Nutanix, Inc. (NTNX) Q1 2017 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good afternoon. My name is Mariana, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Nutanix's Q1 Fiscal 2017 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] . Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Tonya Chin, Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's conference call to discuss the Nutanix's first quarter of fiscal year 2017 results. This call is also being broadcast live over the web, and can be accessed in the Investor Relations section of the Nutanix's website. Joining me today are Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix's Chairman and CEO; Duston Williams, CFO; and Howard Ting, Chief Marketing Officer. After the market close today, Nutanix issued a press release announcing the financial results for its first quarter of fiscal 2017. If you'd like a copy of the release, you can access it in the press release's section of the company's website. We would like to remind you that during today's call, management may look -- may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of safe harbor provisions of federal securities laws regarding the company's anticipated future revenue, gross margin, net loss, loss per share, free cash flow and other financial and business-related information, including our business plans and objectives, product features and technology that are under development, competitive and industry dynamics and potential market opportunities. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated by these statements. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them, as representing our views in the future, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. For a more detailed description of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our prospectus filed with the SEC on September 30, 2016, as well as our earnings release posted a few minutes ago, on our website. Copies of these documents may be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website. Also, please note that unless otherwise specifically referenced, all financial measures we use on this call will be expressed on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. We've provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in the Investor Relations section of our website, and in our earnings press release. Before I turn the call over to Dheeraj, I'd like to highlight a few upcoming investor conferences. Tomorrow, Dheeraj and Duston will be speaking at the Credit Suisse Technology Media and Telecom Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona; and on December 5, Sunil Potti, Nutanix's Chief Product & Development Officer and Duston will be presenting at the Raymond James Technology Investors Conference in New York City. Live webcasts of both presentations will be available on our IR website, and we will also make archive versions available for at least 90 days. We hope to see many of you there. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Dheeraj.

