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Qualys, Inc. (QLYS)

Q4 2019 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 12, 2020

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Qualys Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. This call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the call over to Vinayak Rao, Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Vinayak Rao

Analyst

Good afternoon, and welcome to Qualys Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. Joining me today to discuss the results are Philippe Courtot, our Chairman and CEO; and Melissa Fisher, our CFO. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that the remarks today will include forward-looking statements that generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. Factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and in our filings with the SEC, including our latest Form 10-Q and 10-K. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. As a reminder, the press release, prepared remarks, investor presentation, and supplemental historical financial spreadsheet are available on our website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Philippe.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Thank you, Vinayak, and welcome everyone to our Q4 earnings call. Melissa and I are pleased to report another good quarter in terms of revenue growth and profitability. We are also very pleased to report continued acceleration in our paid Cloud Agent subscriptions with almost 31 million now, 90% growth from prior -- from the prior year quarter. We continue to see good adoption of our free Global IT Asset Inventory -- Discovery and Inventory application with almost 6,000 new companies signed up and over 600 using the service. We now have over 300 existing customers using it as well. We saw strong growth this quarter from our paid IT Asset Discovery and Inventory Solutions. And in fact, a leading aerospace company procured the solution this quarter in order to gain visibility of all their known and unknown assets across multiple environments as well as the end-of-life of their installed software. In terms of our other newer solutions, we also saw robust growth again from Container Security and FIM, File Integrity Monitoring. A large software company selected Qualys' FIM as well as Policy Compliance this quarter in order to build these capabilities into their DevOps and cloud environments, which they could not do with competitive products and deployments, and the deployment was simple as they utilized existing vulnerability management, our existing vulnerability management Cloud Agents. In addition, it's worth noting that Patch Management has seen the highest customer ramp among our newest application, with particular strength in the mid-market segment. Now let's look at our product innovation. In Q4, we continued to make strong progress in our goal of achieving ubiquity for our Cloud Agent. Our Cloud Agent is the technology platform for seven security compliance and IT solutions, namely Vulnerability Management, Policy Compliance, File Integrity Monitoring, Indication of Compromise,…

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Thanks, Philippe, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue, all financial figures are non-GAAP, and growth rates are based on comparisons to the prior year period unless stated otherwise. We're delighted with our increasing Cloud Agent subscriptions and multiproduct adoption, which lays the foundation for future revenue growth and industry-leading profitability. Our Q4 financial and operational highlights include revenues for the fourth quarter of 2019, grew 14% to $84.7 million. Platform adoption continued to increase as the percentage of enterprise customers with 3 or more Qualys solutions rose to 48% from 41%, and the percentage of enterprise customers with 4 or more Qualys solutions increased to 28% from 21%. Paid Cloud Agent subscriptions accelerated to 30.7 million over the last 12 months, up from 27.9 million for the 12 months ended in Q3 2019. New products released since 2015 contributed approximately 35% of total annual bookings in the quarter, up from 26%. And our average deal size continues to increase, growing 9%. Our scalable platform model continues to drive superior margins and generate significant cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2019 was $37.6 million, representing a 44% margin versus 39%. Q4 EPS grew 25%. And our free cash flow for the fourth quarter of 2019 was $25.1 million, up 9%. Excluding onetime CapEx related to the build-out of our Pune headquarters and M&A-related payments, our free cash flow grew 32%. In Q4, we continued to invest the cash we generated from operations back into Qualys, including $5.3 million in capital expenditures for operations, including principal payments under capital lease obligations as well as $3.2 million on capital expenditures for the build-out of our Pune headquarters and $12.5 million to repurchase 145,000 of our shares. Looking back on the year, we…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. I show our first question comes from Daniel Ives from Wedbush.

