Corey Thomas
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is open
Thank you, Sunil. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our second quarter 2021 earnings results call. I'm pleased to once again report sustain outperformance, and our business as Rapid7 delivers strong second quarter results exceeding both our growth and profitability goals for the quarter. Strong demand across our Insight Platform show year-over-year ARR growth of 29% in the quarter at approximately $489 million. As we shared a few weeks ago, this strong organic growth is the validation of both our strategy and our execution as we continue our journey to make the best as a truly operation accessible and achievable for all. Our ability to meet customers where they are in their SecOps journey with leading capabilities across portability risk management, detection response, and cloud security representing is evidenced by two consecutive quarters of accelerating customer growth to start 2021. I'll share more on this momentum and our customer growth engine shortly. But I'd like to start today with some perspective on the security landscape and what we're hearing from our customers. If you think back to our Investor Day in March, I shared with you how we are in a fundamentally new dynamic right now when it comes to the pace of technology adoption. Companies of all sizes across industries and regions are dramatically increasing their focus on delivering world class digital and remote experiences with their customers and employees as they look to keep up with the pace of innovation. However, alongside this rapid expansion of the technology footprints, customers are experiencing an evolving threat landscape. We are in an environment where the accelerated investment in digital transformation is turning every company into a technology company. Travel and explosion in the surface areas that customers must monitor and protect. This is being met by a shift in the attacker landscape over the past year with escalating risks driven by a clear increase in both the scope and the impact of attacker activity. Against this backdrop, our strong 2021 performance to date is a clear indication that customers are recognizing how Rapid7 has integrated Insight Platform portfolio is designed to address the challenges of today's threat landscape. Let me take a moment to level set you on why we believe our strategy to build a unified SecOps platform experience in the cloud is well positioned to address multiple aspects of the shipping threat landscape. Rapid7's vulnerability management solution remains a critical component of our customer security hygiene. Accelerating technology adoption is opening even more vectors of attack. Managing risk visibility is more important than ever for our customers. Many of today's threats continue to leverage known vulnerabilities. So having a best-in-class game program remain foundational to protecting against for basic threats such as Ransomware. This is demonstrated by the durable growth we continue to deliver in VM with solid celebration in ARR during the second quarter. However, a strong VM program is just a part of the equation. Remediating vulnerabilities takes time, and an increasing trend with recent attacks that people don't know about them to the after the attack occurs. This is where customers increasingly need best-in-class detection response capabilities to alert them to suspicious activity. For the second year in a row, Rapid7's InsightIDR has been recognized as the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM, but we believe this is just one component of the IDR store. As we reflect back on the roots of IDRs six years ago, we had a strong point of view that's driving alerts off additional law like most simply had been, and many continue to do today was insufficient. This robust to build a differentiated capability for them one that began with behavioral analytics, and has since expanded to include law, import telemetry, network traffic visibility, attack analytics, and cloud visibility among other market leading capabilities. The best validation of our winning formula with IR, beyond a sustained high growth at scale has been the emergence of the extended detection response market, which espouses this view of comprehensive detection response that spans across SIEM, EDR, SOAR and now threat intelligence. Our recent edition of insights positions Rapid7 believes extra movement, enabling our customers to drive comprehensive security transformation alongside their digital investments. But as these digital transformation initiatives accelerate, businesses are increasingly leveraging the cloud to drive more innovation. As a result, cloud infrastructure usage is skyrocketing. And so too is the need for security teams to gain visibility and understand risks across these environments. Rapid7s newly released InsightCloudSec is leading the charge to provide customers a single cloud security solution that natively integrates cloud posture management, cloud identity management, infrastructure as co, and Kubernetes workload protection. This fully integrated cloud based security platform enables broad visibility across multiple cloud environments, enhancing cloud security programs by automating payable security and compliance. We remain focused on innovating to help security and DevOps teams shift to the left, reducing noise and complexity and protecting their container environments and automating workflows to drive better security outcomes as customers scale into the cloud. Each one of these mandates to provide foundational beyond visibility to deliver comprehensive, extended detection response, and to enable continuous protection of complex cloud environments is top of mind for our team here at Rapid7. In fact, Rapid7 is one of the only vendors in the market today that can offer best-in-class products across each of these three critical security vectors. As the attack surface expands, Rapid7's platform is increasingly relevant because security teams are struggling to manage a myriad of independent security tools. Resource constraints and