Operator
Operator
Good afternoon and welcome to the F5 Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all parties will be able to listen-only until the question-and-answer portion. Also today’s conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. John Eldridge, Director of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin. John Eldridge – Director, Investor Relations: Thank you, Carol and welcome everyone to our conference call for the third quarter of fiscal 2011. The speakers on today’s call are John McAdam, President and CEO and Andy Reinland, Senior VP and Chief Financial Officer. Other members of our executive team are also with us to answer questions following their prepared comments. If you have questions following today’s call, please direct them to me at 206-272-6571. If you don’t have a copy of today’s press release, it is available on our website f5.com. In addition, you can access an archived version of today’s live webcast from the Events Calendar page of our website through October 25. From 4.30 p.m. today until midnight Pacific Time, July 21, you can also listen to a telephone replay at 866-511-5157 or 203-369-1957. During today’s call, our discussion will contain forward-looking statements, which include words such as believe, anticipate, expect, and target. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. Factors that may affect our results are summarized in our quarterly release and described in detail in our SEC filings. Please note that F5 has no duty to update any information presented in this call. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Andy Reinland. Andy Reinland – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer: Thank you, John. In the third quarter of fiscal 2011, F5 achieved solid sequential and year-over-year growth. Revenue of $290.7 million was at the high end of our $287 million to $292 million guided range grew 5% from the prior quarter and grew 26% compared to a very strong Q3 a year ago. GAAP EPS of $0.77 per diluted share was above our guided range of $0.69 to $0.71. Excluding stock-based compensation expense, non-GAAP EPS of $0.97 per diluted share was also above our guided range of $0.89 to $0.91. The strong EPS results reflect additional R&D tax credit benefits of approximately $0.05 per share recognized in the current quarter. Product revenue of $179.3 million grew 22% year-over-year, and represented 62% of total revenue. Service revenue of $111.4 million grew 34% year-over-year, and accounted for 38% of total revenue. Book-to-bill for the quarter was greater than 1. Both APAC and Japan delivered strong revenue growth during the quarter. APAC which represented 16% of total revenue grew 58% year-over-year and Japan as 7% of total revenue was up 42% year-over-year. EMEA representing 20% of total revenue grew 15% from the third quarter of fiscal 2010 and was down sequentially. Accounting for 57% of the total, revenue from the Americas was up slightly compared to the prior quarter and grew 22% year-over-year. During Q3, our core application delivery networking business accounted for $282.5 million compared to $270.5 million in Q2. Revenue from our ARX file virtualization business was $8.3 million up 16% from Q2 and 32% from the third quarter a year ago. Both the telco and technology verticals represented 21% of total revenue in Q3. The financial vertical accounted for 19%. Total government revenue was 10% including 5% from U.S. federal. In Q3 we had two greater than 10% distributors, Avnet which represented 16.4% of total revenue and Ingram Micro which accounted for 10.6%. Our GAAP gross margin in Q3 ticked up slightly to 82%. Excluding approximately $2.4 million of stock-based compensation expense, non GAAP gross margin also moved up to 82.8%. GAAP operating expenses of $150 million were within her target range $147 million to $151 million. Excluding $20.5 million of stock-based compensation expense, non-GAAP operating expenses were $129.5 million. GAAP operating margin was 30.4%. Our non-GAAP operating margin which excludes stock-based compensation expense was 38.2%. Reflecting the R&D tax benefit, I mentioned earlier, our GAAP effective tax rate for Q3 was 30.6%. Excluding stock-based compensation, our non GAAP effective tax rate was 29.8%. Turning to the balance sheet, cash flow from operations was $101.1 million, free cash flow for the quarter was $92.2 million. We ended the quarter with total cash and investments of $1.57 billion. DSO at the end of Q3 was 48 days. Inventories were 17.9 million. Deferred revenue increased 3% sequentially to $321.9 million. Capital expenditures for the quarter were $8.8 million and depreciation and amortization expense was $5.2 million. We ended the quarter with approximately 2350 employees an increase of 95 from the prior quarter. During the quarter we repurchased approximately 472,000 shares or common stock at an average price of $105.96 per share for a total of $50 million. Looking ahead to Q4, while we remain cautious about the impact the ongoing financial uncertainty in Europe might have on our EMEA business, we are seeing strength within our North America enterprise business and we believe our US federal business will reflect to seasonal strength we typically see in Q4. We believe the key drivers of our business remain intact and that we will continue to achieve solid sequential and year-over-year growth in Q4. With that in mind, our revenue target for Q4 is $307 million to $312 million. We expect GAAP gross margin to remain strong in the 81% to 82% range including approximately 2.5 million of stock-based compensation expense. We anticipate GAAP operating expenses in the range of $156 million to $160 million. This includes approximately $21.5 million of stock based compensation expense. Our GAAP EPS target is $0.75 to $0.77 per diluted share. Excluding stock compensation, our non GAAP EPS target is $0.97 to $0.99 per diluted share. We are forecasting an effective tax rate of 35%. Excluding stock-based compensation, we expect a non-GAAP effective tax rate of 33%. We plan to increase our headcount by more than 125 employees in the current quarter. We estimate our DSO will be in the