RBBN

Greetings, welcome to the Ribbon Communications second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Fahad Najam, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, welcome to Ribbon's second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. I am Fahad Najam, SVP Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations at Ribbon Communications. Also on the call today are Bruce McClelland, Ribbon's Chief Executive Officer, and Rick Marmorek, Ribbon's Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being webcast live and will be archived on the investor relations section of our website at rbbn.com, where both our press release and supplemental slides are currently available. Certain matters we will be discussing today, including the business outlook and financial projections for the third quarter of 2026 and beyond, are forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in the documents filed with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K.

I refer you to our safe harbor statement included in the supplemental financial information posted on our website. In addition, we will present non-GAAP financial information on this call. Reconciliations to the applicable GAAP measures are included in the earnings press release we issued earlier today, as well as the supplemental financial information we prepared for this conference call, which again are both available on the investor relations section of our website. Now I would like to turn the call over to Bruce.

Great. Thanks, Fahad. Good afternoon, everyone, thanks for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results and outlook for the second half of the year. We had a solid second quarter with key financial metrics above the midpoint of our guidance. Revenue grew 18% sequentially to $192 million, earnings improved by $20 million-$12 million, with improvement in both of our operating segments. Excluding maintenance, product and services revenue increased 28% sequentially. Following a similar pattern to the first quarter, bookings in our IP Optical segment were very strong. In fact, product and service bookings were an all-time high in the quarter, with a book-to-bill of 1.6x revenue. Overall IP Optical backlog has increased more than 60% so far this year.

This includes several new data center interconnect projects and one of our strongest quarters ever in the U.S. market, supporting mission-critical networks and broadband services. The U.S. enterprise market segment was also a real highlight in the quarter. We expanded several strategic customer relationships, including voice and data projects with multiple Fortune 100 companies, including one of the nation's largest financial institutions and another project with one of the nation's largest energy producers. During the quarter, we announced a very significant and material partnership with Salesforce to accelerate time to market of its new agentic AI contact center offering, Agentforce Contact Center, which integrates Ribbon's secure carrier-grade voice capabilities. We believe this validates a new market segment enabling enterprise customers to securely deploy AI-powered applications while leveraging the resiliency and reliability of carrier-grade communications infrastructure. I'll expand on this very important partnership in more detail shortly.

When comparing year-over-year, as we expected, sales in our Cloud and Edge segment in the second quarter were down 19% year-over-year, primarily as a result of lower sales to Verizon. It's important to remember that the prior year included record shipments and deployment activity associated with Verizon's Voice Network Transformation program, creating a particularly difficult year-over-year comparison. IP Optical results in the second quarter were very consistent with the previous year, growing modestly after accounting for the completion of a long-term support maintenance contract. In summary, solid performance in the second quarter with progress against several of our strategic growth objectives and meaningful improvement versus the first quarter.

Looking into the balance of the year, we continue to expect sequential revenue growth and improved earnings in Q3 and Q4, supported by the strong IP Optical bookings momentum in the first half and a strong pipeline of new projects. There are a number of larger opportunities within our IP Optical business that could drive additional growth. Therefore, we have a wider range of potential outcomes for the second half of the year, which I'll comment on more later. Voice network modernization deployments with U.S. Tier 1 service providers have improved, but more slowly than we expected, moderating our second half growth rate while increasing the backlog and opportunity in 2027.

Looking at the broader market environment, we continue to see healthy investment across communications infrastructure, especially tied to building and expanding mission-critical networks, data center interconnectivity, and adoption of cloud-native technology to be able to innovate more quickly, improve cybersecurity, and support agentic AI voice deployments. From an end market perspective, as expected, sales to both service providers and enterprises in the second quarter were up significantly versus the first quarter. Total enterprise sales, which includes large enterprise, critical infrastructure, and government and defense agencies, increased 42% sequentially. Year-over-year sales were essentially flat with growth in large enterprise offsetting lower sales to federal and defense in the quarter. Total service provider revenue increased 9% sequentially in the second quarter, with both Verizon and Bharti remaining 10%+ customers.

Consolidated gross margin in the quarter was in line with our expectations, with IP Optical revenue and margins a little stronger than expected. The growth in the U.S. market contributed to the significant sequential improvement in IP Optical margins in the second quarter. Cloud and Edge margins also improved sequentially, reflecting the higher product revenue offset by continued lower professional service revenue. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $12 million, a $20 million improvement versus the first quarter, and above the midpoint of our guidance. Now a few more highlights in each of our operating segments. Starting with our IP Optical Networks business. As I mentioned, we had our strongest bookings quarter ever since the acquisition of ECI in 2020. Demand was broad-based across multiple customer segments and geographies, giving us increasing confidence as we move through the second half of the year.

Product and services revenue increased 36% sequentially in the quarter, with the largest increase coming from our optical networking Apollo solutions, which increased over 70% sequentially. Geographically, the strongest growth in the quarter was here in the U.S. with a combination of regional service provider, data center, and critical infrastructure projects. One of the most encouraging growth opportunities continues to be data center interconnect. During the quarter, we doubled the number of new projects as compared to the first quarter. These projects spanned multiple regions and customer types, including a new major award in Africa, where we will be helping our customer build an optical fiber backbone spanning several countries, connecting data centers and other services. Mission critical infrastructure also continues to be a key area of strength and differentiation for our IP Optical solutions.

Utilities, transportation providers, and government agencies continue to invest in highly secure private communications networks where reliability and resiliency remain paramount. During the quarter, we had a significant number of projects in the U.S. and EMEA regions, including the major expansion project I mentioned with one of the largest energy providers in the U.S. We continue to expand our portfolio to address this key market segment. Our solutions are a great fit with significant differentiation. We have a strong position with multiple defense agencies across Europe and the Middle East, where it's imperative that they continue to modernize and expand their secure command and control networks. Defense related revenue increased nearly 60% sequentially and year-over-year, reflecting the growing importance of secure optical transport and IP networking in these environments.

To continue addressing the significant opportunities within the defense market, we recently announced the commercial availability of our Network in a Box product offering, targeting critical network infrastructure requirements in highly challenging and rugged environments. In the Asia-Pacific region, our business in India remains strong with good visibility into the second half and significant additional growth opportunities in 2027, including a very substantial optical networking expansion project. We also closed additional opportunities across Southeast Asia in countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan, and expect further growth in the second half. Overall, demand across our IP Optical business remains healthy and increasingly diversified. The mix of opportunities includes higher value applications including data center interconnect, mission critical infrastructure, and secure communication networks, which we believe represent attractive long-term growth opportunities. Turning to our Cloud and Edge business.

