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A10 Networks, Inc. (ATEN)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 27, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to the A10 Networks' First Quarter 2017 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Maria Riley with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Maria Riley

Analyst

Thank you all for joining us today. I am pleased to welcome you to A10 Networks’ first quarter 2017 financial results conference call. This call is being recorded and webcast live and may be accessed for one year via the A10 Networks Web site, www.a10networks.com. Joining me today are A10’s Founder and CEO, Lee Chen; A10’s Interim CFO, Shiva Natarajan; and our Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Ray Smets. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that shortly after the market closed today, A10 Networks issued a press release announcing its first quarter 2017 financial results. Additionally, A10 published a presentation along with its prepared remarks for this call and supplemental trended financial statements. You may access the press release, presentation with prepared comments, and trended financial statements on the Investor Relations section of the company’s Web site, www.a10networks.com. During the course of today’s call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our projections for our second quarter 2017 operating results, our expectations for future revenue growth or security product revenue, profitability and operating margin, expectations of customer buying patterns, expected product launches and the general growth of our business. These statements are based on current expectations and beliefs as of today, April 27, 2017. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control that could cause actual results to differ materially and you should not rely on them as predictions of future events. A10 disclaims any obligation to update information contained in these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. For a more detailed descriptions of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our most recent 10-K filed on February 24th. Please note that with the exception of revenue, financial measures discussed today are on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. The non-GAAP financial results measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in the press release issued today and on the trended quarterly financial statements posted on the company’s Web site. We will provide our current expectations for the second quarter of 2017 on a non-GAAP basis. However, we are unavailable to make a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance measures to corresponding GAAP measures on a forward-looking basis due to high variability and low visibility with respect to the charges, which are excluded from these non-GAAP measures. Before I turn the call over to Lee, I would like to announce that in June management will present at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Conference in San Francisco and we look forward to seeing many of you there. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Lee for opening remarks. Lee?

Lee Chen

Analyst

Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered a solid first quarter as we continued to execute our strategy of capitalizing on security and cloud market opportunities while driving bottom-line improvement. We generated 12% year-over-year revenue growth, bringing revenue to $60.3 million. We also achieved non-GAAP EPS of $0.01, which was at the high end of our guidance range. Our top line performance was driven by ongoing strength and expansion within cloud provider, service provider and web-scale customers. Our continued success with these customers is based on growing demand for our security and cloud solutions in ultra-high performance networks. For example, we continued to expand within marquee customers in Japan with our TPS and CFW security solutions. We also sold more than 200 licenses of our virtual Thunder ADC to a mobile provider for their SDN/NFV infrastructure. Globally, we are excited about the strong traction we are experiencing with our highest-performing Thunder 14045 appliance. As we discussed on our last earnings call, the Thunder 14045 is the most successful product in our company’s history. The product is helping A10 standout competitively due to its high-performance packet processing capabilities in a very small footprint, providing customers with CapEx, OpEx and security advantages, especially for service providers, cloud providers, e-commerce and online gaming customers. At the lower-end of the market, we saw softer sales in North America mostly due to the end-of-sale of our entry-level appliances. In comparison to our first quarter of last year, these entry-level appliances generated approximately $2.5 million less product revenue in North America this quarter. We plan on releasing a new series of entry-level appliances during the third quarter when the newest chipset is available. Our core customers at the high-end of the market increasingly require greater performance, scalability, and reliability in…

Shiva Natarajan

Analyst

Thank you, Lee, and thank you all for joining us today. First quarter revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $60.3 million, surpassing the midpoint of our guidance range of $59 million to $61 million. We also grew deferred revenue 24% year-over-year to reach $93.1 million. First quarter product revenue grew 9% year-over-year to reach $39.7 million, representing 66% of total revenue. First quarter service revenue grew 18% year-over-year to reach $20.6 million, or 34% of total revenue. From a geographic standpoint, first quarter revenue from the United States was $30.7 million, up 4% on a year-over-year basis. First quarter revenue from Japan was $13.1 million, up 20% on a year-over-year basis. First quarter revenue from APAC excluding Japan was $10.2 million, up 52% on a year-over-year basis. First quarter revenue from EMEA was $5.2 million, a 3% year-over-year increase. Enterprise revenue was 55% of revenue or $33 million, up 2% from Q1 of last year. We had one cloud customer that contributed 12% of total first quarter revenue. Service provider revenue was 45% of revenue or $27.3 million, up 27% when compared with $21.6 million in the first quarter of 2016. As we move beyond revenue, all further metrics discussed on this call are on a non-GAAP basis, unless stated otherwise. We delivered first quarter total gross margin of 77% achieving the high-end of our expected range of 75% to 77%. This is a decrease of 60 basis points from last quarter and an increase of 90 basis points from Q1 of last year. First quarter product gross margin was 75.4%, a decrease of 80 basis points from last quarter and from Q1 of 2016. First quarter services gross margin came in at 80.1%, decreasing 50 basis points from last quarter and increasing 420 basis points versus Q1 of 2016. We…

