Erez Antebi
Analyst · Oppenheimer & Co. Please go ahead
Thank you. Welcome everyone to our conference call. And thank you for joining us today. I would like to start with some key financial parameters for the third quarter. The third quarter was another quarter of solid growth. Our revenues grew 14% year-over-year for the third quarter, and our gross profit grew 12% year-over-year for the third quarter. This is our seventh straight quarter of double digit revenue growth year-over-year. I am very pleased with the results we achieved during the third quarter and the main message is that we are on track and successfully executing on our plan. We see a growing number of opportunities. We are continuing to close new deals, winning against the competition, bringing more Tier 1 business and our revenues are growing. We expect this trend to continue through the remainder of 2019. We expect revenue growth to not only continue into 2020, but to accelerate. While our revenue growth in 2019 is on target, we are increasing our investments to capitalize on the significant number of opportunities we see. While Alberto will provide more details on our financials later, I did want to start with the financial highlights that demonstrate our growth. I would like to return out to a general discussion on our business. Overall, we are signing business at a growing rate. During the first nine months of 2019, our bookings were significantly higher than over the same period last year. During the quarter, we announced that we won a significant expansion with an existing EMEA customer worth 10s of millions of dollars. We also stated that this deal revenues will be recognized over several years. The combined bookings we won from all the deals including the significant one and the strong pipeline we have will enable us to enter next year with a significant backlog providing us with strong visibility going forward. As we work with more Tier 1 operators worldwide, we take upon ourselves additional commitments that span product development, delivery and customer support. This is the reason we are investing further in our R&D and customer success organizations. I believe this is the right thing to do, as this investment enables us to fuel our growth and catch up on certain product gaps we still have. While today, the rate of growth in our expenses is similar to our rate of growth in revenues, I expect that next year the rate of growth of expenses will be lower than that of the revenues allowing us to reach profitability. I will now discuss a bit of visibility and control domain. We are continuing to see an active market here with a healthy pipeline of opportunities for our Allot Smart product line. We see similar use cases to what we saw in previous quarters, such as traffic management and analytics. In addition, we see growing interest for congestion management and roaming analytics. As I discussed in the previous call, we see a growing need of governments to curtail illegal traffic on the internet, which results in regulations imposed on the operators who then require technology such as ours. The type of illegal traffic targeted by these means – includes for example, child pornography and VPNs used by criminal organizations. We see a growing market here with more RFPs coming out globally. We won several such deals this year and are seeing interest in this use case continuing to increase. I would like to say a few words on technology. We're seeing a growing number of CSPs deploying or transitioning to an NFV environment. I am proud to say that currently we already have several NFV implementations with multiple operators in the US, EMEA and APAC. We have invested significantly and are continuing to invest in NFV technology. In addition, we are seeing CSPs plan and start 5G deployments. 5G networks bring a promise of much higher bandwidth to consumers. And we believe this will require traffic management and enhanced security. The transition of an operator to NFV technology or to 5G creates an opportunity to reevaluate all of the network elements. We are investing resources to take advantage of these opportunities. While our main focuses on CSPs, a portion of our revenues comes from sales to the enterprise market. Two years ago, we established a customer facing unit or CFU, focused on the worldwide enterprise market. The enterprise business is signing up new customers every quarter. During the previous earnings call, I noted that we won our largest enterprise deal in over two years for a National Post Office network in the EMEA. I am glad to say that since then we beat that record and won an even larger deal for a public institution in Latin America. Overall, we see a strong pipeline for our Allot Smart product line serving the visibility and control domain. We are winning against our competition in new deals, and even replacing their products and some of their existing customers. Overall, I feel comfortable with our continued growth in this area. I would like to turn now our attention to the security domain which as we stated in the past, is our main long-term growth engine. As I mentioned in previous calls, we see a growing number of CSPs who understand the need to provide secure broadband services and see value in three elements. One, an important enhancement to the brand value becoming a quote secure broadband unquote, provider; two, a potentially large new source of revenue; and three, a key element in their customer satisfaction. As the market recognizes the importance of providing a broadband security service, the number of CSPs we are engaged with continues to grow. This growing interest is across the breadth of the Allot Secure product family, including Network Secure, IoT Secure, Home Secure, DDoS Secure and the combination with our partners Endpoint Secure. I would like to remind you that Allot's ability to provide protection at several locations in the network, while seamlessly providing the same service across customer location and platforms is one of Allot's key advantages, and that we see a growing number of opportunities that combined two or even three different products of the Allot Secure family. This is a strong testament that our strategy of enabling operators to provide, quote anywhere any device any threat unquote protection to the consumer and SMB markets is gaining acceptance. I believe the most important factor to assess the importance of a security service to a CSP is the adoption rates of paying customers. I would like to share with you a little of what we are seeing in the market today. In Vodafone, our largest security customer, the total number of subscribers is continuing to grow, albeit at a lower rate than before as some markets reach saturation levels. Looking across the 10 different markets where Vodafone launched the mobile security service, we see adoption rates maintained between 15% and 60%, one five and six zero percent of the total mobile customer base. In markets where security services were launched in recent years such as in the UK, Turkey and Germany, we are seeing healthy consistent growth every month. Telefonica Spain launched the Niji service less than a year ago, the security services offered to converge customers as a bundle service with speed and content. The service already has hundreds of thousands of users and Telefonica Spain is in the process of maxifying the service by including it in a bundle for everyone. While we cannot commit to the timing of Telefonica services, we further expect Telefonica Brazil to launch the service