Product and services revenue increased 19% sequentially, with sales to both enterprises and service providers increasing quarter-over-quarter. The majority of the sequential increase resulted from a number of new projects with large enterprise customers. In the quarter, we closed two significant voice communication infrastructure deals with major Fortune 50 companies. As I mentioned earlier, the first is a global Microsoft Teams deployment with one of the nation's largest financial institutions. It leverages our entire portfolio of SBC, policy routing, analytics, and management products deployed on-premise across multiple data centers around the world. With the increased awareness and focus on cybersecurity, our ability to constantly monitor threats and proactively address vulnerabilities via a new SecOps offering was a key factor in our selection. This will be one of our largest Microsoft Teams deployments to date.

The second is a new customer win and competitive replacement with one of the largest U.S. car manufacturers. They're initiating a global voice communications upgrade and selected Ribbon to replace a legacy platform. The other major announcement we had in the second quarter was the partnership with Salesforce, who are leveraging our cloud-native portfolio to bring voice capabilities to its Agentforce platform. This win is highly strategic as we believe there is a new market forming with the integration of AI applications and voice communication. With Salesforce, we'll benefit from the growing traction Agentforce is enjoying in revolutionizing the contact center market across the entire spectrum of small, medium, and large businesses.

As AI agents augment or even replace human agents and tasks, we expect a dramatic increase in total voice call sessions as contact center capacity will no longer be limited by human agent capacity, and instead will be driven by available GPU compute capacity. This should drive strong demand for our cloud-native SBCs, serving as voice firewalls for each AI agent. In fact, another important and long-term customer, Bandwidth, also called out the favorable tailwinds they expect from serving voice agents globally on their platform, which also leverages Ribbon technology. The cloud-native Ribbon session border controller and SIP routing engine is integrated into the Agentforce Contact Center application and deployed across multiple AWS instances to support rapid deployment and scalability.

Public cloud is increasingly becoming the infrastructure of choice for these types of applications, and we added five additional customer wins in the second quarter where AWS is the chosen deployment platform. Overall, we continue to advance our strategy of broadening the base of solutions within our Cloud and Edge segment beyond traditional voice modernization into a broader secure communications portfolio supporting cloud-native networking, AI-enabled communications, and mission-critical enterprise infrastructure. With that, I'll turn it over to Rick to provide additional financial details on our results and come back on to discuss outlook for the third quarter. Rick?

Thanks, Bruce. Good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with our consolidated financial results. In the second quarter of 2026, Ribbon generated revenue of $192 million, up 18% sequentially and down 13% year-over-year. Consolidated non-GAAP gross margin was 49.3%, increasing 350 basis points sequentially and down 280 basis points year-over-year, primarily due to lower margins in our Cloud and Edge segment and approximately $1 million of higher component and logistics costs. As we indicated on our last earnings call, we continue to expect a stronger second half, which will drive additional margin improvement. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $88 million, up $1 million year-over-year. While we continued to face FX headwinds from the stronger Israeli shekel, we were able to offset most of that impact through targeted cost savings. Adjusted EBITDA was $12 million, up $20 million sequentially and down $20 million from the prior year.

Net interest expense was $11 million in the quarter. Non-GAAP net loss was $5 million, a $15 million decline year-over-year. This resulted in a non-GAAP diluted loss per share of $0.03, down $0.08 compared to the prior year. Now let's turn to the results of our two business segments. In our IP Optical Networks segment, second quarter revenue was $82 million, increasing 30% sequentially with significant growth in North America. Year-over-year sales were down 2%, primarily due to lower sales in Europe, reflecting the end of a legacy maintenance contract in the fourth quarter of 2025, partially offset by higher sales in the America region and our European defense vertical. We delivered another strong bookings quarter with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.6x, positioning the segment for continued growth in the second half.

Second quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 35.2%, up 680 basis points sequentially and down 70 basis points year-over-year. The sequential improvement was driven by a combination of product and geographic mix, as well as improved fixed cost absorption from higher revenue. IP Optical Networks adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $6 million, improving $11 million sequentially and down $1 million versus the prior year due to slightly lower revenue. Now turning to our Cloud and Edge business. Second quarter revenue was $111 million, up 11% sequentially and down 19% year-over-year. Non-GAAP Cloud and Edge gross margin was 59.8%, improving 300 basis points sequentially and down 210 basis points from the prior year. As we noted on our first earnings call, we had retained key resources to support anticipated higher service deployments, which we have now adjusted and expect improved services margin in the second half.

Adjusted EBITDA for the segment was $18 million or 16% of revenue, improving $10 million sequentially and down $19 million year-over-year. Cash flow from operations was a use of $12 million in the quarter, driven by lower billings and lower second quarter adjusted EBITDA. We ended the quarter with $45 million in cash and our net debt leverage ratio was 4.0 times. As revenue and earnings grow sequentially in the second half, we expect our cash balance to improve. Capital expenditures totaled $5 million in the quarter. In conclusion, as expected, our second quarter results improved substantially from the first quarter. We remain focused on growing both revenue and adjusted EBIT in the second half while maintaining cost discipline, including the ability to flex our services cost structure up or down based on the timing of deployments. With that, I'll turn the call back to Bruce.

Great. Thanks, Rick. As evidenced by the stronger IP Optical sales and bookings trend, we're incrementally positive on the outlook for the business for the balance of the year and beyond, which I'll discuss more in a minute. As I mentioned earlier, we're also having very good success growing our market share in secure voice communication for enterprises across multiple use cases, including unified communications, contact center, desktop, and agentic AI applications, and have a solid backlog and pipeline of projects for the second half of the year. We continue to work closely with Verizon to re-accelerate voice switch upgrades within their network and have good alignment and engagement, although there is still more work to do to achieve the higher velocity that we're mutually targeting for the rest of the year, and even higher deployment rates in 2027.

There is a sense of urgency to go faster and capture the significant cost savings associated with the investment. We're also exploring additional catch products with several of our customers that enable even further cost savings by moving the TDM-to-IP conversion right out to the subscriber edge, completely eliminating the legacy copper infrastructure. The large voice modernization projects we have underway with several U.S. defense agencies are also progressing. We are still confident in reaching full commercial deployment this year, opening the opportunity for additional expansion business in the new government fiscal year. There's a very good pipeline of additional projects across civilian and military organizations where Ribbon is highly differentiated. We expect new wins later this year.

