Dennis Story
Analyst · Truist Securities. Your line is open
Thanks Eddie. I would characterize our first quarter execution as an all-rounder. We delivered strong financial performance from top line to bottom line with across the board, solid growth, profitability, cash flow, and balance sheet results. Here's the key summary of financial highlights with growth rates on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. As Eddie mentioned Q1 total revenue was $157 million, up 2%; adjusted earnings per share was $0.43, up 8%; GAAP EPS was $0.35 and overall performance was driven by cloud revenue in the quarter. Q1 operating income totaled $36 million, up 12% year-over-year; adjusted operating margin was 22.7%, up 200 basis points and our GAAP operating margin was 16.2%. Q1 cloud revenue was $27 million, up 54%. License revenue was $7.8 million, down 19% as our end markets are predominantly choosing our cloud solutions. And Q1 RPO was a record performance at $421 million, up 108% in case you forgot from Eddie's comments year-over-year and up 36% sequentially. At our current full year outlook $450 million to $550 million we are on track to exceed our $500 million midpoint. Further cloud momentum is fueling our services pipeline and revenue growth opportunity. Q1 services revenue exceeded expectations totaling $80 million against an $87 million comp in Q1 2020. More importantly, services revenue was up 13% sequentially over Q4 2020 with our growth outlook accelerating for the balance of 2021. Our Q2 services revenue forecast is $83 million to $85 million, up 17% year-over-year. And for Q3 and Q4, our forecast calls for 20% year-over-year growth. Maintenance was up 1% on cash collections. Important point here, like license revenue, we do expect second half attrition on customer conversions to cloud, which will positively impact our RPO performance. And also our hardware team delivered a solid $6 million in sales up 56% year-over-year. So let me turn to cash and cash flow, another strong performance, Q1 closed with cash on hand totaling $197 million with zero debt operating. Cash flow was $40 million up 3.5 times year-over-year and our Q1 free cash flow margin was 25%. Our current deferred revenue balance totaled to $123 million up 8% over Q4 2020 and 17% year-over-year on cloud billings. And also we invested $27 million in share buybacks in Q1 and our board raised our buyback authority to $50 million. That's the results summary, I'll cover some additional financial updates and guidance and then turn the call back to Eddie. Our cloud revenue outperformance was mostly driven by positive deal timing, overages renewals. Overages and renewals can be lumpy on a quarterly basis, for Q2 we expect cloud revenue to be roughly up 46% compared to Q2 2020. For the full year, we are raising our previous cloud revenue estimate of $108 million to $110 million to a range of $111 million to $113 million equating to 40% growth at the midpoint. As frequently mentioned, remaining performance obligation or RPO is the leading proxy for our cloud revenue. While we updated our RPO outlet to exceed $500 million midpoint for 2021 going forward, our intention remains to guide RPO on an annual basis as bookings can be lumpy primarily based on sales cycle timing and the number and relative value of large deals and product mix from quarter-to-quarter. Furthermore, on flow-through from RPO to cloud revenue, some customers have longer implementation cycles, associated with large projects requiring a multi-year annual subscription ramp built into the contract. These revenue ramps are commonly or common for larger cloud deals and with larger opportunities becoming more prevalent in our pipeline, we expect RPO growth to accelerate first, followed by a gradual steepening ramp in cloud revenue growth, providing us with very good visibility into future subscription revenue. So all said, we are confident in our ability to achieve the high end of our prior $450 million to $550 million RPO outlook for 2021. As discussed in our previous Q4 earnings call, we expect license and maintenance revenue attrition to accelerate in 2021, estimating license revenue to be in the range of $20 million to $25 million for the full year, which represents a 41% year-over-year decline. For Q2, we anticipate license revenue to be approximately $6 million, and Q3 and Q4 to be about $4 million each quarter. For maintenance revenue, we continue to target approximately $35 million per quarter throughout 2021, and we expect the attrition impact will manifest itself for the most part in the second half of 2021. Our consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin for the quarter was 50.9% driven by revenue performance and cloud operating leverage. We expect Q2 consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin to be about 52.6% improving 40 bps over prior expectations. Given the strong demand we anticipate costs to tick up slightly in the second half on hiring and performance-based comp with second half margin to be about 51.1% compared to our prior expectations of 51.5%. And for operating income and margin, we are increasing our full year 2021 guidance 50 bps, resulting in a midpoint of 21.5% and we remain confident in our ability to make strong progress on achieving the rule authority over time. On a quarterly basis, we anticipate adjusted operating margin to be 22.5% for Q2, 21.2% in Q3 and 19.4% in Q4. Regarding taxes, our adjusted effective income tax rate was 21.5%, we expect our Q2 and full year 2021 adjusted tax rate to be 21.5%, down from our prior expectations of 23%. The lower tax rate will benefit pro forma adjusted EPS by roughly $0.03 for the full year, our GAAP effective income tax rate was 9.9% for the quarter driven by excess tax benefits on restricted stock vesting. We expect our full year 2021 GAAP tax rate to be about 20%. Regarding our capital structure, in Q1 2021, we repurchased approximately 214,000 shares worth roughly $27 million, for the second quarter and full year, we estimate our diluted shares outstanding to be 64.8 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Also for CapEx, we estimate for 2001 [ph] to invest about $6 million to $8 million at this time. So that completes the core financial update, turning to increased 2021 guidance. For total revenue we are raising guidance from our previous range of $595 million to $625 million, which represented 4% growth at the midpoint to a new guidance range of $625 million to $640 million targeting 8% growth at the midpoint of $632 million. As a reminder, this includes $22.5 million of revenue compression equating to 4 percentage points of growth driven by license and maintenance attrition. For Q2, we expect total revenue of $154 million to $159 million or 15% growth at the $157 million midpoint. As we account for continued license attrition, we expect Q3 and Q4 midpoint total revenue growth to be approximately 7% to 8%. For adjusted earnings per share, we're increasing our previous guidance range of $1.44 to $1.59 to $1.60 to $1.70 with a midpoint of $1.65, up from our previous midpoint of $1.52. For GAAP earnings per share, our guidance range is $1.10 to $1.20 with a midpoint of $1.15 up from our previous midpoint of $1.04. For Q2, we expect adjusted EPS $0.42 to $0.44. And as previously discussed for operating margin, we are raising our target range to 21% to 22% and for Q2 we expect an operating margin range of 22.3% to 22.7%. So in summary, our underlying growth fundamentals are strong, excluding license and maintenance, which are line items negatively impacted by our cloud transition, because they are a trading at the midpoint of our Q2 and full year guidance, our pro forma total 2021 total revenue growth is 23% for Q2 and full year 17%. So thank you, that covers my financial update and I'll turn the call back to Eddie.