Patrick Harshman
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets
Well, thanks, Blair, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today, particularly on short notice.
Given the softer than expected preliminary second quarter results and outlook for the third quarter, we thought it important to share this information with you as soon as possible. At the same time, we also believe it was appropriate to take enough time to really understand and be able to share with you the dynamics impacting our business, and that's our goal here on this call.
As we'll explain, we believe the softness impacting our video business is primarily a precursor to the market move to the new video technologies we've targeted for growth. That is to move to virtualized infrastructure, where our dear [ph] pipeline has grown much faster than expected. The adoption of the new HEVC compression standard and the upgrade of broadcast centers to support Ultra HD. A secondary source of challenge during the quarter was unforeseen weakness in the EMEA. And we'll discuss both of these dynamics in some detail.
With that, though, let's first turn to Slide 3 and take a look at our preliminary results for the quarter, which really reflect the disappointing setback to our near-term financial growth agenda. Revenue is now expected within the range of $108 million to $110 million. And business in the Americas continues to outpace last year's results, and results at Asia Pacific are largely in line with expectations. EMEA fell short of expectations with several large projects deferred in the final weeks of the quarter.
In terms of customer verticals, business from our service provider customers were solid, reflecting a very strong quarter in our Cable Edge business, while business from broadcasting media customers was softer than we anticipated. Our second quarter bookings were approximately $113.4 million, down about 10% year-over-year, while our first half bookings were up approximately 1% for the first half of last year. Relative to our expectations, EMEA was the primary source of bookings weakness. Our book-to-bill, however, was slightly above 1%, as our service business continues to grow and we also continue to see a strong mix of project-based deals. And consequently, our backlog and deferred revenue finished at approximately $132 million, up about $6 million from this time at the beginning of the quarter.
Gross margin for the quarter is expected within the range of 49% and 51%. Reflecting the mix shift to more Cable Edge products and specifically not fully licensed NSG Pro blades [ph] and lower-than-expected video product revenue. With lighter revenue and gross margin, we anticipate non-GAAP earnings in the range of $0.00 to $0.02 a share. However, we generated healthy cash from operations and repurchased 3.6 million shares during the quarter for approximately $25.7 million. Carolyn will provide further details and commentary on these operating results in just a few minutes.
Now turning on Slide 4. As context from my comments in the quarter and our outlook, I'd like to refer back to the strategic overview we presented at our Investor and Analyst Day in mid-May. At that time, we reframed our business as being the sum of our related but distinct video and Cable Edge businesses. And we detailed the disruptive transitions impacting and our corresponding new strategic platforms addressing each of these strategic markets. Despite a choppy and disappointing second quarter, we believe our strategy remains sound, our technology and competitive fundamentals positive, and that we remain solidly positioned to accelerate earnings growth in the mid to long term. So how do we reconcile a weak Q2 with this continuous strategic conviction?
So let's turn to Slide 5, and I'll describe what we see going on in each of our 2 businesses. So the video business was our problem child in the quarter and this was due to a combination of market dynamics and execution challenges. As you may recall, during the first month of the quarter in mid-April we announced our new architecture and platform for the entire video chain, all virtualized on software, which we call VOS. In an industry steep to proprietary hardware and bespoke features, we expected customers to be positive about the vision but slower in planning for adoption. Well, as the quarter progressed, we were surprised to see more customers wanting to move in this direction more quickly than we anticipated. That as a consequence, our VOS deal pipeline is actually running significantly above where we expected it to be. And that's certainly the good news here.
The bad news is that from -- for a service provider and media customer, transitioning to a cut [ph] server and data center operational model is a major change requiring extensive planning and preparation. Consequently, our second quarter bookings and our expectation for third quarter bookings have been negatively impacted by this acceleration of serious interest and our customers transitioning to virtualized software.
Now with many of our Tier 1 customers, this virtualization transition pause is actually being exacerbated by coincident planning for the refresh wave to Ultra-High Definition or 4K and for the next generation of video and compression known as HEVC. Specifically during the quarter, for the first time we saw several of our Tier 1 broadcast and service provider customers actively engaged in the planning process to deliver Ultra HD and HEVC services. The Sony advertising blitz for their 4K TV is around the World Cup in Brazil further bolstered this effect.