Thank you, Tonya, and good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased to have you join us for our very first earnings call as a public company. Today, we'll cover a lot of ground on the way we think and dream about the future of enterprise computing and book some history on our audacious decisions of the last 5 years, discuss why we succeeded in everyday basis and demonstrate how all this continues to reflect in our quarterly earnings. Many of you joining us may be new to Nutanix. So I'd like to begin my remarks by spending a few minutes summarizing our view of the industry and our position within it. So how has the industry evolved? As many of you're well aware, enterprise adoption of cloud architectures continues to accelerate, exerting immense pressure on legacy box vendors, and piecemeal infrastructure operating system software companies, that failed to match the 1-click delight and fractional economics of public clouds. Contrary to some perceptions, we believe adoption of Amazon Web Services is ultimately a tailwind for us. Owning and renting will find a balance. And the operating system that straddles the 2, will emerge as the new virtualization layer for enterprise infrastructure. I repeat that again, the operating system that straddles the 2 will emerges the new virtualization layer for enterprise infrastructure. The more developers spin up their test environment in the public cloud in minutes, and the more that IT managers deploy their elastic workload such as big data analytics and the public cloud for better scaling, the more demand we see from organizations looking to move off of legacy 3-tier environments. As some of you heard during our IPO roadshow, we are a firm believer in the idea of the Enterprise Cloud, which combines the frictionless delivery in consumption model of public cloud, with the control, security and long-term economics of on-prem infrastructure. We believe Nutanix is uniquely positioned to deliver this Enterprise Cloud experience. We're often asked how our enterprise customers could possibly match the scale and efficiency of AWS. While achieving scale is an important metric for cloud customers, we believe equally important are considerations such as customized SLAs for diverse enterprise applications, data governance to meet compliance and regulatory requirements across nation states, and the long-term economics of owning versus renting. We strongly believe that the Global 2000 clouds will be dispersed, and not be consolidated into a handful of mega data centers, as it is with consumer or SaaS clouds. Just like other utilities such as water and electricity that reside closer to end-users, cloud computing will evolve to span thousands of data centers across a 100-odd countries, powering millions of customer applications that codify the business processes and local laws of individual companies and government agencies that view computing as a competitive advantage in an increasingly digitized world. To be clear, we view these custom applications to be different from horizontal SaaS applications that codify relatively generic business workflows for meaningfully large markets. Companies and governments do not view these commercialized SaaS apps as their competitive advantage. Another question we're often asked is how the hybrid cloud will evolve, or said, another way, how public and private cloud computing will converge and effectively homogenize owning and renting. Convergence is a powerful phenomenon we've seen repeated in many occasions in our lifetimes. The fax, the phone, the printer, the copier, the iPhone, the Intel microprocessor and the X86 chipsets, the new software-defined data center, the list goes on and on. As a company, we think we have made a bet on convergence that naturally resonates well in technology. The true delight of conversions though, comes from the software stack that powers it. 5 years ago, large infrastructure incumbents came together to define bolt-on convergence, heavily driven by joint marketing and professional services. Industry pundits fell for the convergent infrastructure trap, and today the market is ashamed of talking about converged infrastructure because it was a hack that flattered to deceive. The hybrid cloud juggernaut will rule indeed, but mega announcements replete with media fodder, filling a 2- to 3-year window of bolt-on hybrid. Before true convergence on a clean canvas triumphs. As a company, we've had to go through that, that rite of passage before, when we had a nonexistent brand and no distribution muscle. The next 5 years will be yet another journey of dreaming and delivering cloud convergence that has end-user delight at its true north. So to set the context, who are we and what do we do? Nutanix identifies this enterprise cloud opportunity early on and has methodically built an operating system that includes all layers of the IT stack over time. Starting with our roots and simplifying storage with our pioneering work in hypo-converged infrastructure, we rapidly expanded our acropolis fabric to include virtualization, native file and block services and containers. In a pivotal early product decision, we elected to build our own pane of glass or user interface called Prism rather than rely on our junk tabs or extensions in someone else's pane of glass, which would have limited our strategic value to our customers. We have spent considerable energy designing Prism to bring consumer grade delight with a search-first interface, customizable dashboards, and a rich machine intelligence platform to bring extensive 1-click automation for many of the common IT tasks. At our inaugural .NEXT Europe conference held in Vienna earlier this month with over 1,200 attendees, we announced a planned expansion of our platform to include networking and security with the aim of bringing the same 1-click delight our customers have grown accustomed to across all layers of infrastructure. The imminent capabilities will focus on visualizing the network showing through Prism how applications are connected to the physical virtual network for simplified monitoring, troubleshooting and remediation of application issues. These imminent networking capabilities also include expanded APIs to integrate with third-party switches, load balances and firewalls from the likes of Arista, F5 and Palo Alto Networks, to automate provisioning and changes to the network environment and to dramatically reduce the time and manual effort required to deploy our skill applications. In a subsequent release, we'll deliver network security by offering native micro segmentation to protect against modern threats, that often rely on penetrating lower valued and less secured environments, and then propagating the attack horizontally across the data center. So how does a competitive environment look like? We believe the competitive landscape continues to evolve rapidly. The transition from legacy 3-tier environments to modernized cloud architectures continues to accelerate, and we believe the primary reason customers elect to continue with, or expand their traditional 3-tier environments, is the inertia of the people managing those products as well as the procurement processes themselves, which are aligned with large periodic CapEx cycles. The growing market clamor for hyper-converged infrastructure has attracted many competitors, with each of them now increasingly leading with these products over their legacy 3-tier offerings. As we articulated during the IPO roadshow, we believe hyper-converged infrastructure is a mere pit stop in the journey of an enterprise cloud operating system. Because we don't have the luxury of bundling shelf there, we have to earn our keep in every deployment. While we remain a force to reckon with in hyper-converged infrastructure space, we're increasingly winning in the enterprise due to our full-stack solution that includes native virtualization, systems management, cloud orchestration, and going forward, networking and security. Our customer adoption continues to grow nicely, and validates our thinking on product and business design. In the first quarter, we added a record number of new customers or 700, which was up 109% year-over-year, bringing our total customers to over 4,400. We also continued to attract large customers, with cumulative customers who spent over $1 million with us, growing 137% year-over-year to 256%. Further as of Q1, 96 customers have done $2-plus million of business with us. Our footprint in the Global 2000 grew to 376 accounts, and our real opportunity is to expand deeply in these accounts, as they bet on future computing architectures. Today on average, our Global 2000 accounts have lifetime purchase multiples of 7.3x that of the initial purchase with us, demonstrating the power of account penetration. We also demonstrated continued strong execution with our newer products in the first quarter. Customers electing to run our full stack continue to increase, as proven by our AHV Hypervisor adoption growing to 17% using a trailing 4-quarter average, up from 13% out of the prior quarter. For customers deploying our solution in ROBO environments, remote office, branch office environments in Q1, nearly 50% elected to use AHV, demonstrating the power of a full stack story. Enterprise computing in the Global 2000 will be extremely dispersed as I said before. As these highly complex organizations that are present in 50 to 100 countries, operate with decentralized teams and navigate local laws around data safe harbor and computing sovereignty. Our webscale commodity hardware-based approach to both the control plane, which is Prism and the data plane, which is acropolis and AHV Hypervisor, allows for this elegant yin yang between computing locality and centralized cloud scale management. Our relationship with Dell continues to be strong, with billings in the quarter better than expectations. In fact, Dell was responsible for signing a number of our new Global 2000 customers during the quarter. We're working closely with them to get both Dell and EMC sales teams trained to sell our products. The teams are also engaged in deeper collaboration to bring automation in 1-click delight to erstwhile EMC products via Nutanix Prism. From the sidelines, it might appear that because of the VMware ownership, Dell/EMC and Nutanix are in a zero-sum game. As hustlers in the front line, we see a very different picture in which customer interest dictates alliances. A healthy cooperatation [ph] with partners is how consumer computing has thrived over the past decade, and exactly how enterprise computing is shaping up to be. We're proud of our appliance heritage, and the strength of both the Nutanix brand and our sales force. What keeps Dell and Nutanix in an honest partnership of mutual respect, is the fact that we can compete and cooperate on a deal-by-deal basis. Let me give some specific color on notable first-quarter wins. We extended our relationship with the Global 2000 software ISV after been selected as their primary platform for their SaaS offering, bringing their total lifetime spending with us to over $6 million. We expanded our footprint in -- at Toyota Motors in North America, as we continue to help them with a major data center consolidation project. Toyota made several purchases in Q1, and remains one of our largest enterprise accounts. We won several expansion projects at Scotiabank, another Global 2000 customer, for Splunk and their enterprise cloud after extensive testing and performance evaluation against competitive solutions. We closed several expansion deals at GIC, exceeding $1 million in total Q1 purchases, to power their enterprise cloud. We won a sizable expansion deal with one of the most recognizable technology brands in the world, to replace Oracle XE data for its manufacturing operation systems, after signing a very large ELA in Q4 for the initial business, and that [indiscernible] software ELA. We closed an expansion deal worth over $3 million with the large diversified manufacturer of consumer products, we initially landed this account in May of this year as part of a project to refresh their manufacturing plans and disaster recovery sites. This deal represents a hard-fought win against bolt-on converged infrastructure for the customers core data centers. We see many customers that look at the public cloud for predictable workloads and conclude that they can have a superior solution with Nutanix's enterprise cloud platform, which offers them greater control and for less cost over time. One great example, is ICICI Bank Limited, India's largest private sector bank, with over $100 billion in assets. ICICI expanded their engagement with us after evaluating public cloud and legacy 3-tier for their branches. Additionally, they'll be using AHV as their hypervisor for this workload. And we continue to expand our footprint at one of the largest beverage companies in the most valuable brands in the world. This enterprise is ranked in the top 100 of the Global 2000, and has an evolved enterprise cloud strategy around own versus rent, and globally dispersed computing. We also had a very strong quarter in the U.S. Federal market, which remains one of our strong verticals. These are a few of the notable wins in the segment during the quarter, which marked the end of the Fed procurement year. We closed a deal worth over $1 million with the U.S. Army Human Response Command for 54 sites, running our enterprise cloud stack, including our own hypervisor AHV, replacing traditional 3-tier architecture at all existing U.S. Army recruiting brigades and battalions. We sold our software to run on Cisco UCS at the U.S. Navy, a new customer, to run Splunk, McAfee server and SQL Server. And finally, we won a new customer, a large functional combatant command in the Department of Defense, in a deal worth over $6 million to power Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server for the first project -- first phase of a project that is expected to eventually include hundreds of thousands of users. Notably, we won this deal with Dell and beat the incumbent 3-tier vendors. As illustrated by some of these customer examples, we have conceived, designed and delivered superior products and customer experience, and continue to hustle better than the competition in the front lines. As I mentioned before with no luxury of selling soft shelfware entitlements or shifting revenue dollars between products, we've had to earn our keep in each of these wins. Large enterprises have had us walk on fire to prove that we could support their mission-critical applications, and we have responded in kind with an incredibly strong Net Promoter Score, NPS that underscores brand loyalty and repeat purchase. While hardware vendors and small insurgence startups continue to enter a frothy market of hyper convergence, they all depend on a full software stack delivered either by VMware or Nutanix, or a combination of the 2. Simply delivering a software-defined storage capability on top of a hypervisor is hardly going to meet the bar in the Global 2000, where OpEx rules and continues to bleed IT. As we expand to meet demand, we continue to add talented and experienced employees with the right insurgent mentality to help sustain our growth, and improve our efficiency as we scale. Our employee base grew by nearly 400 in the first quarter of just -- to just over 2,350, including over 110 employees that joined us from PernixData and Calm.io acquisitions. One notable addition to our team is Chris Kaddaras, our new Head of EMEA, filling an important role that had been vacant for the past year. Chris joins us from EMC, where he spent the last 15 years and brings a wealth of industry knowledge in deep network relationships to lead our second largest region, where enterprise cloud computing will be truly dispersed across 50-plus countries. We also continue to receive strong industry recognition in Q1, Gartner named us as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for integrated systems for the second year in a row. While we believe our enterprise cloud operating system extends well beyond the definitions of hyper-converged infrastructure and integrated systems, the strong third-party endorsement aides in our sales efforts, particularly as it relates to the Global 2000 and larger enterprise. Now I couldn't close without noting our robust Q1 financial performance, which Duston will review in detail in a moment. As a young public company, we'll strive to balance our short-term goals with the long-term bets we must make for sustainable differentiation. Through these quarterly calls, we hope you get to know us better and as a public persona emerges. The laggard observer focuses our core data management capabilities to box us into hyper-converged category. Data to us is what music is to Apple. Data has gravity. Data has viscosity. Data makes us sticky. Data is what makes a control plane machine intelligence hum. Having said, all that, we've built a holistic cloud scale operating system, learning immensely from VMware, as they've learned from us to craft of distributed computing, agile execution and consumer grade design. The biggest disruption upon infrastructure is the new consumption model. We disrupted storage in our virtualization, with a new consumption model that makes components invisible. In the next 5 years, there's an immense opportunity to build a pure play, independent cloud company that is acutely aware of the needs of the enterprise 5000. As a nerdy operating systems company that is passionate about usability, we stand a nontrivial chance. With that, I now turn it over to Duston for a detailed review of our first quarter financial results. Duston?