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first question comes from Rod Hall with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. A couple things I guess I wanted to focus on. One is we had your competitor report yesterday and they’re talking about some pretty good size wins in tier 1 security systems, firewall like systems and they’re talking about a large increase in data volume from some of these unlimited plans driving some of this? And I wonder are you guys seeing that and how big of an opportunity on security do you think that is? Is the carriers continuing to move toward these unlimited plans and a higher data usage? And I have a follow up to that as well.

Lee Chen

Analyst

Yes, we saw a good traction and wins we saw through the offering in Q1, while Thunder 14045 is really as we mentioned in the last earnings call and also in this earnings call, it’s our fastest growing product in our history. We continue to see success with our Thunder 14045 and we are continuing to see great pipeline we saw through the offering.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Can you say where that – like geographically where that pipeline looks the strongest for you?

Lee Chen

Analyst

Yes, the TPS employees concentrate on North America and Japan but for over the last two quarters we are seeing them expanding globally. CFW we are – Q1 was the first quarter we saw success globally.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Okay, so North America and Japan and CFW also in North America and Japan. Those are your two main --

Lee Chen

Analyst

North America, Japan, APAC and also EMEA.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Okay.

Lee Chen

Analyst

We had success globally on CFW.

Rod Hall

Analyst

And then we noticed – I think we got this right. Your headcount declined a little bit in the quarter. Could you just comment on what drove that? We would have – I think that’s the first time we’d see that happen. So just wondering what’s happen from a headcount point of view?

Lee Chen

Analyst

It’s really about operational efficiency and driving leverage. Actually we increased 1.4 million in R&D. We added more headcount to both cloud and security.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Okay. Do you think your headcount continues to come down or do you think it will just pretty much remain stable looking forward? How should we think about that?

Lee Chen

Analyst

Really if you look at Q1, we tend to have seasonality in the headcount. Every year we plan to continue to invest. As long as we see opportunity, we will invest.

Rod Hall

Analyst

Okay. All right, thanks a lot.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Catharine Trebnick with Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Catharine Trebnick

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question. And Lee, you haven’t talked in the last two or three conference calls. Could you just give us an update on some of your partners? I know a year ago, Cisco was pretty important. You signed Cylance. Recently in the last quarter it was Fidelis. Can you just give us an overall update on that and if you’re seeing some of these partnerships are helping you drive some of these new wins that you’ve been describing today? Thank you.

Lee Chen

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Yes, I think we have close relationship with Cisco as we go to market together. It’s not an OEM relationship but we are working very close with Cisco globally. And we also continue to invest in our partnership program to drive more partners across the globe. Ray, maybe you want to add something to that.

Ray Smets

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Yes, I’d add a little bit more, Catharine. From a Cisco perspective, you know they are a technology partner and it’s one of the most strategic partners that we have. In Q1, we definitely expanded our Cisco FirePOWER, SSLi solution opportunity pipeline on a global basis with these guys and we’ve seen an uptick in revenue and conversion rates from the relationship we’ve had with Cisco. So our SSLi products are getting a lot of attention in the Cisco events, like the Cisco Live events and we really like to participate in those. We also announced the Fidelis relationship which is a global SSLi solution partnership and we’re super thrilled to work these guys. It’s really just beginning but we look to build a differentiated next-gen intrusion prevention and advanced threat protection solution with Fidelis that we think is going to be very attractive to customers in North America and EMEA. And with Cylance we continue to build on that relationship as well. We have some upcoming product announcements that we’ll be making on that partnership in the very near future. But we’re looking forward to integrating the AI-based endpoint protection software from Cylance into our security product line. So we’re looking to make some hay with that product as well.

