Earnings Labs

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, Oct 27, 2015

$96.05

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Third Quarter 2015 Akamai Technologies Earnings Conference Call. My name is Derrick and I'll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We shall facilitate a question-and-answer session at the end of the conference. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tom Barth, Head of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Tom Barth - Head-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you and good afternoon and appreciate you joining us for Akamai's third quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Speaking today will be Tom Leighton, Akamai's Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Benson, Akamai's Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements including statements regarding revenue and earnings guidance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in Akamai's filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements included in this call represent the company's view on October 27, 2015. Akamai disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances. As a reminder, we will be referring to some non-GAAP financial metrics during today's call. A detailed reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found under the financial portion of the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Tom. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Tom, and thank you all for joining us today. Q3 was another solid quarter for Akamai on both the top and bottom line. Revenue in the third quarter was $551 million, up 11% year-over-year, and up 15% when adjusted for foreign exchange headwinds. Once again, revenue growth was especially strong for our Cloud Security Solutions, which grew 44% year-over-year in constant currency. Our annualized revenue run rate for our Cloud Security Solutions now exceeds $250 million per year, making Akamai one of the Internet's largest cloud security providers. Non-GAAP EPS for the third quarter was $0.62 per diluted share, exceeding the high-end…

Operator

Operator

Our first question will be from the line of James Breen, William Blair. Jim D. Breen - William Blair & Co. LLC: Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple of questions, one on the guide. Jim, can you give some color into the breakdown there? It sounds like Performance and Security is doing okay. So the weakness relative to where consensus was, is that mainly in the media group? And I guess for Tom on that, is this sort of a fundamental change with your relationship with those three big media companies? There has always been a concern about some of those large players doing it themselves in terms of handling traffic internally within their own networks. Can you sort of give us some color on that? Thanks. James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, I'll take the first part of it. Then I can let Tom comment on kind of the do-it-yourself efforts. But certainly you could tell from the guide, this is predominantly a media story as far as the deceleration in growth rate that we're still having very, very healthy growth rates in our Performance and Security Solutions, and our Services and Support Solutions. We don't guide necessarily by product category, but if you generally look at the growth rates we've had in those other areas, you can certainly see that media growth rates are going to be effectively flat to up very significantly, or down very significantly. This is largely in the Americas, and it is really very heavily focused on these three particular accounts, and as you can imagine, we had a huge, huge Q4 last year with these accounts. These accounts in Q4 grew well over 40% year-over-year last Q4. So it's a very difficult compare, but admittedly, we…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Gray Powell, Wells Fargo.

Gray W. Powell - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the question. So your server account really spikes starting in mid-2015, and I guess that it's in anticipation of future traffic growth likely in 2016. I'm just kind of curious what kind of visibility do you have on initiatives that could drive traffic growth higher next year. And then what's your confidence level around them? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I would say that we have some visibility there, but there's a lot of uncertainty, and there's a lot of factors that are certainly beyond our control. I think with perfect hindsight, we probably would've spent a little bit less on CapEx this year, but we don't have perfect view into when various OTT offers will become available or how successful they'll be. And our goal is to be ready and to make sure that we have a platform that can deliver any broadcast OTT that becomes available in very high quality and scale and also make sure it's affordable. And so we will, as we talked about before, lean in there. And really the worst that happens is we are a little too early and that we will eventually be using that capacity. And we just don't know exactly when, but we're going to be ready.

Gray W. Powell - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. That's very helpful. And then that actually kind of leads into my next question. If I look at 2013 and 2014 and your cash expenditures like CapEx plus OpEx, they grew at a slightly faster pace than revenue. And then in 2015, we've seen a bit of a divergence with expenses growing more in excess of revenue. I know you don't want to give guidance on 2016, but when should we see more of a direct correlation between expense and revenue growth? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Well, yeah, to be clear, I think what you've outlined is true. But we were very clear that was our intention. The intention of the company back in the 2012 timeframe was we felt that we were going to purposely lower the financial model of the company to make what we thought were the right investments to drive future growth and scale. And so it was by design that we made these investments. Yes, they grew at a faster pace than revenue growth, more on the OpEx side than the CapEx side. And certainly, as you can see, we did moderate spending in Q3 with the near-term revenue moderation that we saw. We are moderating spending in Q4. And we'll continue to manage spending in alignment with revenue growth of the company. I did provide some caveats that obviously – that depends upon revenue volumes, possible M&A we do and things of that nature. But I want to be clear that where the company financial model is now is effectively what we said we were going to do. Yes, this year we're going through a year where we're spending a little bit more on CapEx. So my – long-term model that I provided has 18% of revenue as kind of the high. And we're probably going to be more in the 19%. And that's largely from building up more network CapEx, as Tom mentioned, which is a bit in anticipation or was in anticipation of demand in the future. And as Tom said, the timing of that is very, very difficult to assess. But we get better visibility, call it, on a three-month window. And so we can always moderate future CapEx investments based on the visibility that we see.