Thank you, Dheeraj. Our Q1 performance led by a much stronger-than-expected federal business due in part to the Federal year-end, coupled with an outperformance in our OEM business, exceeded expectations by almost all measures. In fact, our federal team simply performed at record levels. In absolute dollar terms, this quarter, the federal bookings were approximately 75% greater than any other quarter in our history. We had well over a 100 federal deals with 12 of them in excess of $1 million. The Nutanix acropolis hypervisor or AHV will be used in over 1/3 of the total federal nodes shipped during the quarter. From a year-over-year growth perspective, federal bookings grew 78% in Q1 versus 37% in fiscal '16, and 37% in fiscal '15. We're also particularly pleased to see our OEM business outperform our expectations in what is typically a seasonally slow quarter. During the quarter, we also continued to execute on our stated gross margin strategy, which we -- as we have consistently communicated in the past, is to target a gross margin for the foreseeable future of around 60%. Any potential upside due to higher OEM and software sales is expected to be invested back into our business through competitive appliance pricing, to accelerate new customer acquisitions as well as to expand into certain targeted geographies. We continue to invest aggressively in the business, although always measured against the backdrop of our sales productivity model. We are mindful of the delicate balance that exists between growth and cash flow. As an example, during the quarter, we took on approximately 110 additional heads related to PernixData and Calm.io acquisitions. To fit within our existing spending plans, we simply canceled the equivalent amount of already approved Nutanix headcount requisitions. If we step back for a minute, to see how our business focus has morphed over the last few years, we would find that early on, like most early-stage companies, we were almost always solely focused on growth and products. After a few years, we added an additional goalpost of operating within a 60% gross margin parameter. Once the margin goal was accomplished, we added the additional goal of operating at a level of positive cash flow from operations. Today, I'm pleased to note that Q1 represented our fourth straight quarter of positive cash flow from operations. Having successfully balanced growth, gross margins and positive cash flow from operations over many quarters, we recently added the next operating goalpost, that of being positive free cash flow, which we expect to occur at the end of calendar year '17. Once we do become self-funded, we clearly have the option of making even further investments to expand the reach of our product platform and to broaden our sales footprint with the goal of securing superior growth over an extended period of time. I'll go through a few details for the quarter now. Revenue for first quarter was $167 million, growing 19% from the previous quarter and 90% from a year ago. We billed $240 million for the quarter, representing a 16% increase over the prior quarter and an 86% increase from a year ago. This billing total excludes a $6 billion addition to deferred revenue, related to the PernixData acquisition. Over the last few quarters, our billings to revenue ratio has elevated to a range of around 1.45 to 1.5, resulting an unprecedented increases in our deferred revenues. Going forward, we would expect this ratio to decrease to a more normalized range, as the last few quarters included some larger one-off ELA deals, outperformance within our OEM business and higher-than-normal support renewals, all of which augmented billings with little associated revenue recognized. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 61% versus 61% in the prior quarter, and 60% in the year-ago quarter. The non-GAAP net loss was $47.8 million or $0.37 per share. This quarter, we had a few more-than-usual reconciling items between GAAP and non-GAAP results due to our IPO, the PernixData and Calm.io acquisitions, and the repayment of our outstanding debt, all occurring within the quarter. We've provided a thorough reconciliation of the impact of these items on our non-GAAP results in our press release. I'll finish it up with a few balance sheet stats and a few other miscellaneous items. Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments ended at $347.1 million. That was aided by approximately $250 million raised in the IPO, we paid off the entire debt balance of $75 million. Our DSO was based on a straight average calculation, it was 81 days versus 73 in the prior quarter. However, the weighted average DSO, which reflects the period an average receivable was actually outstanding, improved to 24 days versus 31 days in the prior quarter. Software as a percent of total bookings based on a rolling 4-quarter average, was 15%, up from 9% in the year-ago quarter. And the AHV nodes, as a percent of total nodes, based on a rolling 4-quarter average, was 17%, up from 6% in the first quarter of fiscal '16. Now looking at the guidance for Q2 on a non-GAAP basis, we expect revenue to be in the range of $175 million to $180 million. Gross margin of approximately 60%, and a loss per share between $0.35 and $0.36, assuming shares outstanding of approximately 142 million. In conclusion, we were very happy with our strong Q1 performance, which included a couple of large ELA deal as well as outperformance in our federal business. With the continued revenue growth, steady gross margins and thoughtful investments implied in our Q2 guidance, we are confident that our business continues to move toward our long-term financial targets. Thank you. Tonya?

