Business Description

Overview We are a network technology company, providing hardware, software, and services to a wide range of network operators and enabling enhanced network capacity, service delivery, and automation. Our solutions support network traffic across a wide range of applications, including cloud, voice, video, data, and artificial intelligence (“AI”). Our network solutions are used globally by cloud providers, service providers, and other network operators across multiple industry verticals. Our Networking Platforms, including our Optical Networking portfolio and Routing and Switching portfolio, are solutions applied from the network core to end user access points and allow network operators to scale capacity, increase transmission speeds, allocate traffic efficiently, and adapt dynamically to changing end-user service demands. Complementing our Networking Platforms, we offer Platform Software, which delivers multi-layer domain control and operations for network operators, and Blue Planet ® Automation Software, which enables service lifecycle management automation with productized operational support systems (“OSS”) across domains and vendors. In addition to our hardware and software, we offer a broad range of complementary services that help our customers build, operate, and transform their networks and associated operational environments. Industry and Market Customers We sell our product and service solutions through direct and indirect sales channels to the following customer and market segments: 4 Table of Contents • Cloud Providers. Our cloud provider customers – also referred to in our markets as web-scale, hyper-scale or neo-scale providers – include internet content providers and providers of internet services and infrastructure, including data centers, cloud compute, Software as a Service (“SaaS”), storage, AI, and web hosting services. In addition to their direct purchases, these customers have also been significant purchasers of capacity on service provider submarine and wireline networks globally, and have heavily influenced networking solution demand and technology and architecture adopted by service providers. • Service Providers. Our communications service provider (“service provider”) customers include regional, metro, national and international wireline and wireless carriers, submarine network operators, and access network providers. In recent years, service providers have offered managed optical fiber networks (MOFN) arrangements to cloud providers who, driven by the need to add capacity quickly and to address restrictions in some jurisdictions on fiber ownership, lease or otherwise acquire dedicated, high-performance connectivity without needing to manage the physical infrastructure themselves. • Other Customers. Our customers also include cable and multiservice operators (MSOs), governments, research and education network operators, and enterprises. Market Dynamics Demand for Increased Capacity The markets into which we sell are dynamic and characterized by a high rate of change. Networks continue to experience strong demand for increased bandwidth due to traffic growth, primarily driven by the impact of AI on networks. Impact of AI on Networks . Unprecedented AI workloads are driving substantial changes in how compute and networking infrastructure are designed and operated, and creating greater demands for high-speed connectivity. Training large-scale AI and foundation models requires massive, coupled GPU clusters that require immense bandwidth, low latency, and power efficiency. These growing demands are influencing data center locations and contributing to greater geographic distribution of training workloads. At the same time, the need to monetize AI infrastructure investment and deploy models at scale is making inferencing a primary driver of low-latency, high-capacity networking investment across regions and edge locations, closer to end users. Collectively, these trends are accelerating demand for high bandwidth, low-latency and energy-efficient network solutions in and around data centers and across the wide area network. Other services, technologies, and customer needs driving demand for increased bandwidth include: • Network Densification . In recent years there has been a shift in bandwidth demands, traffic patterns, and computing functions to the edge of networks.…