Gray W. Powell - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. That makes sense. All right. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Sterling Auty, JPMorgan.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Yeah, thanks. Wanted to start with – I still want to get a little bit more clarity in terms of when we look at the fourth quarter and the slowdown in media, exactly how much of the slowdown is the DIY impact versus how much of that slowdown is just general slowing volumes in the media industry or segment? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. It's mostly the former, which is the top three accounts. And again, these top three accounts in our media business represent a reasonably large percentage because these are big, big, big media companies. So the biggest share of the revenue deceleration and actually these three accounts are declining year-on-year. And so again, their revenue weighting is pretty high for our media business. The rest of the media business is actually performing reasonably well. We are seeing a little bit of a slowdown, as I mentioned, in our software download customers. And as we've shared with you in the past that the timing of gaming and software downloads varies from quarter to quarter, we're not expecting a huge software download quarter. We expect a reasonably good gaming quarter this quarter, but the bigger driver of the revenue deceleration is these large three accounts and modestly a little bit of softening in the software download customer base. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Right. And that is the overall traffic is not growing at as fast a clip. And as we talked about a few minutes ago, when you combine that with an existing DIY infrastructure and the nature of that traffic, that can lead to substantially disproportionate deceleration in the traffic that we're carrying in those accounts.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

So, about a year ago, you were willing to at least give us a way to triangulate the size of your largest media customer. I think you gave us a percentage of accounts receivable. Can you give us some sense of what portion of the media business these top three represent? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I'm not going to provide a specific percentage. Obviously, as I shared before, our largest customer, we don't have any 10% customers, but as I shared before, we obviously have had a 10% receivable customer in the past. And these three customers are, call that, no one is larger than the largest customer, but customers two and three are not that much smaller. So that gives you some kind of order of magnitude of the size of these customers. And these are almost predominantly, not exclusively, but almost predominantly media customers. So that's largely where you see the impact for our media business.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

And last question (37:50) you talked, Tom, I think you mentioned that this impact could persist. Should we be walking away from this thinking that we need to see the OTT initiatives kicking in as the catalyst to get this part of the business to rebound, or is there any other items that could come along to offset some of this impact? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, the even years can be better in terms of the major sporting events like Olympics and so forth. And events themselves don't do that much, but they do tend to get people to try a higher bandwidth or higher quality format which drives more traffic, more devices are used. So there can be some benefit there. I would say if large amounts of content, broadcast content, comes over the top, that can make a difference. And then obviously we're sort of setting up a different base here, at least we're projecting to through Q4. And so just with time through the year, the effect will become mitigated in terms of our growth rates.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Steve Milunovich, UBS.

John M. A. Roy - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Thank you for taking the questions. John Roy in for Steve. Hey, I know you don't have the OTT timing, but can you give us an idea what OTT might do to margins? Any type of color would be useful on that. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, the volume of traffic we talked about, I think, on the call last time. If you imagine, and I don't know if and when this will happen, you had five million people watching, and they were watching at a pretty reasonable quality, and the target these days is for 10 million people, that's 50 terabits a second, which is more traffic than we're pumping right now. So there's a large amount of traffic there. We are working, as Jim said, to stay in the zone of 40% to 41% EBITDA margins. If there was – inside there are things, as Jim said, that can take you out of that zone. But that's our expectation at this point in time.