Given the latest view on these key voice modernization projects, we have moderated our expected revenue increase for the second half of the year, but expect a good setup for 2027. To be clear, there's still a large market opportunity over the next several years to replace legacy voice communication infrastructure with modern cloud-based technology and retire TDM voice networks, and we're positioned to capture a significant portion of the capital and operational spend. This provides a great platform to expand our base of solutions beyond traditional infrastructure into a broader secure communications portfolio supporting cloud-native networking, AI-enabled communications, and mission-critical enterprise infrastructure. As mentioned on our last earnings call, we're seeing solid momentum in the other areas of our business, which are becoming increasingly meaningful contributors and key growth pillars as our customer base broadens and communication networks continue to evolve.

The first key focus area of growth for Ribbon is in the critical infrastructure and government market sectors, where we're uniquely positioned with our voice and data portfolio. We continue to add new logos and improve our win rate across this segment, both internationally and in the U.S., with numerous energy companies and transportation providers. Sales to government and defense customers in the second quarter represented 10% of overall revenue. We're working closely with a number of large system integrators and specialized channel partners to address this large and growing market. We believe our product and service offerings maintain meaningful differentiation. The secure communications market has very unique requirements and is in the early stages of a multi-year investment cycle, replacing legacy voice and data communication infrastructure with modern software and IP networking technology.

Our second major focus area this year is targeting the exponential growth in data traffic and the massive investment in fiber and wireless network infrastructure. Here in the U.S., we've been very focused on regional service providers who are investing in fiber-to-the-home services, which contributed to our strong bookings in the second quarter. In many cases, these providers are now designing their metro transport networks to also support data center and enterprise traffic as construction moves to areas of the country where there's lower permitting risks, plentiful power availability, and lower cost of cooling infrastructure. While BEAD funding has been slow to materialize, this additional funding will only accelerate investment in this area. Similarly, many of our international IP Optical deployments are multipurpose fiber transport networks supporting fiber internet access, mobile backhaul, enterprise services, and data center interconnect.

Finally, we believe there's a new category emerging as the adoption of AI increases within the enterprise, similar in nature to the widespread use of unified communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. As customers begin integrating AI into customer engagement, collaboration, and business workflow applications, secure carrier-grade voice communications are becoming an increasingly important part of the overall architecture. While it's still early, we're seeing growing customer interest in cloud-native communication platforms that can securely connect people, applications, and AI services. This is an area where we believe Ribbon is well-positioned. Our cloud-native communications portfolio, together with our strategic partnership with AWS, provides a strong foundation to support these next-generation deployments. We have a solid pipeline of innovation related to AI voice, with a focus on enhancing the security feature set of our platforms to ensure our customers can deploy AI capabilities with confidence.

While still early, customer engagement around these opportunities continues to increase and reinforces our confidence in the long-term direction of the business. Taken together, these growth drivers represent an important evolution of Ribbon. While voice network modernization remains a large revenue opportunity, our business is becoming increasingly diversified across enterprise, digital infrastructure, mission-critical networks, and AI communications. We believe this diversification expands both our customer base and our addressable market while creating a more balanced growth profile over time. In summary, we're operating in a dynamic market with fresh tailwinds and momentum in the strategic growth areas of our business, offsetting timing delays in other areas. We remain confident in meaningful sequential improvement for the rest of the year and a stronger 2027.

With that backdrop, for the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue in a range of $215 million-$230 million. Adjusted EBITDA in a range of $26 million-$31 million. For the full year, we're updating our outlook and now expect revenue in a range of $810 million-$840 million, and Adjusted EBITDA in a range of $78 million-$88 million. Our guidance assumes approximately $2 million per quarter in increased product cost associated with higher components and logistics expenses, with the potential to partially offset through targeted price increases. Consistent with the broader industry trend, we do anticipate supply limitations in the second half of the year given the increasing demand environment for key technologies. Operator, that concludes our prepared remarks, and we can now take a few questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star key. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Company. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for the question. I wonder if you could expand a bit on the supply chain you referenced there at the end about $2 million a quarter in cost impacting you. Can you maybe peel that back a little bit in terms of where you see the most sensitivity around supply, whether it's optics or memory or high-end silicon? I'm sure it's any number of whack-a-mole areas. Thanks.

Hey, Ryan, thank you for the question. To your point, it's a number of areas. It does depend on the product to some extent. If I give three different examples. In our Cloud and Edge business, we're many times running our software on commercial off-the-shelf hardware, Dell servers, HP servers. We've certainly seen an inflation around those types of products. In that case, it's really a complete pass-through, where we're reselling those platforms integrated with our software. We're minimizing any impact around that and reducing price guarantee timelines and things like that to make sure we protect ourselves and our customers at the end of the day. A second example, around our IP routing platforms. The core silicon in that case dominates a lot of the product cost, and we've certainly seen inflation around core silicon expenses as the core manufacturing costs have gone up.

Having a long-term agreement with those suppliers and managing that carefully is really important. Memory obviously plays into that as well, as there's a considerable amount of memory in those products. Finally, as you mentioned, in our optical products, it's really around the core optical transceiver technology and managing those costs. We're taking a fairly, I'll call it surgical approach around how to manage those inflationary costs and working with customers to pass on some of those expenses. It's not a one-size-fits-all. We've got to be careful in how we manage it out into the market.

Really helpful. Thank you, Bruce. Maybe follow up, you mentioned this new initiative around subscriber edge, IP voice. I wonder how you're thinking about that relative to, is this kind of fiber or wireless offerings? I assume you don't want to be in the CPE hardware business, so how would you add value at that level? Is it with some kind of embedded software, or how are we thinking about that?

Yeah. It mostly focused around enterprise edge as opposed to subscriber or residential edge.

Got it.

That's, in general, not a space we're in, but we're definitely in the enterprise edge and have a portfolio already there today that we sell through our customers in either a sell to or a sell through model. We've expanded that portfolio and have a number of new products where, and even a larger enterprise now can preserve the legacy TDM services and move that demark point right to the edge at the enterprise so that the legacy copper or SONET infrastructure can be completely removed. We're providing a set of interfaces facing the enterprise to preserve that. That's a business we're already in today. Now we're expanding that with some new enhanced products, and the early indications are they should be pretty popular in the market and enable the full elimination of copper at that point.

That's great. Thanks so much. That's all I've got.

Thanks, Ryan.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed with your question.

Great. As it relates to Verizon, were they a 10% customer in Q2?

Yes. Yeah, they were. Christian, hey. They and Bharti were both 10%+ customers again in the quarter.

Okay, great. As we look to the second half of the year, and the increased growth, but the moderating expectation of Verizon, will Verizon still remain a 10% customer in the second half of the year?

Yeah, we believe so. The first half has obviously been a slower deployment rate, as we've talked about multiple times below the 2025 levels. We expect Q3 to be stronger and Q4 to be stronger, so we expect those to continue to increase and we expect them to increase at a rate similar to the growth in the overall business such that they would remain at 10%+. We'll see how it plays out, but that's the visibility we have today.