Now at the same time, but quite separately, we also experienced an unexpected slowdown within the EMEA region over the last month of the quarter. Specifically, we saw several anticipated deals get postponed. Now EMEA, for us, has a strong -- has been a strong performer over the past couple of years. And this change in business conditions certainly heightened our caution as we enter the back half of the year.
Turning now to execution. We saw the newly announced PURE Compression Engine, announced as a component of our VOS virtualized architecture and platform win its first video quality shoot-outs against the best of the rest in the industry. Now this is significant and most of our Tier 1 competition is proprietary hardware-based. And therefore were positioned uniquely, as offering both unrivaled video compression efficiency and future-looking virtualization capability. But based on this positive traction and despite our customers operational transition challenges, we do expect a couple of our most advanced customers to be installing and deploying VOS technology by the end of the quarter.
Also as mentioned a moment ago, we've seen accelerated market interest in both Ultra-High Definition and HEVC. And specifically during the quarter, we won an important contract to supply the world's largest transcoding firm with HEVC encoders in support of the Ultra HD video delivery streamed over the top. This marks our first scale Ultra HD and HEVC win, further illustrating Harmonic's distinct technology leadership in video quality and compression, which I see becoming a real and increasingly important competitive advantage.
Now in the context of this call, I certainly don't want to overstate our success. These new technology trends have undoubtedly created more turbulence in our business than we anticipated just 1 month ago. Some of our largest and most thoughtful customers are stepping back to actively consider new approaches to video delivery. And with VOS in its first substantiation, Electra XVM, we're seeing sales cycle elongate as customers turn their attention to the operational aspects of shifting hardware-based video processing infrastructures in the software. And looking ahead to Ultra HD and HEVC, we're also seeing customers pull back spending plans, as they prepare new deployments based on these new technologies.
So from a broader strategic sense, we're very pleased to see this activity and are encouraged by the clear trends. We're seeing a near-term transition trough in our business and this is an area where we will sharpen our execution to navigate successfully.
Now finally regarding the video business, we recognized during the quarter the breadth and complexity of our business in Europe, Middle East and Africa across both developed and emerging markets warranted structural changes to enable better coverage, visibility and ultimately growth. Consequently, 2 weeks ago, we've reorganized our EMEA sales organization, and after some stabilization, we expect improved visibility and to be better positioned to again drive our performance across this region.
So let's pivot now to our Cable Edge business where we're quite pleased with our preliminary top line results. People are really starting to see the heavy investment we've made in this business over the past 2 years beginning to pay off. From an overall market perspective, cable operators worldwide are deploying much more powerful and user-friendly content navigation guides for accessing their own content, driving the accelerated consumption of traditional video-on-demand services. And with new cooperative agreements between cable operators and over-the-top service providers, bit rates and stream quality is increasing, creating demand for scalable modular CMTS edgeQAMs. These and similar trends are accelerating the shift to CCAP-enabled architectures. And as some of you already know, CCAP is a term used by the cable industry to describe a flexible all IP-converged video and data network. And here Harmonic's NSG Pro is increasingly at the forefront of this investment cycle, representing an eventual addressable market of roughly $1.6 billion and really 5x the traditional edgeQAM market we've historically served.
Now as the shift to CCAP occurs, we're also seeing growing momentum for Layer 2 virtualized CCAP-based solutions. Further enhancing the overarching theme of enabling flexible and cost-effective network capacity. In this light, we see ourselves well positioned for both centralized and distributed architectures with our NSG Pro and the more recently introduced NSG Exo. Both of these platforms leverage the virtues of standards-based Ethernet connections to existing edge router ports and control plane software in the network, simplifying operations and reducing costs for our cable customers.
