Marc E. Chardon
Analyst · Stifel, Nicolaus
Thank you, Tony, and thanks to all of you on the call for joining us today to review our fourth quarter and full year 2012 results. We are pleased to have delivered fourth quarter non-GAAP revenue at the high end of our guidance range and profitability that exceeded our expectations. During the fourth quarter, we had solid contributions from each of our business units and we saw early signs of acceleration in the opportunity pipeline for Luminate products that we acquired from Convio. Our management team also executed at a high level with respect to identifying and realizing synergies from the acquisition, which led to better-than-expected cost savings for the quarter and for the year. More recently, we initiated additional cost-saving actions in January 2013, which we believe have rightsized our combined company and expense structure and which are expected to contribute to improve profitability for our shareholders in 2013 and beyond. We believe our efforts to improve the efficiency of Blackbaud by itself will drive increased shareholder value. In addition, while we're mindful that the macroeconomic environment remains challenging, we remain excited about the opportunity we have to leverage our best-of-breed online fundraising and CRM solutions to gain share in our multibillion-dollar market. We remain confident that Blackbaud will realize revenue synergies from the Convio acquisition over time, which we believe will drive further enhancements to shareholder value. Let me provide a summary-level view of our fourth quarter results. Non-GAAP revenue was $120.8 million, which was at the high end of our guidance. We generated non-GAAP operating income of $22.3 million, which was $2.3 million above our guidance due to a combination of realizing deal synergies at a faster-than-expected pace and some onetime cost benefits that Tony will detail in a moment. As it relates to the macro environment, we view conditions in the fourth quarter as largely stable to slightly improved, after the instability we experienced in mid 2012. During the fourth quarter, there was still a level of uncertainty amongst customers, but we are hopeful that the initial resolution of the fiscal cliff negotiations will be a modest positive for nonprofit giving. It was encouraging to see the Blackbaud Charitable Giving Index return to modest growth in the fourth quarter after turning negative in the third quarter for the first time since 2009. While macro conditions are still far from what we'd traditionally be calling robust, we believe that charitable organizations are increasingly adapting to the new normal of economic uncertainty and are recognizing the need to improve their fundraising processes in order to thrive in this environment. We're focused on ensuring that Blackbaud is viewed as the vendor of choice within the multibillion-dollar technology market for serving nonprofit organizations. We believe we're uniquely positioned, based on our broad array of best-of-breed fund raising, CRM and back-office solutions, and we expect to be a major beneficiary when the economic and charitable giving environment eventually improves. I'd like to take a few minutes to review the performance for each of our business units and lay out our priorities for 2013, beginning with our Enterprise Customer Business Unit. ECBU had a solid quarter, which was highlighted by closing 9 deals across our CRM offering, including new wins with Texas Christian University, the CHI Foundation and The National Deaf Children's Society. We're particularly pleased to have closed 2 CRM deals internationally, where we think we have significant growth opportunity over time. We also closed a deal in the $500,000 range at the lower end of the market. As we discussed last quarter, moving our CRM offering further down the enterprise market, especially in the higher education and hospital sectors, is a strategic focus for Blackbaud. As we look ahead to 2013, we're encouraged by the growth in our pipeline and improvement in our execution in this area of our business. We've made a significant investment in our CRM solutions over the past 5 years, and it's created the most robust CRM solution in the industry. In fact, ZDNet, a leading technology news service, recently rated Blackbaud as having the #1 CRM offering for the second year in a row, beating horizontal CM -- CRM providers as well as those that are focused exclusively on the nonprofit market. As we've discussed in the past, we believe there's a major systems replacement opportunity in the enterprise segment of the market over the next 5 years, and we believe that Blackbaud is very well positioned to capture this market. During 2012, we continued to advance our CRM capabilities and made excellent progress by bringing our key early-adopter customers into production, which we believe will help in CRM sales cycles in 2013 and beyond. In addition to making good progress with our Blackbaud CRM offering during 2012, we continued to invest in expanding the capabilities of the Convio Luminate offering, which addresses complementary areas of our market. As we look ahead, we'll be making incremental investments in Luminate in areas such as next-generation user experience for team fundraising, integration with the Raiser's Edge and with Blackbaud CRM in order to further enhance the platform and ultimately drive faster growth. After reassuring customers of our commitment to the Luminate offering at the very end of Q3, we closed a few deals in the fourth quarter, and the Luminate pipeline stabilized and began showing initial signs of acceleration. As we move through 2013, we are focused on continuing to build the Luminate pipeline, which is expected to lead to accelerating deal signings over the course of the year. In fact, taken