Great. As far as non-GAAP gross margins in the back half of the year in the IP Optical business, would you assume that that remains at the levels that we saw in Q2, or what are the pluses and minuses there?

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think we're modeling it very consistent with Q2. Maybe it's down a hair just depending on the mix, what the regional mix is. Obviously, we're absorbing some of these additional component costs and passing some of them along as well. The overall blend we expect is pretty consistent with the second quarter.

Moving to the Cloud and Edge on the non-GAAP gross margins, the improvement there, would we expect that to improve in the second half of the year from that level again or remain consistent?

Yes. We do expect some improvement in the second half of the year on Cloud and Edge. Obviously, there was a big step up Q1 to Q2, we're still below the lower to mid-60s that we were last year. We expect continued improvement in Q3 and Q4. One of the key drivers there is just incremental professional service revenue. We've talked about that had come down as the deployment rate had slowed down, we expect that to help recover margins in the second half.

Great. It sounded like last quarter you talked about 30 customers with existing Ribbon IP Optical deployments have been awarded BEAD grants. I thought I heard you say it's kind of been slow to happen or slow to be bookings and orders. Did I hear that right? Or maybe just give us a quick update on what you're seeing in BEAD for the second half of 2026.

You heard correctly on both cases. We have over 30 customers that we know have programs lined up that they'll do with us once they secure BEAD funding. It's been, I don't know what others have seen, but what we've seen is it's been a very slow adoption rate, even though approvals have gone through NTIA and through NIST. There seems to be some friction in the environment or the process to get money out into the hands and spent. Whether that's something on the funding side or resistance on the operator's side to leverage that funding, given the restrictions or the conditions that come with it's a little unclear. We have not seen a lot of BEAD funding flow into the market so far and are not really expecting much in the second half of the year.

Thank you for that clarity. My last question has to do with initial guidance at the beginning of the year at the midpoint to your current midpoint of guidance. Despite optical, or maybe you assumed optical was going to be as strong as it's turning out to be with the book-to-bill, et cetera. If we just go midpoint to midpoint, is that shortfall almost entirely Verizon?

The majority is certainly our U.S. Tier 1. I think the IP Optical, all things being equal, is playing out stronger in the second half than we'd initially projected. If you just look at Verizon's numbers in the first half, and we report that in our Q, they're probably down about 25 million in the first half of the year. That accounts for a pretty significant amount of the reduction in the full year guidance that we're giving at this point.

Perfect. Thank you for that clarity. No other questions. Thank you.

Thanks, Christian.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good afternoon. Congrats on the optical bookings in particular, and that's kind of where I want to focus here. Maybe these two questions are combined. I guess, do you expect IP Optical backlog to continue to grow through the second half of the year? Then you'd mentioned, I think a couple of big opportunities in IP Optical, I think in the context of widening the guidance range. I imagine the answer to that first question is somewhat reliant on some of these big deals coming through, or maybe not. I would just like a little more color on both fronts.

Yeah, good question, Tim. Thank you. Our objective obviously is to be able to ramp supply to kind of keep up with what we see as demand. You don't always get that right. We've got to be able to guess 6-12 months in advance on what the demand's going to be. Clearly we could have shipped more in the first half if we'd been able to supply more, given the growth in the backlog. It's good. It gives us good predictability on mix and those sorts of things. I think third quarter, our objective here is to obviously get more out the door. I'm not sure we expect backlog to grow certainly at the same rate in the third quarter. These larger deals I referenced, assuming they materialize in the fourth quarter timeframe, I think that is another catalyst for backlog growth.

That's kind of the way we see it. We've had a nice step up. We're now very focused on delivering and want to be ready for more.

Okay, maybe we can drill down on sort of the nature of some of those larger opportunities. I don't know whether that's you know, how big a factor data center interconnect is in there, or whether those opportunities lie in other verticals. Along those lines, I think you mentioned the number of DCI projects doubling in the quarter.

Right.

Just want to make sure I understand that. I think you talked about, you called out three, I think, major DCI wins. Does that mean three more or six more? Any color on those incremental wins would be appreciated as well.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we talked about three projects awarded in Q1, now we had an additional six projects in Q2. Just to provide a little more color, in many cases, it's not a dedicated DCI interconnect network. In almost all cases, except for maybe one, we're building out a flexible, high speed metro long haul, in some cases subsea, optical and IP network. They're being used for multiple purposes, particularly international. A network will handle mobile backhaul. It'll do internet broadband aggregation, in some cases, even satellite, like the Starlink example I gave. Then in almost all cases, they're now picking up regional data center traffic. They look at that as their business case. They want multiple sources of revenue to justify the investment. We're helping build these flexible networks. I referenced one in Africa, which is exactly that example.

It's a carrier of carrier example where they're providing either lit fiber services, IP layer services. It just depends on what the customer demand is. I think if we added up the projects that we had in the second quarter that included data center interconnect, it would be more than 10% of our revenue in the quarter. It's starting to show on the radar at this point.

Okay, great. Thanks. I guess last question, was that 10% of IP Optical revenue or total, I guess?

I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry. 10% of IP Optical revenue, Tim.

Okay. That's what I thought. As you look at the larger opportunities that you referenced, any way to quantify the size of that pipeline in the aggregate, in terms of the type of opportunities that you're shooting for here?

I think, the potential for us, and again, it's over a somewhat of a period of time, maybe a 12 or 18-month period, is over $50 million of incremental business with customers we're not working with today. That just sizes it for you.

Sure does. Thanks very much.

Appreciate it, Tim.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Genovese with Rosenblatt Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, this is Amol Dhaliwal, stepping in for Mike Genovese. I just have a quick question on the full-year gross margins. In Q1, you guided to 52.5%-53.5%. Now you brought it down to 51%-52%. Is this just due to the mix between optical and edge or is there anything else in there?

Yeah. Hey, Amol. Two factors there. It is mix, more IP optical revenue, which obviously carries lower gross margin, and less Cloud and Edge. Then, within the Cloud and Edge business, given the lower professional service revenue in the first half, higher costs there, that certainly impacted the profitability and gross margin. I guess the third thing I'd add is that the component cost expense. When we started the year, we probably estimated a few million dollars in the year. It's probably closer to $5 million of cost inflation on components. We'll recover some of that, I think, through pricing action, all those things contributed to the now 51%-52% gross margin estimate for the year.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dave Kang with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Just wondering, regarding ECI, whether there were any disruptions because of the geopolitical situation.

No. Hey, Dave. Team's been doing great executing and there's disruptions everywhere in the world these days it seems. The team's continued to stay focused and no disruptions to speak of at all at this stage.