Daniel Ives

Analyst

Quarter and to the year, so Philippe maybe you can just talk specifically about -- when you think about what we're seeing on deal scope and size. I mean you start to see more of your strategic deals in the pipeline. I know you don't guide to larger deals. Maybe you can just talk about that in terms of just maybe difference to where we are today versus 6, 12 months ago.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes. No. Well, clearly, as you know, we have a very significant penetration at the very high end of the market, with about 70% of the Fortune 100, which are truly standardized on Qualys. And so with these companies, we are seen by them as more and more strategic. Not only vulnerability has been -- now people realize that you've got to absolutely pay attention to vulnerabilities, but just not only across your traditional servers and so forth, but across the entire spectrum,and that's really what makes us significantly strategic. And of course, the ability to create a global IT asset inventory, which is a foundation, is also very attractive for them. So we are really seen as more and more and more strategic. And of course, what is it in our road map, like, of course, the SIM, the next-generation SIM and EDR which we are currently building and hoping to deliver to market sometime at the end of this year, that also makes us even more strategic. So as a result of more deployment, then of course, we become more strategic for them. At the time, also what they have to consolidate the -- their stack, they cannot continue with that many disjointed enterprise traditional security solution and at the same time moving aggressively into the world of the digital transformation and the world of DevOps. And our product line fits absolutely perfectly the DevOps environment. Now in addition to that, what we see today and especially -- and VMDR has been received -- of course, we have presented VMDR already to many of our customers, and it's extremely well received because it simplified and not only it consolidates even further everything into a lot of this application to one single app with what we call transparent orchestration so you don't have to add another solutions like it's all done for you, it's all integrated, it's all seamless, but also, of course, the fact that now we price that on a per asset basis, which is much more interesting for a large corporation, which have a very complex environment and global. What we see also very clearly is VMDR makes us extremely competitive today at the lower end of the marketplace because [indiscernible] of the packaging, but also of its pricing as well. So, we see also a very big demand from VMDR from our mid-market and the SME, SMB business as well.

Daniel Ives

Analyst

Okay. Great. And just a question here for you, Melissa. In terms of just spending, obviously you've done a great job on margins and just containing costs, which is well known. But as you look ahead, just talk about that balance going into this year in terms of plugging more into sales and marketing while continuing to focus on obviously margins. Just talk about that balance. And is it different now just given some of the opportunities? Or maybe just talk about that.

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes. So the implied margin guide from our EPS guidance is modest contraction, a little bit over 100 basis points. And we're proud of the fact that we have a highly profitable operational model that allows us to continue to further invest as well as -- while still maintaining strong margins. So we expect to be investing, frankly, broadly on the technical side as well as, as Philippe mentioned in his prepared remarks, expanding sales and marketing efforts. And we'll be able to do that while still holding margins strong.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

And this is because of the model itself. I mean we have the advantage of being a pure cloud-based solution, is that, of course, we can make our solution available for trial, et cetera, at the minimum cost, and that's why we're putting a lot of investment in creating a lot of lead generation campaigns, try and buy. And of course, the installation, everything is self-updating, so you don't need significant expensive – you don't need professional services, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that at the end makes that -- the additional growth, a big chunk of it comes back -- comes down into the bottom line, and that's essentially the model that we have built and proven over time. I mean this is not something new.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Nick Yako from Cowen and Company.

Nicholas Yako

Analyst

Great. Philippe, you mentioned increasing your focus on the mid-market going forward. Just wondering if you expect to maybe leverage the channel community or partners more so than you have in the past.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

That's a good question because we are today -- as you very well know, when you have a major computing shift, the channels are the one which takes it on the change [ph] first, and they have to adjust. So what we see today is that a significant renewed interest from some of these traditional channel to really move in becoming MSSP. And so Qualys in that sense, we can enable them to become managed security service providers absolutely very quickly because they don't have to worry about building all these solutions we deliver them or made, so yes, in that sense, to answer your question, we see a huge opportunity with managed security service providers to bring our solution to the mid-market. They have the customer base, typically, especially these large companies. And so it's just a question of bringing our solution, which are already available and readymade to that market, so we see that absolutely.

Nicholas Yako

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And Melissa, could you maybe remind us of the revenue and customer mix between enterprise and mid-market today?

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes, Melissa.

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes, it hasn't moved significantly. It's roughly 20% of the customers and 80% of the revenues -- the enterprise, right, because it's bigger dollars.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Melissa Franchi from Morgan Stanley.

Melissa Franchi

Analyst

Yes. I wanted to ask on VMDR. You noted that there is potential within the mid-market, low end enterprise, but it seems like it could be compelling for the enterprise space as well. And so what are you expecting in terms of enterprise adoption? And then I know it's early, but what kind of uplift do you get from VMDR versus just a regular VM sale?

