Alan Trefler
Analyst · Wedbush Securities. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Rafe. We kicked off 2015with a very strong Q1 and we’re very excited about the year. As we’ve talked about in the past, first quarters have often required us to consume backlog to achieve our license goals. This quarter sales performance yielded both strong license revenue and increased backlog. Our strategic applications are being well received by an increasing set of clients and our unified platform once again lauded this quarter by leading industry analysts, continues as a powerful competitive differentiator. We’re being successful addressing the most daunting challenges enterprises face today, to become more customer centric and to become digital. Our history in the market gives us the perspective to see the change is a constant and likewise, both our customers and us are continually being driven to change, to evolve, to meet the needs of our respective clients. As we’ve discussed in the past few quarters, we’ve embarked on an ambitious effort to bring our solutions to a broader market and we’re in the process of raising our name brand recognition with new audiences, instituting more repeatable and scalable sales models, packaging our capabilities as easier to deploy applications and addressing the critical needs our customers have to improve their engagement with their customers. We believe this strategy of increasing our visibility and moving to a broader market will lead to improved sales repeatability and long-term growth. To make this transition, we are continuing to invest in our products, our talent, our marketing and really looking to have PEGA be a tremendous growth business and we’re off to a great start in 2015. Now, this quarter, we’ve made some significant progress in communicating on new positioning that are focusing on strategic applications and we are seeing enthusiasm from clients and prospects. And we’re raising awareness among the broader range of clients, we believe, represent a significantly larger long-term revenue opportunity. I’d say that over the last 12 months, we’ve made dramatic changes to our marketing organization and our thinking about how to go to market, in that we’ve rolled out a number of new marketing programs throughout the quarter, starting at the very beginning of the quarter when we rolled out our brand new, completely redesigned website. We’ve also put in place global regeneration programs. We launched our first paid advertising campaign this first quarter. We call it Pega Can and it challenges clients to consider how to best meet the needs of the most sophisticated, complicated and rich organizations that really are our best customers. And most recently, we have an initiative with Accenture and The Economist to position PEGA as a thought leader in digital transformation. I’ve spent a lot of time with existing and potential customers and they’re all pretty stressed . We’re living in an age of the empowered, consume and constant change. But in building businesses that are successful, our clients understand that software is central to how they run their businesses and they need new approaches to software to help master complexity, achieve scale achieve scale, quickly evolve and enhance the client experience. On-message continues to resonate, because our solutions deliver compelling results and because they’re built on a unique platform that brings a model-driven architecture to our clients, empowering change now and in the future. In terms of customer successes, this quarter we added a number of important new logos, one significant business and extended relationships with many important existing customers. Good start to the year included real strength in the Americas where Bradesco Seguros, the largest insurer in Brazil shows PEGA to be the basis of an enterprise transformation and new industries for us. In the auto business, where we’ve continued to expand with companies like Nissan, using us to support the global dealer network and Toyota, around quality information management. And Sprint, helping them with their challenges in marketing and retention. And return business from long-standing customers like Healthfirst, Bank of America, Anthem and Bank of Nova Scotia. Now our European results have been slower than we’d like. We are pleased to see a number of new logos such as Virgin Media in the decisioning space, Next-Best-Action Marketing, and [WW], an important insurer in Germany choosing PEGA for its sales and onboarding capabilities that they need to support their agents with a flexible selling and onboarding solution, and return business from customers like Vodafone, ING Capital, Siemens. And I was in Europe just last week, and it has time in Europe, but I’ll tell you, I’m seeing an increase in energy levels and an increase in interest and I think it would be fair to say it was more promising than my sentiment on previous visits. Now Asia, where I am heading next week, was also very successful in the quarter. We had an important new business with the Australian government, it’s probably in the Department of Defense. And one existing business from clients such as AIG, Mitsubishi and Siam Commercial Bank. So, I’ll say that International is going to continue to be a very important engine for growth, though I’m thrilled with the way the Americas are holding up. Around the world we saw lots of great go-lives, which are very important to us as a company. Many of these will be talked about at the upcoming PegaWORLD Conference. Isbank, which is one of the most innovative banks I’ve ever seen in Turkey, is putting in place a remarkable enterprise-wide business and IT joint transformation. AffordaBlue put a quoting system in for their agent, mobile enabled to enable them to, well, basically do things whatever they