Michael Saylor
Analyst · Mizuho Securities. You maybe begin
Thank you, Phong. I want to share a few comments on my perspective regarding the result in the quarter and our plan going forward. I think the pros of the quarter, we were profitable and had good cash flows and I was pleased with quality of the deals that we were doing. In particular, I’m excited about the fact that we’re doing really good business with some of the largest banks in the world, we had good deals with some of the largest companies in the world, we have some really good business with some of the most procedures technology vendors in the world and the appeal of our product at the enterprise level appears to be fairly well balanced across just about every major industry and also lots of governments around the world. So the products really, I think is resonating with the marketplace. I was pleased with the analysts endorsements we got from Bark and Force during the quarter. The analyst make a difference in the industry and we had some negative analyst developments in the past and this was a nice turnaround for us and Force just in September give us a really nice endorsement and Bark just a few months before that. And so that’s been resonating really well in the marketplace both with the channel and also with our customers. I think it’s an auspicious development for us. In many cases these analysts reviewed up to 20 of our competitors and anointed us as a leader or the leader in many of these spaces. So I’m excited about that. We see good things and good trends in customer satisfaction, where our customer satisfaction ratings that we are gathering from our install base continue to trend north in the right direction. I have had the opportunity to travel around the world just in the past few weeks presenting MicroStrategy version 10.9 and we’ve been getting really good customer and partner response to 10.9 and so I think that was really a nice pro and the services performance year-over-year was strong and so we are pleased with that. The negative is software bookings were lower this quarter than this time a year ago and so that we’re not pleased with. As I look at some the business going forward, I think, we’ve got a pretty good plan in place that makes sense for us to drive organic growth in the business and our plan consistent of a variety of different strategies. We are going to increase our investment in corporate, marketing and digital marketing, especially by spending money across channels like Facebook and Google and Twitter and some of the other publications where CXOs have their eyeballs. And so we have already started that process and that will continue and we think that that will help us build our brand and drive additional leads and brand awareness in the marketplace. We have got a pretty ambitious program to increase the degree of field marketing we are doing in the coming year and that means both continue with our existing symposiums, as well as be present at lot more tradeshows. With regard to field marketing we are looking to targeted places where CXOs and then also IT executives driving digital transformation and enterprise and analytics purchases will be. That means big data conferences, analytics conferences, digital transformation conferences, enterprise mobility conferences. I think gatherings of CIOs, CTOs and other IT executives and also CXOs. This is dramatically ramping up versus where we were a year ago and so I expect that we’ll see good things come from that. We are making investments in our sales organization to strengthen our sales capabilities everywhere in the world and that means in some cases additional field marketing personnel and others additional channels personnel and additional sales leadership and also product localization personnel. So these are investments we are making in China and Japan and Korea and Asia-Pacific and in the Middle East and in Europe and Latin America, and of course, all throughout the Americas region. And I think that given the arrival of our new product and product capabilities, this is a time like thing for us to do and I’m getting good feedback from all of our field sales organizations that this is a positive development. So we will continue with that. We are going to make additional investments in our services organization and we will be bringing on more support professionals and support engineers and more professional services experts in order to raise the level our professional support and also to grow our professional services business and to proactively target our customers with an enterprise support offering, which will help them to get the most of the MicroStrategy platform. I am really enthusiastic about our enterprise support approach because I feel like just about all of our customers will benefit from the developments we’ve made in our product and improvements we have made in our platform and also the best practices that we’ve been developing for how to deploy the MicroStrategy platform more effectively throughout the enterprise by developing some good approaches to optimize our configurations and we will develop new methodologies to deploy self-service on the MicroStrategy platform, which is a really high demand thing right now and we are also developing new methodologies to create additional environments that people can use to deploy mobile and IoT and embedded analytic applications and cloud applications. And so, our services strategy is really integrated well with our product strategy and is integral and I think that it will help us to grow the business and not just grow services but grow software revenue. So we will add additional talent to do that everywhere in the world. And I would be -- I wouldn’t want to leave out maybe one more important areas of our growth strategy, which is product development. There are whole set of product themes that we are investing in in order to grow the business and we are going to ramp up those investments. Certainly one area we are enthusiastic about is our new Dossier and Workstation. I think the Dossier is a dramatic advance in our interface and not only it is extremely modern and a great way to deploy mobile applications and analytic application