Seth Ravin
Analyst · Cowen & Company. Your line is now open
Thank you, Dean and thank you everyone for joining us today. For 2019, we achieved record fourth quarter and fiscal year revenue that exceeded management guidance, increased our gross margins and continued to improve our balance sheet with reduced debt and increased cash. Additionally, we experienced improved performance from investments in global sales, the launch of new products and services and expanded geographic operations. For the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2019, we generated revenue of $76.1 million and $281.1 million, year-over-year increases of 11.7% and 10.9% respectively. Gross margin was 62.6% for the full year 2019, up from 62.1% for the full year 2018. We exited the fourth quarter with annualized subscription revenue of $302 million. Revenue retention rate for subscriptions which makes up most of our revenue remained above 90% with more than 70% of subscription revenue non-cancelable for at least 12 months on a rolling basis. For the full year 2019, our global service delivery team closed over 31,000 support cases across 55 countries and delivered more than 70,000 tax, legal, and regulatory updates to clients in 38 countries. We achieved an average client satisfaction rating of 4.8 out of 5.0 on the company’s support delivery, where 5.0 rating is considered excellent. In 2019, we were honored with 34 awards, including 2 awards for company of the year, 1 award for customer service outstanding performance of the year and 24 other awards for customer service excellence. Also in 2019, the Rimini Street Foundation funded exclusively by Rimini Street Inc. and its subsidiaries, proudly partnered with 68 charities around the world to provide financial contributions, in-kind donations and hundreds of employee volunteer hours to those in need. The year end employee count totaled approximately 1,270, a year-over-year increase of 17%. We ended the year with 2,063 active clients, which includes 100 Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 companies, representing a year-over-year active client net increase of 14.5%. Notable client wins, during 2019, we announced some notable global sales wins across our Oracle, SAP and Salesforce supported product lines and have saved clients nearly $5 billion in total maintenance costs since our inception in 2005. Wins included Hyundai-Kia Motors, who switched to Rimini Street for support and maintenance of its global database portfolio; San Fang Chemical Co., who switched to Rimini Street for support of its Oracle e-business suite application and Oracle database software; and Seoul Semiconductor and iMarketKorea, who switched to Rimini Street for support of their SAP ECC systems. Wins also included cross-sells to clients brand Safeway and EBSCO Industries, each of whom expanded their existing Rimini Street support contracts to include Rimini Street application management services for Salesforce. Investments, initiatives and market opportunity. We followed up our 2018 launch of Application Management Services for Salesforce with the launch in 2019 of our Application Management Services for SAP and Oracle. Application Management Services commonly known as AMS is where we run the system for the client and support service is where we provide technical support and required updates to an internal or an AMS team who runs the systems for the client. Rimini Street’s expansion into AMS allows us to integrate our ultra-responsive traditional support services with the clients’ day-to-day needs to run their system. We believe our integrated support services and AMS offering is a unique and valuable competitive offering in the market. The integrated service offering creates a significant opportunity for us to secure additional long-term subscription service contracts, grow revenues and increase the wallet share of our client’s IT spend. Our integrated service offering can provide clients a better model, better resources and better outcomes with higher client satisfaction and significant savings of time, labor and money. When just considering the software vendor products Rimini Street services today, our launch of Oracle and SAP AMS essentially doubles our target addressable market from $14.5 billion for just support services to more than $29 billion for support services and application management services. Already, we have achieved sales wins with our new application management services and we are successfully delivering our integrated support and application management service offerings to clients across a variety of industries and geographies. Competition. Competition with our primary support service competitors, Oracale and SAP remains fierce. Both software vendors are engaged in continuing efforts to force their licensees to upgrade and migrate from current stable software releases to the vendor’s newest immature products. Oracle and SAP are planning to end full support of major product releases by 2030. We believe this creates tremendous opportunity for Rimini Street, because many licensees do not see the value and spending for what they believe are unnecessary expenses and disruptions that do not improve their competitive advantage or contribute to their growth. Rimini Street can provide significant savings, a more robust and responsive service offering and allow clients to invest the financial and labor savings into innovation