Therese Tucker
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your question, please
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to BlackLine's third official earnings call. In our first quarter of the year, BlackLine executed well on the major initiatives that we set for 2017. We are happy to report that total GAAP revenue reached $39 million, reflecting a year-over-year growth rate of 45%. This is a great start, particularly in a seasonally slower quarter, when many accountants are focused on their year-end financial close rather than investing in software. They are at their busiest, closing their books for the year completing and filing their financial reports working through audits, and frankly doing most of it manually. BlackLine is changing the way finance and accounting works one company at a time. In our last two earnings calls, I've asked our participants who invest in, analyze or work with other companies, to think about how those companies might be helped by BlackLine. I am happy to report that several of you have taken action. We've had referrals from several investors. We even had one person send us a list of companies that had gotten into trouble with their internal controls. So I very much appreciate the evangelism, and would like to encourage more of you to ask the CFOs that you know, how they close their books; is the process manual and labor intensive; have they ever heard of BlackLine; are they interested in efficient, accurate, cost effective, controlled results. They can learn more about us in our website at blackline.com. And thank you so much for spreading the word and helping us grow. Now, on to the highlights. Our broad and diverse customer-base grew to more than 1,800 customers around the world. We had 92 net new customers in both enterprise and mid-market across multiple industries and geographies. In Q1, we continue to attract customer switches from competitors. While this is not our core strategy and represents a small part of our logo acquisitions, I am always pleased when we get the opportunity to demonstrate our value to a new but experienced customer. Our strong net dollar revenue retention rate of 117% in Q1 demonstrates the stickiness of our solution. Once customers begin using the product they see the value, and begin adding more products and users over time. Today, we offer more products and solutions than at any other point in our history. I will talk about that in a minute, when we review our 2017 strategic initiatives. In Q1, we continue to see strong demand in the market. Let's talk about some customers who are using BlackLine solutions or have just recently made the decision to go with BlackLine. The first example I'd like to tell you about is a large enterprise customer, who have been on the continuous accounting journey with BlackLine for some time. This is a global manufacturing company with more than $26 billion in revenue that started with our Financial Close Management solution in 2011, as the benefits and value of our solution has been proven out over time, the company has added more users and more products. In six years, their user base has grown from 30 to 700 end-users worldwide. And they've reduced the time spent globally on their monthly close by 33%. The Chief Accounting Officer tells us that they've improved their financial statement reporting accuracy and confidence in their reported results. Given their level of satisfaction and success with our core platform, this company decided to trust us to solve another very large problem. With more than 100 different legal entities, this company needed a single central source for intercompany activity. In mid-2016, they purchased BlackLine's new Intercompany Hub and went live in Q1 with their first few entities. An exciting new customer is a large EMEA company with over 23,000 employees. This customer was previously using a competitive product for reconciliations, while other portions of the close were being performed manually in spreadsheets. They came to BlackLine, looking not only to replace their current process, but also to find a cloud-based solution that would provide greater visibility into the overall close process, generate better reporting and analytics, and enable more efficiency by reducing manual processes. The biggest driver of their decision to switch to BlackLine was our unified cloud model, where multiple products work together seamlessly for the end user, and eliminate manual data uploads and batch processing across disparate systems. It is so encouraging to see more and more companies around the world embrace having financial information in our secure cloud. At BlackLine, we were one of the first to offer this type of cloud solution in 2004, and to this day, we have gained the confidence and trust of many larger companies. Previously, we highlighted our [Technical Difficulty] for this year. While it is still early, we made good progress on these goals in the first quarter. And I would like to share some of that progress with you. In 2017, we are really focusing on all aspects of the customer journey. Each customer is at some point on the road that we call continuous accounting, perhaps we should call it the continuous accounting freeway. In any case, this is a transformation and process evolution, whereby companies break up large period-end batch processes into smaller daily pieces that are automated wherever possible. The results and benefits are many. Exceptions and potential problems can be identified in almost real time, and dealt with immediately. This reduces risk and allows for agile business management. By automating broad [ph] processes, more time is able to be spent upon value added business analysis. Our customers have told us that the overtime hours at the end of the period can be substantially reduced. Controls are inherent and documented throughout many process, audits can run more smoothly and many times can be conducted remotely. But best of all, we built software that improves the lives of accountants and transform how they do their jobs. We first coined the term continuous accounting to describe this journey back in 2014. We are delighted that analysts and other companies are starting to adopt this language in their descriptions of their own research and products. It's so accurately describes the transformation that can happen, when a company gets on this journey. A very important part of the customer journey is the end-to-end customer experience. BlackLine has seen terrific success, because from the very beginning, we've been focused on taking care of our customers providing incredible value and honoring and festering close relationships with them. You may know that last year we hired a Chief Customer Officer. She has responsibility for the entire lifecycle of the customer experience from initial demonstration through implementation, support and customer success. This nonstandard approach gives us an opportunity to better streamline the customer experience, so that go-live can happen faster, adoption rates are higher, and handoff between departments happens more smoothly. In Q1, as an example, based on improvements and implementation times, and started to measure individual customer satisfaction more closely. We are improving our customer engagement model by hiring more customer success people. They are very popular with our customers. Better defining the ownership of accounts and creating more alignment across sales, marketing and service teams, and reviewing our communication plans for all types of customer communications, including maintenance windows, release notes, usage metrics et cetera. We feel we've made great progress to better serve the needs of our customers. Another initiative in 2017 is to incorporate more strategic products into our deals. Our core platform and associated solutions will continue to be the primary engine of growth. We believe this represents the largest current market opportunity, and where we have established leadership position and market awareness. We are also building capabilities around strategic products such as the Intercompany Hub and Smart Close, where we see a bright future. Our success in going to market with these products will further cement our leadership position and help drive larger deal sizes. We are happy to report that in Q1, we sold one of our largest deals in company history, which included the Intercompany Hub. We continue to see a trend of rising demand and also rising price points related to the Intercompany Hub in Q1. Ecosystem partners play a key role in providing expertise and transformational services that pair well with BlackLine software. We are making good progress towards having more formalized partnerships with some major consulting partners, and are in the market with them now. It is still very early with these partnerships, but we remain optimistic that they will help us generate larger deals that include more strategic products. From a product perspective, in the first quarter we focus on platform improvements that make our customers happy. For example, we continue to make progress on the integration of our Smart Close product, enhanced reporting and dashboarding, making the variance analysis of seamless of every client's close, and building our additional connectors to other ERPs. While this may not be the most exciting news for all of you, it is important to the users of the system and the customers that have asked for these enhancements. Many of our users log their enhancement requests on our community board, and we play close attention to what they're asking for. We're pleased that 2017 is up to a strong start. I want to thank BlackLine's employees, customers and partners for helping us achieve our successes to date. We have a tremendous market opportunity ahead of us. And we remain focused on our key initiatives to continue driving growth. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. Now, I'll ask Mark to discuss the financials. And then, we'll open the call to questions.