need to, up and live and running in less than four months. Roche, an event management system, helping them track payments to healthcare professionals. GE Healthcare around the complaint and customer service management solution. WellCare for appeals and grievances. And Connad put a CRM tracking app in that they say has raised customer satisfaction by 20 points. So, the market is increasingly recognizing and seeking out the unique capabilities we bring to customers, a unified platform that can deliver end-to-end solutions and strong capabilities built on top of that, making it possible to go from point of contact with the customer, all the way through fulfillment and across all channels. In fact, we have the only product that to be recognized by industry analysts in five separate ranking reports issued in 2015, covering software categories, including everything from back-office platforms to customer-facing apps. Remember that this is all the single unified PEGA platform. This isn’t a bunch of stuff brought from other companies that have been stitched together in a way that makes it hard to use and impossible to maintain. This is with a really well-architected, model-driven architecture that enables customers to get started fast and keep going. For further evidence, you can check this out on our website, the pictures are beautiful. We were really recognized by Gartner as the Most Improved Leader in their Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management suites. We’re once again recognized as a leader in Forrester’s Wave for CRM suites for large organizations, and our software was noted in its ability to empower organizations across marketing, sales and service to predictably engage in real-time with their customers. We are ranked as a leader in Gartner’s annual MQ for CRM customer engagements centers, which cited our predictive intelligence as a strength as a strength. And Gartner also placed PEGA as a leader in its application-focused Magic Quadrant for BPM based case management frameworks. And for the first time we were recognized by Gartner in multichannel campaign management. Now, we’re really pleased, as I said, to be able to have all of these wonderful positionings, if you check out the pictures, and to have it on a single product, because that is what we understand is going to drive our customers to be more successful and make us more successful as we go forward. One might assume that it’s necessary to compromise when choosing a comprehensive solution like PEGA’s, but these reports indicate the exact opposite exact opposite. And they demonstrate the strength of the capabilities of our unified architecture and our customers demonstrate how these strengths build upon each other. Now, I also think an important differentiator is our ability to deliver our software in the cloud, as well as on premise. Many large global organizations are looking for options when it comes to their strategic applications and the ability to start on one place and go back and forth, we think and we’re seeing is very compelling. Our leadership in real time marketing analytics is also being recognized as a strength. And having these all work together provides that end-to-end customer experience that, well, we think is so key. Now in terms of the verticals that - our traditional verticals in banking and insurance continue to have been strong, but we’re also seeing other development verticals, including manufacturing, as I mentioned with Toyota and Nissan. And a lot of interesting things going on in the healthcare space this year on the back of many of the changes across North America. The telephony and media space also continues to be very strong. So we’re really happy with how the businesses are performing pretty much across the board. In wrapping up, I’m going to spend a moment talking about PegaWORLD, which would be wonderful event for those of you who are interested in learning more to attend. We’re expecting about 3500 attendees. It’s in June 7 to June 9 and we have a very, very focused agenda that enables people to hear from clients about their successes, about their visions, about what they’re going to be doing and what they have done. Royal Bank of Scotland will talk about how transform the way that international clients to deliver more personalized customer experience. At RBS, PEGA makes more than 1 billion real time recommendations every quarter. AIG Japan will talk about its state of the art omnichannel portal, which is now being used by 180,000 agents. The application has helped reinvent how it interacts with its customers, using data-driven insights to guide agents to comp to optimal customer interactions. And Cigna will share how it’s addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with today’s healthcare consumer through a core health platform that will enable new models of payer and provider collaboration. And Vodafone will discuss how it’s created a differentiated customer experience, reducing onboarding times, increasing sales and operational efficiency through a transformative initiative that won the 2014 Gartner BPM Excellence Award. So in summary, strong start to 2015. We’re very excited about the transitions we began last year, where we are today and that we are making progress. We continue to be excited about how our software is being adopted and how this new push to strategic applications is really complementing our traditional strength and bringing the power of our platform to an increased suite of clients. And our 2015 plan anticipates its continued investments in the initiatives I’ve discussed today and on recent calls, and we will continue to reallocate our resources to repeat - to create a model that we believe is increasingly repeatable and definitely increasingly scale. With that let me turn the conversation over to Rafe.