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Box, Inc. (BOX)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, Jun 1, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to Box first quarter fiscal 2017 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded today, Wednesday, June 1, 2016. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following management’s prepared remarks. [Operator Instructions] It’s now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Alice Lopatto of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Alice Kousoum Lopatto

Analyst

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Box’s first quarter fiscal year 2017 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Aaron Levie, our CEO; and Dylan Smith, our CFO. Following our prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after close of market and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. The webcast replay of this call will be available for the next 90 days on our company website under the Investor Relations link, www.box.com/investors. During portions of today’s call, we will be referring to presentation materials posted on our Investor Relations website. We’ll also post highlights of today’s call on Twitter at the handle @BoxIncIR. On this call today, we will be making forward-looking statements, including our Q2 and FY 2017 financial guidance and our expectations regarding our financial results, market adoption of our solutions, our market size, our operating leverage, our expectations regarding achieving positive cash flow and future profitability, our planned investments and growth strategies, and expected benefits from our new products and partnerships. These statements reflect our best judgments based on factors currently known to us and actual events or results may differ materially. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors in documents we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q for information on risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. These forward-looking statements are being made as of today, June 1, 2016 and we disclaim any obligation to update or revise these statements. If this call is reviewed after today, the information presented during this call may not contain current or accurate information. In addition, during today’s call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations with comparable GAAP results in our earnings press release and in the related PowerPoint presentation, which can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to financial measures are on a non-GAAP basis. With that, let me hand it over to Aaron.

Aaron Levie

Analyst

Thanks, Alice and thanks everyone for joining our Q1 FY’17 earnings call. We had a solid start to fiscal 2017. We had strong customer momentum adding more than 5000 new customers in Q1, our largest number of new customers in a quarter. We also had wins and expansions with leading companies like Airbnb, GEICO, Whirlpool and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. We now have more than 62,000 total paying customers. In addition, we continue to improve our already best-in-class customer retention with our customer churn rate improving to just below 3%. These metrics showcase how valuable and essential Box is to our growing global customer base. In Q1, we achieved record revenue of $90 million, up 37% year over year. We also continue to gain operational efficiency and demonstrate leverage in our business model as we move towards our commitment to achieve positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter and in January 2017. Cash flow from operations in Q1 improved to negative $500,000 in the quarter, excluding a one-time litigation settlement. This represents an improvement of roughly $7 million year over year. And non-GAAP EPS was negative $0.18, a $0.10 improvement from last year, well ahead of our guidance. Q1 billings came in at $76 million. As we noted in our last earnings call, we anticipated Q1 billings to be impacted by a few early renewals last quarter and our focus on annual payment durations versus multi-year prepayments. Lastly, as we’re becoming a more strategic investment for our customers, larger transactions are shifting towards later in the year. Looking ahead underlying demand for Box remains very strong and our competitive position in the market has never been better. Coming off of Box World Tour where we engaged with thousands of customers and prospective clients, we created record sales pipeline in…

Dylan Smith

Analyst

Thanks, Aaron. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today. As Alice noted, you will find GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations in the slides that are available on our website. The financial measures I will be discussing on this call are non-GAAP unless otherwise noted. We had a solid start to fiscal 2017 with both revenue and non-GAAP EPS coming in well ahead of our guidance as we continued to converge on becoming free cash flow positive in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year, roughly nine months from now. As Aaron noted, this quarter we drove record revenue of $90 million, up 37% year over year while adding more than 5000 new customers. Billings came in at $76 reflecting a number of factors that we discussed on our last earnings call and which I'll revisit in further detail later on this call. Deferred revenue grew to $172 million, up 39% from a year ago, demonstrating strong visibility and health in our future revenue. We achieved these top line results while driving significant leverage in our bottom line metrics. We delivered non-GAAP EPS of negative $0.18, an improvement of $0.10 from a year ago and well ahead of the high end of our guidance range. Our cash flow from operations was another highlight, improving by roughly $7 million from Q1 of last year to approximately negative $500,000, excluding $3.8 million in settlement costs associated with our previously announced OpenText litigation. These results demonstrate solid progress toward becoming free cash flow positive as well as the inherent leverage in our business model. Our best-in-class churn rate is now slightly below 3% annualized, an improvement of more than 100 basis points year over year. This reflects our increasing focus on enterprise customers who tend to have lower churn rates as well…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We’ll take our first question from Phil Winslow with Credit Suisse.