to the entire enterprise, but it also incorporates collaboration and as you see from our press release we are really excited about collaboration, it makes it much easier and much faster to embed analytics into workflow and it will draw large new user constituencies into our analytic enterprise framework and so the Dossier is key. Workstation is our tool strategy to dramatically improve the quality and the effectiveness and efficiency of our tools. And we are going to continue to drive that forward and I expect that in 2018 we will start to see good things come from that. I have got really good feedback from our customers about Workstation. They seem to be pretty enthusiastic about the potential of our new toolset to drive productivity and agility. Another big theme in the market right now is data and conductivity, especially big data. And then in our latest releases we have added upgraded drivers and gateways to support direct access to Hadoop and Spark and many of the new cloud-based data sources like Snowflake and Redshift. And that combined with new conductivity options we have for big data, new support for MDX data sources like MSAS and other cubes and new functionality related to MDX. These are very auspicious. I think they are going to help us in our growth strategy. We continued to open up our architecture. It is now possible with MicroStrategy 10.9 to turn the MicroStrategy environment into a data warehouse of sorts. So you can publish MicroStrategy data sets from one MicroStrategy environment to another MicroStrategy environment and this is really exciting development for us, because it means that we can actually use our environments to federate data sets and federate KPIs to other MicroStrategy environments, which has been in high demand for a while. We have got a exciting agenda to improve and enhance our gateway and big data connections in a coming year and I think that this is going to be a great growth area for us. Dossier is a great underlying technology to help us turbocharge our enterprise mobility applications as well and so I think mobility is going to be even more of a theme in 2018. And the Dossier allows you to very quickly build an application which renders very nicely on all types of mobile form factors, as well as web and desktop, and it’s generating a lot of excitement amongst customers as they see this. The latest release of our product has some dramatic upgrades to our APIs for embedding our analytics into custom applications. And sometimes that takes the form of building custom mobile or custom web apps, and those areas are RESTful APIs and JSON API has been very popular customers. We have also illustrated how you can actually serve up MicroStrategy federated data sets to other enterprise be iTools or Tableau or Power BI or Qlik, and so it makes MicroStrategy a really good corporate citizen where we can serve as a data warehouse for them, and that’s exciting. And we will ship this new embedding APIs and 10.9 which makes it possible to take the Dossier in a matter of minutes embedded into a web portal or blog or any HTML document and people really excited about that. So we are going to continue to invest in embedded analytics APIs as we look forward in the year and I think that that will be a source of growth for us. Another source of growth in the market is the migration to the cloud and especially the explosion of AWS and companies that have their own virtual private clouds and AWS environment, our latest releases is the best version of MicroStrategy’s platform for the cloud yet and now -- we are now actively selling and marketing MicroStrategy for AWS. And the exciting thing about it is that any customer can deploy an enterprise grade version of MicroStrategy in their own BPC. They can integrate it back into their data center and they can manage it and they have the encryption keys and they have all the administrative controls of it. So they have complete control of an environment. It’s also exciting because MicroStrategy for AWS means that any of our partners and system integrators can deploy the MicroStrategy environment in their BPC and they could become a cloud service provider tapping right into the power of AWS but then layering on their own managed services and applications in order to be a software-as-a-service vendor or managed service center. This is going to help us move our cloud value proposition everywhere in the world. It means that local partners of ours in Japan and Korea and international, they can all create their own tailored versions of MicroStrategy cloud offering, tailored for the local political and legal environment and tailored for the local language and solution environment. And so we see this is being a nice breakthrough and scalability, and will allow us to grow our cloud revenues over time. And the last area that’s worth highlighting in this call is the advances we’ve made with regard to mobile identity and communications and telemetry in the Usher product line and we feel like that’s the best we’ve had so far and starting to work really, really well and was generating lots of enthusiasm throughout the customer base and the potential of mobile communications and mobile identity to either turbocharge the analytics frameworks or to the -- to improve their enterprise mobility solutions or to deploy standalone communications and security applications on mobile devices. So our growth strategy in a nutshell is ramp up our marketing, strengthen our sales, strengthen our services organizations, focus more services on our enterprises and continue to make substantial investments in the product platform writing on these waves of mobility, of big data, of embedded analytics and cloud and in IoT. We will spend more money on engineers and on professional services people, and sales and marketing professionals in order to pursue this agenda. The cost will ramp up during the coming year. But I believe it positions us well for revenue growth. So looking forward we are heads down executing on our growth plan. I’m more excited about the future than ever and I’m looking forward to 2018 and what the year will bring. With that, we would be happy to answer questions if there are some.