Thomas L. Massie
Analyst · Taglich Brothers
Thank you, Mike. During the third quarter, Bridgeline continued to execute against its long-term strategic plan, to strengthen and grow its iAPPS business model. Today, I'm going to put into perspective our third quarter results and how it relates to our overall business thesis. Although we experienced volatility in our third quarter revenue, our business fundamentals remain steadfast. The revenue shortfall in Q3 was caused by a few specific events, which I will detail momentarily, but the longer-term opportunities Bridgeline and iAPPS represent have not wavered one bit. Our backlog is strong, exceeding $14 million and our qualified pipeline of iAPPS opportunities has soared to over $40 million. This is up from $22 million just 1 year ago. We continue to win 70% of the proposals we submit, and recently, customers such as Teradyne, Qualcomm, WebMD, LeSportsac and MainGate have selected iAPPS for their mission-critical websites or web stores. A year ago, our historical average of an iAPPS enterprise engagement was about $120,000. In the last few quarters, it has been consistently over $300,000. Over the long term, this is exciting for Bridgeline as our customer base continues to improve from both a quality and engagement value perspective. Mike will be discussing Q3 financial details and results in much greater detail. But in summary, Q3 revenues were only $5.6 million. The major elements of the revenue shortfall were related specifically to a 44% decline of legacy non-iAPPS related revenue and some of our larger iAPPS engagements experienced unwanted delays on the customer side. Taking a closer look at Q3, you will see increases in both recurring revenue and licensing revenue. Recurring revenue increased 10% and licensing revenue increased an impressive 33%. Our iAPPS revenue grew 4% when compared to Q3 last year, and iAPPS-related revenue of -- in the quarter was 78% of our total quarterly revenue compared to 66% in the quarter of last year. Our continued progress of growing our iAPPS-related business is what's going to drive enhanced shareholder value. In order for Bridgeline to generate positive EBITDA, our revenue needs to be approximately $6.5 million. And in Q4 2013, which is our current quarter, we anticipate to minimally meet that revenue level. However, we felt it was prudent to examine our operating expenses, and in June we took steps to reduce our quarterly operating expenses by $250,000 a quarter or $1 million annualized while increasing our national sales force by 40%. Bridgeline's national sales force now has 22 professionals touting iAPPS daily, increasing our qualified pipeline, increasing the number of proposals issued and increasing iAPPS bookings. In turn, we believe this will drive strong organic revenue growth for 2014 and beyond. Now, I'd like to update you on our eCommerce partnership with UPS Logistics. As most of you know, we do have a partnership in place with UPS Logistics, to sell our integrated, all inclusive B2C and B2B eCommerce solution for mid-market and large market organizations. UPS Logistics selected iAPPS as its partner of choice, providing enormous validation to the iAPPS Commerce value proposition. We launched our marketing efforts and began building our qualified pipeline in June of 2012. This is a little bit more than 1 year ago. Our traditional sales cycle for eCommerce opportunities with UPS is approximately 12 months. To date, we have closed and are launching multiple iAPPS-driven B2C and B2B commerce sites with UPS Logistics. These are companies like GE Healthcare, Triumph Motorcycles, Carbon Audio. In Q3, our partnership with UPS helped Bridgeline secure eCommerce engagements with companies like Qualcomm, WebMD and Lighting Science. Our multimillion-dollar qualified pipeline continued to grow and we look forward to sharing more wins with you in the coming quarters. Let's discuss our new and exciting product, iAPPS ds, or distributed subscription. iAPPS ds has been specifically developed for franchises in large unit [ph] networks who need to provide superior website engagement tools to their numerous franchises or dealers while maintaining content and brand control. iAPPS ds enables corporate franchises to provide a centralized digital marketing structure for their franchises and dealers and it's a Cloud-based, multi-tenant SaaS solution that is highly scalable. We believe that there's not another web platform solution in the franchise marketplace that can truly compete with the quality, value proposition and scale of iAPPS ds. From a financial perspective, iAPPS ds has the potential to significantly increase Bridgeline's recurring revenue and profitability. This subscription-based model would require each franchise owner or dealer to pay a monthly subscription fee of anywhere between $40 and $100 per month, depending on the total volume of franchise organizations. For this, each franchise would receive a self-service pre-templated website that includes iAPPS Content Manager, Analytics and Marketier. iAPPS Commerce is available for an additional incremental monthly fee. We've previously disclosed the UPS Store was an iAPPS ds customer with 4,300 franchise locations. And at the end of June, we have sold and deployed 2,160 iAPPS ds licenses to UPS stores. They're running on the premium website platform. We do expect to add more UPS stores over the next 12 months. The UPS Store team is ecstatic with the iAPPS ds platform. This is a major upgrade for them in terms of functionality, ease of use, quality and scale. Bridgeline's qualified pipeline of opportunities for iAPPS ds has rapidly grown to $20 million. We estimate our sales cycles for this sector to be 12 months, however, in the third quarter, we signed an agreement with a dealer network, who's a leader in outsourced sales. The network has a total of 400 locations. We expect 200 locations will transition onto the iAPPS ds platform at launch, and then the remaining 200 will transition onto iAPPS ds over the 12 months following the launch date. We expect this iAPPS ds customer will go live this fall. We look forward to sharing more iAPPS ds wins with you in the coming quarters. To accelerate Bridgeline's time-to-market in the franchise marketplace and strengthen Bridgeline's credibility and acceptance in the franchise marketplace, we acquired a company named Elements Local on August 1. ElementsLocal has developed an online marketing SaaS platform for the franchise marketplace that incorporates brand reputation, web content management, social media, eMarketing and web analytics. ElementsLocal is a respected web platform brand in the franchise market that has 35 franchisor customers and over 3,200 franchisees on their platform. Over the past 4 years, ElementsLocal has experienced a 95% retention rate. Most of ElementsLocal's customers are national franchise brands such as Sports Clips, Maaco, Glass Doctor, Pearle Vision Center, Molly Maid and Mr. Handyman. In 2013, ElementsLocal is on track of having a record revenue year of approximately $2 million, of which the majority of this revenue is recurring. The ElementsLocal platform has been renamed to iAPPS EL, and throughout 2014, Bridgeline will be migrating the ElementsLocal customers onto iAPPS ds. ElementsLocal founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy LaDuque, has joined Bridgeline as its Senior Vice President of Franchise and Large Dealer Networks. Jeremy is a certified franchise expert and he's a very active member of the International Franchise Association. He's a great addition to the Bridgeline team. Our iAPPS-related business is healthy, vibrant and growing. It is Bridgeline's future and it's what's going to maximize our shareholder value. Our legacy business has declined much faster than anticipated and our deferred revenues have increased significantly. Clearly, we are a few quarters off of our overall top line goals. However, Bridgeline's management team is laser-focused at executing initiatives that's going to drive our business over the $7 million per quarter revenue level and we believe that we're going to be there in Q1 of 2014, which is our December quarter. At the $7 million per quarter level, we will begin to see positive leverage to our margins. Lastly, in May, we were very excited to release iAPPS 5.0. This release is the most comprehensive release we have made to iAPPS since the initial product launch. iAPPS 5.0 boasts a new cross-channel interface, cutting-edge mobile-friendly editing and on-the-go authoring, technology integration from industry leading partners and an overall enhanced user experience. In addition, in the anticipation to our iAPPS growth, since April, Bridgeline has made over $1 million of investment into the network infrastructure environment that houses the iAPPS-driven websites and web stores. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike Prinn, our Chief Financial Officer, who will provide you with more details on our Q3 financial results. Michael?