Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q3 2018 BlackLine Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. It is now my pleasure to hand the conference over to Maria Riley with Investor Relations. Ma'am, you may begin.

Good afternoon, and thank you for your participation today. With me on the call is Therese Tucker, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BlackLine; and Mark Partin, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives and expected performance are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this conference call. While we believe, any forward-looking statements we have made are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on our current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Also, unless otherwise stated, all financial measures discussed on this call will be non-GAAP. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results is currently available in our press release, which may be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.blackline.com, or on our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today. Now, I will turn the call over to Therese to begin.

Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today. It has been two years since Blackline went public on October 28, 2016 and during that time, we have continued to believe in the size and opportunity of this market as well as the importance of the customer relationship as a key building block for our long term growth strategy. In Q3 of this year, we continued to see further validation of a solid demand environment and improving competitive position and strong customer renewal rates. In fact, we believe these business fundamentals have strengthened since our IPO. At the beginning of 2018, we established a number of key initiatives designed to maintain and extend our leadership position. I am pleased with the progress we made in the quarter on those, particularly in the sales organization. This year, we scaled our leadership team for the next phase of growth. This began with the addition of Marc Huffman as COO in March and two new senior sales hires during the summer. While changes in the sales organization can create near term disruption, our leadership team is working to minimize that, while making improvements to the go to market and customer engagement models that will help take us to the next level. Marc and his team have already identified key areas of the sales, marketing and customer organizations that can benefit from their playbook and are in the process of making those changes, which will take some time. Since we last spoke, in addition to the sales changes, we have continued to build out our leadership team with two new recent hires. Andres Botero who joined us as our Chief Marketing Officer and Susan Otto is our new Chief People Officer. Andres who joined Blackline from CallidusCloud is an experienced global B2B marketing…

Thank you, Therese and good afternoon everyone. As a quick reminder, unless otherwise noted, all numbers mentioned during my remarks today are non-GAAP. Additionally, our results and guidance discussed on this call are on the new standard ASC 606 that went into effect at the beginning of this year. We will publish a retrospective of Q3 2017 historical financials for comparison purposes in our quarterly filing. Total third quarter GAAP revenue grew 29% year-over-year to $59 million. The timing of deals helped drive better than expected revenue in the quarter. Our revenue mix in the quarter consisted of 96% subscription revenue, which grew 31% year-over-year. We continued to see strong global demand for our solutions and a good solid performance across all aspects of our business, including international, which represented 20% of the total. We are making good progress on our top initiatives for the year and on track to achieve our revenue growth guidance for the year. Moving to our key performance metrics for the quarter, we added 92 net new customers globally across both enterprise and midmarket. This brings our total customer count to approximately 2,500, representing 19% growth year-over-year. The total number of Blackline users grew to over 214,000, representing 15% growth year-over-year. Sales of strategic products in the quarter were between 15% and 20% of total and did not increase the number of users, but increased the deal size. Our dollar based net revenue retention rate was 109% within our expected range 108% to 110% for the year. One of our top customers was acquired last year, so we have been planning for their churn in Q3 following their integration into the acquiring company. This has negatively impacted both our retention rate end users. Notwithstanding this loss, we are pleased with our progress on customer churn…

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from the line of Rob Oliver with Baird.

So first one is just on the lumpiness around some of the large deals, you obviously guys are coming off a quarter where you had a fantastic quarter on the large deal size. Just wanted to get a little bit more color on kind of how that sets up for the rest of the year and then I know Mark last quarter you had called out a record quarter in mid-market and some of our structures have been showing real nice activity in mid-market. I know you guys have changed some of the parameters around the go to market there to advantage them in market sales team and how do we think about the customer count going forward, because it might seem to me that the mid-market customer might be slightly smaller, but higher volume customers, should we see that customer count rising?