With that, we'll turn it over to the operator for the question-and-answer session. We'd like to request that you please limit your question to one question and one follow-up to allow time for others. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg.

Dheeraj, I wanted to ask you, years ago, hyper-converged was mostly used for VDI deployments. But today that's clearly significantly different. Can you talk about some of the new use cases or applications that you're seeing, maybe some of the fastest growth from customer adoption?

Yes, I mean, as I mentioned in my call script as well Matt, every rearchitecture of the data center has actually had to go through one killer app, one killer workload. And if you look at VMware 10 years ago, it was test and dev. For AWS, it was exactly the same test and dev. So VDI became that killer app for us because Windows 10 refresh was coming, there was a lot of iOS and Android on the edge. So Windows moved to the cloud, which people call a virtual desktop infrastructure. And we foresee that market by itself to grow quite a bit. But at this current stage, it's less than 30% of our business. I think, last quarter was 25%, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty much the rest of the 75% is server virtualization workloads there. About 8% to 9% is remote office, branch office. There's a lot of Microsoft applications, as I mentioned, in some of the customer wins, there's Splunk as a use case, there's Oracle. And basically, a ton of healthcare apps that people don't know, these are like dark apps that nobody apart from healthcare actually knows about. So healthcare is becoming pretty strong vertical for us, and we're going pretty deep certifying a lot of these applications on a quarter-by-quarter basis. And a huge focus for the company is really looking at things top down rather than selling infrastructure bottom-up. And that will mean going deeper into, for example, in federal, we've just certified Crystal as a new piece of hardware because it's ruggedized. And so we speak the language of the industry as opposed to going and speaking a hyper-converged infrastructure language.