Philip Winslow

Analyst

Thanks guys for taking my question. Just want to drill in to the deal size metrics that you talked about. Obviously the customer adds at 5000 is particularly strong for Q1. But then you talked about, obviously the deal metrics year over year 100K deals et cetera, coming down, I understand that it was a strong Q1 but maybe give us some more color, sort of what you're seeing, and then in the context of the full year outlook, sort of any change on these larger deals which I'm assuming are more up-sell deals in that new versus what you're expecting, call it, three months ago?

Aaron Levie

Analyst

Yeah. So this is Aaron. I think as you saw in the performance of Q4 in terms of the big deal metrics that we provided, certainly the business is becoming a little bit more seasonal for our larger transactions, Q1 was much more of a building period for us in terms of building pipeline across sort of all segments of the business and all regions. We are -- we did build a very very strong record pipeline in the quarter, including many many large deals that are in that mix that are -- the seven-figure level. And in terms of the 5000 new logos, a lot of this has been driven by innovations we've been working on for our online sales segment. So getting much more efficient about how we go out and acquire and bring on consumers in the sort of SMB segment but also giving us a lot of future up-sell customers in the mid market segments and beyond. So I think you'll see certainly bigger numbers be put up in terms of our larger deal sizes in Q2 and beyond.

Philip Winslow

Analyst

And then just one quick follow up. I think you guys talked about exiting -- last fiscal you were at 44 million users, and I think it was 12% paid. Just wondering if we get a sense for where that was exiting Q1.

Aaron Levie

Analyst

Yes. So we have 46 million users and about 13% of those users are now paying.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take the next question from Rob Owens with Pacific Crest.

Rob Owens

Analyst · Pacific Crest.

Good afternoon. And thanks for taking my question. A couple of things. First off, just around strategic partnerships. Can you talk about how much of your business is partner influenced at this point, maybe share how IBM is ramping as well?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Pacific Crest.

Yes. About 20% of our business is partner influenced and that’s through a mix of partners including AT&T and IBM. With IBM we saw again kind of record pipeline get created in the quarter because of IBM's customer base, obviously large enterprises and governments, a lot of those deals are much larger which means that the deal cycles do take a bit more time and we don't close those transactions within the quarter of the pipeline being generated. But we are seeing a tremendous amount of pipeline being built up with them, especially in international markets where we don't have as much of a presence on the ground. So we're seeing significant traction in really throughout Europe and that was also one of the big drivers for our Box Zones partnership with them. So the ability to use the IBM cloud for storing data in places like Germany, Ireland and other key markets that they operate in. So I think you're going to see pretty significant and healthy traction in a lot of international segments as well as larger businesses in the U.S. as well throughout this year.

Rob Owens

Analyst · Pacific Crest.

And on the product fronts, realizing Box Zones is probably too new to really talk about. Some of the other capabilities you haven't had in the market for a while, whether it be Box KeySafe for some on that front, governance capabilities, can you talk about your success with those, what attach might look like at this point and then is pricing still holding for these up-sells? Thanks.

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Pacific Crest.

Yes. Pricing is still holding for the up-sells. We are still seeing about a 15% to 20% uplift in the ASP when the product gets attached or more. And we have nearly 300 customers that are on Governance right now. So we're still seeing a pretty strong growth with customers adopting Governance. The sales cycle for our add-on products is still something that we're figuring out. For each individual product there's a slightly different kind of sales dimension that Zones versus Governance versus KeySafe experiences but overall that mix of products is creating an incredible amount of differentiation against our competitors and providing significant uplift in the customers that elect to purchase those products.

