Seth Ravin
Analyst · Cowen and Company. Your question please
Thanks, Dean, and thank you, everyone, for joining us to review Rimini Street’s first quarter 2018 financial results. We founded Rimini Street in 2005 to disrupt and redefine the $160 billion enterprise software support market by developing and delivering innovative, value-driven and award-winning enterprise software support products and services, primarily through an annualized subscription model. Today, Rimini Street is the leading independent software support provider for Oracle and SAP software products, based on both the number of active clients supported and recognition by industry analyst firms. Our current offerings cover an addressable market of more than $30 billion of the $160 billion annual global enterprise software support spend before adjusting for Rimini Street’s standard 50% discount pricing to a client’s current spend. Organizations have invested significant money, labor and time in their current mission-critical enterprise software systems and want to maximize the ROI and extend the life of these investments while focusing new investments on innovations that could rapidly drive growth and competitive advantage. To date, we have saved our clients more than $3 billion. First quarter 2018 results. Rimini Street executed well in the first quarter of 2018 in revenue, service delivery and global operations. We generated net revenue of $59.8 million, a year-over-year increase of 22% from the first quarter of 2017 and delivered our 49th consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Annualized subscription revenue was $239 million, also up 22% year-over-year. And we delivered a gross profit of 60.6%. We ended the first quarter of 2018 with 1,581 active clients, a year-over-year increase of 23%, which includes 75 Fortune 500 and 20 Fortune Global 100 companies. During the quarter, we served clients across a broad range of industries and geographies, closing more than 7,000 support cases across 49 countries. We maintained an average client satisfaction rating of 4.8 out of 5, where 5 is rated as excellent, on the company’s support delivery. We ended fiscal Q1 2018 with approximately 990 employees, an increase of 16% year-over-year. Sales growth headwinds. Despite seeing growing global demand in the market for our services, in Q1 2018, we faced some continuing sales growth headwinds. First, as we noted on our Q3 and Q4 2017 earnings calls, we had to limit our investment in sales and marketing activities in 2017 due to covenants in our credit facility. We spent 45.5% of revenue on sales and marketing in 2016, but were governed down to spending 31.4% of revenue on sales and marketing in 2017. This reduced spend limited our ability to expand sales capacity. In October 2017, we were able to negotiate an amendment to the credit facility, which [Audio Dip] including the sales and marketing spending covenant. Accordingly, we began investing in sales and marketing and increased spend during the first quarter of 2018 to 33.8% of revenue. We plan to further increase sales and marketing spend to between 36% and 39% of revenue in fiscal 2018. We believe this increased spending will allow us to better serve the growing demand for our products and services. Second, we faced some behavior by a competitor that we believe was illegal and materially impacted our new client sales in the second, third and fourth [Audio Dip] 2017 as well as continuing in the first quarter of 2018 with what we believe is a declining impact each consecutive quarter. We’re addressing the behavior in court and seeking appropriate damages. Litigation developments. I would now like to review some developments on our litigation with Oracle. As discussed on our Q4 2017 earnings call, we have 2 different litigations with Oracle: Oracle’s litigation against Rimini Street filed in 2010 that is in the remand stage and referred to as Rimini 1; and Rimini Street’s litigation against Oracle filed in 2014 that is in the pre-trial stage and referred to as Rimini 2. With respect to Rimini 1, on January 8th, 2018, the U.S. Appeals Court ruled favorably for us on our appeal. The Court of Appeals reversed certain awards made in Oracle’s favor during and after the 2015 trial and vacated others, including all claims and judgment against me personally and an injunction that had already been stayed by the appellate court. The court ordered Oracle to refund approximately $50 million that we had paid to Oracle in 2016, and we had anticipated this refund to be paid sometime in 2018. Oracle has now refunded the approximate $50 million, including $21.5 million paid directly to Rimini Street on March 30, 2018, and $28.5 million deposited into the federal court registry, an escrow account, on May 2, 2018, to be held and distributed as appropriate following a remand ruling on Rimini 1 legal fees by the district [Audio Dip] Tom will provide more specifics in his prepared remarks regarding the uses of the $21.5 million refund we received from Oracle during the first quarter. Recent launch of new product and service solutions. On April 24, Rimini Street announced the launch of Rimini Street Mobility and Rimini Street Analytics, its latest offerings and a new family of solutions designed to provide an improved competitive