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

So let me answer the first question first. The second is a bit more complex, and I will explain that. The first one is we have absolutely significant interest from both the mid-market and as well as the large enterprise. It's exactly what they wanted. They have been asking us that for a long time. And what you have to realize for us to deliver that, it was not that easy. That's a major significant engineering effort because on one hand, we had to expand our platform to scale significantly, as we mentioned many times. We currently index 3 trillion data points on ElasticSearch, returning results in 100 milliseconds, and so -- and expanding to cover not only just the traditional network but also the cloud and containers and everything. So that was a huge technological effort. In addition to that, building this best-of-breed because today we consider that the application that we have are best-of-breed because they have the benefit of being able to essentially receive data from multiple sources and correlate that data so we can essentially eliminate better than anybody false positive and false negative, which is really what makes a security application best-of-breed. And so -- and now we have built all of that, and now what we're doing with VMDR is now we're certainly bringing them all together into one single application with the workflow, which are all integrated. That's what we are doing and finishing as we speak. And those 2 are now in that one single platform that allows you to, one, any device that connects instantly would pick it up; second, we can build from there, the global IT asset inventory automatically. Then from there, we can identify vulnerabilities across that entire hybrid environment, then we have made significant extension to our…

Melissa Franchi

Analyst

Okay. Yes, sounds like it. Melissa, I just wanted to follow-up on your comments on investing in sales and marketing next year. I'm wondering if you could talk about how you're investing in the sales part versus marketing and particularly, what you're expecting in terms of sales head growth next year.

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes. So we're happy with our sales force. As we discussed last quarter, we promoted Laurie, our VP of North Americas, to head our worldwide sales. We have a lot of people in place. We're always looking to add here and there but not significant -- there's not significant needs to the sales force. And so we look for the right people. Philippe mentioned we've just added significantly on the marketing side, and so there'll be a few places on the sales side to fill in, but nothing significant.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes. And you will see more partnerships also essentially really becoming -- I mean we are really the ideal solutions for partners. I mentioned the MSSPs because today, they -- and also because we are moving into a response, and that's the thing that MSSP absolutely needs. To really provide a good application is the ability not only to detect but to respond. So we have expanded significantly our capabilities of responding. We're going to do more. As now our agent, for example, soon we'll have the capabilities to also be capable of being interventionalist, if I had the term in English, so we could certainly remotely remove processes, give some processes. And you could really do microsurgery remotely, which is very important if you want to automate things. So I think we see today and these -- the partners who have already, and then there's quite a few more, which are coming our way because it's a -- we need the scale. We need all of that done for us. We don't have the time to build all of that. And so -- and we are not competing with them. Because unlike other companies, as you very well know, like for example, Rapid7, which have a managed security service providers, we don't and we will never have one. I can tell you because it's not really profitable or as profitable, I should say. So they don't see us as a competing business solution, so they can deliver their service and their additional added value. And what we see also is that they're all looking to our SIM because the problem they all have with the SIMs is that they are using existing SIM, which I don't need to mention, which are very, very expensive for them and do not…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Gur Talpaz from Stifel.

Gur Talpaz

Analyst

Okay. Philippe, I actually want to follow up on some of your commentary that you just offered. You're pushing into SIM and EDR, and those are 2 very large and very significant markets in the enterprise and really kind of across security, in general. When you think about your push into these new markets, how do you think about your differentiation, what you're going to bring to table that's ultimately different than what's already out there?