Dylan Smith

Analyst · Pacific Crest.

This is Dylan. Just as a note, in Q1 both of the products, Aaron mentioned, KeySafe and Governance provide an uplift of more than 30% in the customers who deployed those products in the quarter. So we've been really pleased at the value that those products continue to provide to our customers and the uplift we're seeing as it relates to price per seat.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from Mark Murphy with JP Morgan Securities.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

Thank you very much. So Aaron, I wanted to ask you about the payment of the FedRAMP certification. What do you think it means for your business prospects with the federal government? And I'm wondering if you see potential for a blanket purchase agreement, do you see indications of interest or engagement from any of the agencies that are outside of the DOJ? And then I have a couple of follow-ups.

Aaron Levie

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

Yes. So one of the key elements of our certification is that it came from the Department of Defense which is -- which obviously has some of the highest degree of scrutiny around cloud platforms and technology that they use. So this is specifically from their information services organization. So we're very happy about who actually did the certification and who did the sponsorship. That is creating a strong ripple through at least the U.S. government, federal government agencies. But other state and local government agencies look toward the federal government standards for adopting cloud technology. So the pipeline has been growing. We actually have been working on building the pipeline even in advance of getting FedRAMP certification. FedRAMP certification is the actual ability to go transact with those agencies in a compliant way. So we're seeing really really strong traction in both civilian and defense agencies in the U.S. government as well as international agencies, so in the U.K. and beyond where we’re continuing to see strong traction. So we think this will be a key vertical for us and we'll certainly be sharing some of the results of this in future quarters once we get some of these bigger deals closed.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

And Aaron, to what do you attribute the record pipeline growth that you mentioned in Q1? I'm just curious if there was something unusual about it and does that include any – does that include seven-figure deals that you think could be -- would be likely to close in Q2? Do you think we'll see some resumption there?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

Yeah, we’re – we can’t give any specifics around on seven figure deals on when they close. But both the reason and a cause for the growth in Q1, we were doing a lot of -- we've been doing a lot of rebuilding on our marketing engine throughout sort of Q4 of last year and throughout Q1 of this year. So a lot of that execution is starting to fire on all cylinders. In terms of sales, the sales team was out in the field, really generating a lot of pipeline. This is a building quarter for us in many respects. We had our Box World Tour which interacted with thousands of prospective customers and existing customers from up-sell and as mentioned around IBM we're just seeing now a lot of that execution start to come to play. So being in the field with IBM with AT&T and others and starting to generate a lot of demand in those conversations. So I think when you put together all of the sort of major drivers of our go-to-market strategy we were executing -- we think in a very strong way throughout the quarter but it was very much a sort of building quarter for us.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

And then Dylan, I had two quick ones for you. The first, I think you ended fiscal year ’16 with 1370 heads. Can you give us any thoughts on the headcount planned for this year, where do you think you would exit the year?

Dylan Smith

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

Sure. So we still expect to grow headcount although in a more metered rate than what we've seen in the past. What I would say and we could talk into the specifics a bit more is from a quota carrying AE headcount perspective before we had talked about sort of similar growth rate to what we had seen last year which was 13% year over year with the majority of that growth being in the field. And as Aaron and I mentioned recently on the call we expect that to be higher than our original target. So that would be an area for growth really building out our field sales organization both in the U.S. and internationally and many of the teams that support that. Similarly there are a lot of really interesting and exciting things we're doing from an infrastructure standpoint to making some investments in our technical operations team as well as continuing to invest in our engineering organization. So overall we would expect our headcount to grow year over year although at a more measured rate than what we've seen over the past couple of years, really making those big investments in the most mission critical areas as many parts of investment -- in many parts of the business we've done a pretty nice job of building a solid foundation and don't expect to see significant increases in headcount or costs in many areas of our business.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

And then the final one, I did want to try to dig into the billings a bit. Do you think, Dylan, would it be reasonable to expect that this 19% normalized billings growth rate in Q1 could create a low watermark for the year in terms of that growth rate and/or any thoughts on just how we should construct our models in terms of deferred revenue and billings for the rest of the year? I don't think -- you haven't issued real granular guidance on that in the past but I'm just wondering if it's warranted given the kind of some of the unusual optics here?

