Earnings Labs

NetScout Systems, Inc. (NTCT)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 25, 2013

$32.61

-1.80%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-2.67%

1 Week

-3.77%

1 Month

+1.95%

vs S&P

-2.96%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the NetScout’s Fourth Quarter 2013 Fiscal Year and Operating Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given to you at this time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. With us today is NetScout’s President and CEO, Mr. Anil Singhal. He is accompanied by NetScout’s Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Michael Szabados; and NetScout’s Chief Financial Officer, Ms. Jean Bua. At this time, I will turn the call over to Ms. Cathy Taylor, NetScout’s Director of Investor Relations to provide the opening remarks. Ms. Taylor, please proceed.

Cathy Taylor

Management

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to NetScout’s fiscal 2013 fourth quarter conference call for the period ended March 31st. Before we begin, let me remind you that during the course of this conference call, we will be providing you with a discussion of the factors that we currently anticipate may influence our results going forward. These statements include forward-looking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of Section 21-E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and other federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements may involve judgment, and individual judgments may vary. Forward-looking statements include expressed or implied statements regarding future economic and market conditions, guidance for fiscal year 2014, acquisition integration success and new product releases. It should be clearly understood that the projections on which we base our guidance and other forward-looking statements and our perception of the factors influencing those projections are highly likely to change over time. Although those projections and the factors influencing them will likely change, we will not necessarily inform you when they do. Our company policy is to provide guidance only at certain points in the year such as during the quarterly earnings call. We do not plan to update that guidance otherwise. Actual results may differ materially from what we say today and no one should assume later in the quarter that the comments we make today are still valid. For the further discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ, see the specific risks and uncertainties discussed in NetScout’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2012 on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our quarterly financial results are included with our earnings press release. We report our results on a GAAP basis as well as…

Anil Singhal

Management

Thank you, Cathy. We are very pleased with the fiscal year 2013 results. Non-GAAP revenue for fiscal year ‘13 was $352 million towards the high-end of the guidance that we issued a year ago and an increase of 14% over the prior year. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $1.32 up 20% over last year and surpassing the high end of our fiscal year guidance by $0.02. Our non-GAAP operating margin improved by one point to 25% up from 24% in fiscal year 2012. In addition, our non-GAAP product revenue for the fiscal year grew by 18% over last year. Over the past two years, we have been working diligently to reach our aggressive revenue growth milestones. In fiscal year ‘12 we passed the $300 million revenue mark and then this year which is fiscal year ‘13 we passed $350 million mark. Today, we are issuing guidance for fiscal 2014 which could allow us to reach another important milestone approaching $400 million in annual revenues. Jean will give you more detail on the guidance shortly. Our fourth quarter results were at the high-end of the full year guidance we provided 12 months ago and within the revised narrowed guidance range we issued last quarter. Non-GAAP revenue was $98.6 million up 10% over last year. Fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.43 and increase of 10% over Q4 of last year. Keeping this our tradition, we’ll be providing full year guidance today for fiscal year ‘14. During the fiscal year 2013, we saw growth in total bookings which includes new business and service renewal bookings. Our service provider business remained strong with total bookings maintaining at significant growth rate. Additionally, our enterprise verticals displayed growth with the exception of the government vertical. As we have previously discussed, the government sector was…

Michael Szabados

Management

Thank you Anil. I will focus on the highlights of our operational execution this past quarter and fiscal year and in particular on the strategic – book that Anil has just outlined. A center piece of our customer outreach is our annual Engage User forum which had record attendance and excitements surrounding our new product initiatives. This event continues to be our point of focus or intense interaction between executives, our engineering team and our customers ensuring we stay and walk steps with the needs of the market. We utilized this year’s Engage to overview to attendance of our four year strategy to our enterprise and service by the customers. We showcased our – nGenius for which we received this endorsement. As Anil noted, this initial release of our next generation nGenius solution will be focused on delivering network oriented application performance management, initially targeted to toward the enterprise segment of our business. With this new generation nGenius product set we building support for information technology service management or ITSM that will provide a differentiated approach to application performance management based on our ability to orchested the work of additional or traditional APM tools implemented by our customers. In forward releases we will deliver enhanced functionality to manage the performance and delivery of our customers, most critical applications and we will provide additional services provider specific functionality running on this new unified platform. Key to our continuing growth in the service provider segment is the completeness of our integrated voice and data management solution. At engaged 2013, we also unfolded our comprehensive voice and customer experience management directions for the service provider and Cable/MSO users to positive reception. And important element of our voice direction is the acquisition of the Accanto team and the technology earlier in fiscal year 2013.…

