Earnings Labs

Rapid7, Inc. (RPD)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 11, 2016

$5.87

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Rapid7 first quarter 2016 earnings call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to now turn the conference over to the company. Please go ahead.

Steven Gatoff

Analyst

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. This is Steven Gatoff, CFO of Rapid7. I wanted to take a quick moment to introduce you to Mark Donohue who recently joined Rapid7 in the newly created position of Vice President of Treasury and Investor Relations. We are excited to have Mark join the team here and he brings a terrific background and skill-set to the company and to our stockholders. We also want to take the opportunity to thank Anita Gopalan, our Controller and VP Finance who did an excellent job building and running our Investor Relations function from scratch through to our IPO. Now that she has taken on additional responsibilities for FP&A, she too is thrilled to have Mark here on the team. Mark?

Mark Donohue

Analyst

Thank you, Steven. I appreciate the warm welcome I've received a Rapid7 from both you and Corey, as well as the rest of the company. I'm honored and excited to be part of the strong team and I see many great things ahead for Rapid7. It is an exciting time in the security market and I believe our positioning and product portfolio in the security data and analytics space is both impressive and compelling. I look forward to working closely with the investor community to share our story and long-term vision. Now on to the business of our call today. I'd like to thank you for joining us to discuss our Q1 2016 financial and operating results. I am on the call today with our CEO, Corey Thomas and as you've already heard, our CFO, Steven Gatoff. We distributed our Q1 2016 earnings press release over the wire and have posted it on our website at investors.rapid7.com. We have also posted our Q1 2016 results earnings presentation along with an updated company presentation on our investors’ website as well. This call is being webcast at investors.rapid7.com and a replay will be available on our website. We would like to bring the following to your attention. The date of this call is May 11, 2016. Our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements about events and circumstances that have not yet occurred including, without limitations, statements regarding future market conditions and management’s plan and objectives for future operation and Rapid7’s future financial and business performance. Statements containing words such as will, expect, anticipate, believe, plan, intend, should and other statements in the future tense are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the expectations contained in these statements due to a number of risks and…

Corey Thomas

Analyst

Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to start by thanking you all for joining us today on our first quarter 2016 conference call. We are pleased to report that we had a strong first quarter with revenue growth of 48% year-over-year. Importantly, we are focused on running the business and we are continuing to make good progress on the three key objectives that I discussed last quarter, expanding the threat exposure management opportunities, disrupting the traditional sale market and driving scale and leverage as we build our business. During the first quarter we generated strong demand for our threat exposure management offering as customers focused on improving the productivity and efficiency of security teams with better analytics. We saw particular strength in the mid-market in driving customer data to transition Intel, MBM customers to Rapid7 solutions. However, our biggest focus for the first quarter was successfully launching our new InsightIDR platform as the primary replacement for SIEMs which are undergoing a major upgrade cycle. In addition to the strong revenue growth, the results of these efforts is that our whole portfolio has been very well received in the marketplace resulting in the strongest and highest quality pipeline in the history of the company. This sets the foundation for strong billings in the second half of the year as we expected. Exiting the first quarter 2016 we have confidence in our ability to execute during the rest of the year and generate positive operating and free cash flow. We continue to see positive trends in the security, data analytics market that are driving the momentum in our business. For organizations of all sizes, in all areas of the world, the risk of compromise continues to proliferate as IT environments become increasingly distributed and complex and cyber crimes remains highly…

Steven Gatoff

Analyst

Thanks, Corey. Good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. We’re glad to provide you detailed color around our Q1 financial results and walk you through our guidance for Q2 and the full year 2016. As always, we’ll wrap up by opening the call to your questions. Reviewing our Q1 performance, three highlights stand out. First, we delivered strong revenue and deferred revenue growth year-over-year. Second, we continued to successfully execute our land and expand strategy with strong renewal rates. And third, we continued to make progress on our path to profitability through thoughtfully scaling the business and disciplined cost management. Diving into the numbers, Q1 total revenue came in at $34.8 million, a strong increase of 48% year-over-year and above the high-end of our guidance. Products revenue also increased 48% year-over-year, driven by increasing demand for our unique security data and analytics offerings. Maintenance and support revenue grew 45% year-over-year and our professional services revenue increased 52% year-over-year, largely driven by our differentiated security advisory services, which continue to generate strong demand. Looking at our business geographically, North America revenue grew 48% year-over-year and represented 87% of revenue on continued strong growth and customer adoption. Internationally, we delivered solid results as well, growing 45% and contributing 13% of total revenue in Q1. Our channel partners continue to play a nice role in our ecosystem and contributed a fairly consistent 37% to total revenue in the first quarter. With 86% of Q1 revenue already on our balance sheet as of the first day of the quarter and 61% of our revenue being subscription-based recurring in nature, we continue to have very high visibility into our revenue forecast. With that context, total deferred revenue grew 49% year-over-year, coming in at $131.9 million at the end of Q1. Implied billings for the…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Rob Owens with Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

Rob Owens

Analyst

First off just want to touch a little bit more on InsightIDR, in terms of when you guys go to bake-offs, who you’re seeing in terms of competition, what legacy vendors are you displacing. And then relative to either ticket size with customers or monetization, what type of expansion is this driving within that customer opportunity?

