Juan Oscar Rodriguez
Analyst · Capstone Investments
Thank you, John, and I want to thank all of our investors for joining this call. Over the course of the past 5 quarters, we have taken specific steps which we believe will position Extreme to deliver increased shareholder value. We have delivered new award-winning products that we believe are best of breed for the markets they serve, and we have focused our marketing to drive higher levels of customer and market awareness to position Extreme as a leading competitor in specific high-growth vertical markets. In fiscal 2012, we adjusted our cost structures to enable us to deliver increased operating income without revenue growth. In Q1 of fiscal '13, we took steps to retool our sales force and add new sales leadership, which will result in an increase to our sales expense. As we progress into fiscal 2013, we continue to review our cost structures and align to the current global economic environment. We are refining our cost structures in Q2, and we expect to reestablish our business model to drive 10% operating income at revenue levels in the low-80s. Beyond the focus on controlling our cost structures, we are focused on driving revenue and market share growth, and we believe that these combined efforts will enable us to drive increased operating income and cash flow. While we were able to meet our guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2013, I want all of our investors to know that I am not pleased with our revenue performance, and we are taking steps to improve sales productivity. With new leadership and sales staff in place, we are identifying areas of low performance, and we are taking steps to improve sales velocity and reduce cost where appropriate. In the quarter, we added new experience and sales leadership to our teams to successfully address larger more complex data center and cloud opportunities. In support of this, during the quarter, we added new data center specific sales staff in North America and Europe, and we hired experienced channel leadership in these geos. In the last week of the quarter, we added Nancy Shemwell as our new EVP of Global Sales, and she hit the ground running as a key part of our executive team this month. On the product front, Extreme continues to focus our engineering investment in what we believe are key leading market technologies, resulting in increased market share. As an example, over the past 12 months, our 10 Gigabit Ethernet port bookings increased by 180%, more than double the industry average. The growth in 40-gig port bookings also reflected this trend, and we booked over 1,000 ports for the first time during the quarter, although this is still an early market. The growth in 10-gig and 40-gig technologies, based on product deployments in mobility, enterprise and cloud customers included shipments of key data center products like our flagship product, the BlackDiamond X8 and the X670 top-of-rack switch. Current Extreme customers deploying the BDX8 for the first time included O'Reilly Auto Parts and e-research [ph], both in North America, and a high-performance computing win at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France. We also deployed these open fabric products at SRCE which is the computing center at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. The SRCE win was notable in that the customer selected our products for both high-performance computing, as well as cloud services, and in that it was a solid win against established competitors, Cisco and Juniper, and a start up newcomer, Arista. In Asia, Samsung Electronics, a long time Extreme customer is deploying the BDX8 amongst a host of other equipment as a part of their new RFI research and development facility. To drive increased market awareness and grow sales pipelines, we have launched key marketing programs and expanded our technical industry interoperability. In both Europe and North America, we have launched lead generation programs designed to drive customer awareness and overall corporate visibility. In North America, we launched a mobile Executive Briefing Center that is partially funded by our select channel partners and will be on the road for the next year bringing products and solutions demonstrations directly to local customer venues. To further grow our data center business, we are taking solutions-based approaches that includes building interoperability, proven with some the most notable technology leaders in this space. During the quarter, we achieved certification to connect what is known as the Vblock solution, brought to market by VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment. VCE consists of Cisco, EMC, VMware, and we are the first Ethernet switch that may connect to the Vblock data replication and disaster recovery applications. And in addition to several industry recognitions we received earlier in this year, this week, we announced that CRN Magazine has awarded us the 2012 Tech Innovator of the Year in Enterprise Networking award for the BlackDiamond X8. We believe the many accolades received this year for our products and innovation will generate increased awareness with channel partners and customers alike. In the quarter, we also announced key offerings to establish our market position in software defined networks. Our early BDX wins, solutions focus, and our SDN thought leadership is beginning to pay off in the quantity and quality of customer proposals we're requested to bid, and also corresponds to the awareness increase by Fortune 500 CIOs as noted by recent independent surveys. And in our recent report on SDN, Infonetics cited Extreme as one of the top 3 vendors driving SDN solutions awareness for enterprise IT customers, along with Cisco and Dell. We expect these trends should have a