Jean Bua

Management

Thank you, Michael and good morning everyone. As Anil outlined, our business performed well against sub plans for the fiscal year with annual revenue growth of 14%, which was at the higher end of our original guidance from last April. Our non-GAAP EPS result was equally strong, ending about our original EPS guidance. This strong performance was delivered in the fiscal year which was made difficult by the federal budget encrustation and continued uncertainty around the European economy. We will be starting with the third slide of our presentation which is accompanying our call and is posted on our website. Our fourth quarter non-GAAP total revenue was $98.6 million, which is an increase of 10% from the same quarter in fiscal year ‘12. Within non-GAAP total revenue, non-GAAP product revenue was $59.6 million, which is an increase of 9% over the same quarter in fiscal year ‘12. Service revenue was $39.0 million on a non-GAAP basis, which is an 11% increase from the same quarter in the prior year. The GAAP total revenue for the same period was $98.1 million, which is an increase of 10% from the same quarter in fiscal year ‘12. Within GAAP total revenue, GAAP product revenue was $59.6 million, which is an increase of 9% over the same quarter prior year. Service revenue was $38.5 million on a GAAP basis, which is a 10% increase from the same quarter in the prior year. On a non-GAAP basis, our earnings per share for the fourth quarter were $0.43. This is $0.04 higher than the fourth quarter of fiscal year ‘12 and represents a 10% increase. On a GAAP basis, our earnings per share were $0.34. This is $0.04 higher than the fourth quarter of fiscal year ‘12 and represents a 13% increase. Turning to slide 4,…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Mark Kelleher from, Dougherty & Company. your line is now open. Mark Kelleher – Dougherty & Company: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Wanted to look at the product and service line, the product line has had some pretty strong growth, the service line seems to have kind of flat line for the last few quarters, and then connected to that maybe you could talk about deferred revenue and backlog, it looks like deferred revenue was up fairly significantly. The backlog has pulled back a bit. And I know those are connected to those two lines as well. Could you just tell us what’s going on between the service and product lines there and the growth?

Anil Singhal

Management

Well let me – yeah first of all deferred revenue is not directly tied to the backlog. It includes other things and I mean backlog is the only product related but as we growing faster than in the past I mean our product line will always be higher than the service revenue and we have been also doing refreshes of technology which impacts the renewal stream. So as we had products all the way down from the network general time and many of these products are in end of life right now which has impacted the renewal stream. So we see a slight pick up in that but overall the growth of product will always be faster which is good news as well as challenging to some extend. Mark Kelleher – Dougherty & Company: So, with the increase...?

Anil Singhal

Management

I’m sorry, go ahead please. Mark Kelleher – Dougherty & Company: With the increase in deferred revenue that we saw in the balance sheet imply a pickup in the service line?

Anil Singhal

Management

Sure. I mean, the deferred revenue is where we pause all of the renewal booking and it varies – it continues increases because the renewals increase, but also varies in the composition. How many people are doing one-year, three-year, five-year, five-year maintenance. What we see though going forward from 2013, probably and to say, the mid point of the guidance, 2013 had higher service revenue growth probably about 9% on a year-over-year basis, that has to do with ONPATH coming in towards end of our fiscal year, and it would have contributed service revenue from those. So that’s why 2013 grew slightly faster than 2012. And as Anil mentioned, as we forward, like any technology company we do end of life certain products, so I think going forward in the mid point of our guidance to service revenue, we probably would see a decrease in that growth over FY ‘13. Mark Kelleher – Dougherty & Company: Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Chad Bennett from Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: Hey, thank you. Couple of question for you. So not to give obviously too detail on guidance, but should we expect that the June quarter be in the way you kind of laid out first half versus second half. The June quarter is the low quarter of the year which I believe it normally is?