Dylan Smith

Analyst · JP Morgan Securities.

Yes. So what I’d say is that because of really the relative strength of Q1 as I mentioned last year really was by far the strongest adjusted billings outcome that we've ever had as a public company, coming in at 53% and calculated billings at 58%. And we’re using that -- this was the toughest comparison from a year-over-year standpoint. And while that 90% does factor in the renewals, that was the other sort of one time nuance in Q1 that we wouldn't expect to see in other quarters. So while we would expect there to be lower billings growth versus revenue growth for the remainder of the year, we would also expect that spread to be less significant than what we saw in Q1, and I really sort of refer to the revenue guidance that we gave, to get an overall sense of how we are thinking about the growth going forward. And that on a quarterly basis we will continue to give additional color into payment durations and how the different billings metrics are tracking.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from George Iwanyc with Oppenheimer.

George Iwanyc

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

Thank you for taking my question. Just digging into the pipeline again. Can you give us a sense of how you look at your visibility through the end of the calendar year and given the larger deals that you're seeing at this point what a normal seasonality rate would be for the first quarter versus the fourth quarter?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

Yeah. So I say that -- as we mentioned we would expect it to be more back heavy than what we've seen in the past. As a reminder, over the last couple of years we've seen an average of 18% and 34% of our total annual billings fall into Q1 and Q4 respectively and we’d expect that to be lighter in Q1 and stronger in Q4 just given the nature of what some of our biggest growth drivers are. And the other thing I’d note on visibility is in terms of new sales that we make, about 60% of those tend to be up-sells from existing customers and we have a pretty good sense of not just when those renewals are up but also what we usage is in those customers and tend to have a lot more visibility and predictability into when those deals will close. So we're still going to see that quarter to quarter variation that you'd expect to see as an enterprise software company but have a pretty high degree of confidence in that pipeline visibility as we talk through the seasonality.

George Iwanyc

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

And following up on the sales cycles, you talked about the larger deals taking a bit longer to get done just naturally. When you look at your overall sales cycles, are there any macro factors, are they getting longer, are they staying about the same, are you seeing any competitive impact from the prices that Microsoft made for OneDrive, any price sensitivity?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

We're not seeing any changes in terms of the overall length of certain types of deals. I mean certainly we think about larger deployments especially when they are really focused on security, compliance, use cases where Governance might be involved or -- similarly we’d expect as we start selling more into the federal government we might see a longer deal cycle there but on a like-for-like basis we're seeing pretty consistent deal cycles year over year and really it’s just a function of the mix shift is why we tend to see longer deal cycles overall versus where we were a year or two ago.

George Iwanyc

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

And just finally on the competitive factor, are you seeing anything different with the Microsoft relationship?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Oppenheimer.

We're not. No, so not only that’s not shown up in any of the deal metrics that we’re looking at but I’d also highlight that we continue to see very stable pricing in that $9 to $10 per user per month range which continues to be stable and we have pretty strong performance there in Q1 as well.

Operator

Operator

We’ll go next to Melissa Gorham with Morgan Stanley.

Melissa Gorham

Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. So I just want to dig into the billings dynamics just a little bit more. And then specifically related to the duration comment, I'm just wondering if you could give us some sort of guidance on what percentage of your base is currently on annual versus multi-years and then kind of how you expect that to ramp over the next year and over the next few years?