Just more questions on the supply situation. How much did you leave on the table as far as first half is concerned, and will they be made up in second half?

From a component cost perspective, Dave?

Component shortages. Sounds like you were supply constrained.

Yeah. I guess, the way I look at it is, there's always something you could do more at the end of the quarter. You're always carrying backlog into the next quarter, obviously. In many cases, customers are fairly flexible. They'll take deliveries as soon as you can get it to them. I've stopped trying to quantify that per se. I pointed out in this case, just because the backlog has grown, as I mentioned, 60% since the beginning of the year. I would hesitate to put a number on it in the first half. How much could we have done if we had unlimited supply? I'm not sure what that exact number is.

Got it. Lastly, regarding IP Optical, it's still running negative as far as EBITDA is concerned. Can you just go over your plans, how are you going to turn that profitable?

Yeah. It's going to be another mission for us going into next year. As you can see, the gross margins are 200 or 300 basis points below where we had been running the last couple of years at the same revenue level. We are focused on continuing to get more efficient and pull more cost out, both within the above the gross margin COGS structure, as well as in the operational expenses, to continue to reduce the amount of revenue we need to have to get breakeven and positive. The geographical mix makes a huge difference. Some of the growth we've had over the last 12 months has come out of the Asia Pac region, which typically is just carrying a little less margin than what we get out of Europe and North America.

If we can continue on this rate to grow in these two, North American, Europe region, it helps a lot. It's a continued focus and mission here to get to a positive contribution.

Based on your bookings, actually, it sounds like since you said North America is stronger compared to other regions, it sounds like that could happen sooner rather than later.

Yeah, I think the U.S. environment was, Rick, I think about 15% of IP Optical sales in the second quarter. That's a good start. We need to keep that momentum up. That was a combination of both energy companies, which are obviously investing a lot in the infrastructure in the U.S. environment, as well as with regional service providers. It was a pretty good blend. That was up a lot from the first quarter and a reasonable amount year-over-year. We just need to keep that trend going.

Thank you.

Great. Thanks, Dave.

Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session, and therefore, I'd like to turn the floor back to Bruce McClelland for closing remarks.

Great. Well, thanks again for everyone being on the call and your interest in Ribbon. We look forward to speaking with many of you at our upcoming investor conference. Operator, thank you as well, and that concludes our call.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.

Greetings, welcome to the Ribbon Communications first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Fahad Najam, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Ribbon's first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. I'm Fahad Najam, SVP Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations at Ribbon Communications. Also on the call today are Bruce McClelland, Ribbon's Chief Executive Officer, and John Townsend, Ribbon's Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being webcast live and will be archived on the investor relations section of our website at rbbn.com, where both our press release and supplemental slides are currently available. Certain matters we will be discussing today, including the business outlook and financial projections for the second quarter of 2026 and beyond, are forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in our documents filed with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K.

I refer you to our Safe Harbor statement included in the supplemental financial information posted on our website. In addition, we will present non-GAAP financial information on this call. Reconciliations to the applicable GAAP measures are included in the earnings press release we issued earlier today, as well as in the supplemental financial information we prepared for this conference call, which again are both available on the investor relations section of our website. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Bruce. Bruce.

Great. Thanks, Fahad. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today to discuss our first quarter results and outlook for the rest of 2026. As highlighted on our last earnings call, we ended 2025 with a broadening customer base and increasing backlog, and we continue to expect a much stronger second half with meaningful improvements starting this quarter. Our first quarter revenue was in line with our expectations and consistent with the industry dynamics we outlined back in February, causing a slower than normal start to the year. Visibility into our customers' plans for the rest of the year and confidence in second half growth has improved since the beginning of the year, particularly around the specific areas we highlighted where we were being cautious.

Sales in the first quarter were near the midpoint of our guidance, with stronger than expected demand in India, particularly with Bharti Airtel, who was a 10% plus customer in the quarter. This was offset by lower sales than we anticipated the U.S. tier one service providers, which I'll comment on more in a minute. This shift in mix resulted in lower gross margins and earnings for the quarter. When comparing year-over-year, as we expected, sales were lower in both of our segments, with Cloud & Edge down 8% and IP Optical Networks down 14% in the first quarter. From an end market perspective, the majority of the year-over-year decline was due to lower sales to service providers in multiple regions.

Within the Cloud & Edge segment, sales to service providers declined approximately 5% year-over-year, primarily in the U.S. region across a number of smaller customers. Verizon remained a 10%+ customer in the first quarter. While voice network transformation activity was lower than we'd expected, impacting our first quarter results, deployment rates are increasing, and we anticipate a much stronger second half in 2026. Expansion into the Frontier footprint remains a significant incremental opportunity. Within the IP Optical segment, sales to service providers in the Asia PAC region were down year-over-year following a strong performance from the region last year. Demand in India was stronger than we initially expected, and we are increasingly confident in our outlook in that region for the year ahead.

IP Optical sales in Europe in the first quarter were lower year-over-year, primarily due to the completion of a long-term support and maintenance contract with a tier-one service provider customer, reducing our IP Optical maintenance revenue, partially offset by maintenance increases with our growing installed base. Importantly, IP Optical bookings in the quarter were strong at 1.5x, indicating a much improved quarter ahead. Within the enterprise market vertical, aggregate sales to enterprise, defense, and critical infrastructure customers declined approximately 6% in the first quarter versus last year, with lower Cloud & Edge sales to U.S. government agencies, partially offset by increased IP Optical business with international defense agencies. Voice network modernization projects with several U.S. federal agencies continued to progress towards full deployment in the coming months, and we expect further capacity expansion and new projects in the second half of the year.

These modernization projects are mission critical to our Department of Defense agencies as these legacy infrastructures are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Consolidated gross margin in the quarter was approximately 300 basis points below our expectations, primarily due to the lower network transformation professional services revenue with elevated service expenses. We believe voice modernization initiatives remain a strategic priority for service providers such as Verizon, and we expect activity to accelerate in the second half of the year. In order to support the increased work, we are deliberately retaining key resources and expertise even though revenue is lower in the first half. While this decision impacts gross margins and near-term profitability, we believe it positions us well to execute efficiently as volumes increase later in the year. This is a deliberate investment in execution readiness.

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was -$8 million below our guidance range due to lower gross profit dollars. Overall book-to-bill in the quarter was 1.1x, with IP Optical at 1.5x, supporting the increased expectations in Q2 and second half of the year. Now a few more highlights in each of our operating segments. In our IP Optical Networks business, we had a number of key wins in several strategic areas, including in the rapidly growing Data Center Interconnect space, we had three new wins across multiple geographies, including Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Two of the projects involve a regional service provider expanding their network to support data center connectivity in their regions. One of the projects is a major biotech company connecting all of their major data center locations with a new high-capacity optical network.