Michael Szabados

Management

That’s true. the. June is usually from a seasonality perspective one of the worst quarter that we have for revenue. And then as I mentioned this quarter, we will have the affect of on task and the contract positions that we did not have in Q. In the same quarter five year across, as we talked about on the call we were very excited about the attendance which was record attendance at our meeting, so that in Q1 also – once through our operating cost.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah. So our operating cost – yeah what Jean is talking about just one other thing we always had first half in the 40% to 45% range in the first half of any fiscal year. And for the last seven year so, at this time we have seeing it could be at the lower end of that range. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: I guess do you have visibility into the second half of the year in any part of your business whether its service provider, enterprise or anything. I guess trying to get a level or comfort of, of you going into this year with maybe a little more back and waited second half than last and kind of your comfort level there?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think we have as much visibility as any other company like us will have for the second half and – but if you think but not feeling good about it we won’t be providing the full year guidance. So I think the best way to look at it, if there are always challenges, is hard to see too much into the future but we think we have made lot of investment in last 18 months which will allow us both on the acquisition front and coming up with new products and technology that we think that that’s a reachable goal. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: Okay. And couple of more. Jean, do you have roughly what acquisitions provided in terms of revenue for the last year?

Jean Bua

Management

So, the acquisitions of ONPATH probably provided combined between test automation and PFS in the last quarter in the low to mid-single-digits of revenue. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: Okay. And Anil, how should we expect the packet aggregation switch market? How impactful should we expect that to be for your business this year?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think it could be in the higher single-digits this year. And as – yeah, I think basically we are not directly giving out those numbers because many of those deals are combined with the merger, but our long-term plan is that we could get to 10% to 15%, share of our revenue will be packet flow switch. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: Okay. And last one for me. So, the mid-point of your guidance range for this year – you kind of imply, if I’m just kind of doing rough numbers right, maybe a 15% to 20% growth rate in service provider, if I’m thinking about the mix right, and then potentially a mid-single digit growth rate for enterprise. Is that the right way of thinking about the mix?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think if you look at 15% growth, you can look at 10%, 14% growth. It could be around 10% or so on the enterprise and 20% or so on the service provider which will result in a blind date 14% number.

Jean Bua

Management

Yeah and we’ve consistently said that the service provider vertical was a 20% to 25% growth vertical. We’ve done that over the last few years, and as Anil mentioned the enterprise we are very excited the products coming out and the reception for them we believe. So the enterprise, we are believing, we will grow in closer to 10 plus this year.

Anil Singhal

Management

I think one other think to mention is that when you start breaking it down if you had look at product revenue only that will be higher than if you were to meet our guidance we will be hitting higher than 14% closer to 20 and that’s why I think we will need 10% plus on the enterprise to reach these goals. Chad Bennett – Craig-Hallum: Okay. Thanks much.

Anil Singhal

Management

You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Aaron Schwartz from Jefferies. Your line is now open. Aaron Schwartz – Jefferies: Good morning I had a follow up question on the service provider vertical its been extremely choppy for the peck industry so far this year I think it’s a very lumpy vertical its sort of difficult to get a I guess a read on how you believe if there in the quarter obviously you had the optics of a difficult compare. But it sounds you are pretty optimistic for growth here in the year contrasting that will see the drop in backlog can you just sort of talk to us about service provider did it come relative to your plan above or below and what gives you the confidence for that 20% growth this year or are you just being brought into sort of more run rate – and avoiding some of the lumpiness that may be some other technology peers are seeing?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think those are basically lined with what we thought this year. Moving forward, I mean like any other company, more than 60% of the service provider business is going to come from less than 10 customers. And we have very good relationship and we have special conferences going on with them. We don’t have estimate from all the deals we can do there, but there are plenty of projects which are in the work throughout the world, and so that is what is giving us the confidence that our talk time which will bring 60%, 70% of service provider revenue, we have very good visibility context and good feeling about NetScout in all some of the things which we announced this month. Aaron Schwartz – Jefferies: Okay. And then just shifting to the product releases, I think you said it in sort of final beta stages and should come out later this quarter. Can you just talk about how you expect the growth to come in from that partly? Is that more or so refresh in units? I think you eluded to that or given that you’ve added lot of capabilities to the product, how do you view pricing there? Would you expect a price increase with the product as well? Thanks.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah there is no real price increase and in fact many of the customers on the software side with latest hardware and appliances will get that great for free. The real gain will come in the enterprise from reinstrumenting the application side of the house because as you know our big strategy which we talked about since November even at the Investor Meeting and today as well as in the user forum couple of weeks ago is that we are transitioning from NPM space to NPM plus APM space, but since it’s a new area for us or in some sense new set of customers, that’s why as Jean mentioned that impact will be seen more on the second half. On the service provider side we are going to be announcing something new but we are not able to talk about it today, but one big change is our voice product is finally getting online and from the Accanto acquisition and there lot of money being spent on LTE on IMS and voice-over-LTE. So that allows us to not only get new projects, but also build confidence what’s continued to do some refreshes of the 3G and 4G stuff they brought from us or other vendors in the past. Aaron Schwartz – Jefferies: Terrific. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Your line is now open. Eric Martinuzzi – Lake Street: Thanks and congratulations on the year just finished. I know it’s difficult to predict a business 12 months out but you guys did a nice job last year. I have question – first of all just a housekeeping the cash from ops, and the CapEx and then I want to ask a question about the forecast, the federal business, but first the housekeeping item.