I'll go in reverse. I think, on the customer count, you're right in the mid-market, we have seen good continued success. But what you noted is right, they're selling and finding good success at the very high end of the range of customer size and even in Q3, we saw that trend where they landed the highest new logo average deal size to date. So they're really at the higher end of that and I think that in the early years, that was more velocity, smaller deals, they're getting bigger deals at the higher end of the range and that's a lower number of deals. So that does impact the number of deals. I think to your other point about lumpiness, it's right. Therese addressed that in her comments because it has become sort of the byproduct of these great initiatives that we're putting in place. We're seeing this from quarter to quarter where these initiatives of getting very large deals are great. But when in Q2, they land, in Q3, they don't, they get lumpiness. I think, we should expect to see that in the near term as we progress towards these initiatives, so we want to be thoughtful and kind of cautious about billings as a lumpy and variable metric.

Our next question will come from the line of Bhavan Suri with William Blair.

Hey. I just wanted to touch a little bit here on the international business. It seems like that's going quite nicely, because of some of the past investments. I guess, when you look at the, just what geos are showing and then the new joint venture with Japan Cloud was announced in October, just some color there and then I've got a quick follow up.

Well, I'll start with our new venture in Japan. We did partner with Japan Cloud computing and it was a logical choice to move into Japan. If you look at the size of the market there as well as our continued push farther east from the APAC region and so we picked a great partner, I think we're optimistic about its long term prospects and it's just a part of our longer term growth. What's so great about our product is that it actually does address problems that every single company in every single geography actually have.

And then, I guess, can you touch a little bit on the SAP agreement, just maybe a little more color on sort of the puts and takes there in terms of obviously there's a real positive in terms of what happened between you and SAP in terms of the relationship there, but I guess, is there sort of a put there that SAP is thinking of maybe not recommending as much, there are some changes, I just wanted to get a little more color in terms of how that relationship is going to work going forward.

Well, in order to talk about how it's going to work going forward, I want to start by just saying that this is a partnership that we've had in place with SAP for more than five years. And we were actually SAPs most successful EBS or endorsed business solution partner to date and I'm really proud of that. Okay? So I look at this new expanded partnership as something that's going to be very positive over the long term and really help us with our reach. If you think about it, I think that the latest numbers that I was looking at is that globally, SAP has something like 30,000 ERP customers, all right and over 8000 ERP financials customers that have more than a 1 billion in revenue and these are not yet Blackline customers. So we think that the extended reach that can be had by embarking on this partnership is a really great long term positive for the company.

I guess, Therese, let me push back just a fraction there a bit. I guess, but they're giving up the incentive and I'm trying to understand sort of how that plays out, it's not incenting your sales people, they've been incented in the past, it's been a great relationship that is quite successful for you guys, obviously for them and for their customers. Do you think it loosens the incentives?

No. Actually, the opposite is true. When SAP's sales people can sell Blackline on their paper, they are way more incentivized.

Our next question will come from the line of Pat Walravens with JMP Securities.

Hi. This is Matt Spencer on for Pat. You talked a little bit about the sales changes that are going on and they might take a little bit of time to implement. Can you just provide a little bit more color and some details on those changes and how they're going?

Yeah. Absolutely. When I think about the things that Marc Huffman is doing, I'd sort of break it into four areas. One of the - first things that we did was we put all customer facing activities underneath Marc and I think we're seeing better alignment across sales, marketing and services. Okay. And just breaking down those silos and making sure that everything is being passed and communicated properly has been huge. Number two, he's been very proactive about expanding the leadership team, all right, and I know you just saw that we added Andres as our Chief Marketing Officer. I think we've just added some incredible talent and that is very positive on that. Number three, all right, one of the reasons that we hired Marc besides his great personality is that he really does bring with him a playbook on how to get to 1 billion in revenue and so there are certain conventions and things that are sort of normal about how to get there and Marc brings a deep knowledge of what conventional software SaaS companies do to grow and I really appreciate sort of the operational standardization that he's bringing to our resource allocation. So I think it's really important. And then finally the work that he's done and is doing in our partnership expansion. So I would put it across those four areas right now. I hope that answers your question.

And then one more if you don't mind, can you just provide some details on what you're seeing with regards to the IT spending environment and customers appetite to adopt technology.

