Therese Tucker
Analyst · William Blair
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are happy to report that the year is off to a good start, and we are pleased with our solid first quarter performance. It is still early in the year, and Q1 is traditionally a seasonal quarter for us, yet we like the trends that we saw and are encouraged by our prospects for this year. Our demand environment, competitive positioning and renewal rates all remain strong. And we are making progress on our key priorities for the year. I would like to share with you a few key highlights. We achieved 34% revenue growth and delivered positive net income. We've added 89 net new customers, which reflects 24% growth over Q1 of last year, and we now have approximately 2,300 customers with over 200,000 users from broad and diverse industries across the globe. In a few minutes, I'm going to talk about some of the customers we have added and how we are helping them use our products to modernize and transform their accounting functions. The customer growth in the quarter was well balanced between both enterprise and midmarket customers, and across all geographies and industries. And we had another good quarter for our strategic products, the Intercompany Hub and Smart Close. We continue to see greater expansion opportunities with Smart Close, as customers experience first-hand the benefits of using robotic process automation for their financial close. For example, this quarter, one of our large Fortune 100 technology customers that began using Smart Close last year is expanding and now rolling out their solution to Morvis Entities in order to simplify, standardize and automate their financial close in SAP. Earlier this year, I laid out the top initiatives for 2018 that we saw as the key building blocks for our long-term growth strategy. And in Q1, we executed well on them. During the quarter we made good progress with our partnership initiatives and activities. The investments that we have made in our partnerships, along with the increase in joint marketing events have continued to build our pipeline and deliver results at six of our top 10 largest deals in the quarter, and over 50% of the deals over $100,000 were partner influenced. Notably in the last few quarters, our win rate is higher when we go to market with a strategic partner. Bayer consulting services and references helped move the ball forward in large and increasingly complex projects like finance transformation. This year, we will continue to explore new avenues to expand and leverage our global footprint through our partners. I am pleased to report our recently appointed COO, Marc Huffman, is fully on board and growing our sales and customer-facing organizations. I am sure that many of your curious to know more about what he's been up to since joining BlackLine, but it is still early days. As Marc has seen firsthand, there's a great deal of interest and demand for our solutions as companies face the future of finance and digital transformation. It is the underpinning of what we believe is a large total adjustable market that remains largely unpenetrated. Marc's experience in large deals, leveraging partnerships and moving into new international markets are all areas where we see opportunities for BlackLine to scale, and where he can bring a lot of value. For example, just last week, Marc spoke at NetSuite's annual customer event, where he discussed the value companies can realize by using BlackLine alongside their NetSuite ERP. And finally, it would not be a BlackLine call if we did not spend some time talking about our great customers. We have many efforts underway to ensure that they have the best user experience they possibly can with BlackLine. For us, this not only includes lavish customer support and great software to make their lives easier, but it also involves expanding our thought leadership and creating an environment where our customers can thrive. At our best practices summit, we bring together partners, customers and prospects to share use cases, insights and the power of BlackLine's transformational Continuous Accounting framework. We had close to 200 companies attend the best practices summits we held this quarter in New York and Los Angeles. One of the recurring themes we heard at these events from companies of all sizes, industries and verticals was that the company-wide digital transformation is becoming a bigger part of the conversation in the C-suite. BlackLine is at the forefront of the financial transformation wave. As we have said previously, we have a few customers that have fully transformed, but the vast majority of our customers and prospects are either just beginning or in the early innings of planning their financial transformation, which provides us a long runway. Our job is to ensure that companies embrace comprehensive finance transformation with BlackLine as the critical technology in their transformation toolkit, and as a complement to their ERP. Our partners can play a big role in this effort, given that companies are looking to consulting firms to help them, guide them through their transformations. Now I would like to share with you a few new customers that are beginning their journey with BlackLine and financial transformation, our Fortune 500 Company in the semiconductor industry. This new customer recently completed an acquisition and selected BlackLine to help centralize and standardize their global account reconciliation process. The ability to integrate with their various source systems, provide visibility into the account reconciliation status and optimize close processes with best practices' automation were critical selection criteria. These capabilities will be the key to enabling their leadership team to more effectively manage the close and establish a system of controls to achieve greater compliance and auditability as the organization continues to experience growth. Another Fortune 500 Company, one of the largest software companies in the world, selected BlackLine over their current solution for our unique ability to integrate with and complement their existing SAP environment. The leadership team will rely on the BlackLine platform to build standardization and automation into their global accounting processes. Their goal, ultimately, is to scale accounting operations, enable real-time analysis of business information and improve collaboration and alignment across their various business units. Efforts will initially be focused on optimizing the account reconciliation process, with the potential to expand into additional BlackLine solution areas as the team works towards this strategic goal. Our top five retailers and one of the largest chains of pharmacy stores in the United States selected BlackLine to modernize their accounting and finance department. This was a competitive takeaway from an existing, on-premise vendor and major ERP player. The company is migrating their ERP from Oracle to SAP, and needed a complementary cost solution capable of unifying their data and workflows on one common platform for performing financial close processes. BlackLine helps them do that and provides scalability, growth and configurability, all of which are required to enable better integration in a multi-ERP environment, and improve reporting across multiple legal entities and shared service centers. And finally, to round out our customer examples, our venture-backed digital experience software company selected BlackLine to help them improve the efficiency of their close process, while also decreasing risk and enforcing controls. For this leading edge company, automation, integration with their ERP and visibility into key financial processes as they grow were key decision factors. In summary, we are pleased with our first quarter results. The fundamentals of the business remain strong, we executed well on our initiatives and we maintained our intense focus on the customer relationship. Before I turn the call over to Mark, I want to thank all of you for your ongoing support and evangelism of BlackLine, which continues to bring us new customers. As a result, we have seen that some of our large investors are also becoming customers. If you have not done so already, we ask that you talk to your CFO about BlackLine, and of course, we still welcome your other referrals too. Now, I'll turn the call over to Mark to discuss the financials.