It's great to see our momentum picking up in this crucial high-growth area. Similarly, we had five new project awards in the quarter from major energy producers and distributors in countries such as Germany, Vietnam, Singapore, and Colombia. They are all focused on building out secure private command and control networks to keep pace with the critical nature of their business. In fact, two of the new 400 Gb networks are leveraging quantum key distribution encryption for enhanced security using our Apollo optical transport platform. In Africa, we have received an award for a major fiber network expansion across three countries, which we expect will exceed over $10 million with first revenue in the second quarter.

Here in the U.S., we now have more than 30 customers who have already deployed our IP and optical products that have been awarded BEAD grants, where we expect incremental new business once funds are finally distributed. Similarly, in Cloud & Edge segment, we had a lot of activity in the first quarter around several strategic areas. One of the key areas of focus for many enterprise and service provider customers is the adoption of cloud-native technologies to lower cost and reduce complexity, whether in their own private data centers or in public cloud. We reached full commercial deployment of our cloud-native SBC solution with a leading service provider in Japan in the first quarter and have a very extensive program underway with a tier one provider in Europe.

This is a fundamental shift in how networks are designed and how software is managed and deployed to achieve higher degrees of automation, elasticity, and reliability. Public cloud is the ultimate destination for many customers, which is why we've established a new partnership with Amazon Web Services that we recently announced at MWC in February. Our first two customers are now live and providing commercial service with our cloud-native SBC running in AWS. This is an important strategic milestone and reinforces our leadership position in cloud-native secure voice infrastructure. Over time, we see opportunities to help enable emerging agentic AI platforms to seamlessly support voice within their application environment. In the enterprise market, the financial services vertical is a key focus area for us, where we are widely deployed across many of the leading banks and insurance companies.

Within the quarter, we were excited to further expand our presence, adding a new top 20 bank to our customer base in the U.S. As mentioned on our last earnings call, we had significant voice network transformation orders in the fourth quarter, and we are executing against these new contracts. These programs typically convert to revenue over six to 12 months or longer on large deployments, which positions us for a strong second half. Finally, we continue to make good progress preparing to launch our new AIOps and Automation platform, Acumen, with lead customer Optimum, which we expect to go live later this quarter. We have a growing pipeline of customers spanning a number of different use cases, including mobile and fixed wireless services, emergency E911 services, fiber to the home internet service assurance, and several others.

With that, I'll turn the call over to John to provide additional financial details on our results and then come back on to discuss outlook for the second quarter. John?

Thanks, Bruce, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with financial results at a consolidated level. In the first quarter of 2026, Ribbon generated revenues $163 million, a decrease of 10% from the prior year, driven by the factors Bruce outlined and which I will touch on shortly in the segmental discussion. Consolidated non-GAAP gross margin was abnormally low in the quarter at 45.8%, down 280 basis points year-on-year, primarily due to lower professional services revenue with continued higher costs to support the anticipated ramp in the second half. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $87 million, an increase of $1 million year-over-year, driven by FX headwinds of approximately $4 million, offset by expense savings. This resulted in marginally higher R&D costs.

Most of the FX impact was a result of the strong Israeli shekel. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $8 million, a $14 million decrease from the prior year, driven principally by the lower revenues and gross margins. Net interest expense in the quarter was $10 million. Quarterly non-GAAP net loss was $8 million, $4 million worse year-over-year. This generated a non-GAAP diluted loss per share of $0.05, which is a decrease of $0.02 versus the prior year. Now let's look at the results for our two business segments. In our IP Optical Networks results, we recorded first quarter revenues of $63 million, a 14% decrease versus the prior year, which is driven principally by lower sales in Asia Pacific and lower maintenance revenue.

Encouragingly, we had stronger IP Optical bookings in the quarter, with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.5x, underpinning our expectations for improving top-line performance as we proceed through the year. First quarter non-GAAP gross margin for IP Optical is 28.4%, similar to last year, but lower than our target level due to the higher mix of India revenues and also fixed cost absorption. We expect this to improve materially in the second quarter and for the rest of the year. IP Optical Networks adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of $16 million, a $1.7 million higher loss than the prior year, driven by the low revenues. Now on to our Cloud & Edge business. We generated first quarter revenue of $100 million, down 8% year-over-year.

Non-GAAP gross margins were 56.8%, down 575 basis points from the prior year, primarily due to lower professional services revenues while carrying higher service costs in readiness for the anticipated second-half ramp in voice network transformation deployments. As a result, adjusted EBITDA for the segment was $8 million, or 8% of revenue, and down $12 million year-over-year on the lower revenues and gross margins. Cash flow from operations was a usage of $22 million in the quarter, resulting from the lower billings and typical seasonal employee-related expenses. Closing cash was $70 million, and our net debt leverage ratio was 2.9x. Total CapEx spend in the quarter was $3 million, and this is in line with our normal run rate.

In conclusion, we remain focused on operational execution and cost management and are confident that we will see meaningful growth in the second half of the year, improving both revenue and margins in both segments, which we expect to drive stronger profitability. With that, I'll turn the call back to Bruce.

Great. Thanks, John. As we move forward through the balance of the year, our confidence in the broader setup for the business continues to improve. While first half results remain influenced by customer timing dynamics, the demand environment across our core markets is strengthening and our pipeline continues to expand. We are making targeted investments in execution readiness so we can capitalize on the opportunities already in front of us. Importantly, we entered the year with solid momentum reflected in the strong bookings over the last six months and a healthy pipeline across service provider, enterprise, EMEA, and Asia PAC markets. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we expect meaningful revenue acceleration from enterprise and EMEA customers, continued sequential improvement at our major Tier 1 service providers, and ongoing strength in India.

In the second half, we anticipate growth across practically all regions and broad-based improvement across most of our markets, including a return to higher deployment levels at Verizon. Beyond that, we remain well-positioned to capture incremental growth opportunity from increasing traction in key growth pillars of our business. The largest market opportunity continues to be the replacement of legacy voice communication infrastructure within service provider networks with modern cloud-based technology. In addition to the large Verizon project, in the fourth quarter, we had more than $50 million of bookings from more than 12 service provider customers, where we were replacing legacy voice switch infrastructure with modern software-based systems. These projects will continue for most of the year, and we anticipate a re-acceleration of our Ribbon program in the second half of the year.