Aaron Levie

Analyst

Sure. So I would say that the combination of customers in dollar terms who are billed for a year or longer is about 70% of our current customer base. The biggest shift and the biggest driver in the payment duration mix that I mentioned is really that shift from standardizing the customers who are paying for multiple years on to one year payment terms. And as mentioned on last call we've tended in the past to see somewhere in the mid to high single digit range in terms of percentage of customers prepaying for multi-years in advance whereas in Q1 we saw that at about 2% and we’d expect to see that type of shift going forward as being the biggest driver of that. And just as a reminder, the reason for that shift is given the strong top line performance that we saw last year and our strong visibility into becoming free cash flow positive, we really wanted to focus our sales team on securing annual billings terms. It is to really void giving discounts associated with multiple year prepayments, as we're really building a business for the long term and I think this is not just the right thing to do to maximize the long term contract value and revenue from our customers but also the right time to do so given our line of sight into becoming free cash flow positive.

Melissa Gorham

Analyst

That's really helpful. And then I just want to follow up on the comments on increasing the quota carrying sales heads. So just wondering if you can provide a little bit more detail on what the driver of that increase in hiring is, is related to you. And maybe you can just reconcile that guidance or that commentary with the outlook for operating margins to improve, where are you seeing improved sales productivity?

Dylan Smith

Analyst

Yeah, so quickly on the context as we are selling more and more into larger enterprises, we're finding that productivity certainly goes up for sales reps when they can put more focus on a smaller number of accounts or named accounts in their territory. So as we are developing a much more consistent and predictable rhythm for selling larger transactions as we've seen in Q4, we want to make sure that we have the right number of people in the field that can go work on the next set of customers, the next set of transactions given the consistency of what that sale cycle looks like. So it's mostly a reflection of how we are seeing the market opportunity. The fact that our deals are getting much larger and that we see productivity going up and we can put more focus for our sales reps while still making sure we capture that opportunity.

Aaron Levie

Analyst

Yes, and with respect to the metrics, I’d add, we’re very focused on improving sales rep productivity. As a reminder, last year we grew that by nearly 10% from fiscal ’15 to fiscal ’16 and we really hire and make these decisions in line with the demand we're seeing and based on the productivity outcomes we're seeing and we don't expect our increased hiring targets to have much of an impact on our rep productivity outcomes which is different from the overall sales and marketing leverage that we're driving in the business. So some of the more major factors that are allowing us to both increase our sales headcount and drive leverage over time is the online sales initiative that we've mentioned, we've been able to take a significant amount of costs out of the business as we focus reps further up market. The pipeline we're seeing and the lift that we're seeing and expect to continue seeing out of many of our channel partners with IBM in particular provide another area of a just way to drive more sales and marketing efficiency. And then finally I’d highlight the freeze of marketing expense where we've really been focused on streamlining those costs as we continue to double down and become more enterprise focused. We've seen that spend as a percentage of revenue drop by 6 points year on year from 14% to 8%. And there are a number of other things we're doing in order to continue improving our operational efficiency.

Operator

Operator

Next question comes from Aaron Rakers with Stifel.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst · Stifel.

Thanks for the question. A couple if I can. First of all, would you mind talking about the gross margin trajectory. I think last quarter you’d talked about the expectation of finding stabilization at current levels but yet we're still down about 90 basis points sequentially. So can you talk a little bit about how we should model that line item through the course of this fiscal year?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Stifel.

Sure. So we think about – and many of the sort of puts and takes we've talked about sort of balancing the continued data center investments with a lot of the operational efficiency improvement and scale that we're seeing in the model, I think net out to being roughly stable for the remainder of this year. So we’d expect this Q1 outcome to be pretty much what you could expect to see for the rest of fiscal ’17 and then over time as we scale -- and we expect to hit a point where we can mitigate those incremental investments and gain leverage in this line as well, by driving efficiencies both in the data center spend as well as the headcount, we'd expect our gross margin to begin trending back upwards some time in the fiscal ’18 year and then to remain in the 75% to 80% range longer term.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst · Stifel.

