Therese Tucker
Analyst · William Blair
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 leader, skilled at driving results across all functions of marketing. Andres is responsible for Blackline's global marketing strategy and his expertise will help us clearly articulate to the market all the capabilities, benefits and value that Blackline brings to its customers. Andres will be a great partner to the sales team, as we look to differentiate our whole product offering and strengthen our premium positioning against potential new market entrants. Blackline's core values have always been centered on cherishing its customers and its people. Susan understands the importance of the people that make Blackline special. As an experienced HR leader with a strong track record of developing high performance work forces and fostering strong employee engagement, creativity and productivity, she will be responsible for building upon our fantastic team culture so that we continue to attract and retain the best people. I could not be more pleased with the world class management team that Blackline has. Our expanded leadership team is quickly moving to scale their teams, support our customer engagement initiatives and go to market efforts. Together, we are planning for 2019 and beyond. Our InTheBlack Conference and Analyst Days in Las Vegas on November 13 and will provide you with an opportunity to get to know them better. In addition to building our leadership team in 2018, we have continued executing on a multi-year multi-pronged strategy of expanding our strategic footprint inside of large enterprise customers. This effort has included enhancing our system integrator and consulting partner ecosystem, creating a more expansive and strategic product platform and developing a high touch customer service and support team to drive engagement and success. I would like to share with you a few data points that show the early success we are achieving on this initiative. Since going public, we have landed our largest deal to date in five of the last eight quarters. The average deal size of our top 10 customers has grown by over 80% and our top 50 customers by approximately 50%. The average user price has increased at a double digit rate in every quarter. Three of our top 10 customers have the intercompany hub and three have smart close, which we think represents both great progress and a great opportunity. We estimate that 60% of our top 20 customers are engaged in a digital finance transformation project. These metrics confirm that our strategy is spot on and that larger deals are important to drive customer value as well as grow our business. These deals do have longer sales cycles, so we expect them to fluctuate quarter-to-quarter, which can cause lumpiness in the results. Following the record number of large deals closed in the second quarter, we closed fewer large deals in Q3. As a result, we saw the upside of lumpiness in Q2 and the downside in Q3 and we expect to see this type of fluctuation going forward, as we continue to focus on larger deals. On the partner front, we have seen a trend of increasing partner attach rates and influence. While it is not a straight line, 60% of our largest deals included a partner this quarter and we saw better win rates and have a strong pipeline of opportunities. Our co-marketing efforts were very strong and included 28 events in North America alone. We believe these activities are key to creating momentum and synergy with our partners and educating not only the finance and accounting buyers, but also IT on the benefits of Blackline in digital finance transformation projects. Additionally, as we announced in our press release this afternoon, we are strengthening our longstanding relationship with SAP with a new reseller agreement. With this expanded partnership, SAP will add Blackline solutions to its price list, enabling its sales team to sell Blackline worldwide with the same processes, contracts, incentives and conditions as the rest of the SAP portfolio. Hundreds of SAP customers are already using our software and this new agreement will make it even easier for SAP customers to adopt and benefit from Blackline. As with any partnership, this will take time to build, but we believe it creates a great long term opportunity for us to expand our global footprint and we are excited to take our partnership with SAP to the next level. The pipeline for strategic products remains strong and we had a healthy balance between core and strategic products. We did not close any new ICH deals in the quarter and this was to be expected, as we dialed back ICH sales activities and increased our focus on accelerating the time to value for existing ICH customers to ensure successful implementations. During the quarter, we more than doubled the number of ICH instances in production. We believe creating a strong book of reference of ICH customers is important to help further develop the market and drive future sales. As I mentioned before, during the quarter, we held many customer events, which are important conduits to engage with customers, prospects and partners to extend our thought leadership. One of the benefits of having a large base of close to 2500 customers is the information exchange and insight we gain from each additional customer. At Blackline, we have deep visibility in the areas of excellence and best practices across industries, use cases and ERPs. In addition to enabling us to be at the forefront of change in our market and provide great value through our software, this insight drives our ability to be a trusted advisor for our customers. This quarter, we held best practices summits across the US and hosted our first ever international best practices summit in Melbourne, Australia. Participation at these events was very good and partner sponsors included Deloitte, KPMG, UHY and Clearsulting. We also introduced a new event format called strategic client forums, which are hosted jointly by Blackline and our various partners and we helped two of these events in the third quarter. The Seattle strategic client forum welcomed tax, finance IT and other functional leaders from several customers to discuss how they are using Blackline to increase business agility in the face of global accounting challenges and changing business conditions. These customers represented a variety of industries in our different points along their transformations and they included one of the world's leading technology companies and one of the largest US based airlines. Now, I would like to share some information with you about a few of the 92 net new customers that started their financial transformation journeys with Blackline in the third quarter. In Europe, a global material solution company operating in more than 40 countries was in the midst of a 3-year financial transformation project. A key pillar in their transformation plan was built around financial close automation. This necessitated a technology solution that could not only deliver greater visibility, but also reduce the risk in their accounting processes. Ultimately, the breadth and depth of our functionality going beyond basic account reconciliations and extending into areas such as compliance, journal entry management and fluctuation analysis is what positioned Blackline ahead of the competition. This company will be implementing Blackline's close process management solution in tandem with a global ERP rollout. A $4 billion leading audio equipment company wanted to move away from manual Excel-based reconciliation processes that were placing excessive demands on their accounting teams. The company needed a solution to help unify and automate their close processes. Blackline's partnership with SAP and our ability to integrate with the SAP Ariba environment were influential in the win. This company will implement Blackline account reconciliations and task management with the potential for further expansion in to other areas supported by Blackline journal entry, smart close, intercompany hub and compliance. A rapidly growing fitness company was looking for a solution to address several control gaps in the reconciliation and journal entry process that were identified with their accounting consulting firm, PWC. Blackline was selected for our ability to deliver several quick wins around SOX compliance. Moreover, the flexibility of our platform provided reassurance that the organization was investing in a technology solution that would scale to meet the needs of their fast growing business. A biomedical mid-market company with over 700 employees worldwide was using spreadsheets for their close process, which included manual reconciliations. The company needed an automated system to improve visibility and control. Prior to selecting Blackline, the organization had just completed migration from their on-prem ERP to a newer cloud version. As part of the migration process, they evaluated the cloud financial close solution offered by their ERP vendor, but found their functionality lacking, particularly when it came to managing high volume reconciliations. In the end, Blackline was identified as the best of breed solution. This company will begin by implementing account reconciliations, task management and transaction matching with journal entry being rolled out in the second phase. In summary, we continue to add more quality customers in the quarter and made good progress executing on our initiatives. I could not be more pleased with our leadership team that we have built and the changes we have made and continue to make to strengthen Blackline's position as a leader at the forefront of financial transformation. Now, I'll turn the call over to Mark to discuss the financials.