Jean Bua

Management

So you want cash from operations for the fourth quarter? Eric Martinuzzi – Lake Street: Correct?

Jean Bua

Management

It was $28.4 and CapEx was $3.6. Eric Martinuzzi – Lake Street: Okay. The Federal business – I mean that’s its just in free fall here and you guys have done a nice job growing in the other verticals, but I was just curious as you put together the 2014 forecast, I would assume you are feeling – things are probably pretty ugly here through the end of September the current Federal fiscal year. But the other half of your own fiscal year will be the first half of the next Federal fiscal year. So, just curious to know, what – how you thought about that as you put together the projections for the coming year?

Jean Bua

Management

Well, we assume that will be slightly better than fiscal year ‘13, but not any better than fiscal year ‘12. So, yeah, we have lot of projects sort of on hold and we are assuming it will be slightly better than or somewhat better than last year, so, no growth from fiscal ‘12 to fiscal ‘14 in the best case.

Anil Singhal

Management

But we are continuing to keep the investment in the federal sector and continue to build our customer relations and support the installation. So, we really want to be prepared when the market comes back and our commitment remains strong. Eric Martinuzzi – Lake Street: Is there anything anecdotal that you could say, gives you that hope or expectation for a slight recovery?

Anil Singhal

Management

Well, I do think that the drift of our product increasing the – pronounce, drift our product into the security space by our customers using our technology both for segment and incident response is going to begin definite upside beside our segment in particular. Eric Martinuzzi – Lake Street: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

your next question comes from Robinson from Wonder Lake Securities. Your line is now open. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: I’ve got a couple of questions. First on the modeling here in the mix of – in the space of revenue. Can you comment on the customer projects and how they have stretched in the fourth quarter relative to maybe three and six months ago? And how that aspect of the industry pace affects the – your outlook in terms of the revenue percentage in the first half and whether that’s impacted it or if it’s all just the timing of new product releases?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think the first half will still be – I mean still be higher than the first half than last year. So what Jean was talking about is – the results will be much – I mean the component of the results will be much higher than usual in the second half because lot of the products we are announcing are really not going to be selling actively until the end of this quarter. And those are the ones which are – we are using will be counting on to do the growth for us both in the voice area for example, for the service provider side and entering the APM space – sorry, on the service provider side for the voice product and for the APM side for the enterprise. So, those are the reasons why but we don’t see any lengthening projects. We see lot of interest except for federal we are not seeing any real change in terms of projects getting delayed.

Michael Szabados

Management

Right. So as we talked about in the past quarters, actually probably there was past couple of years with the – whether it’s continuing economic condition, the pipeline always remains stronger, always interest where we have lost from visibility in the past year across what really goes into funding we – we have founded and we have talked before that company’s large enterprises have put in one cycles for funding and have delayed them. So there is no change that we’ve seen in Q4 over that and I don’t really anticipate that much increase in our fiscal year ‘14 will have much, much, much more than economically answer to that, that funding scrutiny is part of our pipeline doesn’t improve significantly. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: And I expect that as DN becomes prevalent you will have more things to measure and monitor but there has been a fair amount of interest I guess of the caps that are part of the open floor standard and use of these types of functions for distributor to internet monitoring and I was wondering, how you will plan around that and how it impacts your the way you look at this packet switch business?