in the next few months. Telefonica Argentina is also expected to master phi the service, which they launched as a pilot in the next few months as well. Towards the end of August, Hutchison Drei launched security services in Austria under the name lnternetschutz. The service is based on our network secure platform and as we announced this is a revenue share deal. The services offered primarily to new users in both mobile and fixed wireless broadband categories, primarily and physical stores. While this time since launch is very short, we are very encouraged by the adoption rates we are seeing. Hutchison is a global operator, and we believe that success in Austria opens doors for us elsewhere within the Hutchison Group. Several months ago, Safaricom in Kenya launched the security service for their fiber to the home customers also based on our Network Secure product. This deal too is a revenue share deal with us. This network is not large, and is almost entirely monthly prepaid connectivity. Users are offered to sign up the security service for an additional fee. I am glad to say that penetration rates after a few months have already exceeded 15%, one five percent. The SMB segment is one where we are seeing growing interest globally. To be more precise, we are looking at SMBs that typically have between a few employees up to a few hundred, but do not have an internal IT department with a security expert. This is an interesting segment for several reasons. One, SMBs pay more for connectivity and should be willing to pay more for security; two, the security requirements of SMBs are similar to those of consumers; and three, the perceived risk of not having security is high. Telefonica Spain launched the SMB security service about six months ago to customers with fixed line connectivity. I will remind you that Telefonica Spain SMB customers enjoy network based security provided by Allot technology together with endpoint app protection, provided by McAfee. In this deal, the security revenue is shared between Telefonica Spain, Allot and McAfee. The service was launched with a try and buy go to market strategy, and is priced at 10 Euros per month to the SMB for a fixed line. The services offered to SMBs joining the Telefonica network or renewing a service plan, and the adoption rate of the security service is close to 50%, five zero percent. This is very encouraging, and it's a testament to the appeal of security service to SMB customers. These cases show us that the high adoption rates achieved by Vodafone for mobile subscribers in Europe can be replicated by other operators and that the commercial incentive for operators to launch security services to the mass market is high. Unfortunately, working with CSPs takes time, typically exceeding 12 months and often much more time than we would like it to take. While we are engaging with more CSPs, we are still challenged by the time it takes to close the deals. We are engaged at various stages with a large number of additional operators for more security deals on all the various elements of Allot Secure family and I am encouraged by the size of our pipeline, the continuous growth in number of CSPs we are engaging and the interest within the CSPs to launch such security services for the mass market. As I mentioned in previous calls, to view this market, I look at the combination of several indicators including one, the initial security OpEx deals we signed; two, the growth in tenders and RFPs that are being issued; three, the healthy pipeline we have in hand; and four, the penetration rates and speed of adoption where the service is launched. Looking at all the above, I'm confident that we are heading in the right direction. And I'm optimistic about this market segment and our future growth in it. As a reminder to help us measure the potential of the aggregated security OpEx deal we signed and our progress in this area, I introduced in previous earnings calls a metric we use internally that we call maximum annual revenue or MAR for short. MAR reflects the annual revenue Allot would receive if 100% of the CSPs relevant customer base were to sign up for the security service. The actual revenues Allot will get are expected to be the MAR multiplied by whatever the penetration rates will be. I remind us all that upon signing the deal, we don't record bookings or revenues. But as service is launched and penetration levels grow, a recurring long-term revenue stream is gradually built. These deals should form a base for continued and sustainable growth for Allot. We have recently been selected by two additional Tier 1 operators in two countries in EMEA for Network Secure revenue share deals, and we are currently in contract negotiations on these deals. Each of these operators is part of a different larger multinational group. We are in advanced stages with multiple other operators around the world where I feel we are in a very strong position. I expect we should sign several security OpEx deals in the coming months. While it may slip beyond the end of the year, I feel confident that we are well on the way to a combined MAR of $100 million in the coming months. I would now like to summarize the overall picture. We are proceeding according to plan and growing the business. I believe our third quarter numbers are a testament to that. In the visibility and control area we have a growing number of opportunities in various areas. We see longer term opportunities as operators move to NFV as 5G networks are deployed and as governments demand more regulation on internet traffic. In the security area, which we see as our major long-term growth engine, we have signed initial deals for Allot Secure products, including several security OpEx deals. Adoption rates in the services already launched are encouraging. Our pipeline of security OpEx deals with CSPs is encouraging as well. It is expanding, and most operators we talked to are accepting of the OpEx revenue share model we offer. We were selected by two additional operators and I expect we will sign additional security OpEx deals in the next few months. From a product perspective, we are progressing well and achieving advantages over our competition such as in NFV capability. In previous calls I mentioned we are investing more in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to create further technological differentiation in both visibility and control and security domains. I see this as a key to our long-term competitive edge. To this end, last month, we established a CTO office in Allot. Ronen Priel, who was previously responsible for both product management and strategy, was appointed our CTO and he is now focusing solely on strategy and long-term growth. A big part of his new responsibility is leading our artificial intelligence teams. Based on our results so far, our backlog and the growing and strong pipeline of new deals, I would like to reaffirm our expectations for 2019 revenues to be between $106 million and $110 million. Our revenues this year will depend on our ability to recognize a couple of significant deals that we have already won. We expect book-to-bill for the full year 2019 to be above one. We are currently working on our operational plan for 2020 and we will provide fuller guidance in our Q4 earnings call. Given our strong backlog and rich pipeline, I do expect to see in 2020 accelerated revenue growth beyond the growth rate in 2019 and the return to profitability. And now I would like to hand the call over to Alberto Sessa, our CFO. Please go ahead.