Catharine Trebnick

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you. Just for my own clarification, maybe others. Symantec was a pretty good – Blue Coat was a good partner of Cisco as is Fidelis. Are those replacements perhaps because they might view them as more competitive both of those companies?

Ray Smets

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

We’re going to sit alongside these other competitors within Cisco and that’s perfectly acceptable and understandable from us. But I think what will happen over time is Cisco will continue to place the best product forward, and we think we’re in a very good position to compete against the other guys.

Catharine Trebnick

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

All right, thank you. Nice quarter, guys.

Ray Smets

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Lee Chen

Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead.

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from James Fawcett with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

James Fawcett

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask a couple of other strategic questions and operational questions. You mentioned that you’re listing the entry-level products until the new chipset comes out. Can you just go into a little bit why discontinue or stop selling it before the new chipset is available instead of just continuing to make it available?

Lee Chen

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Sure. Really as very large vendors that traditionally never missed the delivery of the chipset. We’ve been working with them for over 10 years. So this is the first time they missed to deliver that line. So they also announced the older chipset end-of-sales. So we followed their pattern. They notified us very late which we already made announcement.

James Fawcett

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Okay, that makes sense. Okay. And then on ADC, what would be the next highest contributing product this year? Is it CFW or CGN, DDoS? How should we think about the rank order of contribution from the different products?

Lee Chen

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

I think the security and cloud will continue to grow to be a bigger portion of the overall product revenue. As a percentage – ADC is still the biggest but with a decline in terms of percentage. If you look at the product, the TPS has been the market – among the strategic products, TPS has been on the market for the longest. So TPS by definition we’ll expect to be the highest in terms of a revenue contributor.

James Fawcett

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Got it. And then last question from me is you’ve mentioned security. Once again this quarter it seems like you’re feeling pretty good about that. How are you – like what’s the up-to-date response and the like on security and the ability to sell security independently of the rest of your ADC portfolio, or how much of security sales are really still very much tied to an ADC sale?

Lee Chen

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

If we look at our strategic customers, almost half are sales to our existing customers, half our new customers. So with an existing customer, we continue on LAN [ph] and expense strategy. If you look at one of the marquee customer in Japan, into the first quarter they deploy our CFW – they like to deploy our CFW solutions in addition to the ADC, CGN, CPS. So it’s half and half. They like the fact that we have a centralized management platform managing all these solutions. They also like the fact we use A10 [ph] operating system and it makes it easy for the operator to manage.

James Fawcett

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Got it. And then did you – can you just in terms of that split of 50-50 that you just mentioned, has that been changing at all or has that been fairly consistent over the last couple of quarters?

Lee Chen

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Over the last several quarters, it’s very consistent. Half of the customers are new, half customers are the existing customers taking on new solutions.

James Fawcett

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Lee Chen

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Jim.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. The next question comes from Alex Kurtz with Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

Alex Kurtz

Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking a couple of questions here. Your competitor talked about some weakness out of Europe around Brexit-related issues. And I was just wondering if you could give us an update on what you’re seeing around deal flow out of that region? And then the second question is just sort of your expectations around APJ service provider and requirements from that vertical and that region to drive your Q3 and Q4 internal assumptions?

Lee Chen

Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

So maybe I’ll just start it and then Ray will be adding something about EMEA. So we did not experience changes here in the ADC market globally. It’s very stable. It’s a slow single digit growth. The good thing is that our security and cloud portion are growing much faster in ADC. Ray, do you want to comment --

Ray Smets

Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

Yes, I’ll just add a little bit on the EMEA front. You may recall we had a bit of a reset of our business in EMEA last year. It affected us all through 2016 and that was contributing – the contributions there were from a number of different factors. But we made some changes and we’re really beginning to see those changes take hold. And actually from a Q1 perspective, we’re pleased with the results. So we’re not immune to some of these macro situations out there but we’re watching them very carefully. But we are listening to our competition and watching what we’re seeing out there to see if there’s any impact for us. From an APJ perspective, you’re right. We had some very good performance in APJ. Part of it was catalyzed by some very strong service provider penetration. These are new service providers and existing service providers expanding into our core product line. We’re using cloud and security as our catalyst in those marketplaces and we’re seeing some very strong competitive wins there. So from an APJ perspective, we do anticipate service provider to be a catalyst for growth in that region.

Alex Kurtz

Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Lee Chen for any closing remarks.

Lee Chen

Analyst

Thank you and all of our shareholders for joining us today and for your support. Thank you and good day.