That's great. And then, maybe as a follow-up. I think in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that your Dell OEM business was better-than-expected. I'm curious though, given your relationship with Lenovo, who's only a few quarters in right now, can you talk about the run rate of that business for Lenovo? How does that feel versus the Dell business maybe one that was only a few quarters in?

I think, a pretty similar. Obviously, they're 2 different companies. Dell, is highly centralized decision making. Lenovo, is quite the opposite. They are more regional, which makes for quite a bit of suite experience, I would say, better because there's no one place where you can actually go and forge product decisions or go-to-market motions and such. But at the same time, it gives leeway to individual regions like China, like Europe, like Africa. So we're doing a lot of these things on a regional basis, but we foresee that Lenovo is going to be yet another hard work for us just like Dell was. And it continues to be one of those things, where we, as a company, need to go and sell ourselves and expect that the OEMs will actually follow.

Your next question comes from Kulbinder Garcha with Crédit Suisse.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

This is [indiscernible] for Kulbinder. Just have a couple of quick questions. And the first one is that this quarter, your revenue grew 90%, and for -- if we use the middle point of next quarter's revenue guidance, it is about 74%, 75% or 73% year-over-year, but which is kind of a deceleration. But when you look at other metrics, you have a healthy billings, and you have customer growth accelerating. And can you just help us understand, kind of just kind of dynamics that you have a healthy billing and better metrics of other things, but your revenue guidance, it's kind of decelerating. And I have a follow-up?

Sure, we mentioned a couple of things on the revenue for Q1, that in, mostly around federal. And federal outperformed our expectations quite significantly in the quarter, and I think the consensus number was roughly $152 million or something along those lines into $167 million. So we're coming from a slightly elevated number in Q1, and it's not quite apples-to-apples to look at that on a elevated Q1 number. I think if you look at the current consensus out there for Q2, it's roughly I think a $168 million. So this guidance of $175 million to $180 million is about 4% to 7%, I believe, increase or raise over that prior consensus also.

And...

But you're right. This is -- and the customer growth was great this quarter. But we had a little extra unexpected in Q1.

Okay. And also, can you kind of give us some kind of color about your billings like how much is from new customer billings? How much is from existing customer billings? Because I think that would kind of help us understand that kind of ASP for each set of customer. And also, is your software revenue close to 10% of total revenue now or how close it is?

Yes, so on the repeat, it was roughly 65%-35% existing and new customers. So existing customers roughly 65% of the total. When we state those figures, it is always percentage of bookings. And that, it's plus-or-minus 5%, maybe, every quarter or something along those lines, but it's fairly -- it's been fairly steady in that 60% to 65% range for several quarters. And then, the second part, what was the second part of the question?

Software.

The software as a percent of revenue, we haven't given that. It's creeping up obviously. We gave the rolling 4-quarter software total, that 15% of total bookings. And as the amortization of Dell and other software continues to roll in there, that's getting up there. But we haven't specifically said it on a revenue basis.

Your next question comes from Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs.

This is Matt Cabral on behalf of Simona. I guess, could you just dig a little bit deeper into the strength that you saw in federal in the quarter? And help us understand what actually drove the acceleration? I mean, I guess, was this just pent-up demand that finally closed in the quarter? Or was there something more structural that changed that maybe had legs beyond just the first quarter?

Well, obviously to the Fed procurement year end. Their procurement ends -- their fiscal ends in September. So Q1 is typically one of those quarters where we see more federal. But there's some large deals that we saw as well. And these are difficult to predict deals. I mean, I talked about some of them here as well. The OEM relationship is finally kicking in as well. One of the things that federal was kind of late to embrace was Fed OEM relationships itself. So they're finally doing well with Dell. And other than that I think it's just there was nothing special about it. We also -- we're probably under-investing in the quarters before and our federal sales investment in terms of putting more feet on the ground and we did some of that in the last 2 quarters as well. So some of those numbers also showed at the federal procurement year-end.

Got it. And then, Duston, on the gross margin guidance, I guess, could you just walk us through the puts and takes to get you to that modest step down that you're guiding for into the second quarter?

Yes, I mean, it's plus or minus. Again, we've just always had that 60% kind of mentality, if you will. So there is nothing scientific, if you will, why it would decrease in several tens of basis points there quarter-over-quarter. It's just that how we've tried to manage the business. And you can't get it perfect all the time. In an ideal world, we'd love 60% every quarter for the immediate future anyway. And then, grow the footprint and add more sales teams and things like that. So it's just the parameter. You can say, it's plus or minus a 100 basis points maybe on each side of that, which we said in the past there. But that's -- it's basically, just the philosophy of how we run the company.

Your next question comes from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan.

Dheeraj, I'm curious how often these days, are you competing head-to-head against Amazon, AWS? If the prospect is considering the economics of predictable workloads. And also, just how frequently are your customers using Nutanix coupled with AWS in kind of a true hybrid capacity?

