John Pagliuca
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Matt, please go ahead, your line is now open
Thanks, Jeff and thank you all for joining us today. We are pleased with both our execution and financial performance in Q1. Our revenue growth was 12% on a constant currency basis that exceeded the high end of our outlook, leveraging the strength of our data protection as a service and security offerings. Operationally, we are on track with the initiatives we outlined last summer and preparation for our spin-off. Our investment in partners success is resulting in better retention figures, more cross sell opportunities, and a better customer experience. Our increased investments in product has allowed us to re-establish our cadence bringing additional offerings to our MSPs and is delivering a disruptive data protection offering that is winning in the marketplace. And our investments in additional sales motions and channel expansion is unlocking opportunities in new geographies and areas. As I mentioned on the last call, this year, we are rallying behind the phrase, earn more N-able fans. And so far in 2022 it has really galvanized our strategy and accelerated our momentum. As you know, we call our MSP customers, our partners because our relationship goes deeper than a mere transaction or sale. Our partners look to N-able to provide them with a world class technology that allows them to efficiently and securely scale their business and support the IT needs of the customers they need. Despite all the noise in the market, we remain focused on a different kind of disruption, placing powerful and disruptive technology and business tools in the hands of our partners, enabling them to achieve their growth goals and increase their value to their customer base. Because when they grow, we grow. We know that in order for us to earn more fans, we need to execute on our mission to empower MSP partners to solve their most pressing problems and keep them secure and ahead of their competition. We have made a long-term commitment to our partners’ success and continuously improve on all fronts. We’ve talked about our industry tailwinds. The digital evolution continues to accelerate and pose both opportunity and challenges to SMEs. The levels of IT complexity, labor scarcity, and rising cyber threats are increasing in a way that underscores the importance of IT service providers. This aligns with our strategy and our business model. First, IT complexity is rapidly increasing. What this means for MSPs is that their customers will continue to ask them to manage widespread digital assets with increasing IT demands so they will need to automate and secure new processes and workflows to ensure their SMEs, their customers remain productive. N-able’s commitment to allow MSPs to manage everything means that our partners are able to meet this move toward a hybrid work and manage the additional complexity of diverse device types, cloud computing environments and SaaS applications. Second, labor scarcity, specifically for tech talent affects everyone from SMEs and larger enterprises who are relying on outsourcing to fill in talent, to SMPs themselves who need to do more with less labor. Our technology is designed and built to allow technicians to automate and MSPs and the businesses they support to scale. And third, cybersecurity threats are on the rise and make the work our MSPs do, not just more important, but in fact mission critical to business continuity for hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. In our current geopolitical situation, both state and non-state actors pose a heightened threat to businesses in Europe and around the world. And MSPs are looking to us to provide them with enterprise grade security solutions with the ease of use that SMEs require, to help them stay ahead of the security curve, and provide this core risk management function. A lot of our activity on the product front directly addresses these industry tailwinds. I mentioned briefly on our last call that we had launched N-able DNS filtering in February, as a new security offering to our partners. This is a cloud-based, AI driven content filtering and threat protection service that is designed to let MSPs better monitor, manage and proactively protect and secure their customers network, regardless of location or connection. This is ideal for hybrid work environments. We have seen a strong pickup since launch, and we expect continued acceleration into the second quarter. We have for a long time been on the cutting edge of data protection with one of the first two offerings of cloud-first data protection as a service for MSPs. Last week, we announced the launch of Cove Data Protection. We believe that Cove is disruptive to the market for its fundamentally different architecture that enables MSPs to modernize their approach to data protection, and allow seamless backup, archive and recovery of data, eliminating up to 90% of labor time and moving roughly 60 times less data, simplifying operations of this transformative solution. Leading into this launch, we celebrated a few milestones that validate the power Cove Data Protection brings to the market. We received the Backup and Disaster Recovery award from Cloud Computing magazine, which recognizes excellence in the advancement of cloud computing technologies, celebrating our cloud-first, data protection and quick and reliable recovery from events such as ransomware attacks. We announced