John M. A. Roy - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Vijay Bhagavath, Deutsche Bank.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah, thank you. Hi, Tom. Hi, Jim. Question on your DIY comments. We could have the Bears pick on that comment tomorrow morning. So please clarify to us the DIY commentary around over-the-top and also help us understand what aspects of the media delivery business that some of these customers would be doing it themselves. And then would that be like a contagion that could spread potentially to some of the other customers? Thank you. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Right. Again, we've been competing with DIY in our largest handful accounts for almost forever, over 10 years, certainly. And DIY is mostly used for the delivery of items where performance is not important or where maybe it's easier to do static objects is an example. DIY is not nearly the kind of competitor to us for things like live and linear broadcast or content that might move over the top in a pay subscription kind of model where a user expects very high quality, they are paying for it and it's very hard to do. So that's where DIY comes into play. A top few customers do it. And to be honest, over time, I think they find that it's not as productive as they thought to do it, and so sometimes a large customer will end their DIY capability, and then you will see them a few years later try to start another project. I know of one large account that's gone through the entire cycle twice. It's not something that I think even makes any sense at all for somebody who is not a giant media company, just – it's not going to be any kind of quality you'd want to have and it doesn't even make sense financially, I think. The very biggest media companies there, I think they've all tried it. Many of them use it and we have been competing with it for a long time very successfully.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

And then a quick follow-on, Tom, on over-the-top. Could we view over-the-top more as an overlay service that would be accretive to EBITDA margins that over-the-top revenue dollars start flowing in? And then also with over-the-top, do you anticipate value-added opportunities such as student-forward (42:46), encryption, ad insertion? Would those be above and beyond how you monetize the core over-the-top traffic activity? Thanks. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we monetize the end-to-end process for over-the-top, often with partners for some components of it. The large majority of the revenue there is with the delivery because of the scale and the enormous number of bits that might be carried if broadcast TV were to move over-the-top in a major way. It's not just free. There is substantial expense in actually delivering all that traffic and providing all that functionality. So it's not the kind of thing that just comes in as revenue with no cost associated with it. There is significant cost, including the build-out of the platform itself.

Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Excellent. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Mark Kelleher, D.A. Davidson. Mark D. Kelleher - D. A. Davidson & Co.: Great. Thanks for taking the question. If I look at your Performance and Security group, it looks like the sequential increase was entirely from the cloud security side. What's going on, on the other side, the web performance? What are your expectations there? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, I mean, certainly that we had another very, very strong quarter in our Cloud Security Solutions, they grew 44% in Q2, they grew 44% again in Q3. You did see a slight moderation in, call it, the other businesses that are in there, the largest of which is our web performance business. We've seen a bit of a deceleration in their product line for the last few quarters. Bookings continue to be reasonable, as I've said before, that there is a tremendous amount of excitement with our sales teams in selling our new security offerings, and I think that there is a fair amount of focus in that area. So, yeah, we probably could do a little bit better in that segment, we know that. We're doing very strong in security, maybe not as strong in the web performance business. But I think it's – we're keeping at it. There's a significant market opportunity for us to further penetrate in that space. It's just a matter of continuing to execute and innovate. Mark D. Kelleher - D. A. Davidson & Co.: Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Michael Turits, Raymond James. Michael Turits - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Hey, guys. A couple of clarifications and then a question. So just to make sure what right that you did expect the media delivery to be flat to down next quarter? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. Michael Turits - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: And also, sort of a clarification is one – so through the two large accounts, a bulk of the impact was mostly DIY, organic slowing. But what really was the organic slowing due to? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: No, it's actually more – these three accounts, these big, big accounts do DIY and in a couple of these big accounts, Akamai is the exclusive CDN provider. No, this slowdown is not so much an increase in DIY. As Tom tried to outline, which is, overall traffic is lower. And so what's happening is that they've continued to build on DIY, which they've been doing all along and their traffic has moderated overall. They are serving more of the traffic themselves, and less is going to us. So if you generally look at it from a share perspective that yes, they are taking more of the share of the traffic, but it's because overall traffic in aggregate is less than expected. Michael Turits - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. And what's the reason for that slowing – that organic slowing of traffic? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: I mean, that's tough to tell. I mean, this is the nature of our business that we can't control how many people are doing a download, how many people are doing…