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

So it's a very good question. And it's a differentiation at multiple levels. So the first one is the scalability, the unique scalability that we have. What we have done, so instead of, for example, depending on an AWS back end and so forth, which of course gives you, of course, instant scalability in a way. You don't have to be low that infrastructure yourself. But the problem it gives you is that now you're certainly more -- much more dependent on them and the pricing structure. So when we took the other route of really building essentially our own, if you prefer, AWS, growing microservices, bare metal, huge scalability, absolutely building everything ourselves using open source engine. And so that gives us -- offered us unique capabilities. And as you can see, because of that, and then the reason is why Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, they're all using us to secure their own platform. So -- and what -- so we can also put our data centers if we own our platform in Azure, in Amazon, anywhere, without being dependent as much of their solutions. So we have much more flexibility, which is very important when you look at the global scale. So that's one element. It's the scalability. We're far above anybody that we know. The second element is the fact that, unlike anybody, we have much more information. We collect the data that they don't. If you look at some EDR solution, the only thing they know is the end point. They have no idea of the rest of the context and the rest of the environment, and that led into more false positive, et cetera. And then you have the challenge, of course, of scale and the challenge of remediation. So Qualys has always taken the longer road of architecting things the right way instead of trying to find the shortcuts, and that's why it took us so much time to get there. But now today, we are almost there. And in fact, we already discussed that in more detail as well as our Investor Day. And again, we are very confident that we are going to deliver these 2 major new applications, if you prefer, which are essentially the extension of the platform. When you look today at an EDR solution, for us, it's an application on the Qualys platform. It's not another point solution, and that's the problem with all of these other solutions. They're all point solution looking at one single element when we are a true very broad platform.

Gur Talpaz

Analyst

That's very helpful, Philippe. Melissa, just one question for you. Last quarter, you touched upon the notion of some changes in competitive pricing dynamics and your ability to sort of -- to match on renewal. Did you see any changes this quarter on that front?

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Right. What we talked about last quarter was the fact that in certain cases, we were leveraging our position to be more aggressive. I think the VMDR package itself is going to make us more impenetrable because we're providing all these solutions bundled in a single app. Really, the way I think of it is the end-to-end life cycle of vulnerability management through remediation. So we think that'll provide us with a lot of strength.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes, it does, and we see that already. And I will not use the term bundle because, yes, it's bundle, but it's more than bundle, as you will see when we see the app itself. It's all integrated in one single app. So it's not really bundling and putting together these different apps that we already have and then giving you a more -- a better price, but it's essentially putting all of that as one single app. And that's where we call it transparent orchestration or building orchestration, if you prefer. It's all building. So you move from one app to the next. It's all one single thing. And that's the big differentiator. And now you will see that for yourself. And once the customers, which already have seen some of it, but once we start to really market that, you already see videos, you already see a very big marketing effort to show because the solution will sell itself at the end of the day when you look at it and say, "Wow." I mean this is absolutely what we need. I don't need to have that another one application and that screenshot and go this here and go there. It's all done for you. And so that's very, very important. So again, it didn't come just like that. This is the work of many, many, many years of efforts of trying to expand the platform, as I said earlier, and building best-of-breed solutions. And now what we're doing is integrating them, all of them into one single solution.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets.

Daniel Bergstrom

Analyst

It's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. So you've had a number of large agent purchases by the cloud providers in the past. You mentioned the recent partnership with Google to embed the Cloud Agent and the GCP on the call. Could you talk a little bit more about that partnership? How did it originate? What are you looking for from it? What does it mean from a validation perspective? And then I guess is it live in the marketplace currently?

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes. So it starts very simply that both Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera, were already using the Cloud Agent for their own needs for securing their own platform. So from there, of course, that means we have the right architecture. I mean you don't -- this kind of company at the scale at which they operate, of course, you have to have the right platform, the right architecture. And so -- and you speak of millions of agents here at the end of the day. So for us, now what we did is to now go to their customers and doing exactly what we're doing for them now for their customers. So the answer is yes. I think today it's well integrated with Microsoft. I don't know exactly where we are with Google, but I think it's done. But if it's not done now, it's very -- it will be done. We need to check. I don't remember. And we're discussing with many other vendors as well in the cloud because today, there is nobody who has the architecture that Qualys has done. And again, remember, this agent -- and we have patent, by the way, around these agents. So that we build this agent. They didn't come again just a few weeks ago. That was -- that's been a long time in the making. And to get the scale, the self-updating capabilities, the fact that they also need to be very secure, all of that is just not easy work, and we have been working at that for many, many, many years now. And starting to have 30 million agent is already -- but of course, our goal is to have an agent on every end point. And now we have now the agent, which we are now rolling out onto the Android, the mobile platform. And where our agent are today, very soon they're going to go in contains as well. So our agent architecture, if you prefer, again, that's the way we look at it, it's essentially spans across all these different environments and also to the OT and IoT environment as well. So we're just at the beginning, and that's what I speak about ubiquity of our agent, just at the very, very beginning. But we are the one who really built this agent technology better than anybody else. And again, we have been working on that. I don't remember exactly the time, but I think our first agent was 2007. I don't remember. It's a long time ago. I would think it's a long time ago so -- that we built these agents.