We did not see a tremendous change in this quarter. We do see that - I think there is a closer look by IT at all things SaaS, okay, because they want to make sure that they get the best vendors and that they don't simply have 1 million vendors out there, but I don't think in the overall market that we've seen a big change.

Our next question will come from the line of Brent Bracelin with KeyBanc.

I want to go back to SAP. Specifically asking questions around kind of the why now, so why make the change now, what kind of led to the change, one and then two, as you think about kind of the incentives, how do you incentivize the SAP sales force kind of today versus before? And then lastly, you did talk about this being a long term positive, Therese. Is there the risk of a near term drag in the short run, just trying to think about those three things.

You brought up the revenue share. This is a revenue share agreement, okay, and we're not disclosing what those commercial terms are at this point, but they are, I think, they're very positive to all concerned. Okay. In terms of why now, it's really something that we've been working towards for probably a couple of years now, all right, just in terms of, it's been discussed on what the pros and what the cons are, all right, and knowing the reach that SAP has globally, I think is over the long term a terrific accelerator. We are not going to ever, well, I shouldn't say ever, we may never get to having thousands upon thousands upon thousands of sales people, all right. And so being able to take advantage of that I think is a very important thing. Now again in the why now, it really just has been a build over time and we had to have the terms in place that were acceptable to all parties where we all felt like we were going to profit from it and when we got to that point, that's when we decided to do this partnership. I think I missed one of your questions. Sorry about that.

The last one was for you Mark and that's just around, you talked about this being a long term positive. Given the change in the relationship, obviously, if you look at SAP actually, we saw accelerating growth and accelerating contribution from SAP this year. Is there any risk in the short run that there could be a, more paperwork or a change or an impact just to the SAP channel because of this change in the near term?

It is not expected to have any material impact in our fourth quarter results and that's already reflected in our guidelines. I don't believe so simply because of our long term nature of the relationship with SAP now.

Our next question will come from the line of Mark Murphy with J.P. Morgan.

This is [indiscernible] sitting in for Mark. Thanks for taking my question. First question is the, I mean, I understand billings can go lumpy and sometimes may not provide a clear picture of how the business is doing. So could you help us maybe characterize the general bookings performance in the quarter from your perspective and versus your expectation and have you seen any kind of impact from the recent sales/go to market changes.

So I'll sort of repeat what you said because I do think it is what we talked about for the time that we've been public that billings does have variability each quarter and that is from the timing of renewals to many things that create that variability in our latest case. When you have the size deals and the large deals that we have closing periodically and you get this Q2 sort of Q3 shift, it creates that variability. So if you trend billings out over time, I would say that it's within our expectations of where we landed. Now expectations around when you land large deals is sort of the reason why this lumpiness is unpredictable and why we don't guide on it. So I think that's probably the best way to characterize this is that it just has a - from quarter to quarter, difficult to predict.

And Therese, I saw your press release on the EBS connector launched a couple of days ago I believe. How significant is that, didn't you already have an Oracle connector and is that essentially the first step to expansion into the smart close into Oracle at all?

We do have a number of different connectors and we always have ways of getting data through and in to Blackline. That's certainly true. We were excited about the capabilities of this connector in that it's much more real time and precisely for our Oracle customer base, which is - makes up a third of our customers right now and so we want to make sure that for the biggest populations out there that we've got it really, really easy to move data back and forth. This is directional in that right now this connector is bringing information in from Oracle. It is not part of the smart close for other ERPs at this point because that's actually data moving in the other direction and that's controlling the ERP inside. Does that makes sense?

Yeah. Got it.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question will come from the line of Terry Tillman with SunTrust.

[indiscernible] on for Terry. The question I wanted to ask was regarding ASC 606 and the impact that has had on your customers. Are you seeing any sort of maybe pent up demand from prospects and had down during a transition to 66 again reconsider the tools you're using.

No. We haven't actually been able to draw that straight line, like from our own experience knowing the intense amount of effort that it took, we know that it's impacting decisions and priorities, but we haven't really been able to pin down what that looks like. I think in a year or two, we can look back on this and maybe have a better sense for it, but we don't see as you call it sort of pent up demand, it's been pretty consistent demand.

