Alan Trefler
Analyst · Wedbush Securities. Please proceed with your question
Q4 was a solid quarter capping off with a strong year for Pega. We exceeded our original full year non-GAAP revenue guidance of $580 million coming in at $593 million, a 16% increase over 2013, while also achieving our goal to increase our backlog. For the full year our non-GAAP license and cloud revenue was up 25% from the previous year. Our business in Europe improved in the past quarter and North America continues to be strong. Our strength in sales and on boarding, marketing, customer service and platforms is a driving business growth across the globe. And the ability of our software with the unifying operations in the customer lifecycle management area is particularly powerful in those markets where cost reduction and customer engagements are both important priorities. And we think we can do more, as we look at 2014 particularly the second half in 2015, we think that is some of the discussions we’ve had on these calls where we’ve talked about how we want to evolve our business going forward. Now in 2014, we made a lot of investments and I think made a lot of the right initial steps to fundamentally change where we go to market and make important changes in our business. We made significant progress in 2014 and will continue to focus in these areas in 2015 and we expect to see returns in the future. The initiatives that we’ve been working on are going to focus the business around accelerating growth and capturing more of the very large potential market, we think we’ve the ability to address. Now, we’ve discussed with you a number of times that our software address is a much larger opportunity then the one articulated traditionally as “VPM”. And in 2014, we developed and rolled out new messaging for the company and our products that positions are squarely in the area of what we refer to a strategic application. Now you can see this description on our website which we launched just after the New Year which highlights this new positioning. Applications engineered for evolution and I think really brings into life. The site data reflects where we’re as a company, what we sell and the value we bring to our clients. We made it easier for clients to understand what we deliver and how we can meet their needs to specific applications and we’ve better content and have navigation and are looking field that matches our company positioning. And I hope you’ll take a look and let me know what you think. Now, we’ve talked about the transition we’re making and how we want to begin to expand our market coverage beyond the traditional what we call say, global 400 large, large accounts and continue our expansion in 2015 to what we refer to as a global 2000. Now doing this we think markedly increases the market that we can go after and obviously making change to this type, we’re going to have to do a number of key incredible strategic things to achieve it. We’ve identified five areas in which we intend to work and deliver this year the types of changes to our business, we think we really set us up terrifically for the future. But first, as we’re going to enhance our marketing, similarly if you started on a website but with much, much more to drive awareness and develop a Pega digital community. Our traditional target account approach to marketing really did not have much marketing awareness project in it. We really were very much focused on direct almost hand-to-hand engagement with our clients. You’re going to see us, work to become much, much more visible as we’ve just started and now talk about what we’re going to be doing as soon as next month in just a little bit. But when do this to expand our target market to the global 2000 and we’re going to accelerate the development of strategic applications that are richer and more capable of allowing those organizations to the global 2000 to not be sold too as much as to able to buy. You’re going to see this transition of moving from a company, it goes a 100% what I would describe target account selling to a company that empowers buying, continue quite markedly during 2015. We’re going to continue our investments in our core platform technology because it is that core platform that gives our technology the power to revolutionize businesses and let them adopt well sort of strategic advantage compared to the competitors and a key part of this, our fifth initiative is going to be around further development and rolling out of our Pega cloud offerings which we think will be a very important way for this next year of potential customers to buy. So, these are the areas in which we’re going to be working and we’re very excited. So, start going into a little more detail about how this is going to look in coming quarters, let me talk a bit about the marketing awareness we’re going to be doing to really be able to expand our target market. You’re going to see several significant marketing campaigns throughout this year and this is really going to be end bolted getting more visibility with this global 2000, but we think it’s also going to be helpful with our larger traditional top 400 account market as well. Next week or two, you’re going to be seeing our first ever paid corporate visibility campaign which we believe will significantly wear our awareness over the next several months and perhaps even cause a bit of stir in the industry and we expect to continue to invest in marketing in 2015 because we know that our awareness has traditionally been very, very long and we think there is a huge opportunity to improve the way we sound [frankly] to the entire base. Now, relatively we’re going to be building out our ecosystem both raising awareness there and using our key partners to be able to help us, well solve for the bigger market that we’re going to be going after. We really done a lot of work on building out this ecosystem and I’m really thrilled with the extended relationships we form with companies such Accenture, Mackenzie, Capgemini, Apples and Cognizant. These are going to be important organizations as we look to expand the amount of license we’re selling while keeping our revenue growth and our staff growth in our services business that are very modest level. Now, we’ve added new partners in Europe in particular to those who have presence there because we find that smaller partners can sometimes be easier and more appropriate to work in the local language and we now have more than 70 partners around the world what we think really extends our reach geographically and vertically. And we think these are going to become increasingly strategic as we expand our prospect base from the global 400 to the global 2000. Now we continue to see on messaging around this idea of strategic applications resonate with the customers that we’ve been rolling in. As a reminder we define this concept of conforming business applications. As long as it support things could be really important to a company but are