In a growing number of cases, customers are choosing to move to a cloud-native technology stack, either deployed in their own private data centers or in a public cloud environment. Ribbon is certainly the technology leader in this area. The second key focus area of growth for Ribbon this year is in the enterprise and government market sectors, where we are uniquely positioned with our voice and data portfolio. We expect this to be a very strong segment for us this quarter, with a number of large enterprise projects across both our IP optical and secure voice portfolio. Within the U.S. government sector, we have several large voice modernization projects underway where we are heads down the first half of the year, migrating end users onto a new cloud-based platform and anticipate new opportunities and further capacity growth in the second half of the year.

Our third major focus area this year is the exponential growth in data traffic and the massive investment in broadband infrastructure. We have a significant number of projects already underway in the second quarter, as highlighted by the strong book-to-bill in Q1. This includes several major network upgrade projects in Europe and Africa, further growth in India, large projects in the Asia PAC region, and continued strength with defense agencies in Europe. Finally, our Acumen AIOps initiatives continue to generate strong customer interest, with several proof-of-concept discussions progressing well across multiple target use cases. An integration of secure carrier-grade voice capability with emerging AI and agentic AI platforms is gaining traction. This is an area where Ribbon is uniquely differentiated.

Our recently announced partnership with Amazon Web Services is an important strategic milestone and reinforces our leadership position in cloud-native secure voice infrastructure. This partnership is already generating increased customer engagement and pipeline activity. Overall, we remain confident in the broader setup for the year and continue to expect stronger performance starting this quarter. Based on the foregoing, for the second quarter, we expect revenue in a range of $185 million-$195 million and adjusted EBITDA in a range of $9 million-$14 million. In summary, the market dynamics we discussed 90 days ago are unfolding as anticipated, and we remain confident in our outlook for accelerating performance in the second half of 2026.

Before we open up for questions, I just wanted to take a moment to highlight we have also made an announcement this afternoon that John will be leaving the company for another opportunity back in the telecom services segment. While I'm sorry to see John leave and fully understand his decision, I'm very excited to announce the promotion of Rick Marmurek to the role of Ribbon Chief Financial Officer. Rick has been an important leader in the company for more than 15 years, playing a key role in building our global finance organization. He is absolutely the right person for the job and will help drive the next phase of execution for the company. John, we wish you well on your next endeavor.

Thanks, Bruce. I'd really like to say I've enjoyed my time here at Ribbon. I remain confident that the company has a bright future. Rick, I know you'll do a great job. Congratulations.

Thanks, John and Bruce. I'm very excited about this new opportunity and look forward to continuing to work closely with the teams across the business to drive sustainable growth and operational excellence.

Great. Well, thanks, Rick. Operator, why don't we now open up for a few questions?

We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask your question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Genovese with Rosenblatt Securities.

Thanks. First let me just say, John, congratulations on the new opportunity. It was nice working with you at Ribbon and just look forward to staying in touch. I guess, Bruce, the question that I'll start with is you seem to have a lot of confidence of improvement in the second quarter. The Verizon Cloud & Edge sounds like it doesn't really get meaningfully better until the second half of the year. Can you just talk more about, you know, Verizon's being stronger in the second half of the year than the first half of the year and just more detail on that?

Hey, Mike. I know what John says thank you, by the way, with me. I think you read it correctly. You know, we don't expect a significant increase in revenue here in the second quarter, with our top customer. Although I think the, you know, the improvement in deployment rates will progressively improve throughout the quarter. You know, the growth in the second quarter is focused in a number of different areas. In particular, we expect a very strong quarter from enterprise customers in North America. We've got a great set of programs there that are both in the Cloud & Edge piece of the business, as well as in our IP Optical Networks business around some of the critical infrastructure deployments we have going here in the North America market.

That's a big part of the growth. The EMEA region, both kind of continental Europe as well as Africa, we're looking forward to a pretty strong quarter. I think that's where, you know, the step-up is coming from here in the second quarter. As we get into third and fourth quarter, in addition to growth around Verizon growth relative to the first half of the year, obviously, you know, we've got a variety of different increases expected from U.S. federal market and additional capacity expansions there, growth in the Asia PAC region and again, even a stronger second half in Europe. It's pretty broad-based and a nice funnel ahead of us this year.

Great. Okay, great. I noticed on your presentation, there's a slide about the number of data centers in rural areas, which I find interesting, but I'm wondering about the correlation between that and, you know, it seems like what would be more compelling is not the location of the data centers, but how many are being built by sort of regional service providers versus hyperscalers? I'm just curious if there is a relationship there between the location being rural and the regional service provider? I mean, are we supposed to draw? Like, can you just help me draw these conclusions?

I think the correlation isn't so much the regional service providers building the data center. It's leveraging the network infrastructure they're putting in place for their fiber to the home and capacity expansions to then pick up additional traffic and interconnect into more regional data centers as they build out into those areas. You know, as you know, I think that's kind of our sweet spot is with the regional operators and, you know, I even mentioned the, you know, the growing opportunity around BEAD where funding's available to be able to build out middle mile capacity.

It's a matter of how do you put as much traffic on that as you can. We see that in the North America market, and then we see it in a variety of international markets as well, where the, you know, the fiber connectivity is coming from an operator or a service provider, not necessarily just dedicated, dark fiber circuits.

Great. Then finally from me before I pass it on, could you just flesh out more for me the agentic opportunity and how you guys support that and play into agentic AI? It's a little bit of a newer part of the story, so I'd like to be brought up to speed there.

I'd like to think of it in kind of two different aspects. One is certainly this new platform we're launching called Acumen, where we're basically working with our current customers to add an agentic AI-driven operations center, if you will, to help them manage their network, create their own agents to be able to automate what today is done, you know, in a more human way into a much more automated way. We're building on top of a couple of different platforms we already have deployed, in particular our analytics platform, which is pretty widely deployed, collecting vast amounts of information off the network and then feeding that into an agentic layer, into a large language model, and basically learning different characteristics of the network and being able to take advantage of that.

That's, that's one aspect of it. As I mentioned, we're launching late this quarter kinda commercially with our lead customer, Optimum, here in the U.S. The second part of how we see an opportunity for us is as the use of agentic AI becomes more prevalent in enterprises, you know, we think the connection between the user and the agentic applications will be voice driven. There's, you know, a need to basically protect that boundary and be able to facilitate the voice traffic, similar to what you would do in a Microsoft Teams or Zoom or a Webex type application. We are able to repurpose our voice platforms into that type of use case.

The first launch customers on the AWS deployment that I talked about are effectively using our session border controller in that way to interconnect into their agentic AI applications. We think, you know, there's a real opportunity there as, you know, new types of agentic AI platforms are deployed for us to have a play there very, again, very similar to how UCaaS platforms are working.

Great. Thanks so much.

Yeah. Thank you, Mike.

As a reminder please press star one from your telephone keypad. Our next question is from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets.