Corey Thomas

Analyst

It's a great question, so in comparison to the same customer size to same customer size, so addressing the first question about what's the opportunity. These deals are typically larger than the comparable threat exposure management deal which is very positive tailwind for us and it gives us a lot of optimism about what we're seeing in the business in the first half of the year from a pipe perspective and also from early conversion perspective. As far as the customers that are we’re displacing it is a number of traditional vendors that have deployed technology in the last three to five years and it’s just not meet the needs as they’re trying to get more responsive to the data that they need. And they tend to actually have data that's consolidated in logs, just in the enterprise. And what they're missing is a wider range of perspective on the data in their business and more importantly they are missing a dynamic ability to actually figure out which attacks are happening today. So as far as the competition what we see for those deals, the primary competition that we see for those is splunk, which actually has both behavioral analytics and search. We have that approach; we think that’s the modern approach to that. LogRhythm has also made some good investments in that place but we are seeing a shift to companies that are shifting away from static rules and reporting focus to much more focus on behavioral analytics and a search focus. And we think that's extremely positive for us.

Rob Owens

Analyst

Steven relative to the billings number in the 34% growth, I think you mentioned there was a compression duration of about 10% or so. Help us understand how the quarter played out, the 34% number, while still strong, is one of the slower growth rates you've seen over a couple of years. So just curious in terms of how that played out and as we look forward the confidence in an acceleration or more of the new business as it should help the back half of the year? Thanks.

Steven Gatoff

Analyst

Yeah sure thank Rob, so to your point we feel, A, we feel good about their trajectory through the year for sure. The nature as you know, I talked about it a moment ago for the seasonality as it tends to be 40-60 if you will kind of front end to back end of the year. And so that’s something that’s consistent and know, so that’s comforting. And the reason for the acceleration if you will for the even stronger performance in the back half of the year is really two things that Corey is just talking also it’s the traction of MDM and having higher conversion potentially though then we perhaps anticipated as well the whole launch of IDR in February in Q1 gives us good runway for the latter part of the year. And so that's where that acceleration and higher growth comes from.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Gregg Moskowitz with Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

Gregg Moskowitz

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

One follow-up to start on one of the ops questions relating to IDR, so Corey you kind of pointed out a couple of unit wins early on, in those two cases, are they companies actually displaying your SIEMs or they running at IDR in parallel?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

So what we find is that in the midmarket we find new deployment, in the larger customers we find that they are displacing SIEMs, although the one comment I would make is that I would say most of them today are poorly utilized and under adopted in the environment even when they have been purchased. And so we are able to go in and show a very strong value proposition around the technology that we’ve built and its ability to not just protect attacks but to speed up the investigation in the forensics process.

Gregg Moskowitz

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

And have you begun to see a benefit from MDM from the [indiscernible] vulnerability management end-of-life program or is it too early?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

I would say that it's exceeding our expectation in terms of potential timing, it’s still too early to tell definitively but one of the things we have observed is that more customers are interested in both having discussion and mapping out their process to migrate at an earlier path than we expected. And that's the positive, it consumed our sales force time lines to go through but we’ve had a number of opportunities that went into the pipeline earlier than we expected in Q1 and we consider that a positive both for this year and as we actually think about moving into the next year.

Gregg Moskowitz

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

And if I can ask this last one for Steven, just getting back to the billings, the quality of billing if you will does seem to be a bit higher than it maybe first appeared, just because your long-term defers were slightly down sequentially whereas they have been growing at a strong clip on a sequential basis for each of the prior five quarters and I’m just wondering if you had any commentary on long-term defers this quarter as well as what you expect going forward?

Steven Gatoff

Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please proceed with your question.