Anil Singhal

Management

Well as we said that our packet switch business share is going to increase from single digits to double digits starting this year or moving forward and so that’s the indicator of that we’ll be taking market share there and second is not only increasing the share but of a bigger number. And second thing is we are doing also initially packet low switch competes with the budgets for pro but overall it enables the instrumentation more effectively and you see bigger sales for everyone specially for somebody like us who is the leader in both the spaces. As to the SDN and open floor is still lot of marketing hype, but we are very involved with SDN initiatives and we will be upgrading our switch also to that as other people do it.

Jean Bua

Management

And we do see additional opportunities as the end base networks for monitoring solutions, so we are very aggressively exploring just traditional but new ways of applying our technology to SDN. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: Does the voice-over-LTE augmentation for a service provider offering, is that – the release timing also this quarter or is that more – is that later in the year?

Jean Bua

Management

I think it’s later in the year. Like I said; our product will be fully ready later in this quarter. And because, as you know, part of the technology is being coming from the Accanto acquisition and that has been migrated to the NetScout platform now. And now we’re ready to go full board with that. And so, by the time, these deals take time and so more impact will be seen in the second half than in the first half. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: Well, will we start to see R&D moderate as a percentage in that timeframe?

Jean Bua

Management

I don’t know. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: Well, I know you will just because of the top line but it seems like there’s been quite a push for ASI too and these other products.

Jean Bua

Management

Right. So as we’ve talked in the past, R&D is a little higher than our long-term operating model we’d suggest, mostly due to the acquired technology and the engineers that we have in huge development move now. That 16%-ish as we increase revenue will go back to the 13%, 15% range.

Anil Singhal

Management

If any one acquisitions which we can’t predict at this point. So that is to answer that. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: Jean, can you give us the depreciation number?

Jean Bua

Management

Sure. Depreciation for the quarter was 2.1 million. Robinson – Wonder Lake Securities: Thanks a lot for taking my questions.

Jean Bua

Management

You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Alex Kurtz from Sterne, Agee. Your line is now open. Alex Kurtz – Sterne Agee: Yeah, thanks Cathy for sneaking in here. Great quarter guys. I just had a quick question Jean about how we should we really thinking about product growth. First up, I know you mentioned low mid single-digit acquisition revenue for fiscal ‘13, is that all in product Jean or is that spread across the product?

Jean Bua

Management

That is – one second, it’s mostly product.

Anil Singhal

Management

I just want to also mention while Jean is looking at it that in the past I think there will be lot of question about – lot of question about organic growth and acquisition related. All of our growth is mostly or most of our growth is organic. All these companies I mean practically very small in revenue and also in area – some of the areas we shifted around. So some of it acquisition related, but is being sold by the same sales force. It’s being developed by the same team. The teams – engineering team have been integrated and so we look at it as part of really being and had it too much revenue from the existing revenue from the acquisitions. Alex Kurtz – Sterne Agee: So fiscal ‘13, let’s say organically it maybe 15% product, obviously fiscal ‘12 had some issue, so is it fair to say that product growth for fiscal ‘14 should be roughly 10%, is that the right way to think about it on normalized basis?

Anil Singhal

Management

No I think it is closer to high teens.

Jean Bua

Management

It should be product growth at the mid point of our guidance would imply mid teens.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah. Alex Kurtz – Sterne Agee: For fiscal 2014?

Anil Singhal

Management

Yes.

Jean Bua

Management

Just like this year, we had at the high end of the guidance this year we had fiscal year 2013 was 14% and 18%. Last year was with 14% and 18%.

Anil Singhal

Management

So last year our product revenue growth was 18%.

Jean Bua

Management

Yeah.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah.

Jean Bua

Management

So that’s always few points higher than overall growth which will be the trend depending on where we end up this year. Alex Kurtz – Sterne Agee: So just to finish here, mid teen product growth and most of that’s organic for fiscal 2014?

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah. Alex Kurtz – Sterne Agee: Okay thanks guys.

Anil Singhal

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Gary Spivak from ABR Investment Strategy. Your line is now open. Gary Spivak – ABR Investment Strategy: Hi thank you. Jean I believe you mentioned that the decrease in bookings this quarter over last year that half of that was from the government, what was if that’s true then what was the other contribution to that?