This is a very good question that actually we think about on a everyday basis. And if you think about our thesis, Mark, , our thesis is that in the Global 2000, and generally speaking, in the Enterprise 5000, it's going to be about hybrid. Not pure play public cloud, and it's kind of kin to the market for electric car versus hybrid versus gasoline. And own versus rent, will kind of shake itself out in the coming years. As I mentioned earlier, predictable versus elastical be a pure economic argument once on-prem's OpEx look similar to a public cloud. Today, it's all messed up because the complexity of dealing with multiple boxes and vendors and tons of opinions on whose hypervisor to choose, whose server to use, whose switch and load balance and firewall to use et cetera. So we are in a path to signify a lot of these. I mean as you can appreciate, IT and Global 2000 is about builders, who have too many opinions on technology. And their balance of trade issues with vendors and ownership of risk and CapEx-friendly mindsets, and things like that. So the highly opinionated public cloud black box is not a panacea for these organizations. And at the same time, this is [indiscernible] over time. We believe that there is no technology provider out there, that who has the attention to detail to affect this change. That's where we see our opportunity. So what do we mean by attention to detail? I mean, on the hybrid front, there are tons of things that are broken in the hybrid world. Networking is broken, security is broken, data center wide workload scheduling, online migration that is cross cloud and cross hypervisor. There is a ton of technology there that we need to pay before we partake in this hybrid buzzword of today. Convergence of public and private cloud will require heavy lifting of design and back-end infrastructure. And what I can tell you is that, we've been busy. We'll come back to you when we think we are ready with the paying off the technology debt itself. And hybrid is, as I said, in a classic conversions, just harder than the last one we did over the last 7 years of our company journey. And just, overall in order to share this with the rest of the shareholders, who are also on the line, I can appreciate the angst that they have as a shareholder of what's going to happen with this CapEx versus OpEx war. And as a very large shareholder, myself, let me reassure you that we have disrupted and reinvented ourselves every 3, 4 years because we are bunch of highly dissatisfied paranoid builders, who wake up every day and think about disintermediation. That's how AHV was born, that's how OEM decision was deliberately taken to compete with ourselves and grow the pie. That's how Prism decision was taken 6-plus years ago. Even though it was considered kind of rash idea, born out of being in control of our destiny. I think net-net, we all have plans to make hybrid elegant, we'll come back to you every quarter and talk about how far down the road, we are with some of the tech debt before we measure success with go-to-market, which I promise, we'll hustle equally hard for.

Okay. Great. Well said. And Duston, I just had a quick follow-up for you. I guess, I'm a little surprised by the federal bookings comments. I think, you said, it grew 78% year-over-year. It's actually a little slower than the revenue growth. And it's a little slower than the billings growth. So I just want to make sure I'm digesting that correctly, that so the federal business performed above plan, but grew a little slower than the broader business. Is that a fair way to look at that?

Yes, I mean, if you look at it, what I was comparing is what it grew Q1 of last year, it grew 37% year-over-year. The prior Q1, it grew 37%. So there was just some good healthy growth comparatively, and clearly, it exceeded what we had expected.

Your next question comes from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley.

First of all, now that the Dell/EMC deal has closed, what have you learned around how that channel will position the Nutanix product versus the EMC and VMware solutions? And a follow on to that, how realistic is it for investors to expect you to broaden your OEM partnerships? Or do you feel like you're happy with the Dell and Lenovo relationships that are in place today?

I think on the Dell/EMC front, I've covered a lot of ground in my talk, but I would say, we're in a good shape. There's healthy cooperatation [ph] on a deal-by-deal basis. We have extended our partnership framework through 2021. We've won joint customers in Global 2000 by helping each other. And yet, we are paranoid to lose them as they are to lose us. That's a healthy relationship, I would say. Our EMC sellers are being enabled as we speak. There's much work ahead in terms of enablement of Global 2000 heavy sales force. Their aspirations of account control, friction reduction, and are preparing them to disrupt themselves as Nutanix disrupt itself and so on and so, it's hard stuff, as hard as product development, if not harder. But we are focused, and we are aware of the pitfalls. We are willing to be the most agile shark in the red ocean, I think, I think, it's a pretty positive move for Dell/EMC to embrace Nutanix and VMware, and Microsoft as a trifecta. And it's going to come down to being humble and honest and hungry. And we'll see where this whole thing goes, I mean, [indiscernible] is very similar. I think it's early days. We don't know what we don't know. We went and localized our product for China, in particular because we look at that as a very different market than the rest of the world, and we have seen some good reception in terms of having empathy for the end user. So it's going pretty -- yes, I think it's going to Tier-2 towns in China and things like that, which broadens our customer base as well.

And how realistic is it, that you would look to additional OEM partners? Or are you happy with what you have in place in terms of channels now?

Yes. I think, one thing that's pretty clear to us is that we should not be suffering from any kind of attention deficit disorder. And simply signing contracts for the sake of signing contracts. Enabling EMC by itself is a lot of work and fraught with friction and requires our utmost attention to detail. And then, there is working on Lenovo and getting it right. So and then there is enabling our own sales force to know, which route to market is best for that opportunity that they're chasing. But there's ton of people enablement, friction reduction, business process automation for 1-click, delight and things like that. So at this point, we just have to get a lot of work we have in our hand right, including Cisco, UCS. If we get these right, then we'll probably look at adding more OEMs in the future.