advantage to organizations with mature and valuable enterprise software investments. Rimini Street Advanced Database Security was the first offering in this new family of products and launched in 2017. The new offerings are available immediately, and a press release that contains additional information about the new product and service solutions is posted on our website. Rimini Street’s new solutions enable an organization to quickly and cost effectively modernize their current enterprise software with the latest desired features and capabilities, future-proof their technical platforms against yet-unknown technology changes and secure their systems against the constantly evolving threat environment. Rimini Street’s new solutions allow organizations to leverage their existing systems as a solid foundation for an innovative hybrid IT strategy. Our extensibility solutions are designed to help companies achieve these objectives by delivering cost-effective, easy-to-deploy, functional and technical capabilities to current mature enterprise software systems. This allows CIOs to access and leverage innovation quickly without having to undertake costly disruptive upgrades, cost-prohibitive replacements or wait potentially years for the vendor to deliver functionality that’s needed now. About the new solutions. Rimini Street Mobility allows users to quickly create and distribute a mobile application in days, delivering the fastest time to value and no business disruption. All existing processes, customizations and logic are fully usable, so no software release migrations or upgrades are required as part of the implementation. Rimini Street Analytics enables users to make better, faster decisions across the enterprise with a cost-effective, quick-to-deploy and easy-to-implement self-service business intelligence platform. Users can connect and analyze data from multiple sources to create their own customer ports and dashboards on the fly. Rimini Street Advanced Database Security, a next-generation security solution that identifies and intercepts attempted exploits of database vulnerabilities before they reach their target without requiring any changes to the database code. This product works with all major database products from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP. In addition, we are pleased to announce the extension of our proven award-winning support model and global capabilities to SaaS products, beginning with the launch today of service for Salesforce sales cloud and service cloud products. Our goal is to help our clients achieve greater [Audio Dip] in their investment across the hybrid enterprise, which now includes support for traditionally licensed and SaaS enterprise software. Salesforce customers can now leverage Rimini Street’s award-winning, ultra-responsive support services to supplement and complement their core Salesforce-provided maintenance program to accelerate delivery of capabilities, optimize total operating costs and maximize ROI on their Salesforce investment. These new services will enable Salesforce customers to benefit from our proven 24 by 7 by 365 operational support with 15-minute guaranteed response for urgent issues, in addition to our managed system administration services and configuration, customization and integration project services. As Brice Salle, CIO of TouchPoint, Inc., a long-time Rimini Street client, noted about the Salesforce service launch: "We have already been reaping the benefits of Rimini Street’s premium-level support for our SAP platform and have saved significant IT dollars that we redirected into more strategic initiatives within our organization. We are delighted that Rimini Street is now offering their award-winning support model for Salesforce sales cloud and service cloud as well. Salesforce customers who have SAP or other mission-critical ERP applications will now have the choice to bring on a high-quality, cost-effective, single-support provider across both cloud and traditionally licensed applications, which will help manage operational costs and achieve business agility." Support services for Salesforce sales cloud and service cloud are immediately available, and a press release about the new support services for Salesforce is posted on our website. Summary. In summary, despite having to navigate some continuing sales growth headwinds in the first quarter of 2018, we achieved solid sales and operational results, increased our investment in sales and marketing and invested in the development of several new product and service solutions launched in April and May, including support services for Salesforce sales cloud and service cloud products. We also had favorable developments in our ongoing litigation with Oracle, including the U.S. Court of Appeals reversing and vacating certain awards in the Rimini 1 case and ordering Oracle to refund approximately $50 million, which Oracle has done. As we continue in fiscal 2018, we plan to fuel growth and continue improving operating leverage by recruiting and hiring additional senior executive talent, further increasing sales and marketing investments, ramping up sales of new product and service offerings and expanding global service delivery capabilities. I will now turn the call over to Tom Sabol, our CFO.