And then curious of what a materially lower CapEx trend looks like over the next couple of quarters?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Stifel.

Sure. So there was – largely speaking to the impact of the Redwood City CapEx, which was about $35 million net outlay that we saw over the previous – the trailing four quarters, and we wouldn’t expect to see that going forward as in Q1 was really the last part of that outlay, so that would be the biggest driver driving that material change. And then from an overall data center driven CapEx we'd expect that for the year, for that CapEx including capital leases to be in the 3% to 5% range of revenue which are a little bit lower than the sort of outlook that we've given a few months ago in the 4% to 6% range and that’s largely due to some of the efficiencies that we're finding as we continue to scale and build out our infrastructure.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst · Stifel.

And then a real quick final question is on again the quota bearing headcount expansion. You talked about 13% last year, I apologize if I'm a little bit confused -- are you saying that that rate of growth accelerates this year from the 192 that you had, or 192 total quota bearing heads that you have exiting fiscal ’16?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Stifel.

That's right. So earlier we said you could expect to see that headcount growth for AEs being roughly in line with that 13% and now we're expecting to see it a little bit higher than 13%. And just to give a bit more color to break it down, last year we saw about 20% growth in our field based quota carrying AEs and single digit growth in our inside sales force and that averaged out to 13%. And again this year -- just as last year we’d expect the most significant investments as it relates to our quota bearing headcount to be in the field.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Joyce Yang with Bank of America.

Joyce Yang

Analyst · Bank of America.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Aaron, I think if I heard you correctly, you mentioned that there was a Fortune 500 customer that increased deployment of 10,000 seats while rolling out Office 365. Can you talk about how the customer came to make that purchasing decision and kind of in which department were those seats deployed?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Bank of America.

Yes. So that example is actually much more indicative of a broader trend where -- what we're seeing is Office 365 is incredible for doing things like online Office document editing, mobile device security, moving your email to the cloud but fundamentally customers still need a best-in-class content management and collaboration platform when using Office 365. So what we're finding is because of our integration with O 365 across Outlook and Office, on the web or on mobile, customers are actually increasing their utilization of both Office 365 and Box because of that connectivity. So with customers like the commercial real estate company that I mentioned, but also many many others at this point what’s happening is, is Box is now being used for more of the daily collaboration, more of the daily document editing as well as becoming the secure repository for more and more cloud platforms that our customers are adopting. So we believe this is going to be really the start of a much broader trend. Obviously you can imagine all – many of the use cases that come with Office 365 and Box but more importantly being really that center of how content management is managed – content is managed in an enterprise across Slack, Salesforce, across Office 365, any of the applications that our customers are using. So that’s really the value add that we're offering with O 365 deployments.

Joyce Yang

Analyst · Bank of America.

So areas in companies where they're going to the cloud –

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Bank of America.

Yes, completely horizontal, so across every job function within the organization.

Joyce Yang

Analyst · Bank of America.

And just to follow up on that, what kind of – the 5000 customer adds, very impressive, and I'm curious to learn more about kind of what drove that strength versus say last year in Q1 you added a lot less customers, and kind of do you see change in environment in which these small medium businesses are approaching cloud and cloud storage? And also on top of that, what were the catalysts for companies that added – for some of the expanded deployments like Airbnb and Whirlpool?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Bank of America.

Yeah. So actually last year is probably where we laid the foundation for this customer win where we've been doing a lot of improvements on our online sales and in online customer acquisition and transaction technology. So it's been about making it more efficient for customers to come on board on Box with being able to do that completely online in a much higher volume way. So that’s what’s driven a lot of the volume and then of course our continued investment in sales and marketing are just bringing on more and more customer logos. So that’s the difference over Q1 a year ago. In terms of what’s catalyzing customers to expand their adoption of Box, we see a natural rate of the users in these organizations virally adopting the technology. So in many cases we will deploy to an organization maybe 5000 or 10,000 seats but then Box will spread virally throughout that organization which allows us to go do an up-sell just in terms of the number of seats that that customer has. But there are many other cases where at a juncture of the partnership often times a renewal, the customer will decide to deploy Box more in a more sophisticated way across their organization, and that’s where things like Governance or KeySafe or Zones might come into play because that allows customers to move more of their strategic or mission critical business processes and content to Box. So it’s both seat based driven reasons for the customer expansion as well as enabling them to adopt Box for more use cases because of our new product innovation, both of those are driving the upsells of our customers.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Richard Davis with Canaccord.