Daniel Bergstrom

Analyst

Great. And Melissa, gross margins were impressive here this quarter, about 82%. They've trended higher sequentially through the year, 4 quarters in a row now. Can you talk about what's driving that? And then maybe any thoughts about how we should think about gross margins with the evolving model here and into calendar year '20?

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes, absolutely, Dan. So we're very proud of our robust gross margins, but we did benefit from mix shift to India. We do have a lot of more investment going forward. We're looking at adding some shared platforms potentially in other parts of the world. So I would expect there to be more investment in the cost of revenue line, putting some downward pressure on gross margin because it is at a very high level. We don't guide to gross margin. So not going to give you a range, but you can imagine that it'll stay at best of class but not necessarily at the current levels.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes, on the gross margin, also the fact that we are very architected and we are benefiting also at significant cost reduction. For example, we have eliminated 70% of our VMware layers and to go bare metal with containers and microservices. So that's the beauty also of that -- of our engineering-driven, if you prefer. We have copied on what Facebook did and what all these big guys done. So we have not invented anything here, but we have been very good students of how the Google, the Facebook, et cetera, did scale their platform and reduce their costs. And so that's -- and we have done our own DevOps, the digital transformation in Qualys significantly. And so that's a big advantage that we are looking forward and when a lot of our competition have not even started.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Howard Smith from First Analysis.

Howard Smith

Analyst

Just wanted to follow up on the prepared comments regarding the technical account reps or TARs, which is kind of new for you last year. How do you assess where you are in their development and the progress seen to date? Just some commentary about that would be appreciated.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Very much, Howard. So that -- yes, this is something that we really -- again, that's not something that I personally am very much involved because it's about scaling not only just every aspect of our business. So this technical account representative, for those who may not remember, we realized that today, it's all about making life easy for people to adapt, to make your solutions not only easy but that you have all the information at your fingertips. So we built a team of technical account representatives in India, which are people that we hire, very junior people but yet from the highly -- high -- good technical schools. And of course, because we have a huge engineering team there, we train them. They have all the technical resources. And their job is not to sell. Their job is via what we call the Qualys Q agent, like in the James Bond movies, Mr. Q. So you have the Q agents who comes in immediately and is there to help you. And behind, you have the TARs, technical account representative because there's a huge pool of talent in India that we can attract, and the cost is absolutely -- we pay about $700 a month. And -- but we give them more than that. We give them a career path. So we have a highly skilled, motivated technical people, which are there to help the customer onboard, and that's all what they do. And now we're putting the systems around in place so we could automate a lot of that as much as possible, get all the feedback, which goes back into engineering and marketing to understand what the difficulty customers may have and deploying the agent, for example, whatever that is. So all that information is essentially more…

Howard Smith

Analyst

That's very helpful color. Yes, I hadn't realized the full distinction between them and sales and how they generate the leads. So that's helpful color. Congratulations on a solid year.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Sterling Auty from JPMorgan.

Matthew Parron

Analyst

This is Matt on for Sterling. So looking at the March guide for revenue, that 14%, 14.5% growth, the midpoint of the range is about the same as this past quarter. So does that mean that the seasonality throughout the year is expected to be even quarter-to-quarter?

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes. I don't think they're actually related. There's nothing in our business that's changed that our seasonality would be different necessarily than prior years.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

And we don't have much seasonality anyway in the -- we have some, but it's very -- it's really minimum. And remember, for us, we take always -- we're very pure in the sense that we do not sprinkle in our projection any kind of perpetual license. We don't have professional services either, so there's none of that. It's all recurring, 100% recurrent. And which, of course, as you know, it's a little bit harder to really grow a recurring model. But on the other hand, it's a much more predictable and more profitable model than pushing and having a kind of a mixed bag. I don't think it's very misleading for the investors, but that's not our case.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Patrick Colville from Arete Research.

