Corey Thomas
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets
Thank you, Sunil, and hello to everyone on the call today. Thank you for joining us on our third quarter 2022 earnings call. Rapid7 ended the third quarter with $684 million in ARR, representing 24% year over year growth. While revenue was within our guided range, and operating income exceeded our expectations. Our ARR results came in below our expectations for the quarter. Growth was moderated by two key dynamics. First, the impact of ongoing global macroeconomic uncertainty on customers' benefits. And secondly, further anticipated sales productivity amount as we evolve our model towards a consolidated platform sales approach. I will speak to this in detail on today's call. But first, let's discuss the environment. We spoke on our last earnings call about how the macroeconomic environment is affecting the pace of demand, driving higher levels of inspection as customers and prospects manage reputation and increased economic uncertainty. These persistent trends continue to affect us broadly. With the downward pressure coming from our international region. Customers continue to squeeze in time into new projects and in some cases are taking a more measured approach to scaling their security investments. While we have limited visibility into the macroeconomic trajectory, we continue to factor in this headwind as we look ahead to the fourth quarter and next year. Now, let me turn to the internal dynamics affecting our performance. As we successfully expanded from selling a single product to a best-in-suite that platform a number of years ago, you may recall that we rely on product specific sales teams to scale the business. In the back half of last year, we began to mature our sales motion towards the channel itself, towards enabling all of our salespeople to sell the full suite of our insight products. This was a key step in the evolution of our Salesforce toward a platform selling motion. While we expected in that times for multiple products to take slightly longer as we scaled our teams this year, we did anticipate an increase in sales activity during the second half of this year, as they gain mastery of our four products suite. Entering into the quarter, it became clear that our salesforce is taking longer than we expect it to effectively sell a wider set of solutions on our insight platform. Let me highlight two predominant reasons for this. First, our audience is changing. Given the breadth of our platform, as sellers are increasingly engaging, and see through level discussions. This requires more robust seller enablement, especially for newer reps to ship them some important product and features to selling platform solutions and outcomes. Second, this motion requires more focused packaging models compared to the land anywhere approach, particularly in an environment where customers have budgetary pressures. As you might expect rapidly sales engine across multiple products while entering a recessionary spending environment further exacerbated these challenges during the quarter. In hindsight, our measured transition from a VM centric salesforce to a security transformation which itself of course has been slower than expected to be underestimated the amount of time enablement support and focus necessary for our team to drive efficient platform adoption. We have responded quickly to address this situation. And here's what we're doing today that gives us confidence in our path forward to improve execution. We maintain strong confidence in our mid to long term thesis. To become the platform of choice for consolidated across the management to resource constrained organization. Amidst a complex and highly fragmented security tool ecosystem, security teams of all sizes are struggling more than ever to deliver the right level of security efficacy for their spending. And the bar is higher today, as these teams are increased budgetary pressure. In a recent survey of [indiscernible] are the highlight of the 75% of organizations they surveyed are looking to consolidate security vendors from destroying African organizations only a few years ago. We believe the platform investments we've made in recent years position us exceedingly well to help customers achieve more consolidated risk and threat visibility, response and automation across their expanding digital footprint and growing cloud environment. A great example of how we're delivering on this consolidation value proposition at scale is a seven figure ARR deal signed in the third quarter with an enterprise healthcare provider. This customer was struggling to effectively and efficiently manage their expansive security environment with a leading team offering managed by a large global consulting firm, claiming pain points and many levels throughout the organization. Rapid service [indiscernible] solution with embedded automation stood out among the competition for its rich detection capabilities. However, a huge differentiator for this customer was our ability to consolidate their SecOps back on a single platform. By leveraging our DNR threat complete packets, this customer was able to solve their most urgent direct response challenge, while also displacing their existing VM provider. All at a better overall economic value. This ability to consolidate parts of their security ecosystem or insight platform, not only solidify Rapid7 platform of choice expanded the value of the relationship for Rapid7. In an increasingly talented transitory landscape, our offerings continue to resonate with customers of all sizes, including our growing enterprise customer base. Customers attending to Rapid7 detection response often and this dynamic threat landscape for its expert driven, intelligent and extensive detection laboratory that delivers market leading time to value. And Rapid7 risk visibility platform is resonating for customers