Juniper Networks announced a record $1.41 billion in revenue for its third quarter of the 2022 fiscal year, with CEO Rami Rahim touting strong demand from its cloud customers and accelerated momentum of 400G system upgrades.

The vendor’s overall revenues surged 19% year over year, with Rahim stating he expects cloud service revenues will continue to grow over the next several years.

“Many of our cloud customers are early in their deployment of large-scale 400-gig upgrade and data center builds that are likely to present multi-year revenue tailwinds as supply improves," Rahim said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call.

The executive also hinted the company is “competing well” for several large cloud business deals that could result in additional growth. “We saw strong growth from four of our top five cloud accounts and continued momentum amongst cloud majors during this past quarter," Rahim said.

CFO Ken Miller added that cloud providers made up five of Juniper's top 10 customers.

Juniper also saw strong demand for 400 Gb/s products from its cloud and service provider customers. It now has nearly “400 wins” for WAN use cases across its MX, PTX, and ACX products, and another quarter of order growth for its ACX cloud metro portfolio and Paragon software automation suite, Rahim boasted.

“Our 400 Gb/s data center solutions are resonating in the market, and our solutions have now secured approximately 100 data center switching opportunities that span across cloud majors, enterprise, and service provider accounts,” he added. “We plan to introduce new hardware and software automation capabilities in future quarters that will further enhance our competitive position in this attractive portion of the service provider market.”

Rahim pointed out that the 100 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s migration is still in the “early innings.” “The vast majority of ports that are being sold and deployed these days, whether it be in the WAN or the data center, is still 100 Gb/s. So that transition from 100 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s is still in the process of happening right now. We should continue to benefit from it.”

Opposite Juniper’s strong cloud business growth, its security revenue declined in the quarter, “due to the deliberate shift from upfront appliance sales to a ratable software subscription model, which is likely to present headwinds to revenue over the next few quarters,” Rahim noted.

The vendor also saw “lumpiness” in its high-end security business, but its midrange firewall portfolio and software-only security and cloud services remained strong, he added.

Last May, Juniper introduced its Security Director Cloud as its portal to secure access service edge (SASE). Rahim noted the platform now has more than 200 customers since it launched in the first fiscal quarter.

He touted the platform providing “a single policy framework to manage all their firewalls, whether in the data center or at the edge or whether on-premises or in the cloud, which is essential to help customers migrate to zero trust and SASE architectures.”

Rahim said the vendor remains confident in its connected security strategy that include its full-stack SASE push and expects the security business will return to growth during the second half of 2023, as they build up more ratable software revenue.