vendor sprawl are a critical concern in today's fast moving threat environment, as customers are tasked with minimizing visibility gaps that exist between their disparate products. Rapid7 for the threat to this challenge by investing not just in building market leading products and their respective categories, but natively integrating these solutions into our Insight Platform and delivering them via a single unified experience in the cloud. This is why our strategy to build a unified technology platform in the cloud that reduces these gaps through an integrated, automation driven experience is resonating with customers today. Customers are increasingly looking to consolidate now to a smaller number of critical security partners without sacrificing best-in-class security capabilities. As security teams look to minimize coverage gaps and respond faster to emerging threats, Rapid7's integrated platform experience is increasingly more relevant. You see this reflected in our business momentum to-date in 2021. We continue to live a strong ARR growth with our business driven in part by our accelerating customer growth engine, which saw 13% year-over-year growth in customers during the second quarter. This is there by two fundamental drivers. First, we continue to add more new customers more efficiently, lap our ability and meet customers where they are in their SecOps journey by landing across any of our core platform pillars while demonstrating ease of expansion over time. Second, our aggressive investments in technology integration are driving compelling customer value realization, enabling us to deliver ongoing strong and improvement gross retention in our business as our platform scales. This is coupled with a compelling cross and upsell opportunity in our existing install base, which is a core driver of our sustained VM teams growth in ARR for customers during the quarter. As our platform story increasingly resonates with customers, we have expanded the ability for more of our sales teams to sell more of our products, which should support global growth in ARR per customer as we look ahead. A great example of this platform value realization with a competitive six figure insight one deal during the quarter was a new international customer. As a brief reminder, InsightOne is an example of how we're looking to lower the barriers to platform adoption, and making easier for customers to purchase multiple Insight products. In this case, InsightVM, InsightIDR, InsightAppSec and InsightConnect to deliver a unified SecOps experience. In this particular case, InsightOne's unified approach not only separated Rapid7 competitively versus other point products, but our platform value proposition accelerated the customer's future projects to leverage this broad set of Insight capabilities. Our single agent and one platform story resonated with the customer was looking for a leading security partner within their business. We're excited about the opportunity to continue partnering with customers like this to minimize their security coverage gaps as we further enable these platforms since with go-to-market motions during the second half of the year. Turning now to a brief update on the recent progress towards our enduring goals. First, we remain focused on leading the charge to enable customers to transform their security operations practices around the cloud. This is clearly demonstrated by our investments and this is to accelerate our SDR vision capability, the addition of Insights while delivering differentiated SecOps experience in the cloud by elevating the capabilities across our Insight platform. We've already begun to see strong customer interest and momentum in this capability. Second, we've been here work on accelerating our platform distribution, but recent launch of InsightCloudSec, which brings together the cloud and workload security capabilities of DivvyCloud and Alcide into a seamless and integrated cloud security experience on an Insight platform is a key milestone. This further accelerates our ability to drop sales leverage across our portfolio, particularly as we enable more of our sales team to sell the platform value proposition. We will continue to deliver on this both from a product innovation standpoint, as well as from a commercialization and customer perspective. And third, we are committed to driving long-term operating leverage in our business while investing for growth. A great validation point is that during the first half of 2021, we have delivered over 300 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin expansion over the first half of 2020 alongside improving free cash flow. This strong year-to-date operating profit performance, our solid growth execution, and our disciplined investment approach position as well to absorb the incremental expenses of the Insight's acquisition while delivering on our prior operating profit expectations, notwithstanding the Insight's deferred revenue write down. Jeff will share more details on this in his remarks. So in summary, we're tracking the challenges of today's escalating threat landscape by delivering a unified SecOps experience in the cloud that helps to minimize visibility gaps, detect threats faster, and deliver automated responses. I cannot be more proud of our team for their ongoing commitment to our customers, as we work to deliver on our goals by making the best and security accessible and achievable to all. And finally, as I'm sure many of you saw from our press release, our CFO, Jeff Kalowski has announced his intent to retire in 2022 once his successor is appointed. On behalf of the entire team, I want to thank Jeff for his outstanding leadership and helping us scale Rapid7 for the past five years. Jeff has been instrumental in our effort to transition and scale our recurring revenue business, while also building a world-class culture in finance management. He has served as a true partner to myself and the entire leadership team here at Rapid7. And I look forward to that continued partnership into the next year. With that, thank you, Jeff and I'll turn the call over to you.