in February, since launching our backup solution for Microsoft 365 domains in December of 2019, we are protecting more than 4000 N-able partners across more than 25,000 customer domains, and over 900,000 Exchange mailboxes. Since that announcement, we are now protecting over 33,000 M365 domains as of the end of April, and that number continues to grow. We believe traditional local first image backup does not suit the needs of our modern IT environments, and certainly misses the mark for MSPs. Our solution was built from the ground up to be cloud-first. Unlike other solutions that claim to be in the cloud, but are simply legacy architectures with bolted-on secondary cloud features that add complexity. Cove Data Protection provides appliance-free, direct-to-cloud capability with advanced Disaster Recovery Benefits and designed in cost efficiency, scalability and reliability that MSPs and their customers require. I’ll illustrate this with a feature that is currently in customer preview and slated for general availability in early Q3. It’s called Standby Image and it’s an elegant toolset that allows MSPs to have backups sent to the cloud while they maintain a standby image at the location of their choice, allowing for fast and flexible disaster recovery without the need to purchase proprietary appliances. Architecturally, Cove addresses the primary need for modern data management systems. Our partners are telling us for example, that with Cove they’re able to go from 40 hours spent per month on backup down to four hours, from three full time support technicians down to around a half of a full time equivalent, and from 95 tickets per day down to nine. That is a massive impact for services-oriented organizations and allows them to focus on more strategic value add work. Data protection has long been a growth driver for N-able, and we believe the launch of Cove will accelerate its importance to our business. A recent report from William Blair estimated the TAM for data management at $37 billion in 2024, highlighting the market potential. And though we are not yet known or well known in the backup and disaster recovery space, we have seen time and time again, that when our partners or new prospects switch from a competitive solution to N-able they consistently come back with very positive feedback on our data protection capabilities. As we put effort behind establishing our brand and data protection, we expect to see even greater growth. Also, we just announced that our N-able Mail Assure email security solution has been awarded first place in the latest VBSpam comparative review, receiving the highest score both in this latest testing in March of 2022 and in September of last year. The tests were conducted by Virus Bulletin, an industry renowned test laboratory and an important reference for specialists and businesses concerned with computer security. We received the highest VBSpam plus rating with a malware catch rates of 99.96% and zero false positives. In addition, we are conducting an external preview of an additional feature called Mail Assure Private Portal, which secures emails beyond managed devices to the recipient with audited access and encryption. This is a high demand feature for our MSP partners and the feedback we are getting so far has been very positive. Finally, we are in the midst of a soft launch of our new professional services offering which is designed to help MSPs better deal with one of the industry dynamics I mentioned earlier, specifically, labor scarcity issues. Known as N-able Enhanced Services, we have structured this offering to help our partners rapidly unlock the potential of N-able products, optimize their teams and technician efficiency, and accelerate time to value by delivering solutions to their customers faster. The guidance and training we provide is instrumental in helping MSPs grow their business and improve efficiency in everything from migrations to onboarding to ongoing support. Above the base-level services we’ve always provided, we are introducing a fee based premium level for partners who require more of a differentiated support experience for their business needs. This is a direct response to partner feedback, and the culmination of the significant investment we’ve made in service delivery that goes to the heart of what N-able’s partners value about us. And we believe this will open the door to even larger scale opportunities. Now, as I did on our last earnings call, I want to continue the practice of sharing some notable wins. First, we won a large six figure N-central deal with a multinational medical research and testing company based in Europe. They were looking for a single pane of glass to manage their global assets and the ability to automate maintenance tasks over and above standard patching requirements. Though they initially contacted us based on our remote management reputation, they were sold on N-central’s advanced security and full visibility to their highly dispersed and specialized global infrastructure. Second, we sold in a near six figure deal for our Cove Data Protection solution to a large MSP that is primarily a Mac Shop. Not only was this a great win to replace a competitor, the partner was convinced by our superior value and technology and service, which allows them to reduce and refocus their technician time. They also liked that Cove provided them with a significant advantage in terms of the profitability and scalability of their business.