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Philip Winslow, Credit Suisse. Sitikantha Panigrahi - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi, guys. This is Siti Panigrahi for Phil. I just wanted to ask on the gross margin side, you came in at the low end of the guidance and I think also guided below consensus. Just wondering how much of this impact due to the CapEx investment you did in the last few quarters versus some of the – co-location and bandwidth costs that you are seeing in the quarter. James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Well, it's largely from what we've talked about. We've been building out CapEx really for the first three quarters of the year in a fairly substantive way. If you take the year-to-date, CapEx as a percent of revenue has been well north of 20%. We're not expecting that for the full year, because you're seeing it moderate here in the fourth quarter. So as you build up more CapEx and you deploy more servers in the network and you are incurring co-location costs, you're going to see an uptick in cost of goods sold. And certainly, as we've talked about, we're building out, or we did build out in anticipation of wanting to make sure that we have the capacity available. We did signal that that may have near-term pressure on gross margins and that's what you're seeing. Sitikantha Panigrahi - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): But any changes in terms of co-location and bandwidth costs in recent quarters? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: No. I mean no change in – from a color perspective around in general the market for bandwidth or co-location spending. As you can imagine that, bandwidth in particular that as you have contracts in some cases that you have fixed port arrangements that you're building out, and if you're not building those fixed ports at a fixed cost that you're not monetizing. But again, that's something that we signaled that it was a bet we were willing to make. If in fact, we've built out more capacity than is needed, we'll grow into it. And so that's effectively what we're doing. Sitikantha Panigrahi - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Heather Bellini, Goldman Sachs. Heather Anne Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thank you. I've got a couple. I guess the first, going back to these DIY comments, I guess what I'm trying to parse, given the guidance for this segment in Q4, why isn't that going to persist for the next three quarters where you are going to be flat to down year-over-year? I mean this is the first quarter you've really made a big point about driving this home. So I'm not sure what's going to change over the course of the next three quarters that's going to make this growth rate be positive. So if you could comment on that. I know you are not trying to give long-term guidance, but it just seems like this is something that's going to persist until you anniversary it. I guess the other part of the question would be just as traffic growth flows and I guess – I just – I have listened to some conflicting data. You're trying to say that it's not because they are doing more in-sourcing when in the beginning it said that you were seeing more in-sourcing. I get that your – the share of traffic is going down because volume is slower. But these top three customers all seem to be building out their own CDN networks as well. So is there a chance that this is just a new trend that you are going to have to live with, with your share of traffic that's just going to continue to go down? So I guess what gives you the confidence that that's not going to happen? And then my last question – sorry, to put so many in there, but how do…

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Mike Olson, Piper Jaffray. Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Hey. Good afternoon. So based on the slowdown in media revenue, I would imagine a lot of people are going to start looking for signposts to give us a sense for whether or not OTT is starting to take off to come in and rescue the media business. What would you suggest the timing of that is as far as more and more material OTT revenue, and what signposts would you watch for if you were us for getting a sense if we're getting closer to that? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, we don't really know of any dates, in particular. I think in terms of watching for signposts, you'd look for offers that come to the market, you'd look for adoption rates of those services. Is it being successful, are users watching more video content online? And then we don't have any dates in mind that we're in a position to share around that. We're going to be ready and we're going to try to help enable it and then we'll see how things unfold next year. Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): All right. And then on the security side, is it around 2,000 or so, maybe 5,500 total customers now that are using security around 35% to 40% of your customer base that are on a security solution? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: That's generally in the ballpark, yes. Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): All right. Thanks a lot.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Colby Synesael, Cowen & Company. Colby A. Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Thanks. Just wanted to go back to the performance portion of the business or DSA. That business, as you mentioned, Jim, has been, I think, weak relative to expectations for the last few quarters now. And I know you mentioned that really what needs to be done here is just better execution. But would you argue that it's more because the competitive dynamic in that aspect of the business has increased, which is making execution more difficult? Or is it that the products that you have right now are arguably ahead of where the market is in terms of demand, and we're just not there where you are seeing just a tremendous amount of demand whether it's for your products or either of your competitors' products in the segment of the business? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes, I mean, I think it's difficult to tell that it's – certainly, we can execute better in that area. What share of it is driven by what drivers is tough to tell. There is certainly still a significant market opportunity for it. I think what we need to do is, in particular, and our sales team is doing this that you've got to go through multiple go-to-market motions both direct and indirect in being able to build out effective channel relationships to be able to sell this and get better acceleration on it that's not just from your direct sales force. It still is a product that requires a fair amount of handholding to be sold, so it's not an easily channeled sellable product. We're working on that. And so there's probably an element of that that is disruptive to being able to get that business back to where we need it to be. But we do think that with continued innovation on the product side, as well as maybe continued focus from a go-to-market perspective around not just going deep and wide with our customers. So the customers that we're going to try to up-sell them to the higher value ion offerings as well as getting new customers, that's really the recipe. It's about executing on the innovation side and executing on the go-to-market side. Colby A. Synesael - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Ed Maguire, CLSA.