and strategic projects that support their growth. Survey results we have shared with you in the past found that approximately 80% of CIO respondents are not planning to move or unsure about migrating to Oracle or SAP’s new software and plan on remaining on their current systems until at least 2025 or beyond. We have also seen the growing opportunity for third-party support noted by leading industry analysts, including Gartner. The recent Gartner Predicts 2020 research report noted a 50% increase in client inquiries related to third-party support during the first 9 months of 2019 compared to the first 9 months of 2018. And they believe the third-party software support market will grow from $351 million in 2019 to $1.05 billion by 2023, a 200% increase. In addition, Gartner states that for many, third-party support is no longer seen as “out of the ordinary” or as “carrying more than an acceptable risk.” More buyers are aware of the value-added offerings from third-party support providers, such as custom code support, interoperability support and global tax, regulatory and security services. The uptake of independent third-party support is expected to increase substantially. These Gartner figures do not include additional sales of Application Management Services that can significantly increase Rimini Street’s revenue opportunity with clients. Additionally, we believe the hybrid IT environment that will integrate existing licensees, new SaaS licenses and cloud deployments will be the IT reality for much longer than expected and the majority of ERP workloads will continue to be on-premise or simply lifted and shifted into a cloud for continuing long-term use. Recent Oracle litigation developments. With respect to Oracle versus Rimini Street that was filed in 2010 and went to trial in 2015, we filed the second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on November 5, 2019 asking the court to review a 2019 Ninth Circuit decision that affirmed, but narrowed the scope of the existing permanent injunction. Although the U.S Supreme Court accepted our first appeal and we prevailed with the unanimous court decision against Oracle, on January 13, 2020, the U.S Supreme Court declined to hear our second appeal. Previously, however, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rimini Street lawfully competes with Oracle. With respect to Rimini Street versus Oracle filed in 2014, we are still awaiting rulings on submitted summary judgment motions. Trial is not currently expected to incur until 2021 or later. Coronavirus, COVID-19 operating plan. Rimini Street is prepared under its global emergency operating plan to continue delivering uninterrupted, mission-critical 24/7/365 support services to its thousands of global clients during the current COVID-19 virus outbreak. Rimini Street has hundreds of engineers working in 17 counties, none in China, that provide extensive global workforce redundancy and resilience to enable uninterrupted service 24/7/365 even if some of our workforce were to be offline for a period due to illness. In addition, we have a unique, innovative and secured global remote connectivity infrastructure and data center model in place that enables our entire workforce of thousands of Rimini Street professionals to securely perform their work from any location with internet connectivity giving us the flexibility to close one or all of our global facilities if necessary, while continuing to provide uninterrupted mission-critical client support under our contractual service level agreements. Rimini Street is already taking some actions under the global emergency operating plan designed to reduce employee exposure risks in our facilities and when traveling globally. These measures aligned to be U.S Center for Disease Controls guidance to mitigate the spread of acute respiratory viruses. With respect to marketing and sales, we are scaling back our global event participation and employee travel, where we feel prudent. We are also adjusting our marketing mix and sales processes for even more digital and remote activities. 2019 summary and 2020 objectives. Financially, we improved our balance sheet in part due to a lower cost of capital for the full year. This allowed us to invest in the business, reduce debt and increase cash. To recap capital market activities between 2016 and ’19. In 2016, we completed a $125 million credit facility. In 2017, we completed a $50 million common stock merger in IPO. In 2018, we raised approximately $140 million at a convertible preferred stock financing allowing us to repay the expensive 2016 credit facility in full. In 2019, we upsized the convertible preferred stock by $10 million to complete the full planned issuance of that security. The balance sheet improvements from year end 2019 compared to year end 2018, including increase in our cash position by $13 million, an increase in deferred revenue by $39 million and with the exception of capital leases payoff most of our debt. Operationally, we were pleased with the progress made in 2019. As we enter 2020, we are focused on executing to our plan and capitalizing on the investments made in prior periods. We have the global assets in place to service our growing global client base and offer new and existing clients a wider range of innovative premium service solutions that meet their strategic financial and operational needs. Now over to you, Stanley.