Joshua W. R. Pickus
Analyst · Craig-Hallum
Thanks, Shelly. Q1 represented a strong beginning to 2013. From a financial perspective, revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share came in towards the high end of our range. Both services and software grew sequentially, gross and operating margins remained strong and our cash balance continued to grow. In total, the quarter demonstrated both continued revenue momentum and sustainability in bottom line performance. From an operating perspective, key services programs continued to grow. In particular, Comcast notched another quarter of sequential revenue growth and Symantec continued the acceleration it began in the second half of last year. In retail, OfficeMax and Office Depot performed strongly. We have worked closely with both retailers since the announcement of their planned merger, and both are focused on achieving their program goals without distraction from the proposed transaction. At OfficeMax, we completed the renewal of our agreement on good terms, extending the partnership through the third quarter of 2014. We also launched OfficeMax On-Call Tech Support, a new services program focused on small business with a national footprint. As we indicated in our last call, Staples declined sequentially and will decline further this quarter as they move their Virus Removal services in-house. Services opportunities with additional partners in communications, retail and other industries continue to progress. Today, we're pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with DISH Network to provide premium technology support services to DISH subscribers. We expect this program to launch this summer. Competitively, 2 developments in the pipeline of services opportunities are worthy of note. First, our privately held pure-play competitors are encountering challenges, and this is strengthening our leadership position in the market and adding replacement opportunities to the pipeline. Second, our introduction of a platform license offering appears to be creating additional services opportunities as prospects focused on the platform determined in the course of discussions that they may wish to utilize our workforce for elements of their programs. In software, we released enhanced versions of 2 end-user products. The first, SUPERAntiSpyware for business, augments SUPERAntiSpyware's traditional strength in malware removal and protection with central management capabilities that make it easy to deploy and manage across organizations. The second, Cosmos 3.0, adds touchscreen tablet support and a home network scanner to Cosmos' comprehensive suite of system care features. In terms of our 2013 initiatives, small business sales efforts at key partners progressed. As we've described in prior calls, premium tech support for small business is a large and growing opportunity, with Parks Associates sizing the market at 11 billion in 2012, growing to 19 billion in 2016. Over this period, we believe the market will evolve in much the same fashion as consumer premium support, with branded national players displacing local and regional providers. A key challenge for nationwide providers seeking to penetrate the small business market is perfecting a sales process that works over the phone and the Internet, rather than in person. Our partners have been focused on this issue, expanding the footprint of their internal telesales groups and optimizing the performance of third party sales organizations. We're beginning to see results from their efforts and look forward to further progress throughout this year. Our Software-as-a-Service offering also advanced. As you will recall, we began licensing our Nexus Service Delivery Platform in the second half of last year, following receipt of inquiries from potential customers about licensing this platform for use in their own support organizations. Our platform represents the next generation in assisted support technology. It offers a host of differentiated features, including automatic diagnostic end solutions that improve technical problem-solving ability; continuous access to guided best practice workflows, based on our standard operating procedures; rapid adaptability to changing issues through on-the-fly cloud-based configuration; a unified tool set that eliminates swivel chairing and many valuable program management capabilities. We completed our first platform license with US Tech Support in October and successfully moved the customer into production in January. Today, I'm pleased to announce that we have completed another SaaS agreement and expanded our pipeline of SaaS opportunities. The agreement with Saba Software is for a program in which the IT organization is using the standard operating procedure automation feature of Nexus to simplify key IT processes. This is our first transaction outside premium support, and will serve as a proof-of-concept for delivering value in the employee help desk context. In terms of pipeline, the SaaS pipeline now contains 3 types of opportunities. The first set is in premium tech support, where customers provide fee-based support services with their own labor and need a technology platform to do so. US Tech Support falls into this category, and we expect the lion's share of early wins to be in this area. The next set of opportunities is in traditional external-facing tech support. A customer's experience with technology increasingly defines the overall customer experience, making the quality of technical support more important and leading support organizations to seek modern tool sets designed to handle the long tail of issues that rise in today's heterogeneous network multi-device environment. The third set of opportunities is in internal IT. Saba falls into this category. The internal technology environment is evolving with BYOD, or bring your own device programs, becoming increasingly common. Such environments require the employee help desk to become more flexible and adaptable, creating an opportunity for the next generation of problem resolution technologies, such as our Nexus platform. We've long believed our substantial R&D investment made the Nexus platform a unique and powerful solution, and we're gratified by the response it's receiving in the marketplace. Looking forward to Q2, we note that for the last 3 years, Q2 has been relatively consistent with Q1, as growth in other areas is offset to some degree by retail's slowest quarter. We expect the same this year, especially with the changes at Staples. Overall, we expect revenue of $19.5 million to $20.5 million, and non-GAAP earnings of $0.05 to $0.07 per share. With that, I'll open it up for questions. Operator?