Juniper Networks delivered better than expected results during its first quarter, with revenue growing 17% year-over-year despite bookings seeing a significant drop from the same quarter last year.

Total Juniper product sales grew 23% year-over-year and the vendor saw growth across all customer solutions and all geographies, results that CEO Rami Rahim said “reflect a healthy customer demand for solutions, as well as the improvements in the availability of supply.”

However, Rahim said total orders softened during the quarter, declining more than 30% year over year. He attributed this to Juniper customers across verticals more closely scrutinizing budgets and project deployment timeline due to global macro uncertainties.

“While order cancellations continue to remain extremely low, as supply improves, we're seeing more customers reschedule delivery dates to better match current project timelines,” he said during the company’s earnings call. “This is proving to be particularly true in the cloud vertical, where certain customers are digesting prior purchases, and we saw a series of projects pushed to future periods during the March quarter.”

These delays may negatively impact Juniper’s ability to grow its cloud business in the current year. Still, Rahim said based on conversations with customers the delays are “a function of timing” and he remains confident in the vendor’s ability to achieve long-term growth in the cloud space.

Juniper CFO Ken Miller assured concerned investors that the drop in bookings is more reflective of supply chain restraints easing and not an indication of the vendor’s overall health in the market.

“As a reminder, in Q1 2022 we were still getting a lot of early orders as customers were dealing with supply constraints and extended lead times,” Miller said. “In Q1 2022 our product orders were over $1.1 billion. Now, customers are consuming those early orders and are no longer placing orders as supply constraints have improved and lead times are shortening.”

The Juniper execs maintain that customer ordering patterns are normalizing and expect to see a return to more traditional seasonal patterns on a sequential basis starting in the second quarter.

“Our year-over-year order declines should improve on a go-forward basis and return to year-over-year growth potentially as soon as Q4 of this year,” Rahim said. “From a vertical basis, I remain extremely encouraged by the momentum we're seeing in our enterprise business, which grew nearly 30% year-over-year in Q1 with double digit revenue growth in both the campus and branch and the data center.”

As of the most recent quarter, the enterprise accounted for more than 40% of Juniper’s total revenue and represented both its largest and our fastest-growing vertical for a second consecutive quarter. The vendor’s enterprise campus and branch business performed well in Q1 with revenue growing nearly 50% year-over-year.

Rahim said Wi-Fi momentum continues to outpace the market, with record interest in wired switching and the vendor’s artificial intelligence-driven SD-WAN.

In spite of a turbulent first quarter, Juniper is raising its full-year revenue outlook and currently expects to deliver at least 9% growth for the year.

“Given our level of portfolio differentiation balanced against our relatively modest share and the large markets where we compete, I expect us to grow both enterprise revenue and orders during the year even in a more challenging macro environment,” Rahim said.