positive impact on our pipelines and revenue in fiscal '13. Also in the United States, we announced a partnership with US-Ignite, a U.S. global and government initiative, designed to bring new and innovative applications based on high-speed connectivity to communities both large and small. US-Ignite is focusing their work on software defined networking, an area in which we've invested for over the past 18 months, and an architecture which we believe we have a first-mover advantage in based on the flexibility of our XOS network operating system, our unique hardware platform designs, and our focus on interoperability and open standards. We believe strongly that SDN, rather than completely commoditizing switching, will require high-performance operating systems, a high performance hardware set and even closer links amongst the applications and controllers. In the quarter, we announced SDN partners in this space, including application controller vendors Big Switch and NEC. We continue to invest approximately 60% of our R&D budget into development of data center and SDN products, and we expect data center sales to increase our average deal size, increase the product margins and drive greater revenue growth. Turning now to geographic performance in what proved to be a challenging quarter in some regions, we were nonetheless able to demonstrate profitability and growth in ports shipped. Although we are seeing some weakness in Western Europe due to decreased customer demand, both Asia-Pacific and North America delivered year-over-year growth. Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America all continued to exhibit strength in product sales, and emerging markets have recently been a catalyst for our growth. Brazil continues to show strength in this quarter as well. We believe the demand for Ethernet infrastructure minimizes customer total cost of ownership and maximizes productivity through services convergence, and is a key ingredient to productivity growth in emerging markets. On the competitive front, we continue to win against larger competitors. In the quarter, we realized competitive wins in data center and campus deployments. We are beginning to experience larger deal sizes in the data center, and we expect this trend to continue. In the campus edge, the new SummitX440 product line, which we introduced in the spring, delivers a highly competitive campus edge product set. These products were recently verified by the Tolly Group as a top performer at the network edge based on key features, including network intelligence and identity management, line break performance and lower power consumption. While we are beginning to see increased price pressure with the traditional premium competitors now aggressively seeking revenue growth, we expect that our continued focus on cost reduction will help us maintain our price competitiveness in the campus edge, while we work to expand our data center revenue sales. Focusing on vertical markets. In Q1, we won a significant data center deal at Kaisha [ph], one of Brazil's leading financial institutions. This was a hard won success against Cisco and is a key deployment for our flagship product, BDX8. In the U.K., we deployed for the first time at Infinity STC, another major data center. We also are beginning a new deployment at a major institution in Japan, in conjunction with a new partner, and we are pleased that our new sales formation in the country is beginning to take hold. Turning to the education vertical, our wins included deployments at Rosemont, Cedar Cliff local schools, and New Ulm Schools all in the United States. We also had combined wired and wireless LAN wins in EMEA, which included the King's School in the U.K., where the competition included Cisco and HP. Other campus wins included Music, a hospitality deployment in Mexico, and Arctic Cat in the United States. In Russia, our switches are now -- now support the national blood donation services of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency, and we have also deployed our hardware in Sochi in the support of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. To further expand our campus and education solutions, we announced the first phase of our physical security initiative during the quarter. This solution was delivered in conjunction with some of the key technology leaders in this space that include vendors: Axis, for IP cameras; and Milestone, for video management solutions. The use of Ethernet as a common infrastructure for all applications such as video security and building controls expands on our core competencies in delivering highly resilient networking solutions and is applicable to many verticals, including traditional enterprise and education campuses, as well as ports of entry and heavy industry. In the mobility and service provider vertical, we saw softer demand from our traditional service provider partner base for the quarter. Yet, we continued to expand shipments in support of Korea Telecom's LTE network. Korea Telecom is one of our largest X670 open fabric deployments to date and provides the switching foundation for the first -- one of the first Voice over LTE deployments in the world. In summary, Extreme is now focused on driving revenue growth for FY '13, while controlling our expense lines. We have new sales leadership in place, and are working to drive increased sales productivity. We expect to leverage what we believe is a superior product portfolio, increased market awareness and an increasingly refined cost structure to drive revenue growth, which we believe can provide increasing leverage to the bottom line in FY '13. I look forward to keeping all of you updated on our progress over the coming year. And now I'll turn the call back over to John to discuss guidance for Q2. John?