Corey Thomas
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is open
Thank you, Sunil, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our third quarter 2021 earnings results call. I'm thrilled to report that Rapid7 delivered a milestone quarter exceeding $500 million in ARR for the first time. Accelerated demand for our security transformation solutions, coupled with sustained growth of our revenue management and our recent Insight acquisition drove Q3 ending ARR to $550 million, growth of 38% year over the prior year and growth of over 30% organically driven by strong contribution from both our land and expand interest in the quarter. Our business was driven by strong customer interest for the expanding set of capabilities on our Insight platform and solid execution on the part of our Rapid7 team. Moreover, we have been pleased with the early reception from our customers to the recent addition of Insights threat intelligence offering. Our third quarter results also demonstrate how we are delivering on our customer mission while balancing our dual mandate to drive durable growth and expand profitability and free cash flow as we scale. Alongside our accelerating ARR growth, we delivered over 150 basis points of year-over-year operating margin expansion during the third quarter, even as we absorbed our largest ever acquisition to date. Jeff will share more details on our strong operating results in his remarks and how it positions us to continue investing behind our growth engine while delivering on our growth and profitability framework. But before we step into those details, I'd like to spend a few moments to share with you our Rapid7 is working to help customers achieve better security outcomes in a rapidly evolving direct landscape. Organizations of all sizes are investing aggressively in scaling the digital experiences that they must deliver to their customers, employees and partners in today's distributed economy. However, as they embrace these broad digital initiatives, they are increasingly faced with critical challenge of managing a dynamic cyber risk profile across the internal cloud and external footprint. As we speak with customers and prospects on a day-to-day basis, many are struggling with the same set of questions, how do I gain visibility to the direct to vulnerabilities in my environment and better manage our risk profile. How to identify and respond to attacks happening in my environment. And I want to improve my security team's productivity to drive better security efficacy in an increasingly tight cybersecurity talent market. These questions are at the core of today's security operations challenges and the expanded security achievement gap that I spoke with you about earlier this year. To solve this challenge, many customers we engage are seeking a more holistic approach to monitoring the threat and ability in their environment. as well as detecting and responding to attacks across their internal and external digital footprints. As I shared at our Investor Day in March, Rapid7 is leading a charge by delivering some of the most advanced capabilities around security, analytics and automation, unified on an integrated platform that are also massively accessible to a wider audience of enterprise and mid-market organizations. This is how we're disrupting the market by enabling customers to marry advanced capabilities, high efficacy and productivity to achieve better security outcomes for their stakeholders. A great example of how customers are leveraging this value with a 6-figure deal in the quarter with a multimillion-dollar general contracting firm. This customer was looking to build a more effective detection and response program after experiencing a security incident with their existing solution. They wanted a comprehensive solution, but one that would also drive improved efficiency for their modest sized security team. As an existing InsightVM customer, they were excited about how quickly and easily they could stand up and integrate additional Insight platform solutions. When coupled with the depth of our detection and responsive capability, and the critical value our automation offering brought to their team, it became clear to them that few competitors could match the combined efficiency and efficacy of our platform. As a result, this customer chose to expand their relationship with Rapid7 as a trusted security partner, adding InsightIDR with our enhanced endpoint telemetry and network traffic analysis to adults, as well as InsightConnect for automation to provide a more comprehensive visibility across their environment and the ability to more quickly respond to incidents. This is a great validation of Rapid7's vision decision and approach towards our extended detection response strategy, which is to help customers minimize the themes and games that exist in their technology environments, through our natively integrated Insight platform. Our approach is built on a premise that to have effective security, you have to have profitability and cost environment. This is why we have invested aggressively over the years to become a leader in enabling that visibility. The core of what Rapid7 does is collect fragmented data across the technology environment, endpoint data, deep cloud data, vulnerability data, API, logs, network data, fast data, all collected and aggregated natively on our Insight platform. This allows us to look at risk more holistically across the environment to not just detect the text, but to perform the forensics and analysis across the environment and ultimately drive remediation with our automation framework. Increasingly, today's detectors are exploiting the data gaps and themes that exist in customers' fragmented security ecosystem. This has led to an increasing focus on an extended approach to detecting a responding to threat in the environment to reduce visibility gaps and introduce that risk. Rapid7's core differentiation is this pervasive end-to-end data collection that allows us to deliver leading security analytics and automation that enables customers to more effectively assess risk, detect attacks and drive remediation across their environments. We're seeing this focus on more holistic risk visibility reflected in our engagement with customers. A good example of this was an international enterprise customer who had an interesting platform journey with us leading up to their purchase of our recently introduced IDR ultimate product -- package. Let me take a moment to step you through that journey. Despite having a market-leading SIM solution, this customer was lacking full coverage of their environment. So they engaged with us early in the year in an effort to achieve the detection response value they were seeking. At the same time, they were preparing to replace their existing VM solution. Our cohesive SecOps platform vision and the idea of a single trusted security partner resonated with them. And so they actually ended up purchasing InsightVM first, demonstrating our ability to meet them where they were in DevSecOps journey. Around this time, they were also beginning their cloud security journey and exploring leading solutions for this. The combination of our best-in-class cloud capabilities and our native integration with InsightVM on our platform put us ahead of the pack. And so they purchased InsightCloud Tech early in Q3. By the time they were ready to make a detection and response decision later in Q3, the integrated platform experience positions IDR as a clear program. With IDR Ultimate, our advanced IDR tier, they were able to gain more full coverage of their environment. While also reducing data gaps by tapping into our extended capabilities, including enhanced endpoint data for more comprehensive forensic analysis and automation for increased efficiency and accelerated response over time. In each part of this customer journey, our complete platform vision as a key value driver for the customer, not to mention a competitive differentiator, and they are now leveraging a large portion of our Insight platform as they approach 7 figures in total ARR. Over time, we believe the winners in this space will be those that can provide this type of extended approach to reducing fragmentation and increasing visibility in our customers' technology environment as we continue to invest in delivering this on our Insight platform. Most recently, our acquisition of Insight amplifies our platform and XDR vision, while layering on external attack service visibility, further minimizing SIEM and elevating each of our vulnerability management, detection response and cloud security capabilities across our Insight platform. Turning now to a brief update on progress towards our enduring goals. First, we continue to lead the charge in enabling customers to transform DevSecOps practices around the cloud. You've seen us successfully extend the core capabilities of our Insight platform, both organically and through strategic acquisitions to help customers effectively scale their 3 operations. Our strong and accelerating customer growth, as we approach 10,000 customers is a great validation of our progress to meeting customers where they are in DevSecOps journey with an expanded set of market-leading capabilities. Second, we're investing to accelerate our platform distribution engine through enhanced pricing and packaging for products like IDR, but also by making it easier for customers to seamlessly expand on the Insight platform through natively integrated experiences. This success is delivering a best-in-class platform experience, continues to drive ownable expansion in customer last year as demonstrated by our ARR per customer, which grew 18% year-over-year to over $55,000. And third, we remain focused on driving long-term operating leverage and cash flow scale while investing for growth. This is evidenced by our strong cash generation and operating margin expansion, even as we continue to invest in innovation and absorb our recent Insight acquisition. In closing, it's clear that organizations across the world are undergoing significant digital transformation and met an escalating cyber threat landscape. Our team is investing to deliver a highly differentiated and more holistic approach to security analytics and automation that better enables customers to bring security transformation alongside the digital investments. We believe this will remain a long-term demand driver for our business as we continue our mission to make the best and security operations achievable for all. With that, thank you, all. And now I will turn the call over to our CFO, Jeff Kalowski.