Richard Davis

Analyst · Canaccord.

Two quick questions. Talking about hiring new reps and things like that, where are you kind of getting them from and what’s their experience level? And then the second question, if you could answer because it would help me explain to people as well. But is there any scenario when your costs go down that you get lower pricing because there’s still kind of an urban myth out there that if your cost of storage goes down this is actually a negative which in my opinion is probably a positive but those two topics would be great? Thanks.

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Canaccord.

Yes. So on the first thing on our sales rep background. We're obviously -- really we're evangelizing in a new market that is disrupting a legacy set of investments. So we look for sales reps that have that kind of capability. Often they've worked at other cloud companies and other SaaS providers but we've found success in people that have worked with a history in document management technology as well. So we've been successful with a very wide array of sales reps. So we're certainly targeting a number of profiles, it really comes down a lot of times to personality, how successful they've been at their prior companies as well as the paths that they've worked in. So those are the factors that tend to drive our sales rep hiring decisions. And then in terms of the cost of storage going down that has unequivocally remained a positive for our business and when Dylan mentioned our move to lower cost to Amazon storage that shows up directly in our lower infrastructure cost from a storage standpoint and has been certainly helping improve the efficiency of the platform.

Dylan Smith

Analyst · Canaccord.

Yes, the only thing I’d add there is that we've been giving unlimited storage to our customers for several years now and so really the value proposition how people think about Box is really disconnected from the underlying cost of storage that we see or that we're seeing in the market. And it’s as Aaron mentioned absolutely a good thing for us and with that savings it allows us to invest in performance, security and all the other functionality that allows us to differentiate ourselves from the competition and certainly the platforms and companies to focus more on a storage based proposition. So that is just one of those – yes, one of those trends have been very positive for us as a business.

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Canaccord.

And if I could just maybe add one more quick thought, the Box Zones architecture was very fundamental to this trend. We basically determined that the competitiveness of underlying public cloud providers was going to help us drive up our efficiency and allow us to focus on more and more technology above the layer of infrastructure. So whether it's being able to deploy in international data centers or being able to benefit from the lower cost of storage that those public cloud providers are creating all of that is both going to drive more innovation from Box, as well as lower cost footprints for our underlying infrastructure over time.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Greg McDowell with JMP Securities.

Greg McDowell

Analyst · JMP Securities.

Great, thank you very much. I want to specifically ask about cash flow from operations as you mentioned it was almost breakeven on an adjusted basis. And as I look at the model from last year, it actually improved from Q1 to Q2. So I was wondering how we should maybe think about cash flow from ops in Q2 and whether or not that number could be positive? Thanks.

Dylan Smith

Analyst · JMP Securities.

Sure. So we actually tend to see cash from ops seasonality really mapping to entrailing our billings seasonality. So we typically see the strongest billings outcomes in Q3 and Q4 and see the strongest seasonally -- seasonal cash from ops outcomes into Q4 and Q1. And so if you’re looking at the cash flow results from last year and that sequential improvement from Q1 to Q2 I think that might be largely related, if you're looking at a $32 million number in Q1, that included a $25 million outlay associated with our move and a letter of credit with our Redwood City headquarters. So while it was $32 million in reported cash from ops we tend to talk about that and speak to it as $7 million negative, which is really the underlying business cash from ops outcome. So we saw an improvement from -- again on an adjusted basis negative $7 million to nearly breakeven, and just as we saw last year and seen in years historically we expected a slightly weaker Q2 and Q3 cash seasonality and stronger in Q4 and Q1.

