-feature traditional router. And our cloud customers, the titans, the tier-two cloud, the providers, all like these architectures.

speaker
Aaron

Great. Thanks for those answers. Thanks, Pierre.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Genovese with Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Michael Genovese
Rosenblatt Securities

Great. Thanks so much. I guess just sort of theoretically in an AI data center, I mean, let's just... Your current way of doing chat versus an AI chat, can you give us some sense of the... switching intensity increase in the new use case with AI? Is there a multiplier to put on the switching or the networking to think about the higher amount of content and spend for AI? Sure.

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Michael, I'll take this one. It's very hard to generalize. So I can't just give a single number that AI equals so much more. But I'll give you an example of something that Andy talked about in the last analyst space. And if you look at the recent cluster on which Meta published some papers, about a third of the time, the GPUs were sitting idle because they were waiting for the network traffic to come back. So networking becomes the bottleneck in these cases. And if you can add more bandwidth, then you essentially become non-blocking. Your job can run faster, and you can use your GPUs in a much more efficient manner. So at a rough order of magnitude, these GPU clusters need about three times more bandwidth. than a traditional compute network today. But again, that's a generalization. It doesn't apply to every use case, but if you need a single number, that's the one I would use. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Mita Marshall

Great. Thanks. I just wanted to get a sense of on supply chain what you are seeing there in terms of did it loosen faster than you were expecting in Q4 and that was part of the upside or just how you're looking at conditions kind of improving throughout the year and maybe just that kind of release to gross margins as we think about throughout the year and kind of the overhead of the inventory currently. Thanks.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Bena. I'll comment on it, and I'm sure Ida will have a few words, too. Look, supply chain hasn't eased up enough for us. Maybe we have more demand than others, and that's why we're feeling it more. But having said that, our Q4 numbers would have been even better if supply chain had eased. And our Q1 gross margin is a reflection that supply chain is still an overhead on our costs, right? We expect Q1 to be the absolute worst. We're going to improve thereafter every other quarter. So supply chain is going to be easing in the back half of 23. And as you know, at the LSD, we gave a guide of, we said 61 to 63 for the year. So we fully intend to improve our gross margins every quarter thereafter, after potentially hitting a low in Q1, which is an indication of supply chain improving. But at the same time, remember, another huge factor in our contribution to gross margins is the healthy cloud-typing mix. We'd like to keep it healthy and ease supply chain, and that'll give us some improvements.

speaker
Aaron

Great. Thanks.

speaker
Operator

Thanks, Vida. Your next question comes from the line of Alex Henderson with Needham. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Vida

Great. Thanks, and congrats on super quarter. I wanted to... push a little bit more on the supply chain issue that you're just talking about. I get the point that gross margins are at their worst in the first quarter, but when do you think the balance between availability and your backlog starts to come into balance so that you can actually ship what orders come in and the duration on your backlog, which I know you don't talk about, but conceptually starts to come in line so that we're back to a fairly normal book and ship environment?

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Paul, I'll let Ida answer this, but I wouldn't call our current environment approaching normality for some time. So we hope it'll be second half, that the supply and the demand catch up. But I hope it catches up because we improve our supply, not that demand goes down. So we want it to also improve for the right reasons.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Alex, I think, you know, the goal obviously is to improve, have supply improve and then improve manufacturing and improve efficiencies. And, you know, we'll be working on that as we go through the year. I don't know what the final normal will be. We'll have to see. I think just given everything that we've been through from a supply chain perspective, it's probably, you know, maybe there's a little bit more lead time visibility that will end up in the system at the end, but we'll have to see.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

I think what we can safely say is we are getting comfortable that lead times will improve. throughout the year. Will we get to normal lead times? I think that'll still take time because we've got to work through our demand.

speaker
Vida

If I could, just one clarification. Did you say you had it decommitted in the fourth quarter? I thought I heard that in the presentation. Thank you.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