Jean Bua

Management

Decrease in bookings for the quarter or for the year? Gary Spivak – ABR Investment Strategy: For the quarter?

Jean Bua

Management

Well on all of the verticals for this quarter we are down on a year-over-year basis for the exception of General enterprise. As we’ve previously mentioned on the call, last year’s comp was a difficult comp. We had we passed $100 million. So all of the verticals with the exception General were down slightly or down. In General what we saw was over the year different some of our new products NVVM and the Packet Flow Switch technology really taking hold in the multitude of industries that stick within the general enterprise. So government on a new business basis for the fourth quarter year-over-year was down about 50%. And the rest of them were down in the mid to upper teens with the exception of general enterprise.

Anil Singhal

Management

But clearly, as we have mentioned before and as well as this morning, because you can see the number of $1 million deals we do especially on service provider the business is so lumpy, that’s why we give yearly guidance. It’s good to track how company is going every quarter, but I think, the best way to look at our business is on yearly basis. And despite what Jean said, I think that’s – when you start looking at quarter-over-quarter comps, it becomes difficult, one quarter suddenly looks so great and other quarter looks bad. So, I think we should just keep that in mind as we compare the quarter versus the year. Gary Spivak – ABR Investment Strategy: Yes. I understand that. Thank you for that clarification. My next question is regarding the security space with incident response. Do you have any partnerships or natural alliances that you can tell us about or point that as potential alliances or partnerships going forward?

Anil Singhal

Management

Now, we have couple of very important one, but I should object before the call whether, yeah, I don’t think we can talk about it. But we’ll make sure that we talk about it in the next quarter assuming we have the clearance. But we have couple of high profile once. But overall, this year we were highlighting IBM stuff and like Michael said, we’ll probably announce something towards the end of the year a special initiative on the cyber space. What Michael was talking about is, currently how people are using our product for cyber security that is well has lot of interest and that has resulted in at least one partnership maybe two already. Gary Spivak – ABR Investment Strategy: And then my last question is on the APM. Is that going to be applications specific? Will it be a targeted application or is it going to be plug-and-play and allow people to instrument whatever they have?

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah. It’s what all applications – they will use. I mean they will need certain volume of our past equipment to be able to get it for free. But I don’t know whether your question was about are we targeting, let’s say middleware application or oracle. Our solution is unique in the ATM space that same solution works with slight configuration and provisioning for all applications in the customers IT environment once we have the ASA adapter which is customization and so that’s the goal. So every time you do, use it for a new application you don’t need – necessarily need a whole new product or upgrade. Gary Spivak – ABR Investment Strategy: Great. Yeah that was my question. Thank you very much.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yeah.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Scott Zeller from Needham & Company. Your line is now open. Scott Zeller – Needham & Company: Hi. Good morning. Want to ask you about the financials vertical? Can you explain the types of projects that you’re seeing in that vertical right now? They are of course questions around all the verticals. But just the character of projects and if you’re seeing any differences or is it more of the same?

Anil Singhal

Management

Let’s talk about I mean there are continue to be things in the trading, at trading verticals, I mean sub verticals where people want to look at latest he operates and things like that where are is sort of fragmented competition there. Then we have e-commerce and we have just released something in the – which allows us to look at encrypted traffic in real time which most people either cannot look at it or are blind to that information or cannot do it in real time. So our traditional competition does it offline and we are able to provide now the same capability for encrypted traffic and which is very important for them to get visibility. And so some of our product was have ended useless in places where their traffic was encrypted. So we are able to do that and that’s under test right now and that’s going to be part of in this release we are announcing. So I see those two areas at least in addition to all financial have customer applications and can benefit and investment a lot in the ATM space and I think we can use our champion in the networking area to target those budget. Scott Zeller – Needham & Company: Okay. Then another vertical the government area there has been some Q&A on that already but as we look over the past several quarters, it’s good to company tempered expectations or on government as you’ve done. But I guess when you look back to one government was material and doing better for the company were the projects concentrated with a few large buyers from the government and perhaps those efforts have rolled off because there has been a dramatic slowdown in government as you have guided us, but how would you characterize what has happened, was it a few buyers only in the government, or any color there would be helpful.