Patrick Colville

Analyst

Can I ask you about CrowdStrike and Tenable? I mean they are articulating more aggressively about their vulnerability management features, and I was wondering whether -- what you make of those guys and whether you see them as competition or whether they are kind of complementary to Qualys.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Okay. Very good question. So let's start with the Tenable, which is more of a direct competitor since many, many years. So the big difference between Tenable and Qualys is that, essentially, they have a very disjointed architecture. So they have the Tenable.io, which is a cloud-based solution. Then they have the security center, which is an on-premise and other solutions, and these are very different solutions. So for them, essentially, their biggest challenge that we see ahead for them is, essentially, they will have to really bring all these different solutions together to one single platform, which is going to really, of course, take time and very expensive. Today, they have been essentially -- as many people know, they have been essentially pushing Tenable.io into their existing customer base. They have a very good customer base with Nessus, very loyal. They're pushing -- try to push Tenable.io. They have had a lot of salespeople and marketing. That's what they do. So for us, I think VMDR is absolutely again, a game changer. So we can anticipate that we are now going to be able to compete very well at the lower end of the marketplace. We see that already happening. And as I mentioned earlier, on the high end of the marketplace, now it becomes very difficult to displace. And you cannot play some of the tactics that they did, which is dumping the price because now we offer so much more into one single application. So I think it makes us more inoculated, if you prefer, against this kind of viruses. So that's what Tenable. So we are a competitor with them head-to-head, and we offer significantly more than what they do in the world. So that's for that. CrowdStrike is a little bit different. So CrowdStrike, as…

Patrick Colville

Analyst

Yes, I mean very clear. And can I ask a question for Melissa, please? The current billings in the quarter was very impressive, 15% growth, based on my numbers. You mentioned in your prepared remarks there was a small benefit from large deals closing in the quarter that may have typically closed in the first quarter. I mean can you give us an idea of what the impact on growth or dollars those large deals could have contributed?

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Yes, so that's correct. That's what I touched about in my prepared remarks, was the fact that some deals were invoiced in Q4 that instead of that their anniversary in Q1. And just as we've been for timing when deals slip out a quarter, we wanted to be transparent when deals move in. Given that there's multiple scenarios when the renewal happens or doesn't happen at the same time as the anniversary of an initial deal, it's really hard to normalize for comparison purposes. And that's why we point to the trajectory of our revenue -- our annual revenue guidance as the best proxy for business momentum.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Yes. And I will add one thing because Melissa is using the term that deals slip out of the quarter. This is an enterprise term. Does not apply with us. We really were clearly -- for us, it's well driven by the customers. So it's the customer sometimes, and we had some of these deals which have been slipping from December 31 to January 1 depending on the budget cycle of the customer, which may have changed. So they are the one requesting that to us. And for us, we don't care because it doesn't impact the revenue. And that's the reason why we always said the way we -- our billings are not really, really representative of what is happening in the quarter. So what happened here as -- and that's why we disclose whenever -- when the business are very strong or very weak, we explain this is what happened. Sometimes, the customers may move the deal, for example, if the early renew or there's so many variables. It doesn't change the revenue, but it absolutely change the billing cycle. So that's the very way we build the model, which, again, is an element of our profitability because when we go at the end of this quarter, then we got procurement, saying, "Okay, guys, if you want me to close the deal, you need to give me a better price. Sorry, guys. The renewal is now, so we could either shut down the service." But we're not like that. But by the way, we don't really care. So whether we close now as long as you renew and we don't care so -- because it doesn't really impact our revenues. And that's what makes us very different from quite a few other companies.

Operator

Operator

I show no further questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to Philippe Courtot for -- Chairman and CEO for closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

Philippe Courtot

Analyst

Okay. So thank you very much. And in fact, thank you very much for attending our earnings call and for your questions. And again, one of the things that I mentioned earlier is that we'd be really happy the next earnings call to discuss about the adoption of VMDR from our existing customers or from -- as well as from new customers. So looking forward to see you, all of you, I hope. If you can make it to RSA, the Four Seasons. It's a beautiful hotel. There's much less noise there than at RSA, and we have our customers there. Also, if you could attend our event, you will see VMDR in action, and you could also speak with our customers directly, and you're more than welcome to do that. Okay. So thank you very much.

Melissa Fisher

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.