Edward Everett Maguire - CLSA Americas LLC

Analyst

Yes. Good afternoon. Just a question on traffic volume. So a few years ago, you had this phenomenon of the number of customers renegotiating their rates for large contracts. And I was wondering if that's a dynamic that you expect to come into play over the next couple of quarters. In other words, if the rate of growth in traffic at these largest customers is slowing, are they still paying a higher tariff? And is there risk of downward resets among some of your other customers on volume-based pricing? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Pricing steadily declines. And I would say in the period we are in now, it's pretty normal; nothing unusual or no bad news there in terms of our revenues. So now when customers send more traffic to us, they often get a lower price. So you have large volumes and traffic costs less per bit than small volumes and traffic. But if you look at constant amount of traffic through time, pricing steadily decreases, and there's really no fundamental change there.

Edward Everett Maguire - CLSA Americas LLC

Analyst

Okay. And if I may, the international growth is really strong. Is there an appreciable difference in the composition of the revenue contribution from your customers outside the U.S. that's really behind that growth? And is that itself sustainable as well in your view? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we are very pleased with the growth in the international markets. It accelerated over Q2 that – I would say that we still think there's huge opportunity to continue to grow the international markets faster than our U.S. markets, for sure. But as far as the mix, actually, the mix contribution between Media, Performance and Security, and Services and Support is roughly similar across all three geographies. Admittedly, though, in the EMEA and APJ (62:22) geographies that there isn't any significant concentration from customers. And so they call it the diversification of their customer base is a little bit broader whereas in the U.S., we have very, very large U.S. media customers that tend to have a pretty high share of some of our U.S. media business. And so obviously when you have a downturn there, notable both for the U.S. market as well as the total companies, but that just gives you maybe a little bit of color on the mix profile.

Edward Everett Maguire - CLSA Americas LLC

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Michael Bowen, Pacific Crest.

Michael Bowen - Pacific Crest Securities

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon. I hate to beat a horse here, but the more I listen to the call, the more I still keep coming back to the fact that we don't really seem to know collectively when or if the traffic volumes on the media side are going to improve. So maybe coming at it from this side, can you guys talk a little bit about what your thoughts are with regard to over-the-top as far as a TAM? And then give us some thoughts with regard to perhaps adoption in 2016. What's your – obviously, you are spending a lot of CapEx as a percentage of revenue to address this opportunity and others. So I'm trying to get a better gauge on timing and magnitude of this opportunity because right now weakness will continue into 2016 was your statement. But I have to think that that turns if OTT manifests like a lot of us think it will. Thanks. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I really can't comment on adoption rates in 2016. I wish I could, but I can't. But the TAM, what hypothetically could be possible is very large. Just think about all the people that watch TV, and imagine if even a very small portion of them started watching TV online. And you think about what quality they might do that at someday. The old DVD format, I say old, but the DVD format is about four megabits per second, compressed 4K. Sort of the next gen format is 16 megabits a second. The average of that is 10 megabits a second, and that's where we see the major broadcasters having an interest in targeting bandwidth rates for watching a single stream at 10 megabits a second. And as…

Michael Bowen - Pacific Crest Securities

Analyst

And that's helpful. I mean clearly, we have two dynamics here, right? You've got whether or not overall traffic is going to increase, and I think it probably will due to OTT. But then you have got the DIY versus coming to you. So if you look at some of the smaller media companies, is there some type of threshold, or how can we think about what size company out there may think – how big do you have to be to do it yourself versus coming to you? How do they make those decisions? What are those breakpoints? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: We only see meaningful DIY in a handful of accounts, and it's not for live linear video. Now that doesn't say that someday people won't be doing DIY themselves for OTT broadcast content OTT. But we don't really see that today. The DIY we see is a handful of very large media accounts, and it's focused on more static – the delivery of static content and often where performance doesn't matter. Obviously, with paid subscription OTT, performance matters a lot, or the subscriber is not going to pay. They're not going to be happy. And as we look across the major broadcasters today, I really don't see DIY as being a factor there, at least for now.