Okay. And then, just a bigger picture question. One that I get often on the competitive landscape. Why do you think customers will turn to Nutanix to bridge public and private workloads instead of turning to another large infrastructure provider like VMware or application provider like Microsoft that already has a lot of existing relationships and are embedded in the applications today?

Yes. I think it's going to -- for me, it's very simple, and it's not technology. It's ambition and attention to detail. I mean, everybody has tried, but we're the only ones that have successfully written a control plane that hides the details of individual hypervisor stacks. And sold it at scale through the channel in OEMs. Now going from here to the next level, trying to do this with AWS is the fourth stack beyond vSphere, Hyper-V and AHV, we could still fail. We are redefining EPIs in the hybrid operating system capabilities, and it could get complicated, as we abstract out individual cloud providers. So let's see, it's early days, and we'll report more in another year. Interestingly, the Calm.io acquisition is very pertinent in this context. They automate entire application blueprints and abstract the cloud underneath. So we're burning a lot of midnight oil, trying to assimilate and integrate that goodness into our Prism and self-service portal. Again, we could fail if we didn't have the attention to detail on organizational assimilation and UX and UI design and things like that. And then finally, containers throws another curve ball here. And no one knows how best to integrate VMs and containers. So it creates a level playing field in which there's no guarantee that the biggest brand will win. If anything being an underdog, has helped with innovation, so looking forward to that.

Your next question comes from Aaron Rakers with Stifel.

I believe in the IPO road show, you guys had made a comment about your sales capacity and I believe, I think the number was around 54% were deemed to kind of be productive. Is that a metric you can provide an update on? And how do we think about your plans on sales capacity expansion going forward? And I do have a follow-up?

Yes. I mean, we, ultimately, would like to probably get away from disclosing that. But this quarter, there was very little change in that metric. Though it's pretty much the same. If you're looking, again, how do we plan to, I think your question was, how do we plan to grow the sales force going forward? Is that?

Correct.

And again, it's all hinged back to the sales productivity model like we do on all the other investments in the business. And we look at that, and we continue to analyze it and study it, and to see how that's progressing. And as long as that continues to perform as or better-than-expected, we'll continue to add resources. As a matter fact, this quarter, I believe, the sales adds for this quarter, total sales, so this is quota, non-quota, overhead folks and the like there, I think it was 25% greater than any other quarter so far in our history here as far as the amount of adds in the sales organization this quarter. So we continue to hit it pretty hard. And we'll -- it won't always probably be at these levels. But again, if the productivity model continues to work, and it has continued to work, it gives us comfort to go do that.

And there's some -- a focus on Global 2000 in Germany and Japan, some of the regions we're looking at.

Okay. And then as a quick follow-up. You talked a lot about the OEM relationships. I'm curious of what you've seen in the field with regard to your ability to sell into Cisco environment of supporting Nutanix on top of the UCS platform?

Yes, I think .NEXT, we announced plans to support both blades and rack mount server form factor from Cisco. We had a high level view of much work to do here, Aaron, just like Uber had to work hard and fight for its rights in every major city around the world. It won't be easy, but we're hoping diehard Cisco UCS customers will see value and then push hard for the 2 companies to cooperate and behave, probably very similar to what's happened between Oracle and VMware in this last decade. The only way to counter platform hubris of companies, including our own hubris sometimes is to listen to joint customers and do it right by them. The rest takes care of itself. And Cisco does realize that they don't have the full stack, they're mainly replacing a slaver of the VMware stack with their arm's length OEM product. The goals are shipping that OEM product are also different. That software in a bundle with every UCS server today, is being delivered literally for free to create the optics of software shipment. But we all know, the enterprise don't buy cheap stuff. They buy stuff that works and meaningfully displaces existing CapEx and OpEx. That requires more than bundling software with every motherboard.

Your next question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James.

Great. Duston, you mentioned the billing-to-revenue ratio in the quarter, or has recently been around 1.45 to 1.5. And you suggested it would trend lower. Could you give us some idea of what you consider normal in this regard?

Yes, I'd go probably back Simon to maybe 4 quarters or so ago, and maybe a little bit more than that and see what it was trending at that point in time. We started to get some pops that put it up the OEM business kicked in heavy there, as I said, ELAs came on this quarter quite heavily, there's some support renewals in there that hit it. That just is not right for us to assume that's going to continue like that from that perspective. So yes, I'd go back probably 4 or 6 quarters and do that calc there. And it's probably more somewhere in that range.

Great. Appreciate that. And in terms of the business with Cisco, in your prepared remarks, you, I think, mentioned that some of the federal projects came about through work with Cisco. Could you help us get a better understanding because it sounds like a number of the questions are dancing around the relationship with Cisco. And in the past, it sounds like you've got a lot of strength in the Dell relationship, you spent a lot of time in your prepared remarks on the Dell relationship. But it seems as if, you've got some brewing strength with Cisco. I'm just wondering if that creates any kind of tension given the relationship or tension between EMC/Dell and Cisco. If you could help us understand, maybe some of the dynamics? And what could develop out of that?