together, we believe that our expanded CRM portfolio and positive momentum will enable Blackbaud to close new CRM deals in the mid-single-digit to double-digit range on a quarterly basis in 2013, which is up from our prior CRM target range of 5 -- 3 to 5 deals per quarter. In addition, we remain confident that we will ultimately realize revenue synergies from our acquisition of Convio, though it will take time for our efforts to translate into the income statement, particularly considering our ratable revenue model for these pure-SaaS offerings. In our enterprise services organization, our fourth quarter results were relatively weak, though consistent with our commentary from last quarter's call. We have made good progress addressing the issues impacting our enterprise services during the fourth quarter. And Joe Moye is doing a great job implementing process improvements that we think will deliver meaningful benefits over the course of 2013. One of the primary areas we are focused on rightsizing, as part of the January 2013 cost-reduction efforts, was our services organization. And we believe this will contribute to an overall improvement in our profitability going forward. Let me turn to our General Markets Business Unit, which posted a solid performance in the fourth quarter. The meaningful shift in the percentage of GMBU deals sold as subscriptions continued in the quarter, outpacing license deals by greater-than-4 to 1. We were pleased with the ability of the General Markets Business Unit to execute despite the macro headwinds which have historically been a bigger challenge when selling to small- and mid-sized nonprofits. As we look to 2013, we are focusing on selling back to our installed base of Raiser's Edge customers. Raiser's Edge is hands-down the best product in the market, but there's a significant opportunity to cross-sell these customers on our broad suite of additional products. We will also be working on adding great functionality for our power users of the Raiser's Edge as well as exciting cloud functionality to extend our reach to less-technical users of this flagship solution. We will also be looking to build on the success that we've had with our first vertically focused product offering ALTRU and bring another vertical-specific product to market during the year. Our international business had a strong quarter, highlighted by the 2 CRM deals I mentioned earlier. These were exciting wins, and we have a strong pipeline of CRM deals we are executing against during 2013. We also went live with our first CRM implementation in Australia during the quarter. Our international strength extended beyond CRM, with Everyday Hero posting strong results as well. We think we can build on the strength we're seeing at Everyday Hero and bring that to a larger audience in 2013. The leadership and organizational changes that we made earlier in 2012 in our International Business Unit have been highly successful. And we are confident that our international operations can represent a much more meaningful percentage of our total business over the long term. I'd like to spend a moment talking about the steps we've taken to position our organization for improved efficiency and execution and to generate profit levels that our shareholders expect and we, as management, are committed to delivering. Despite the fact that our revenue faced headwinds during 2012, we did our best to protect the company's bottom line by streamlining processes, managing costs closely and exceeding our goal of $9 million to $10 million in annualized cost savings as part of the Convio integration. More recently, in January 2013, we reduced the company's total headcount by approximately 150, a significant part of which realizes the final integration cost synergy with Convio. This action is expected to generate $9 million to $10 million of additional cost savings in 2013, and it was possible due in part to the initial portfolio simplification we've undertaken, which has the added benefit of freeing-up resources to be deployed on other projects. To be clear, even though we rationalized our combined company headcount to improve efficiencies in several areas of our business, we're continuing to invest in our business and we're actively hiring in areas that will help us execute our growth strategies. As Tony will detail in a few moments, we believe our actions will help Blackbaud to deliver approximately 250 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin expansion in 2013. In closing, as you're all aware, we announced the CEO transition plan 3 weeks ago, and I will be stepping down as President and CEO by yearend, or earlier if my successor's named. It's been a privilege to lead Blackbaud over the past 7 years and I'm extremely proud of what our employees and management team have accomplished. While we were forced to navigate a challenging and volatile economic environment for the second half of my tenure, we were successful in tripling the size of our revenue base, transitioning a significant portion of our business to SaaS- and subscription-based offerings, expanding Blackbaud's position and offerings in the highest-growth segments of the market and extending our leadership position in the nonprofit technology market. When I hand over the reins, I know that my successor will be leading a strong team and that Blackbaud has the foundation in place to continue to achieve great things. That said, until that time comes, I remain fully engaged in the day-to-day operations of the company, and everyone at Blackbaud is focused on the task at hand which is delivering improved profitability to our shareholders and position the company for accelerating revenue growth over the long-term. With that, let me turn it over to Tony to review our financial results and guidance in more detail. Tony?