mid-40 day range. We expect inventory levels within the range of 18 million to 20 million and we believe our cash flow from operations will be in excess of $110 million. With that, I will turn the call over to John McAdam. John McAdam – President and Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, Andy and good afternoon everyone. The F5 team delivered another solid performance in the third quarter of fiscal 2011. The Asia Pacific, Japan region with the start of the quarter with year-over-year growth rate over 50%. The Americas year-over-year growth rate up 22% was constrained a bit by some projects spending delays in the U.S. federal market as well as some project spending delays particularly in the financial vertical. The EMEAs region’s year-over-year growth of 15% was clearly impacted by the economic challenges currently present in that region. We passed a significant milestone on our stellar balance sheet with cash and investments surpassing the $1 billion mark, currently at $1.06 billion having repurchased $50 billion worth of common stock in the quarter. Our services business once again produced solid results with 34% growth in revenue along with strong contribution to our overall profitability. Our non-GAAP operating margin was very solid at 38.2%, which is our highest level to-date. We also saw improvement in our ARX sales in Q3 with ARX revenues growing 16% sequentially and 32% year-over-year. We started shipping our new VIPRION 2400 product known internally as Victoria, towards the end of the quarter. The VIPRION 2400 leverages the significant success of our current VIPRION solution by providing industry leading functionality at a various rate of price point. With the VIPRION 2400 chassis-based architecture, customers enjoy enhanced availability features and the flexibility to scale the ADC infrastructures without changing network, application or device configuration, leading to dramatically reduced operating expenditures. As we mentioned in our press release announcing availability of this new product, the VIPRION 2400 is shipping initially with TMOS Version 10.2.2 and will support Version 11 of TMOS, when it is released. Initial sales and customer interest in the VIPRION 2400 has been very high and we expect a level of interest to continue to increase during Q4 and continue additional momentum in fiscal 2012 as customer’s option of Version 11 accelerates. TMOS Version 11, which is target to ship in this coming quarter, includes over 150 new sophisticated management and scalability features to enhance datacenter consolidation and cloud architectures. Version 11 also includes new application visibility and management features, specific solutions for the telco market, and significant software and firmware performance enhancements to many of our software modules. Version 11 also also includes a sophisticated Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing Technology, vCMP. That combines virtualization and multi-tenancy capabilities to help customers consolidate and efficiently manage application delivery services. VCMP enables multiple instances of BIG-IP software to run on one device and provides enterprises the unprecedented ability to have complete logical separation of software version and instances on a single highly scalable device. This capability is critically important for large enterprises and cloud and other service providers, who need on-demand scalability and the ability to ensure that each group's resources in network traffic are fully isolated from one another. As far as the overall business outlook in concerned, I feel very confident about our prospects both in the short-term and as we move in to the final quarter of fiscal year 2011 and for fiscal year 2012. At our last investor conference, we highlighted an application delivery controller technology is the starting point to address our major market opportunities such as security and service provider. The key to this expansion is TMOS and our ability to deliver application level intelligence at network speeds. Version 11 contains significant enhancements that directly address these markets. For example, the majority of money spent on security to date has been targeted at protecting the network. F5’s market leading and award winning application firewall solution, the application security manager is becoming increasingly vital to our customer’s as attacks on their IT infrastructure have become significantly more sophisticated, targeting not only the network, but applications directly. The recent high profile hacking exploits against major banks, governments, and other corporations to demonstrate the inherent weakness of traditional firewall and IP solutions and highlight the need for a security solution that not only protects the assets of the networks, but of the application as well. ASM coupled with the core capabilities of TMOS allows our customers to blow up this new generation of sophisticated hacker exploits. We have major Fortune 500 customers replacing traditional network firewalls entirely with big IP. Along with the significant additional security functionality in V11, our short-term product roadmap include additional classification, enhanced network firewall capabilities, and broader application protection that should further accelerate the opportunity to expand our presence in the security market. We believe this opportunity coupled with our strategic footprint in the data center will significantly expand that addressable market in fiscal year 2012 and beyond. In the context of several global macroeconomic issues, we delivered solid sequential and year-over-year revenue growth in Q3. And as we stated last quarter, we continue to believe it is prudent to remain cautious in the short-term. Having said that, we believe there are real growth opportunities for F5 in the foreseeable future and we plan to continue aggressively hiring to expand our sales and marketing service and development organization and enhance our prospects for future sustained growth. In conclusion, I would like to thank the F5 team, our partners and customers for the support last quarter. And we will now hand the call over for Q&A.