expanding rapidly into the cloud. As we deliver more consolidated risk visibility across cloud and on-prem environment. This underpins the sustained growth we've seen in our security transformation solution. We saw another quarter of 40% year over year AR growth. Let me share how we're optimizing our go forward sales approach by operationalizing our strip around these two specific customer opportunities. As we look to the fourth quarter and early 2023, we're activating more focused customer centric sales motions that are organized around customer needs. This will simplify and consolidate the cell emotions that our teams leverage many customers, we began to separate in Q3 as we started to attack them alongside security transformation project. However, we're accelerating this path in the fourth quarter as we plan to a placement anchor our customer engagement around their most critical needs tied to detection response, and cloud risk visibility. This is an obvious next step for two distinct reasons. One, as we engage with customers today, we continue to see the strongest the most urgent customer challenges centered around detection response and cloud security, especially for our time in the process visibility in the cloud, we see on-prem VM as a critical component of that. Number two, this step directly aligns with the natural progression we've seen in our business, as security transformation has scale to represent over 70% of our year to date, land motion. With over 50% of our land ARR coming from detection and response, specifically. Even this one, we expect to focus sales efforts around two core platform packages that are optimized to address customers' most pressing security needs on our platform. [Indiscernible] threat complete, enables customers to consolidate best in class, expert driven threat detection response offering, along with a limited coverage of our market leading VM on a single platform. A cloud with complete is our cloud center risk visibility offering which consolidates unlimited visibility across customers on-prem, cloud and external environments at all stages of transition to the cloud. It enables the use of cloud and application security with unlimited VM covered together in one platform subscription for more complete coverage of their cloud and traditional infrastructure environments. In addition to this to provide pricing and packaging, over the next quarter, we intend to sharpen our enablement and drive a focused marketing efforts around threats and this complete value proposition as we lean into our opportunity to help customers manage and respond to threats in their modern and cloud environments. We expected experts to gain traction over the next few quarters. With improvements in growth starting in the second half of 2020. We will pay close attention to sales productivity as the success of our packaging efforts with both new and existing customers? Over the past few years, we've assembled the best in class suite of products across the platform. We firmly believe that the fundamentals of our business are healthy and our opportunity for growth remain strong. Honing and operationalizing our pricing packaging and overall go to market strategy, which rob the next leg of our growth. We've had success with thoughtful in some cases, to ourselves plus in the past, and this gives us confidence in our four trajectory towards a more effective and efficient platform centric sales motion. While these cases are moderately disruptive in the short term, we believe they will set us up better for growth in the back half of 2020 and beyond. Rapid7 continues to benefit from strong secular tailwinds and underlying drivers of digital transformation and prioritization of security spending are very much intact. Our plans to approve sales execution by navigating macroeconomic uncertainty are aligned with the overall strategy to provide a strong value proposition for customers. As we work to enable organizations to close the gaps in their security environments, we remain hyper focused on solving critical customer challenges. Looking forward, our updated outlook assumes near term macro and productivity related headwinds, the latter of which we expect to begin to normalize over the next few quarters, and we see gradual benefits from the changes that we're putting in place. This should translate to a modest sales execution tailwind in the later part of 2023 and into 2024. In early 2021, we shared our expectation to become a ruler 40 company with over $1 billion in ARR by 2025. We remain confident in reaching those targets. However, our expected path to get to, shifted. Let me share some brief context on how we think about that today. First, despite the execution challenges, which were actively interesting, we continue to see a double multi Japan for 20% ARR growth CAGR and our business through 2025. Though we expect that 2023 may be modestly below 20% as we navigate short term impact to our sales optimization efforts. Ultimately this means we now expect the relative mix of growth and profitability to achieve our ruler 40 status will be more balanced towards profitability than we previously anticipated. Our strong Q3 profitability demand and raise to full year not GAAP operating income demonstrates our deliberate focus on margin expansion and underpinned our confidence in delivering our midterm targets, which Tim will provide more color on. We remain committed to our long term strategic goals to enable customers to securely transition to the cloud to expand the capabilities and value proposition of our best in class insight platform and to balance our dual mandate of scaling profitably, while strategically investing to drive general growth. With that, thanks again for joining us on the call today. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Kevin Adams to share additional detail on our financial results and outlook. Tim?