Juniper Networks this week reported a fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, despite the ongoing supply chain constraints. However, the company expects the supply chain costs to remain elevated throughout the next year.

The networking giant posted $1.18 billion in revenues for the third fiscal quarter of 2021, up 4% year over year, which narrowly missed Wall Street expectations and fell slightly below guidance.

As warned in the last quarter’s earnings call, CFO Ken Miller blamed declining revenues on supply constraints.

“One way to look at it is the difference between our adjusted bookings on a product perspective, which is 15% or mid-teens in Q3 year over year as compared to our revenue growth on a product perspective of 5%,” he said. “So, it's easy to imply that there's an extra 10% of revenue growth that did not happen due to supply constraints, and that would have really lifted all boats, enterprise, cloud, NSP [network service platform].”

However, as the company continues to grapple with supply chain challenges, Juniper claims its product order growth remains strong across all verticals, geographies, and product offerings with double-digit growth in each category. 

CEO Rami Rahim noted the company “experienced very strong demand during the September quarter.” 

Orders grew by over 50% year over year for a second consecutive quarter, he said, adding the backlog of orders has increased by more than $1 billion since the end of last year.

Additionally, Juniper's top 10 customers for the quarter accounted for 31% of its total revenue. Six of them were cloud providers, three were service providers, and one was an enterprise, Miller said.

Rahim also called out an expansion in opportunities and diversity in the hyperscale market. “It's not just our traditionally largest cloud provider customer that's driving that growth, is also other hyperscale customers."

Juniper also gained broad-based strength in the enterprise business, Rahim boasted. He explained that its artificial intelligence-driven Mist system and Apstra-integrated data center offerings drove “significant wins of net new opportunities”.

“Customers are increasingly recognizing the value delivered by platforms such as Mist and Apstra that dramatically reduce deployment time, eliminate trouble ticket, and reduce mean time to resolution for network problems,” he said.

Rahim reported triple-digit revenue growth for Mist offerings, the first triple-digit bookings quarter for Mist wireless products, and 35% growth year-over-year for AI-driven enterprise products.

Data center orders jumped over 50% year over year in Q3, while the company's cloud-ready data center products grew 26% during the same period. Rahim credited the “significant differentiation with Apstra as the management solution for the data center,” for the growth. 

Juniper acquired Apstra in December in a bid to drive deeper automation into Juniper’s Junos-based data center networking platform.

Despite Juniper not anticipating a material improvement in supply chain constraints for the next year, the vendor still “expects to deliver improved growth and profitability in 2022 and beyond,” Rahim said.

The company forecasts fourth-quarter revenues of $1.26 billion, plus or minus $50 million.

“We currently expect to deliver at least mid-single-digit sales growth and at least a point of operating margin expansion in 2022,” Rahim said. “I think the demand strength we're seeing coupled with the backlog that we built right now sets us up for a great next year, both from the standpoint of achieving revenue growth, but then also our commitment to expanding profits as well.”