Brian Carolan
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open
Thanks, Sanjay, and good morning, everyone. Before discussing our outlook, I’ll briefly recap our results. Total revenue was approximately $173 million, up 7% year-over-year. Software and products revenue increased 20% year-over-year to $76.6 million, an all-time first quarter record. Software revenue growth was driven by a significant increase in large enterprise deals and a successful initial subscription renewal effort. Software transactions over $100,000 increased 41% year-over-year to approximately $56 million. These large deals represented 73% of software revenue in the current quarter compared to 62% a year ago. The number of these transactions increased approximately 5% year-over-year and the average deal size exceeded $400,000, approximately 35% higher year-over-year. The increase in large software transactions was driven by an all-time record contribution from seven-figure deals. This included the largest ever purchase order in company history, a subscription transaction with an eight-figure total contract value, in addition to two other very large deals. While we are pleased with our ability to close these large deals, they influence the contribution mix from subscription and recurring revenue as well as the average deal size and should not be considered a baseline for the next few quarters. Fiscal first quarter services revenue was approximately $96 million, declining 2% year-over-year. The decline was primarily due to COVID-related restrictions, which impacted on-site professional services. In addition, maintenance revenue growth was impacted by the strategic transition of legacy perpetual customers to subscription licensing arrangements. These conversions benefit us over the longer term, because of the associated opportunity to drive lifetime value with an active customer. Let me now discuss our continued transition to a more recurring revenue-based model. As you know, prior to FY '18, we primarily sold perpetual contracts. At that time, subscription and usage-based utility contracts accounted for less than 10% of our software and products revenue. Recurring revenue, which included subscription software and maintenance, represented approximately 50% of total revenue. Beginning in FY '18, we introduced subscription-based pricing that align to our customers’ workloads and purchasing preferences. FY '21 marks the first year of our subscription renewal cycle. This opportunity represents a positive inflection point for our business. We expect the upcoming renewal cycle to serve as a revenue tailwind in FY '21 and beyond. As Sanjay described, the announcement that we made at FutureReady represent an important streamlining of our product, packaging, and pricing strategy. We expect this evolution will continue to result in even more subscription-based recurring revenue over time. In order to best report and measure our business consistent with the way customers consume our products and services, we will be increasingly focused on the following three operating metrics; subscription as a percentage of software and products revenue, recurring revenue as a percentage of total revenue, and annual recurring revenue or ARR. Now, I’ll take a moment to discuss each of these metrics. In Q1 FY '21, subscription revenue represented approximately 69% of total software revenue versus less than 10% in FY '17. We added approximately 200 subscription customers in the quarter, and our subscription net dollar retention rate was above 100% exceeding our initial expectations. Our total recurring revenue increased 24% year-over-year to $141 million and represented 82% of total revenue in the quarter. This compares to approximately 50% in FY '17. This quarter, we are also introducing annual recurring revenue or ARR. We define ARR as the annualized value of Commvault’s recurring revenue streams at a point in time. Going forward, ARR will replace ACV, because we believe it is a better measure of our recurring revenue streams. As of June 30, 2020, our ARR increased 9% year-over-year to approximately $472 million. Now, I'll discuss expenses and profitability. During the quarter, we remained disciplined on expenses. Q1 FY '21 expenses, including both cost of sales and operating expenses, declined 4% year-over-year to $138 million, resulting in an EBIT of $32.5 million and an EBIT margin of 18.8%. Both EBIT dollars and EBIT margins approximately doubled year-over-year. We note that Q1 FY '21 benefited from approximately $12 million of temporary and COVID-related expense reductions. We expect approximately half of these reductions to repeat in Q2, while the balance of these temporary reductions are likely to return to near prior levels as business normalizes. Our focus on prudent cost management continues. Now, I'll discuss our financial outlook for Q2 FY '21. For the second quarter of FY '21, we expect total revenue of approximately $164 million. We expect software and products revenue to be at least flat year-over-year or $69 million. Please note that the subscription renewal opportunity in Q2 FY '21 is the lowest of the year. In addition, the SME segment remains challenged and COVID continues to create overall macro uncertainty. That said, we believe our renewals, enhanced product and pricing strategy and refined go-to-market motion should more meaningfully contribute to results in the second half of the year. Beginning in Q2 FY '21, with the integration of Hedvig into our new HyperScale X platform, we expect to see a reduction of certain third-party royalties to benefit gross margins by approximately 100 basis points for the balance of the fiscal year. As noted, we also expect that some of the temporary cost reductions we saw in Q1 will begin to normalize. As a result, we expect OpEx to modestly increase sequentially. We will remain disciplined in aligning our underlying operating expense base to current revenue levels, and we've identified other potential cost-saving actions. With that, we expect Q2 FY '21 EBIT margins to be approximately 13%. Lastly, our projected share count for Q2 is approximately 47 million shares. Now, I’ll turn the call back over to Sanjay for some closing remarks. Sanjay?