No, decommits on the supply side. I mean, we've had a thousand starts on the supply side for sure, if that's the question.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

No, nothing to do with it. It had to do with our supply constraints. Component vendors are constantly decommitting.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Ellen. Your next question comes from the line of Matt Nicknam with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Matt Nicknam
Deutsche Bank

Hey, thanks for taking the question. I just want to follow up on the question on macro that was asked earlier. Are there any regions, verticals where you've seen any maybe greater than usual slowness in ordering because of macro? And then maybe if I can sneak one in for Ida. On the free cash flow trajectory, broadly speaking, Just curious if there's any broad color you can provide around working capital and primarily asking around inventory and whether that's still a drag or whether you expect to maybe convert some more of that to cash this year. Thanks.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, maybe I'll take the cash piece of it first. Yeah, I'm not sure that we start to see it kind of come down just yet. I think probably at least for the first half, we'll probably still be building inventory. I mean, we do have some kind of key components that are still you know, long lead time. And we're, you know, we wanted to build buffers, so we'll continue to do that. And then hopefully in the second half, it probably at least kind of flattens out. But again, we'll update that as we go quarter by quarter. But I think there's definitely a piece that's still going to be long lead time that will kind of hold inventory a little bit higher than what we might like for the time being.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

And your question on macro, like I said before, we'll call it when we see it. We're not seeing anything major and significant.

speaker
spk11

yet and you know customers are watching we're watching and no major trend i can point to that's great thank you your next question comes from the line of tim long with barclays please go ahead your line is open thank you um just kind of a two-parter on the the campus business um first um i think you guys have talked about doing a little bit better in the wireless LAN area. So curious if you think that having a better wired and wireless portfolio kind of accelerates the share gains potential in that area. So was that something that was maybe holding back some wind that could help in the future? And then secondly, I think the analyst that you talked a little bit about SD-WAN, I'm just curious if you can give us an update on when you might start to see another leg to the campus strategy in what's a pretty high growth vertical. Thank you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. So, Tim, on the wired and wireless, we are obviously much stronger on wired because there's a very natural affinity to the Arista EOS stack. So, and we also have a full portfolio, 1RU, 2RU, all the way to a chassis with built-in encryption No other company, maybe except one, has that. So we're very competitive there. On the wireless, we're sort of the new kid on the block. As I said, if you just look at our campus entry, we are a new kid on the block. This is our third year. So we, I think, are going from being a toddler to an adult now here very soon. So we believe we have a strong portfolio, also differentiated by Cloud Vision for both wired wireless coming into the same spline architecture that we articulate and design for the data center. So we feel very, very good about our portfolio being strong. I think more of our efforts will go into go-to-market and reaching these customers, because much of what we've done to date is, if you will, low-hanging fruit with our familiar customers and our existing base.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Vitay Kidron with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Vitay Kidron
Oppenheimer

Thanks, and nice finish for the year, ladies. A couple of questions for me. First of all, for you, Ida, on the cash, I just want to piggyback on some of the previous question on the account receivables. Clearly, they've ballooned here on the year. Are the cash payment terms of the cloud guys any different than a normal enterprise? And what percent of this account receivables do you think you can recoup in the year? And then For you, Jayshree, on campus, clearly supply chain is a little bit of a hurdle there. Cisco has taken action to redesign some of its solutions to products and components that are much more readily available. Is that not a path for you? And if it is, what can you do on that front to alleviate the supply and more easily address demand?