Anil Singhal

Management

I think top 10 is again applicable there; also we were more on the defense side not on the civilian side and that has been impacted quite a bit. But we were doing business in other – I mean, most of the projects were quite large and million-dollar deals as you probably see from couple of years ago were quite high in the federal area. And so, I don’t – I can’t tell you exactly, but it’s across the board. I mean the kind of depression we saw last year in terms of how much down it was, it was across the board. But yes, I think it’s mostly big projects. Scott Zeller – Needham & Company: Okay. And then...

Anil Singhal

Management

Those big projects long-term in nature. And as we continue to say, we have the pipeline. In fact, the pipeline keeps building. It is just more a question of whether the funding for the types of projects that our customers have will come through or not. Scott Zeller – Needham & Company: Okay. And then for service provider, I may have missed this in the previous commentary, but there’s been some question around the strength of 4G LTE roll outs and how much of a driver that is for your business versus let’s say 3G, older network projects or projects were on VoIP. Could you give us some color on if it’s the new efforts around 4G LTE that are driving or is it a balance of old versus new? Any color would be helpful.

Anil Singhal

Management

So I think 4G LTE is still – I think people still continue to expand. And you are right that lot of the initial investment is done, but they continue to expand. But in the voice-over-LTE and IMS area they are investing – I mean that’s new investment which we are counting on, that’s traditionally part of because triggered by LTE also. And lastly there is lot of interest on how you what kind of analytics you do. We talked about cell based analysis and how – what kind of issues that impacted by cell towers, the handset types like Google phone versus others. So there are new features needed on existing LTE also. And thirdly the vendors are coming out with infrastructure vendors like Ericsson, Cisco are coming out with common boxes to cut down reduce of shelf space and everything with 2G 3G and 4G combined, so in those cases that requires a refresh of our equipment also even though they brought for LTE. Scott Zeller – Needham & Company: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Kevin Liu from B Riley & Company. Your line is now open. Kevin Liu – B Riley & Company: Good morning. Just looking at your growth for fiscal 2013, you guys had strong performance in both North America and Europe and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the geographical expectations for growth as we look towards fiscal 2014?

Anil Singhal

Management

It’s still going to be basically similar to this year it will be little more so now it’s internationally is that right 25%?

Jean Bua

Management

So portions are relatively consistent 25% and 25%. What we see internationally and how we think about the business going forward is that Europe it has Europe and Asia still when it comes to the financial institutions as we’ve talked about it’s been very-very quite. We continue to keep up our partnerships and our relationships and those customers still continue to be loyal evidenced by the fact that they continue to purchase maintenance and support of the existing product. But they are very focus still internally on their internal operation. We saw some shift and it was – as I mentioned in the comments, only about a 2% increase. It was in Europe. And that is – that’s mostly focused on service provider. We get a lot of questions on service provider in 4G and 3G. And just summarize 3G has been where we been playing even if it IT-based. And 4G is as Anil mentioned still rolling out. We still see a lot of opportunity in that area. In 2014, we probably think it will be spread out a little more through the international operations, because we will have the voice product for refreshes. We will also be able to do – be a vendor for one-stop shopping. So the revenue might be a little more disbursed in FY ‘14 in SP rather than concentrating like top U.S peers. So, we haven’t really seen much of a shift to our revenue base going international.

Anil Singhal

Management

Yes. So U.S. will still be 75% to 85% next year also, that’s what we think. Kevin Liu – B Riley & Company: Thanks. That’s helpful. And then, just few quick ones on the new product areas. For packet-flow switch launch are you getting better reception right now within enterprise or service provider, and then both for that product as well as the newer that you’re announcing for APM. What your sense about your relationships with appropriate decision makers and your customers. Do you feel like you already have pretty descent traction and could therefore drive that growth with some confidence or is there a lot of, I guess, business development that needs to be done?

Anil Singhal

Management

I think we have existing relationships and all those and initial traction has been higher on the enterprise side, but – because service provider make more long-term decision and they already spend something. So as Michael talked about as refreshes are coming up for 10G and otherwise the higher core density that’s where we have a chance. So moving forward we see traction sort of equal -equally on both sides as a percentage of revenue.

