Roy Zisapel
Analyst · Needham. Go ahead please
Thanks, Doron. During the fourth quarter, we performed according to our projected revenue forecast and financial performance. We finished the quarter with strong overall bookings despite a challenging market environment. While we saw improvement in our overall revenues and bookings versus the third quarter, we still saw weakness in several geographies, such as China, Japan, Russia and Brazil and the U.S. carrier and service provider markets. We have taken several steps to improve our sales results including focusing resources internationally on markets that we feel continue to be strong and reducing investment in some of the weaker markets. In the U.S., we created a special sales force to focus on service providers while we focus the broader teams on the enterprise markets. Despite the weakness we saw in the U.S. service provider market, we continue to see a lot of business potential in new account wins in the segment. For example, in the first quarter, we announced several wins predominantly coming within two main applications. The first, protecting the provider’s infrastructure against attacks and the second, delivering new security services to service provider customers, namely cloud security services. Two examples from the fourth quarter for protecting service providers’ customers are SingleHop, a Chicago-based leading provider of managed hosting and infrastructure-as-a-service, serving more than 5,500 customers. And QuadraNet a Los Angeles-based full service data center provider with additional locations in Dallas, Miami and Atlanta. The main reasons these companies chose our attack mitigation system where it’s fast detection and mitigation of DDoS attack vectors, accurate detection of legitimate traffic resulting in low force positive and low administrative overheads. In addition, we announced last quarter a $1.5 million contract for comprehensive infrastructure protection project from a leading global cloud hosting company that focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery. We finished the fourth quarter with strong bookings highlighted by continued growth in our subscription and service business. This growth resulted in a 19% year-over-year growth in our deferred revenue from $85 million in 2015 to $101 million in 2016. As Doron mentioned in 2015, our overall subscription recognized revenues grew 60% year-over-year. In the past quarter, we continued to expand our cloud business and cloud customer base and we believe we are progressing well in building subscription revenue stream in addition to our product and service revenue streams. Overall, we see more transactions where customers are consuming our products and solutions either completely as a service, our cloud subscriptions and managed services are a bigger portion of the deal. While in the short-term it has a negative impact on revenues versus the straight product purchase, we see the strong growth in cloud and product subscriptions as the clear positive for the business. It provides for larger deal sizes, more strategic positioning within our customer’s IT organizations and strong potential for renewable revenue streams and enhancements. As the cloud subscriptions are a key pillar of our strategy, I would like to take a couple of minutes and review our offerings in this space. We are offering today a broad set of cloud services including our DDoS cloud and DDoS hybrid cloud mitigation services, our Cloud WAF, web security service and our FastView, cloud acceleration service. Our DefensePipe hybrid DDoS mitigation service is comprised of our DefensePro device installed on the customer’s premise and our global footprint of cloud scrubbing centers. The on-premise device detects attacks and mitigates them in real time. If and when the attack becomes a volumetric attack that supersedes the datacenter internet pipe, the customer traffic is automatically diverted to our cloud scrubbing datacenters where the attack is cleaned and the legitimate traffic is forwarded back to the customer’s datacenter. This solution offers the broadest and most advanced attack detection coupled with real time mitigation in the datacenter and in the cloud in a fully automated manner. Our WAF Cloud service provides an always-on web application firewall datacenter IPS and DDoS prevention service and target customers that are either completely operating from a cloud datacenter or ones that are interested in a complete security as a service offering. In addition, we offer customers our premium ERT managed service. With the shortage of security resources on our customer’s end and the lack of expertise in protecting against cyber attacks, the ERT premium service provides our customers with a fully managed attack mitigation service for their on-premise and in the cloud Hadoop solutions. It provides for the complete outsourcing of monitoring, management and mitigation of cyber attack from customer datacenters. In the application delivery market we saw improved trends in the fourth quarter. As we announced Gartner named Radware as the leader in the application delivery market for the sixth time. This was another proof point for our leading products and technology. During the quarter, we saw very good number of contract awards in global 2000 larger enterprises and leading carriers displacing competitive products. Looking into 2016, we believe we are making solid progress in our business and are forecasting growth on a full year basis despite our Q1 guidance. Furthermore, we are forecasting growth in deferred revenues driven primarily by our growing subscription business. We are very excited by the opportunities ahead of us especially in the cyber security space. We provide the best attack mitigation solution in the market with a complete datacenter and cloud solution and we plan to focus more efforts on this market. We have the strongest market adoption for our solutions by cloud security providers such as Akamai and Level3, larger enterprise accounts and leading security vendors such as Cisco and Check Point. Our revenues from the Check Point OEM continued to grow and we see nice growth in the pipeline for 2016. Check Point recently expanded the OEM contract with us to include also the difference by cloud solution. As it relates to the Cisco OEM relationships, we are getting closer to the Cisco launch of the Firepower product line with the Radware DDoS module and are excited by this opportunity. We believe initial revenue recognition from Cisco OEM will start in calendar Q3. Looking forward, we will execute our strategy with the following key points. First, we are very focused on providing the comprehensive integrated solution for datacenter application delivery and security. Second, we lead innovation in the market as it relates to the datacenter attack mitigation, secure hybrid clouds and SDN and NFV application for secure networking. Third, we will increase our market footprint through traditional channels, OEMs, clouds and CDN channels and acquisitions. To summarize, we believe on a full year basis 2016 will be a growth year for Radware. We have a leadership position in both ADC and datacenter attack mitigation. We are experiencing strong growth in our subscription business that drove a 19% deferred revenue growth in 2015 and we expect this trend to continue. We are seeing increased growth in revenues and activities from our Check Point OEM relationship and are looking forward to the Cisco OEM launch and we have a strong financial standing with continued positive cash flow. With that I would like to open the discussion for Q&A.