So with that background, let's talk a little bit more about our progress executing on our edge plan and the growth that we're seeing. The second quarter represents our third volume production shipping quarter for the NSG Pro platform. In early June, Infonetics Research asserted that during the first quarter, NSG Pro was the only CCAP-enabled product which gained share on a like-for-like revenue basis. So we remain very encouraged by this early success and I'm pleased to report that the momentum for the NSG Pro, in particular, accelerated throughout the quarter. Once again, contributing meaningfully to the strengthening of our overall Cable Edge business. Although I regret not having the precise revenue number to share with you today, we do know that we delivered a record quarter in Cable Edge sales in Q2. And as we enter the third quarter, our pipeline of new Cable Edge opportunities was quite healthy.
Now as a reminder, initial shipments of the NSG Pro do yield well below our corporate average margins. We've been seeding the market with our NSG Pro for the past 7 months, while gaining valuable real estate along the way. In the second quarter, we shipped a record number of hardware plots [ph]. This real estate is valuable because once the NSG Pro is inserted within the network, it can grow and expand capacity by adding more cards or just software licenses, which turn on more capacity for the cable operator and in turn yield very high margin sales for us in the future. So again we're quite pleased by the early success and extensive footprint we're establishing with the NSG Pro platform.
Now earlier, I believe, we briefly touched on our Layer 2 virtualized distributed CCAP solution, the NSG Exo, which we'll begin shipping later this quarter. We introduced this product in the market in mid-May, and I'm pleased to report that customer engagement and reception has been quite positive. This distributed approach to CCAP extends our ability to penetrate the market by placing DOCSIS functionality closer to subscriber, while let again leveraging standards-based Ethernet connections to existing edge routers in the network, providing the means for cable operators to not only drive more bandwidth deeper in the network, but further reduce the operational complexity of more traditional DOCSIS deployment scenarios. So we see a growing pipeline for this new project and anticipate the NSG Exo to contribute incremental revenue to our Cable Edge business in the back half of this year and throughout 2015.
Finally, regarding key milestones directed towards achieving CMTS upstream functionality on the NSG Pro platform, I'm pleased to say we remain on schedule to deliver production-ready cards into customer labs by the end of this year. So summarizing our Cable Edge business, our edgeQAM and CCAP program results certainly represented a bright spot in the business throughout the quarter. And we see the network footprint we've acquired and solid demand trends validating the investments we've been making, capture a greater share of this growing market.
So let's now turn to Slide 6. We're -- listen, in light of the softer-than-expected performance during the quarter, I really want to step back and summarize our focused efforts and direction in the last couple of years. If you go back to 2012, we view this CCAP market as a solid opportunity for our business and we charted a course toward an aggressive but disciplined investment process to deliver both the NSG Pro and the NSG Exo to address the CCAP business. Along the way, we stayed close to our customers, understood their requirements, and received outstanding feedback as we chipped away feature development. As our first CCAP product is near completion, our cable customers paused purchases of our heritage edgeQAM products, and many of you remember that our Cable Edge business flagged during 2013. Well, today, our Cable Edge business is seeing strong market appeal and we're in the very early innings of an all-IP and data-network convergence that we're clearly positioned to benefit from.
With all that said, the same story we believe can be painted for our video business. The investments we've been making in virtualization, next-generation compression, Ultra HD and HEVC are solid. Our customer base is actively engaged and our pipeline is building faster than we anticipated. Here again, as we await customer planning cycles that incorporate these new technologies, our VOS platform, Ultra HD and HEVC technologies, our video business visibility and deal flow is likely to be impacted and somewhat turbulent, just as we saw with the Edge business a year ago. However, as that recent history has demonstrated, we still have a clear view to ensuing success and strong demand trends ahead. So we're clearly disappointed in our second quarter results and near-term outlook, our strategic direction remains focused and firmly intact. We're armed with a competitively differentiated and largely refreshed product offering, we're prepared now with a growing pipeline of exciting new business opportunities and a stronger than ever leadership position in the markets we address. And as such, we're no less optimistic about what lies ahead and ultimately, the achievement of the operating objectives that we've outlined to you.
And on that note, I'll now turn the call over to you, Carolyn, to talk more about the preliminary results of the quarter and our financial outlook.