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Maybe I'll take the cash one first. I mean, a lot of the DSO growth is really around those service renewals that we saw at the back end of that quarter. You know, if you think about those and how they flow, they generate almost no revenue, but obviously they're in AR, they're multi-year, so it causes the AR to spike. We'll collect kind of a lot of that in Q1, good healthy AMR balance target heading into Q1. So there's no change in aging or

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

anything else it's really just the timing of those service renewals and the fact that they end up in ar at the end of the quarter yeah so uh itai on the thank you for the wishes by the way and happy valentine's day we listened to you and made sure the earnings call was not on valentine's day ask you a question absolutely we have our choice of vendors and redesigns redesigns take time and qualifying them with our customer takes even longer So we've chosen a multi-profit approach where we do have redesigns that we can invoke, but we are also improving our relationship and partnership with our supply chain vendors. Anshul, your team has been working on that. I think your vendor list has gone from tens to hundreds, if I remember right, right?

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

That's right, Jashvi. This is the first time we are close to... Almost 100 suppliers, but we talk to them directly. Even if we don't buy the components from them, we control the relationship and the technology and the roadmap.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

So to answer your question, in the campus specifically, both with redesigns and with our supplier partnerships, we fully expect to come back and not fall short of our numbers in 2023. Very good.

speaker
Aaron

Thanks. Good luck.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Our next question will come from the line of Ben Bolin with Cleveland Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Ben Bolin

Thanks for taking the question. Good afternoon, everyone. I also wanted to piggyback a little bit on campus. Jayshree, could you talk a little bit about how customers are responding as they're facing the increase in lead times or the lead times overall? It's been a market share opportunity. Any risk that that share is perishable? Do they choose to opt to renew with who they have? And then you talked a little bit about go-to-market on campus. What are you doing differently, or what are your thoughts on where that goes from here? Thank you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, no, both are very good questions, Ben. I would say currently we are gaining share because others are messing up. You know, whether it's changing to a software model or not able to supply, ERISA has been the benefactor of that. There's still small numbers, obviously. But it's difficult to imagine that we're at risk of losing share when we have such small share. Our goal is to grow share at the moment. What was your second question? Second part to that question?

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Go-to-market strategy.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Oh, what is the go-to-market? Well, in the near term, our go-to-market has very much been to target our 9,000 cumulative customers. But we are building a mid-market strategy. We are going to work closely with channel partners. Those things take time. So I would say our initial go-to-market is our enterprise customers, and over time, we will have a more mid-market strategy.

speaker
Aaron

Thanks.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
James Fish
Piper Sandler

Hey, happy Valentine's Day, ladies. Great quarter. Just going back to your commentary on Cloud Titans being kind of between 21 and 22 levels, Just given the overall growth, it does suggest a bit of an acceleration for everybody else. I guess what's driving that confidence? Is it just mainly what's in backlog? Is it additional hyperscaler wins, including with AI or enterprise share games or something else? And then, Ida, just for you as a follow-up on the cash flow, is there a way to think about kind of a normalized cash flow level or where you expect inventory turns to get to by the end of the year? Thanks.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, maybe I'll take that one first, Jim. I'm not quite ready yet to call kind of a turns number for the end of the year. I think, you know, inventory dollars probably grow certainly through the first half, and then hopefully we can flatten out from there. You know, we will look for optimization, but there is still, you know, a fair amount of kind of long lead time items that we need to kind of carry and buffer. So I'll come back to you as we kind of go through the year. But I think certainly for the first half, you should be looking for inventory to probably continue to grow on an absolute dollar basis.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, James, for the wishes. I think in one word, I would say momentum. Our enterprise customers are really looking for an alternative to what they've got. There's a lot of fatigue in the system. And what's driving my optimism, whether it's backlog from prior demand or present demand, is they're really hungry. And Arista presents that alternative.

speaker
James

Next question, operator.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
David Vogt

Great. Thank you, everyone, for taking my call. I just want to pivot back to Meta for a second. And so in addition to the new architecture that they've been talking about, and I think Anshu addressed it, the company also talked about, you know, potentially using more co-location and maybe other public company assets to kind of meet its capital intensity needs going forward. We'd just love to kind of get your thoughts on how that impacts your spending. They're spending on a risk of gear going forward. And then just going off on the Titans mixed percentages, if the rest of the business is growing at the rates that we think it's going to grow in 2023, to end up somewhere between the 21 and 22 level, does that suggest that the Titans business in total grows kind of in the low teens in 23 off of triple digit growth in 22? Thanks.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, just to answer that one, it is definitely not going to be triple digit in 23. We can say that with certainty. That was a beautiful year and one for the history books. Actually, you want to take the rest?