I think the nature of the long-term deferred is simply a math exercise Gregg where as you said it’s a function of change in duration of, call it two month off of the long end, which is, what we mentioned earlier really a function of the lumpiness of the large deals that we have had and as we talked about in the past, we are very pleased that we did let’s say a million-dollar deal once a year two years ago and picked up to once a quarter and now we are at a point where we’re executing multi-hundred thousand dollar deals throughout the quarter. Having said that scallop function and so you have lumpiness in the larger end and when you have larger deals that are longer duration that pushes it out and so far the duration of deferred and long-term. To your first point though on the quality of bookings, one of the metrics that we feel really good about so far is the growth profile for the quarter and really for the last two or three quarters and our expectation for the rest of the year is that all of our lines of business are contributing to growth meaning whatever growth profile we’re posting 30 plus to mid-30s for this quarter it really a function of being evenly dispersed there is no one product that’s driving the growth that you said, oh it’s all VM, it’s all AppSpider, it’s all IDR, it’s all SAS and so it’s a very balanced growth profile across all cylinders and it’s nice when those are marginally producing well each quarter going up a little bit and it really has a strong leverage effect on continuing to grow bookings as we go through the quarter.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Just wanted to understand with the higher I guess up sell opportunity that has come with some of the renewals, can you tell us maybe what product you’re seeing drive that and is there – has it happened more in the enterprise side and midmarket, just want to get a sense for a little bit more detail in terms of what's driving that effect?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

It's happening across the base of line, you do see it more biased towards larger customers just because smaller customers have left them an environment to expand into, in some cases it was primarily cross sell when it comes to smaller customers and you have the up sell and cross sell phenomenon with larger customers. So at the larger end of the section, you see companies that might start out just looking at a North America region for example, and they may expand globally from a direct source and management perspective or to multiple subsidiaries around the world. And on the cross-sell perspective, we see adoption not just within direct source and management of moving from just Nexpose to either the Nexpose Ultimate, which includes the AppSpider or AppSpider on to that. Likewise, we are seeing healthy adoption of our InsightUBA, which is our User Behavior Analytics solution and just recently, we saw some adoption, it’s early, but we also saw lots of pipeline build around InsightIDR. So the thing that Steven just mentioned, that actually gives us great confidence is we are seeing all agents operate efficiently and effectively and that’s exactly the thing we want to see.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Got it. And then, can you talk a little bit about sort of the international growth, are you seeing a pickup or strength in any particularly regions, are there any sort of compliance drivers that might be pushing faster adoption in any area?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, we are seeing – we remain and feel confident in international and the great growth opportunity, we are seeing ongoing growth, so actually you’ve got a longer time horizon in the international segment. You do have lumpiness internationally because it’s coming off of a small base, but we see strong growth prospects and we would continue to deliver good growth there. What I would say is that security awareness and prioritization outside of the US is still less than it is within the United States. But that said, it’s still a good growth opportunity and we are very focused and we are seeing good conversion there.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Saket Kalia

Analyst · Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. So firstly, maybe for Corey, can you just talk about the go-to-market strategy for InsightIDR? I know it’s early, but is this something that requires more of a direct sales touch or is it something that can go through the inside sales machine?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

It’s something that we believe can go to the inside sales team. As you know, we have a small team of direct sellers, but we got off to a very strong start and we didn’t take the time and we spent a lot of time this quarter, both training and enabling the sales team and ramping up our sales specialist, and our SCs who have expertise around this, and aligning them with the product groups. But we are seeing momentum in our inside sales team and we do believe that it can be sold via the inside sales team in addition to our outside sales team. And we are increasingly working with channel partners who are seeing the success that we are having on expanding our penetration and footprint of InsightIDR.

Saket Kalia

Analyst · Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Got it. And then to stay on InsightIDR, you mentioned – obviously the alert fatigue is something that InsightIDR is going to address, but you also mentioned sort of a lower total cost of ownership. So can you just give us a sense for what you’re seeing again realizing it’s early, when a customers is evaluating InsightIDR versus a legacy SIEM, for example, what’s sort of savings could that customer expect to see?

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Absolutely. I will talk about three broad ones. So one, you actually talked about the alert fatigue and that’s just a factor of the static rules versus behavioral analysis that’s there and we are able to demonstrate that to customers and they actually see the value and proof-of-concepts very effectively. The second piece is really the productivity of security teams, because they still have a lot of things to investigate and respond to. And what we found out is that our contextual search model of being able to process and search through and relate and contextualize large amounts of data very, very fast, makes incident responders just much more effective and efficient in how they investigate in research and do forensics around events, and that’s valuable. If you think about traditional SIEMs, they are much more geared towards being a single pane of glass into reporting versus contextualized search and investigations. And so that productivity driver just allows our customers to be a lot more efficient and that really resonates well, because lots of security teams are just strapped for resources and they are undermanned. The last part of it that actually is resonating very well, I talked about this earlier, is we are seeing that customers have higher scrutiny and they want to consolidate lots of their aspects of their data and that have three to five different products that look at different aspects of data, and they want to work with one company that has pure solutions to be able to process and manage their data and their solutions, and that’s both what our platform and our SIEM and IDR offerings are offering customers.

Saket Kalia

Analyst · Barclays Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Got it. Very helpful. That’s it for me. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from line of Michael Turits with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Turits

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. Just a quick question really, if you’re seeing anything from a macro perspective? It’s a tougher year, stock market, macro, and things like that, how that is, if at all affecting the core TEM business? And then I’ll ask something else.