Michael Szabados

Management

Right. So regarding the PFS question, if you – the Simena acquisition that we did about a year ago that was a lower scale product. So naturally, it fit more into the enterprise segment. The ONPATH acquisition at 3900 that Michael also talked about that is much higher capacity and that would be of interest to the service provider market also. Kevin Liu – B Riley & Company: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Sanjit Singh from Wedbush. Your line is now open. Sanjit Singh – Wedbush: Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to get back to what’s driving the momentum in general enterprise. We had some nice bookings growth over the last couple of quarters. Is it just a function of the new products? Or is there something going on the channel or competitively, do you see some opportunity there with or maybe Riverbed or Opnet, just wanted to get a sense of what’s driving momentum in general enterprise?

Anil Singhal

Management

Well first of all its not new product yet because even though people knowing that we have been investing and we have been done – doing a lot of little smaller user forum guide meetings, people are feeling very good about continue to invest in NetScout. So that’s helping to some extend indirectly, but new product is not that had a direct impact yet. PFS as we talked about, lot of the growth which we talked about single-digit in PFS was coming from the enterprise. And the rest of the business has – I mean has stayed steady except in few places where we take some special application or work for a couple of large customers that has helped. But most of the growth so far has been – in the enterprise has been in those areas.

Jean Bua

Management

And as we talk about that has been in the industry and in the past we have always seen different businesses to different applications whether as retail or utilities and the products that we have invested in the past. So for instance, nVVM had sold few times in there. Also as I had mentioned just a few moments ago, the products that we acquired from – the PFS 1500 has sold nicely into those industries also. Sanjit Singh – Wedbush: I appreciate that. I think Jean last quarter you mentioned that – maybe the shift or the incremental shift might loose to more – and the search provider business might shift to the European Tier 2 search providers. Is that something that you saw this quarter, if you talk about the mix between the Tier 1s in the U.S. versus the Tier 2 opportunity? How should we think about that mix for fiscal year ‘14?

Jean Bua

Management

In the quarter I don’t – I think in the quarter we didn’t really see much of the shift towards overseas, heights of service providers. Just to be clear, we will still continue to sell into Tier 1. We still have sort of our top customers of the U.S. Tier 1. We just see as we have talked about before to continue the growth of 20% plus and the amazing adoption and recognition that we’ve got in the globe on our IT based product that we will naturally just be able to sell more and more into international as the Tier 1 are in the labs right now with VoLTE and might come out in the second half with choices and things like that. I don’t see that its going to be dramatic I just think that it might be a subtle enough shift. Sanjit Singh – Wedbush: Right, appreciated. And my last question the gross margin, first half is still below 80% in several quarters still within your range was anything driving was it less federal that has higher gross margin would have just simply a mix issue or was there potentially more discounting as well?

Jean Bua

Management

The gross margin percentages I am just looking real quick, this quarter it’s been about 80% or so over the last few quarters so you are correct about. It is slightly lower this quarter. As we had mentioned on calls before the PFS staged product which is much more of a hardware product rather than the software that we sell with the antenna stream also has a lower margin. It has maybe a 70% to mid-75% gross margin. Going forward I think will go although our gross margin should still stay around the 80% range. Sanjit Singh – Wedbush: Got it. Thank you so much.

Anil Singhal

Management

Good.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Mark Jordan from Noble Financial. Your line is now open. Mark Jordan – Noble Financial: Good morning. Couple of questions just related to the GAAP reconciliation. You mentioned that post-combination compensation services were 2.8 million; two questions related to that one, is that earn-out related or is that just redundancies that are incurred during the simulation process and how does that 2.8 million get spread-out over the quarters?

Jean Bua

Management

`: So the $2.8 million is compensation related to acquisitions, so some of the leading personnel from acquisition. It is not an earn-out, it is not performance-based, it is time-based. So it is relatively consistent over the quarters for the next few years. Mark Jordan – Noble Financial: Okay. Then secondly, related to stock comp, 13 million estimated for fiscal ‘14, little under 9.5 last year. And in last – I mean fiscal ‘13 versus fiscal ‘12 we only saw relatively much less per million increase year-over-year. You got about 3.5 million increase here. Is there a specific reason for the larger jump in this year?

Jean Bua

Management

This will be the first year that we will have the full impact of the way we schedule share-based compensation. We’re moving more towards annual and in the past few years it has been about two years. So this year it will have the first time, it will be like a full year effect. Mark Jordan – Noble Financial: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I turn the call back over to the presenters.

Cathy Taylor

Management

Okay. Thanks everyone for your questions. We’ll talk again in July.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.