Michael Bowen - Pacific Crest Securities

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question will be from the line of Greg McDowell, JMP Securities.

Rishi Jaluria - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst

Hi. This is Rishi Jaluria dialing in for Greg McDowell. Thank you for taking my questions. Mostly follow-up questions on all the stuff we've been discussing. First, just wanted to go a little bit deeper on CapEx. I know you have mentioned in the past that your CapEx is mainly server build-out preparing for this OTT opportunity. Putting aside questions around the timing of when OTT will become more widespread or see that adoption, at what point do you think Akamai in terms of its server build-out and capacity is going to be ready for that opportunity whenever it comes? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: I mean, that's, obviously, we are building out based on discussions that we have with folks in the ecosystem. We've certainly – what is a lot of uncertainty about what is going to get introduced, when it's going to get introduced, what the adoption rates are going to be. So as Tom indicated, yes, we have done build-out and the build-out means that we have available capacity. It is an (69:17) infinite capacity, obviously. This would be, call it, we built out capacity for what could be the first wave of some level of over-the-top. I think we certainly did signal that we do expect generally traffic moderation going into 2016. And I do believe – just to be clear, I do believe that there are – the biggest catalyst that's going to cause traffic growth to reaccelerate is going to be continued movement of premium content online. The rate and pace of that is very, very difficult to assess. I mean, some of it is being done now. So it's not like it's not being done now, it's just being done now on a very much smaller scale. The question is when does it start to get hold in a more fulsome scale, and I think that will be the catalyst. But I think without that, I think there are certainly headwinds that we have going into 2016 on traffic, just to be very clear. I think Heather asked earlier that is tough to tell with these large three customers what their traffic volumes are going to do, whether their traffic volumes accelerate or not. So there's a bunch of dynamics that will have an impact on the media business in the near term. So I just want to make sure we're clear that we think that there are certainly catalysts to grow this business in the medium term to long term. We're not calling out guidance here for 2016, but it's just important to be clear with you that certainly we do see deceleration in traffic. We do think that there are going to be catalysts for traffic growth. The question is rate, pace, and timing.

Rishi Jaluria - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay, great. And then following up on OTT, you did mention it's a major opportunity for Akamai. And you also mentioned on this call that you're seeing slowdown in growth with your three largest, let's call it, U.S. media delivery customers. I just wanted to get a better handle on how significant that OTT opportunity internationally outside the U.S. can be. Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I think the math is the same. It could be very significant. There's obviously a lot more TV watchers and people online outside of the United States than here. Many countries are better connected with their Internet than here. So in the long run, I would say it's a larger market, potential market outside the U.S. than inside the U.S.

Rishi Jaluria - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay, great. And then in terms of – you touched on your partnership with Microsoft. Is this primarily going to be an impact on the Performance and Security side of the business versus the Media side? And what sort of impact do you think that it could have on the company over the next several quarters? Frank Thomson Leighton - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I would hope it would have a positive benefit to both our Media business and our Performance business and our, for that matter, our Security business. That Microsoft will be selling all of our services and in terms of the basic Azure CDN capability, you will be able to automatically take advantage of Akamai's base level CDN capabilities.

Rishi Jaluria - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay, great. And then last one, I will jump off. But it looks like this quarter the rate of employee addition is a lot slower than it's been in, I don't know, let's call it, the past six quarters. Was this primarily the result of cost controlling, or was this more in anticipation of this slowing down of traffic growth that you talked about? James Benson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Certainly, when we guided for the quarter for Q3 that we certainly did guide that OpEx expense was going to slow, we certainly had better visibility of what we thought was going to be happening going into Q4 as the quarter progressed. And so we did moderate hiring as the quarter progressed.

Rishi Jaluria - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay, very helpful. Thanks a lot, guys.

Tom Barth - Head-Investor Relations

Management

Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate there is a few more in the queue, but we are well overtime. So I apologize if we weren't able to answer your questions today. But in closing, we want to thank you for joining us. We'll be participating on a number of investor conferences and events in November and December. Details of these can be found in the Events section on the Investor Relations website at akamai.com and we look forward to seeing you at those events. Thank you again for joining us and have a nice evening.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.