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

Sure. For the meta question, David, in the architecture and so on, I think the high-level message to us is they want to run their business efficiently, as efficiently as possible, and optimize. So projects are nice to have. Obviously, those are getting cut back. And as you mentioned, in places like Kolos and so on, you don't need a very large architecture to start with. If you only have a three-megawatt site, as an example, you have a smaller cluster size. But our products already fit very well in all of these use cases. So we don't believe there's any significant impact to networking from what we can tell today in the near term. We don't have visibility that's many, many years out today. But the message we've been given is there's basically no big impact to networking as far as we are concerned.

speaker
Aaron

Great.

speaker
Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Tom Blakey with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Tom Blakey
KeyBank Capital Markets

Thanks for squeezing me in here. I have a question back on the F&E line, financials and enterprise. The drivers there, I think maybe Tal was getting at many questions ago. But I was wondering how much like rip and replace type of wins are kind of like starting to – rear into here this you know implied in my mind anyway acceleration and growth and the growth in the f e line uh and specifically uh the new cloud test product that you launched at the end of last year if that's kind of uh more of a 2023 driver and again that kind of rip and replace type of wins which is a large opportunity and enterprise is more of a 23 driver or if it's more 24 and then maybe just quick uh for for um Ida, as enterprise mixes up, just remind us what the gross margin and operating margin impact should be for mixing more towards enterprise. That'd be helpful. Thank you.

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Maybe I'll take that one quickly first. I mean, I think, you know, the gross margins, we've kind of talked about it improving as we go through the year, and kind of the mix is obviously part of that. Operating margin, you know, it's pretty neutral, actually, between, you know, cloud versus the rest. So I don't know that there's any big driver there.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

No, we have much lower... sales and marketing on the cloud, more technically driven. So it's not the same. Going back to your rip and replace for financial, I take it F&E means financials and enterprise? Just to clarify.

speaker
Tom Blakey
KeyBank Capital Markets

Yeah, exactly. And just talking specifically about the new cloud test product where you can emulate, you know, an existing network and then just kind of plug and play the Arista product over an existing install.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Okay, so one of the common threads we're seeing in enterprise and financials is that nobody's getting more staff to do their job. So they want more tools to automate and bring their SecOps, DevOps, NetOps, all of their operations together. And this is where the Arista introduction of our continuous integration, continuous design, and continuous test has really been strategic because not only do you have to give them a tool for automation, but you also have to work with them and train and teach them how to deploy it. So these end up not necessarily being rip and replaced, but sort of a gradual evolution where they'll identify the first use case or first data center that they'll do this on, and then it'll expand, land and expand to more use cases. So most enterprises are not a rip and replace, but it's a use case that we begin with and then gradually evolve to, you know, go into a rip and replace as their depreciation gets completed on the existing legacy here. So it's a multi-year type of deployment, and it usually begins with a couple of use cases.

speaker
James

Thanks, Tom. Thank you, Jayshree. Thank you, Tom.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Superger with JMP Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Eric Superger
JMP Securities

Yeah, thanks for fitting me in, and happy Valentine's. On the meta front, I'm just curious. They talked about adopting more of a modular kind of scalable architecture. I'm wondering if that changes any of the buying behavior or the purchasing patterns. Does that smooth out some of the purchasing from the likes of a meta? And then secondly, Ida, on the balance sheet with your purchase commitments, do you have control over how much inventory you take on? Or as the inventory becomes available, do you take it in? in which case might we see your inventory balloon if more of the inventory becomes available?