Hey, good afternoon. Sorry about that. You talked about couple of the product drivers for the Q2, the sequential growth in Q2, but I don't know if you talked about that from a segment standpoint, whether you expect, you know, a meaningful difference in growth rate by segments. You've had 1.5 book-to-bills in each of them in the last quarter or two. Any color there, and then I follow?

Yeah. No, good question, Tim. We expect growth in both segments here in the second quarter versus the first quarter. As you just pointed out, the bookings over the last six months, you know, combined have been very solid for us. We're expecting both segments to be growing. I do believe the IP Optical segment will grow more than the Cloud & Edge segment in the second quarter. You know, as I mentioned, in North America, we've got a number of great opportunities for growth here in the various different markets I mentioned.

You know, I highlighted a number of kinda interesting wins in the first quarter that helped build the backlog, some around data center interconnect as we start to deploy our new 9408 optical transport platform into that market, and then a number of critical infrastructure. Again, a kind of a broad range of different customers, Colombia, Vietnam, Europe, Germany. You know, all of those are kinda contributing to the growth here in the second quarter. I think Cloud & Edge would obviously be growing faster, you know, as the Verizon deployments kinda pick back up again. And that'll be, you know, a key part of the growth into the second half of the year.

Okay. Just as an aside, I just wanna check in. Those sound like absolute dollar comments. I know IP Optical Networks is smaller, so I'm gonna check on that versus percentages. The main follow-up question was, you know, if we look at Q1 results, is it fair to look at the year-on-year declines Cloud & Edge? Is that, you know, mostly Verizon or not at all? I know they stayed on the 10% list, I assume they are down pretty good. Then maybe a little more in-depth on the IP Optical Networks decline, year-over-year. I guess India was up, so what was the real weakness there?

Yeah. Three good questions. The first one around dollars versus percentages for second quarter. I think from a dollars perspective, the IP Optical Networks business will be up more from a dollars or revenue perspective. I think that translates probably into a larger percentage increase at the same time. Yeah, we don't guide, you know, each individual segment, but I think that's the trend we're expecting to see in the second quarter. The question on kind of year-over-year, what was down in the first quarter, was it Verizon versus other things. Actually, Verizon was perhaps the smallest piece year-over-year from Q1 last year to Q1 this year. It was really actually not one specific thing. It was a number of kind of smaller projects that we had with different service providers.

I think we were down 5%, 6% in the first quarter on Cloud & Edge. It wasn't a big drop, and it wasn't one individual customer, kind of a series of smaller things. I think in the last question, which was similar around the IP Optical decline, the Asia PAC region in the first quarter, including India, was fairly consistent. You know, maybe off $1 million or $2 million, something like that. Very consistent year-over-year, with India being the strongest piece of that market for us. The weaker parts was really around the European market and a little bit North America as well. I think Europe was the kind of the largest contributor to the decline in the first quarter.

You know, our business in Europe, in particular, is concentrated with a whole variety of different types of critical infrastructure customers, railways, oil and gas, big in defense. You know, those projects tend to be project-based. You know, you win something, you complete it, and then you go, you know, find the next program. It can be a little bit lumpy. As you've seen, though, with the bookings metric, clearly that was a real positive and, you know, sets us up for, you know, stronger growth here in the second, third quarter.

That was my last question, actually. Talking about that IP Optical book-to-bill, and you guys highlighted what's happening data center interconnect-wise, you know, pretty significantly here in the report. You know, say you gave us an order of magnitude, I think, on this contribution from your big Africa deal. I wonder, you know, to what extent do you see either what you've booked order-wise or the opportunity pipeline or however you'd wanna term it in terms of additional color, how you would look at this DCI opportunity in terms of materiality relative to either book-to-bill or the overall IP Optical business? Thanks.

Yeah. You know, the data center interconnect space was not a big focus area for us, say, three or four years ago. You know, we really, as you know, have been very focused on. You know, we can't do everything, we're focused in on the critical infrastructure segment, where, you know, highly secure, robust, capabilities are really crucial. That was a real sweet spot. Building out our capabilities around middle mile, IP MPLS, and the access and aggregation layers of the network, which is one of the big strengths in our India deployments. The third leg in the stool really for us is around data center interconnect.

You know, we kinda started in full earnest last year with the launch of two new platforms, our 2700 series, which is a very dense aggregation platform, for aggregating 400 Gb IP clients. The other optical transport platform, which was built for the data center, basically built for enterprise, different form factor, you know, a compact modular sled design that allows us to leverage pluggable optics. Those were the two new products that we launched last year focused around data center. That's allowed us to start to generate wins and kinda grow into that market. Relative to the first two markets, it's small for us today, but we've, you know, improved our go-to market to match the new products that have come out.

You know, we do think it's a stronger growth path for us. It's a little hard for us to forecast revenue yet at this point, because we're kind of, you know, building wins as we go. You know, I think you'll hear a lot more about it from us in the future. Obviously, there's a ton of spend going into data centers, and we wanna be able to go after that market, both through our service provider customers as well as direct into different types of data centers.

Great. Thanks very much.

Okay. Thank you, Tim.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to Bruce McClelland for any closing remarks.

Okay, great. Thanks, Paul.

Oh, there's one question there.

Maybe, maybe Russ has squeezed in on the, on the, question line. Paul, if you can check with him.

Yep. Our next question is from-

Awesome. Great. Great. Hey, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. Is it fair to say, Bruce, that visibility into the sustainability on the India CapEx side has improved since last quarter, and that's largely intact now?

Yes. You know, on the last call, I talked about really three different areas that we were being cautious on around the growth in India, around plans with Verizon and others around network transformation. We feel like we've got, you know, better improved visibility. Clearly, you know, the India market is remaining very strong. In fact, it was a catalyst for us to do well in the revenue line for Q1. I think we're feeling, you know, better. I think the enterprise market, both critical infrastructure on our IP Optical side and then large enterprise around our secure voice looks really robust for the rest of the year.

The final area that I, you know, I've been, you know, just cautious on is around the U.S. federal space. I mentioned, you know, we have a couple of large programs that need to get into full deployment, so we can start adding capacity to that. Those were the areas that I think we were more cautious on and feel better about all of those as we sit here kind of 90 days later.

Thank you.

Okay, Russ. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Bruce McClelland for any closing remarks.

Well, great. Thanks for everyone joining us today. You know, just to reiterate, I guess the key messages here, you know, we, as we just summarized, I think we feel like we have good visibility going into the rest of the year, starting with improvements here in the second quarter. Look forward to keeping everyone updated. We have a whole slate of investor conferences over the next couple of months, and look forward to keeping you updated with our progress. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you again for your participation.