Steven Gatoff
Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead
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 first quarter contributed to the strong result, with growth of 34% [ph] year-over-year in range with our expectations given the seasonal trends in our business. And, so far as the business metrics driving these results, weighted average contract length was 22 months in Q1, a modest change compared to 24 months in the year ago period. As we've discussed, average contract length fluctuates a bit primarily due to some lumpiness and large deal sizes. With regard to billing seasonality, we’ve typically seen about 40% occur in the first half of the year and about 60% of billings occur in the second half. For 2016, we expect billings to be 1 to 2 points higher in the second half of the year, largely as a result of our Q1 launch and strong pipeline of InsightIDR as well as the good traction that's building with Intel MVM customer migrations. On the customer front, we had another quarter of strong year-over-year new customer growth with our total customer base increasing by approximately 37%, as we added Q1 with more than 5,300 customers globally at the end of the quarter. This includes the addition of approximately 350 new customers from the Logentries’ IT search business that we acquired in October 2015. We continue to see large enterprise adoption and now have 36% of the Fortune 1000 as customers of Rapid7, up from 33% a year ago on their rebalanced definition of the index. In Q1, revenue from enterprise accounts grew 41% year-over-year. As I mentioned, one of the highlights of our performance during the quarter was our continued success, executing on our land and expand strategy. We saw this in Q1 across both our enterprise customers and the midmarket. This expansion was reflected in our very strong renewal rate, which increased to 126% in Q1 compared to 112% a year ago and nicely consistent with the seasonally strong performance in the prior Q4 quarter. This increase in customer adoption was driven by the ongoing theme that we’ve been seeing for a few quarters now, where customers are buying more of the products that they initially deployed and they’re purchasing other Rapid7 products, as we demonstrate the value and effectiveness of our offerings and continue to introduce new products on our technology platform. We clarified products, because these renewal rates do not include the upside and increased revenue for customers who are also buying professional services from Rapid7, which provides additional upsell and cross-sell opportunities. We believe that our track record of generating material customer cross-sells and upsells further validates the return on our investments that we’re making in newer areas like security, behavioral analytics, search and the whole SIEM upgrade cycle, in which we now find ourselves really well-positioned and garnering good pipeline traction with customers. Importantly, our baseline customer retention is also strong as our expiring revenue renewal rate, which measures the renewal of the prior year’s revenue run rate increased to 89% versus 85% in Q1, 2015. Moving on and looking at our cost structure and path to profitability, we’re pleased to deliver another good quarter of non-GAAP gross margin, with Q1 coming in at 77%, an improvement from 74% in Q1, 2015 and from 75% in the prior Q4 quarter. Our professional services profitability continues to complement our strong products margin and grew to 30% gross margin in Q1 on a non-GAAP basis, compared to 11% in Q1, 2015. This is the result of our sales and professional services team's continued success in driving higher margin services like incident response and security program assessment, scaling the business and managing implementation spend well. We continue to take a disciplined approach to managing our spend and moving down the road to profitability, with our gross margin just shy of what we would see as a steady-state gross margin in the 78% to 80% area. We take confidence by the fact that we see ourselves delivering profitability through higher operating margin contribution to the bottom line and not from some new product line or structural cost reductions down the road. We get to profitability, specifically from growing sales efficiencies as we continue to scale and continuing to benefit from our already lower marginal R&D costs. With that perspective, let's look at our Q1 non-GAAP operating expenses. Let's start with sales and marketing. The non-GAAP expense to revenue ratio was 57% of revenue and improved significantly on a sequential basis from 64% in Q4, 2015. We expect to continue to see marginal improvements in sales and marketing expense ratios as we move through the year and we will also note that there is some variability in the timing and magnitude of transitioning Intel’s MVM customers to Rapid7, which could potentially affect the timing of royalty payments. Overall, we’re being thoughtful and disciplined in our approach to our go-to-market spend, pacing our sales and marketing expenditures on what we’re seeing increases in pipeline, sales rep productivity and customer traction. Turning to R&D, our non-GAAP R&D expense was 31% of revenue in Q1, reflecting the investments we’re making across our technology platform. In particular, both operationally and strategically, a big shout out to our product and engineering teams who, in four short months, took the core search technology from our acquisition of Logentries, integrated it into our platform and launched our new InsightIDR offering this February. Our team is delivering great and timely technology into the hands of our sales force and customers and they are doing it at a lower marginal cost. This is due in large part to our talented offshore engineering teams in Belfast and Dublin and as a result, we expect continued marginal decreases in our R&D expense to revenue ratios in 2016. Finishing now on OpEx, non-GAAP G&A costs in Q1, 2016 were 16% of revenue, consistent with Q1 of last year and down marginally from Q4, 2015, as we’re already showing leverage improvements in our operations as we scale the company. Like the improving leverage and support of our path to profitability with our R&D spend, we expect to see continued marginal improvements in G&A expense to revenue ratios as we move through 2016. Putting this all together, Q1, 2016 non-GAAP operating loss was $9.5 million, squarely within our guidance and non-GAAP loss per share was $0.23 at the top of the range of our guidance. Turning to cash and cash flow, we ended Q1 with cash of $83.5 million. As expected and communicated, our companywide annual bonus and sales commission structures have higher cash outlays in the first quarter. Our operating cash flow, while a negative $1.6 million for Q1, was better than expected on strong customer collections. As we've discussed previously, we expect to generate meaningfully positive operating cash flow in 2016, a particularly important metric and leading indicator demonstrating our success on our path to profitability. With that let's now turn to our outlook where we have set a dual mandate of continuing to drive strong revenue growth while making sure we’re delivering on improving profitability. With those two criteria, we believe we are taking balanced approach to investing in our product platform, growing our sales force responsibly and supporting our marketing programs into these customer awareness and adoption. Our guidance therefore for Q2 2016 is as follows, we anticipate total revenues to be in the range of $35.4 million to $36.8 million this equates to strong year over year growth of 40% at the midpoint. We anticipate non-GAAP operating loss for Q2 to be in the range of $9.4 million to $10.4 million and we anticipate non-GAAP loss per share for Q2 2016 to be in the range of $0.23 to $0.25 this is based on an anticipated 41.5 million weighted average outstanding. Looking at the full-year 2016, we are encouraged by both our strong Q1 results and our pipeline build. We’re therefore raising our guidance for all three metrics, revenue growth, an improving non-GAAP operating loss and an improving non-GAAP EPS loss. So for the full-year 2016 we expect total revenues to be in the range of $149 million to $154 million representing 35% to 39% year over year growth respectively. We anticipate non-GAAP operating loss for the full-year 2016 to be in the range of $35.5 million to $39.5 million this equates to a meaningful improvement on our path to profitability as the non-GAAP operating loss margin for 2016 improves by about 500 basis point versus 2015. And we anticipate non-GAAP loss per share for the full-year 2016 to be in the range of $0.86 to $0.96. This is based on an anticipated $41.7 million weighted average shares outstanding for 2016. And finally, we continue to anticipate generating approximately $10 million of operating cash flow in 2016 and being free cash flow positive for the year. In closing, we are extremely pleased with the start to the year and we are particularly excited with the customer reception and uptick for our new InsightIDR offering and its disruption at the SIEM market in which an important upgrade cycle is now underway. And of course, we continue to be very bullish on the overall growth profile and customer adoption that we’re seeing with our unique security data and analytics platform. With that, we appreciate your time and support, and we are glad to open the call for any questions. Operator?