Greg McDowell

Analyst · JMP Securities.

That's helpful, thank you. And maybe one for you, Aaron. You mentioned bringing on a new chief marketing officer and I was wondering just what the marching orders are going to be for that new chief marketing officer? I mean when we went on -- attended the Box World Tour, certainly Box platform was a key theme and I know that that might be one area of increased marketing. But I was just wondering how you're maybe thinking about that -- the role of that new person?

Aaron Levie

Analyst · JMP Securities.

Yes. I think it's certainly to build on and continue a lot of the efforts that you've seen recently. So we're certainly expanding our footprint and our story globally. So we're going into new markets we serve everything from small businesses to the largest enterprise on the planet. So there's a mix of field marketing as well as digital marketing that gets combined in there. And I think we are representing what a modern enterprise sort of marketing machine looks like in terms of digital marketing capabilities, making sure we can reach customers directly in their region as well as be able to extend our marketing leverage through partners, channel resellers et cetera. So that’s really the job of the of the CMO to take that work and continue to extend it in the future and do it in a best-in-class way.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from Brian White with Drexel Hamilton.

Brian White

Analyst · Drexel Hamilton.

Dylan, I am wondering if you could just comment on the shorter payment duration. Is it something that is proactive that you're driving or is it something that your customers are driving?

Dylan Smith

Analyst · Drexel Hamilton.

Yes, it’s absolutely a proactive measure driven by us in order to maximize contract value as well as normalize the billing terms but most importantly to make sure that we are really getting as much in annual contract value versus having to discount those contracts as it is typically the case when securing multi-year prepayments.

Brian White

Analyst · Drexel Hamilton.

And Aaron, when we look at Box platform, could you give us a little color on what you saw in the quarter in terms of wins or interest levels at customers obviously, this is a huge opportunity for Box. So any color would be appreciated.

Aaron Levie

Analyst · Drexel Hamilton.

So Q1 was the first time that we were kind of on out in the field with the platform story. We attached it to our Box World Tour. We are now doing a lot of in-region customer marketing. So this is the first few months where we are really driving that message directly to existing customers and working with their development teams, their technology organizations so the pipeline is building in a very healthy way. The use cases are representing nearly every single industry but with a key concentration in markets like financial services, health care, life sciences where you have a lot of regulated business processes with a deep need for secure and compliant content management and storage. And those customers are building new digital experiences to go work with their customers and their clients. So I mentioned one example of a bank that is going out and digitizing their customer interactions around how they share documents and how they share files with their clients. Those are the kinds of use cases that will be built on the Box platform and how we can extend both our revenue opportunity but as well as strategic footprint within those customer environments.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from Terry Tillman with Raymond James.

Brian Peterson

Analyst

Hi, this is Brian Peterson in for Terry. Just one quick one from me. Dylan, just wanted to understand the mechanics on the full year revenue outlook. It looks like you’d be by close to 2 million this quarter and your full year guidance is going up by a million. So just wanted to understand what assumptions were baked into that.

Dylan Smith

Analyst

Sure. So as we've talked about our pipeline for larger deals is healthy but given our more back end loaded business model, we're going to be pretty conservative in terms of setting the expectations around the revenue impact of those deals this year. I know that – and as you mentioned the guidance in that range is slightly higher, close to in line with we had guided to before. And so we'll continue to give color into sort of the bookings and the business as it’s developing. I’d say there's nothing materially different about our kind of assumptions that go into the guidance we gave beyond the increasing seasonality that we see in the business that we highlighted as we continue to move further up market. End of Q&A

Operator

Operator

And it appears we have no further questions. I'll return the floor to our speakers for closing comments.

Alice Kousoum Lopatto

Analyst

Thank you everyone for joining us today and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter. Have a great day.

Operator

Operator

And this does conclude today's teleconference. Thanks for your participation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.