not central to the way of firm differentiate itself. Examples could include accounting, payroll, contact management these are things that well, a company might buy but it’s unlikely to think of as needing to make their own, needing to evolve, needing to change rapidly. By contrast strategic business applications of those that organizations used to differentiate and they must evolve its market, its products, customers’ regulation and competition all change. Now other features are important for these apps, the ability for the organization to tailor the application to its needs and rapidly adjust the changing requirements will be what distinguishes strategic applications from conforming applications and they will distinguish the companies that are able to empower themselves to be strategic from the firms that will grow by the way side. We continue to see opportunities where competitive differentiators are winning us business including especially in our intelligent customer relationship management capabilities that can actually not just response but even project and address customer needs, the ability to connect backend operations with frontend customer facing systems and really allow customers to go end-to-end during - well, immediately from request all the way to fulfillment and going from one channel to another. This helps our customers get more value out of their existing systems and helps them manage complexity and achieve end to end simplifications. Now, this quarter we’ve seen new wins and meaningful increases in our relationship with a great number of companies, great firms like [indiscernible] Schwab, CVS, Cocks Enterprises and Barclays, it will be ultimate test of our software though as much as customers which used to buy, but customers who are achieving important go lives and really helping their business. And we had wonderful wins and successes going live with companies like Pfizer working in the area of pharmacovigilance, an important area for process, case management and customer engagement. Well point where we delivered a new claims workstation capital one, handling disputes for cards, for study group perhaps an organization representative of the new direction of small organizations are operating out of Asia using us on the cloud to streamline admission to educational institution. Robobank, a new commercial lending app, U.S. bank in web based contact center for billing [indiscernible] commercial firms like General Electric in the supply chain area. So, we’re finding that we can deliver improved applications, we can help our companies, the customers we’ve strategically differentiate and we’re very excited with what we added to the product in 2014 and what we’re going to be able to show in 2015. In 2014 we made a number of what I would describe as strategic technology acquisitions, and very small companies have enabled us to really bolster the technology in particular somebody called MeshLabs which is text analytics and social engagement technology and fire five, the co-browsing and that we’ve now completely unified these into our Pega Technology so that our customer relationship management, our customer service all aspects of our platform now were enabled with the state of the art features. We launched the new version of our sales automation with improved omni-channel capabilities that leverage this and also do a brilliant job of supporting mobile which is also an example of where we think are model driven approach of our unique platform. It’s really going to facilitate organizations that have to run on multiple country devices and that want processes that work seamlessly from the mobile device all the way through their front and back offices. Once again, we think the way that world is going fix what our technology does and will do perfectly. And on the vertical front we launched new and enhanced applications in a numerous number of industries you can see on the website and continue to invest in our Pega 7 platform finding ways to build things into that platform that help all of our industries but also help organizations that may want to do something on more of a platform basis. This includes enhancing our decision management capability with new business user tools and make it easier for people to directly manage and change how they market to their customers, what the offers are and how we can help them always know what the next best action is for an individual client. So, we’re going to continue to push in these areas, we’ve launched significant product releases, I’m very excited about the things we’re going to be doing over the next couple of quarters and including what we’ll show in Pega world in June which is always a high point of the year for us. And one of the things that we know we’re continuing to emphasize is the cloud. Now, the cloud I think is central to our new strategy because frankly in this year of customers that are smaller than the global 400, they really benefit from some of the cost, scale and operational advantages more than some of the larger companies do which frankly have economies scale themselves. But, we do think that cloud will become increasingly important in all aspects and sectors in the market. Now it’s true it’s off of the small number, but I was pleased that our non-GAAP cloud revenue grew 86% in 2014 and we anticipate strong additional growth as we go forward. In 2014, we recruited one of the industries foremost leaders in cloud computing to run our cloud operation and we’ve been making great progress with our partner Amazon Web Services to be able to provide what I think is a state of the art cloud environment and this is something we’re continuing to dig in. We were pleased to be able to present an Amazon’s we call the big think partner reinvent conference in November and are excited about the evolving relationship and what we think we’re going to be able to do on that platform. So, in summary 2014 was the strong year for Pega, we know we’ve a lot more we can do, we think 2015 is going to be an important building year for us. But the opportunity we see in front of us is very significant and I’m quite encouraged that this transition has the potential to be as potent as the one that we made years ago when we actually decided we are going to go in and pretty much lead the business process management market. This gives us a chance to broaden our opportunity that we’re going after that what we’ll be focusing on and we see a lot of customers left space already starting to respond positively up to what we are going to be able to do that. We think that this need for digital transformation which our technology will support is one that’s going to be continuing and increasingly and as a result we are excited that we are well positioned to be able to take the steps to be true leader in this strategic application market really driving applications that are engineered for evolution. And with that let me turn it over to Rafe to talk about some of the number.