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, no, I think I don't like balloon as a word. I mean, there are certain suppliers where, you know, lead times are still a key. So we'll continue to do that. I think on the purchase commitment, you know, we talked about this a little bit at the analyst day as well. I mean, as lead times start to move around, obviously we'll work with the contract to respond to those lead times. That's why, I mean, over time, that number should come down, managing to lead time with the contract manufacturers.

speaker
Aaron

Okay.

speaker
Anshul Sadana
Chief Operating Officer

On the meta question, the meta architecture already is quite modular. We've talked about the design. It can go up to 256-way ECMP. So 256-minute bus. The cluster sizes are smaller. They don't need 206. Maybe they can start with 16 or 32. So we're already built into the model today. I don't believe it has any impact on us. Same thing on the 7800 AI is fine. They can add a number of line cards based on the number of GPUs or racks that they're connected to. So we are very, very efficient already and it fits very well into our models.

speaker
James

Thank you, Eric. Operator, next question.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sammy Badry with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
Sammy Badry
Credit Suisse

Great. Just fit me in. Two quick ones. First one is for Ida. Can we just talk about the benefits of pricing from some of the price increases that you guys have put through to the portfolio and the effect it's had on gross margins? And then the second question is for Jayshree. Jayshree, you've given us kind of a ballpark visibility, I guess, you know, some kind of quantification in the number of months that you see visibility with some of your biggest customers. Could you give us an update on that same type of visibility?

speaker
Ida Brennan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I think on the pricing piece of it, I mean, for sure we're getting some benefit from the pricing, but, you know, as time goes on, it's a dynamic environment. It starts to be harder to track that kind of, and it gets lost in the overall, you know, growth in the business. But we did check, and there's definitely some uptick for pricing there. It's just not something that we're kind of tracking on an ongoing basis.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

And in terms of visibility, Sami, in the past, we've seen as much as a year's visibility. If I were to guess, I think as the lead times improved, that visibility will reduce. Maybe it's down to three quarters now. And the visibility was very much tied to planning cycles. And when the planning cycles were, you know, longer than a year because our lead times were longer than a year, then we got greater visibility. Thank you, Sammy.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of George Nodder with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

speaker
George Nodder
Jefferies

Hi there. I'm curious about why you guys think you should take share from InfiniBand going forward in AI and HPC environments. I'm just curious about what the logic is there. Thanks.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

there's two big reasons i think in the past ethernet was always trading in terms of performance and bandwidth to infiniband today as we start talking about 400 800 1.2 terabits the options on ethernet are much greater and very cost effective and everybody's very uh the the other is i think um historically in some band has been more for high performance compute use cases We are very bullish on the AI workloads and its impact on Ethernet, where we don't believe that Cinnabon has any particular advantage, and in fact, Ethernet does.

speaker
Liz Stein
Director of Investor Relations

Thank you, Jordan. We have time for one last question.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Simon Leopold
Raymond James

Thanks for taking it. I wanted to maybe dig a little bit into the campus business, particularly whether or not that unit has been more constrained and therefore in a recovery bounces back. And ultimately, wondering if really an increase in campus in the mix. I know you gave us that 750 million target by 25. Wondering if that's considered a headwind to gross margin or whether it's more about the market verticals that affects your margins. Thank you.

speaker
Jay Shriulal
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, no headwind to gross margin. Our campus business has good gross margins. I just, you know, as we said, on the product side, I feel very good that the campus can execute. On the go-to-market side, we have more work. So I'm giving ourselves some optionality there that if we do the work really well, we could exceed the 750. And if we can't, then that'll be the more likely number.

speaker
Liz Stein
Director of Investor Relations

Great. Thanks, Simon. This concludes the Arista Network's fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. We have posted a presentation which provides additional information on our results, which you can access on the investor section of our website. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for your interest in Arista.

speaker
Operator

Thank you for joining, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

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