And then maybe just one other question is, if you could talk about maybe key investment areas you have your eye on as we head into 2019?

Yeah. Thanks. So we're going to give guidance in February that would be typical for us. At our Analyst Day in a couple of weeks, we'll talk about our growth strategies, you'll meet the team and we'll give a lot of color around where we're planning to invest. You can look at our trended investments around kind of global growth, our partnerships, key initiatives like the consulting partners and so like. Those will be all areas that are driving growth where we will be investing and meeting that demand.

And our next question will come from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James.

So I just wanted to hit on the one lumpiness you guys mentioned a bit. And wondered if we could parse that out. Was that on some of the larger deals? Was that maybe a bit of an air pocket from, let's say, the SI channel this quarter or did we see some of those deals maybe just push into the fourth quarter. And historically, well, I've talked to a lot of your customers, you've seen a migration up from one module and typically up to 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. For those customers that kind of start with one module, are you still seeing that same type of cell activity that you've seen over the past few years?

Yes. Our land and expand model still remains about a 50-50 balance in growth, so the healthiness of - and the balance of landing and then expanding continued in Q3. With respect to the large deals and seeing fewer of them in Q2, but - in Q3, but having a large Q3. There wasn't one thing that contributed to it. We saw the demand. We know it's there. We didn't lose them to anything new or different. These are deals that we just know will, from a timing perspective, are difficult to predict.

And our last question will come from the line of [indiscernible]

I might have missed this in the prepared remarks, but did you give out what the SAP contribution was for the quarter and I guess digging in a little bit more on the SAP agreement or the announcement today, will you still be giving out that SAP contribution mix metric in the future, I mean is that kind of an apples to oranges comparison now and that's just not the right way of thinking about that line item anymore, any color on that would be helpful?

Yes, of course. A good question. So it's about a 23% in Q3 that would be relatively consistent with some of the previous quarters in SAP. The EBS partnership wasn't a factor in Q3 and we plan in the future, this is an agreement that most of what we report in terms of metrics can and will be reported pretty consistently. With respect to the percentage of revenue, it may not be as apple - it may not be oranges and oranges, but we'll be disclosing going forward what our SAP revenue partnership percentage will be.

And then I just had a quick question on the dollar based net - revenue retention metric, it looks like it's down to about two points here from the second quarter to 109. And it sounded like from the prepared remarks it was really due to a customer that you were expecting to churn from last year and it happened this quarter that caused that metric to downtick. I guess what I'm getting at is, do you happen to know what that dollar based net revenue retention metric would have been and maybe even the net new user account too, if that customer did not turn off the platform.

Yeah. We do know that. We're not disclosing this specifically. We wouldn't have brought it up if it wasn't material though, so the impact obviously on the net dollar retention rate did tick it down, but 109 is within our range for the year. We expect it to be in the 108 to 110. We were well aware that this happy, long-term customer was going away in Q3 and was going to impact us. We also know that from the user standpoint that losing those users impacted the user rate. So rather than give the metric, I can tell you that it did create a headwind for those two metrics, three metrics actually when you include billings.

And just one last question for me. The Blackline - the Oracle connector for eBusiness suite, was that built off the technology, was that an extension off the smart close for SAP. And I guess if it was, can we expect that the data flow similar to what you have as smart closing with SAP to eventually come to the Oracle connector that you talked about or that you announced today?

At this point, that connector is simply to bring information in. It's not to actually control the Oracle ERP like smart close does, so not at this time.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time. So now, I'd like to hand the conference back over to Therese.

Excellent. Thank you everyone for joining us today and thank you for continuing to support us and bringing us your referrals and customers. Do please keep it up. We do look forward to seeing many of you at our upcoming user conference in just a couple of weeks and there, you're going to have a great opportunity to meet our leadership team, our customers and our partners and you get to see what's new in our products. The theme of this year's conference is building trust in an uncertain world and it's about how Blackline can help accounting professionals build trust in their organizations. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation on today's conference. This does conclude our program and we may all disconnect. Everybody, have a wonderful day.