Yes, I mean, I wouldn't read too much. There's a few wins here and there. We're still very early. It's like seeding a new starter product within a larger company. And I mean, it's not just love from their side, it's also our own attention to detail on how we go and focus on Cisco as if it's a mini startup within the big startup. There's challenges and there's risks, and we don't know what we don't know about the next 12 months. But we'll hustle hard and hope to get more joint customers, and from then on, it could be a different relationship. Right now, I think Dell is probably the most self-aware and the most situationally aware OEM with Lenovo. That understands where the market is headed, what the public cloud is doing to consumption models and what it means to actually keep the on-prem environment elegant. Everybody else is still scratching the surface of what it means to compete with AWS, and then so on. So I think it's early days to see what Cisco and Nutanix will do together.

Your next question comes from Alex Kurtz with Pacific Crest.

Maybe, some color around ASPs in these larger strategic Global 2000 accounts? And how that trended during the quarter? As you get into these bigger million dollar-plus transactions, what does that mean for sales cycle? And any potential lumpiness in future quarters?

Yes. I think the ASPs on the appliance side have pretty much held up. I can't see a reason to say that from a year ago, it's actually been any different. Now there's some Global 2000 customers that have bought ELAs from Nutanix, via the Dell OEM agreements, so we realize only software dollars. And then, there's some other ELAs that went on white boxes, that again, have a very -- it's an apples and oranges comparison in terms of the ASP there as well. But overall, I think, the sales cycle -- early sales cycles and look at the first dollar that a Global 2000 is spending on us, is probably 6 to 9 months. And then, in the next 18 months, as we reported in the past, they are repeat purchasing another $7.50 on average. And our top 25 is doing about 14x.

No, 15.5.

15.5x from the first dol -- in the next 18 months after the first dollar.

Okay. And just a follow-up on that one of the other competitive questions. Maybe, you could just frame the argument right know against you guys versus VxRail and how VSAN to VMware only environment type of product? And how that has been looking in your pipeline? Has it been growing in your pipeline? Or it was more sort of legacy sort of converged systems that you're seeing?

Yes, I think 70% are still 3-tier. I think, we are thankful to VMware and pretty much everybody in the space to go and broaden the market because everybody is going and spending marketing dollars, educating thousands of customers talking about new architecture. I think it's very helpful, and I think, the good thing is that HCI is not about hardware speeds and feeds. I mean, the true repeat business to end-user delight, it's about a complete experience on operating system and its capabilities around automation and orchestration, machine learning, OpEx reduction. And then you don't just do this for compute and storage, but for containers and networking and security and self-service for developers and think about migration, I mean, EPIs for partners. It's a very high-level problem than the speeds and feeds of selling boxes, whether it's HCI or AFA or what have you. And I'd say also intrinsically your distributor system problem that large incumbent vendors are inherently not good at. I mean, only software company that have successfully solved algorithm problems around multiple machines, that made it look like one, have done it right. So I think VMware is close. No one is even close actually except for VMware. So and then top of that HCI is about usability in the control plane. It's about design and elegant simplicity. It's about celebrating less is more, that many incumbents have never come to understand or appreciate. But that's the barrier to entry. Having said that, we are aware that good enough is the biggest enemy of the great, so we're constantly thinking about pricing, packaging, for the value-friendly buyer, who is most cost conscious, and that's where the multiple routes to market become important, and the fact that we have to segment the pyramid.

Your final question comes from Jayson Noland with Baird.

I wanted to start with Global 2000. If my math is right, you added 65 to this category in the quarter, last year, you averaged about 25 or 30 per quarter. I think Dheeraj Dell was mentioned but a little more color there, that's a big deal.

Yes, so what's the question, again, Jayson?

Why was the Global 2000 add so strong in the quarter?

Yes, Jayson, Duston. Every year, the Global 2000 resets. And so what we do is we recalc based on the current Global 2000 at any given time. We finished the fiscal year on the old method -- on the old Global 2000, and we just updated to the new Global 2000. So it was more, I think it was like 20, 23 new adds based on the new Global 2000 recent publication there. That's what we do now. In our investor presentation, that's either posted or will be posted on our website, you'll have all the history there based on the current Global 2000 mix.

Okay. And then a bigger picture or question to finish. Dheeraj, you mentioned on-prem, is a cost-effective alternative to the public cloud for predictable workloads. Is that a common opinion for your target customer base given the public cloud pricing isn't exactly transparent?

Yes, I think, it's -- if you look at the common sense around renting a hotel for 30 days or renting a hotel because paying for the optionality of pulling the plug any day, you want. So renting a hotel for a year or 2 years or 3 years, it just doesn't make sense or I mean, if you go and try to rent a car for a year, it's going to come out with darn expensive. So these service providers, who rent cars or rent hotels, they know that that's the kind of pricing they need to subsume to be able to pay for the rest for the optionality, actually. And I think computing is just going to be like the rest of the stuff. Computing is not going to be any different than housing or autos or what have you.

Is that well understood across your customer base or still some confusion?

It's very early. I mean, look, I was talking to a healthcare provider today at an ABC, and they are like look, we are completely CapEx oriented, and we cannot even think of moving to OpEx because of blah, blah, blah reasons. So it's really a CapEx versus OpEx argument, and it depends on the culture of the organization, and how their finance teams look at tax depreciation and things like that, and who has the power in terms of the CIO or the CFO, and things like that. So a lot of things that actually are not about technology or things like that more political and cultural.

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