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

No, we expect TEM business to still grow as we discussed with a multiple of the vulnerability management market. We are seeing strong demand in that business. And by the way, we are very aware of what’s happening in the environment. The primary macroeconomic context that we see is customers have higher scrutiny and there is lots of things up, there is lots of solutions and customers want to make sure that they are getting the most impact of what they are doing and that’s extremely, extremely positive for us. And the reason for that is that we are able to demonstrate that customers can consolidate their security and data analytics that they need to have across their organization, which means that they actually can go from multiple product solutions and partners now to a single partner and actually get better efficiency and effectiveness out of that. The other thing that we are seeing is we are seeing purchasing partners, purchasing departments take a lot more scrutiny as they look at deals, which could have some impact on timing, but we are seeing them still actually buying products as they move forward. But those are the two things that we are seeing that affect our business directly.

Michael Turits

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

And then Steven, back on the duration question, I know you said it's volatile, big deals go up and down. But where do you think we are if you're down a couple months at this point, is that the right new normal, or do you expect it to bounce around, or any trends we expect over the next year?

Steven Gatoff

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, we would expect it Michael to bounce around for a pretty tight – we are within 10% band, while you’re talking two months of bounce on a what’s classically been a 24-month – 22 to 24 month metric for the last two years that’s gone between 22 and 24 pretty consistently. And so to your point, as you have more larger deals that tend to be further out and it’s more towards the 24 and when you have fewer in the mid-market practice, the bulk of the growth for that quarter is more towards the 22. But as I mentioned earlier, it feels like it’s a bit of a scallop function, right, it’s moving up into the right in a scallop chart, not a linear straight line.

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, which is why we look at large deals on, not just a pipeline on an annualized basis and see how they come in and we are seeing good traction in adoption across there. And that’s why that’s our focus just because Steven indicated, we are still scaling into that mega and a large scale business.

Michael Turits

Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Okay. Great, thanks. Thanks, good for me. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Melissa Gorham with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Melissa Gorham

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. I just wanted to dig into InsightUBA a little bit because that has been on the market for obviously a little bit longer than IDR. So I am just wondering what you’re seeing in terms of customer adoption, if you’re seeing good growth and whether it’s meaningful from a revenue perspective today.

Corey Thomas

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

It’s a great question. So there is two comments about it, one, we are seeing amazing customer retention and we are seeing good customer growth. Although the thing that I would say is that InsightIDR is the lead product in the category, and so just like with TEM, our Nexpose Ultimate is the lead product in the category. The shift that actually happened last quarter is that InsightIDR became the lead product in that category and because of that we are able to have a few deals that actually we were able to upsell in the process, we continue to close, we saw very, very good growth in the category of our technologies and our products around incident detection and response. But we also had some additional deals that we decided it was better economical with us and the customer for them to evaluate InsightIDR, and so we actually went along with those customers and those deals may take longer. We think that’s a healthy construct, because we would refer customers to be on our full solution and have an experience. InsightUBA right now is positioned as a complement to SIEMs, where customers can get the detection capability and some level of investigation and forensics, but not the full search experience, but allows them to get some of the behavioral analytics if they want to keep their SIEM in there. And we do find that message resonates and we are seeing adoption in larger enterprises that know they have to move from their legacy SIEMs over the longer term time horizon. But it’s not the right time right now and so they find the InsightUBA allows them to go down the path to get some of the benefits in a way that’s complement here, and that’s great for us.

Melissa Gorham

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Okay, that’s helpful. And then just, Steven, on the full year, you brought up revenue by $3 million, which is great and then operating income is up more modestly, I am just wondering if there has been any sort of change in the level of spending or your expectation or maybe there is an area in which you feel like you need to put more investment dollars?

Steven Gatoff

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, good question, Melissa. Thanks. No, there is definitely no view towards changing our spend for the upside. If anything, it’s the opposite where we expect to continue to deliver higher marginal returns, the bottom line for increasing revenue, and you’ll see that as I think we talked about first and foremost in our R&D that’s really starting to come down nicely and we will really benefit from greater efficiencies and in sales. So the commitment is to return greater amounts of revenue growth through profitability and while we do that, the important leading indicator of that profitability is the operating cash flow profile, and so that’s why we continue to be pretty bullish on delivering meaningful $10 million of OCF this year 2016 as that kind of key indicator of the effectiveness of the expense management and continued profitability. So thanks for asking a good clarification.

Melissa Gorham

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to you.

Corey Thomas

Analyst

Thanks, everyone for joining us. We look forward to connecting with you soon.

Steven Gatoff

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation, and ask that you please disconnect your line.