Earnings Labs

Commvault Systems, Inc. (CVLT)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, May 5, 2015

$98.02

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Q4 2015 CommVault Earnings Conference Call. My name is John. I'll be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. Now, I will turn the call over to Michael Picariello.

Michael Picariello

Management

Good morning. Thanks for dialing in today for our fiscal fourth quarter 2015 and fiscal 2016 earnings call. With me on the call are Bob Hammer, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer; Al Bunte, Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Carolan, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made during this call, including in the question-and-answer session at the end of the call may include forward-looking statements including statements regarding financial projections and future performance. All of these statements that relate to our beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions regarding the future are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are based on our current expectations. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties such as competitive factors, difficulties, and delays inherent in the development, manufacturing, marketing, and sale of software products and related services, and general economic conditions. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties affecting our business, please see the risk factors contained in our annual report in Form 10-K and our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and in our other SEC filings, and in the cautionary statement contained in our press release and on our Web site. The company undertakes no responsibility to update the information in this conference call under any circumstance. In addition, the development and timing of any product release as well as any of its features or functionality remain at our sole discretion. Our earnings press release was issued over the wire services earlier today and also has been furnished to the SEC as an 8-K Filing. The press release is also available on our investor relation's Web site. On this conference call, we will provide non-GAAP financial results. A reconciliation between the non-GAAP and GAAP measure can be found in table four accompanying the press release posted on our Web site. This conference call is also being recorded for replay and is being webcast. An archive of today's webcast will be available on our Web site following the call. I will now turn the call over to our CEO and President, Bob Hammer.

Bob Hammer

Management

Thanks, Mike. Good morning everyone, and thanks for joining our fiscal fourth quarter and FY'15 year end earnings call. I want to begin the call by describing the progress on our business transformation, and then I will provide an overview of our Q4 results and the outlook for FY'16. Brian will follow that with a detailed discussion of our financial results, including additional color on our FY'16 outlook. I will then conclude the call with an overview of the industry, our products and technology, and plans to improve sales productivity. Regarding our business transformation, we've made significant progress towards our business transformation and operational performance objectives. We've been describing this business transformation, which we call, "Commvault Next to You," over the past several quarters. This transformation was in response to significant technological changes in the industry, and in more complex competitive landscape. Importantly, the key foundational elements to reposition and strengthen CommVault's position in the market are now in place. Over the past quarter we have introduced new leading products, including products that separate our core solution sets from the platform, as well as new packaging and pricing models. These introductions were led by our new business units' structure. In addition, we have significantly enhanced our core data protection platform functionality and pricing, increased distribution leverage via new and existing distribution partners and channels, added key leaders and new capabilities in critical functions. We initiated the beta program for our next-generation platform, and reinvigorated our overall marketing approach, which includes implementing new digital and outbound marketing lead generation capabilities that are driving our pipeline, and re-branding the company, including the introduction of a new brand and logo, unveiled yesterday at Microsoft's Ignite conference, which you can experience firsthand on our Web site. These transformation initiatives better align us with the…

Brian Carolan

Management

Thanks, Bob, and good morning everyone. I will now cover some key financial highlights for both the fourth quarter, and full fiscal year 2015. The strengthening of the U.S. dollar compared to foreign currency has had a significant impact on the results for the quarter. On a constant currency basis for the quarter, total revenues were up 2% sequentially, and year-over-year. Software revenues were up 1% sequentially, and down 5% year-over-year. From an earnings perspective, on a sequential constant currency basis for the quarter, EBIT margin was 14.4%, and EPS was $0.30. For the full fiscal year, on a constant currency basis, total revenues were up 6% year-over-year, software revenues were down 1% year-over-year. EBIT margin was 17.8%, and EPS was $1.48. Now, moving on to as-reported revenue results that have not been adjusted for FX movements; on an as reported basis, Q4 total revenues were $150.7 million, representing a decrease of 4% over the prior year period, and 1% sequentially. For the full fiscal year, total reported revenues were $607.5 million, representing an increase of 4% over fiscal 2014. For a quarter, we reported software revenue of $70.1 million, which was down by 11% from the prior year period, and down 2% sequentially. Revenue from enterprise deals, which we define as deals over $100,000 in software revenue in a given quarter, decreased by 12% from the prior year period, and was up 8% sequentially. The number of enterprise deals decreased 13% year-over-year, an increased 8% sequentially. Our average enterprise deal size was approximately $250,000 during the current quarter, compared to $248,000 in the prior quarter, and $245,000 in the prior year period. Americas, EMEA, and APAC represented 64%, 25%, and 11% of total software revenue respectively for the quarter. The sequential increase in Americas' software revenue was 11%, while…

Bob Hammer

Management

Thank you, Brian. I will now provide our perspective on the market, and an update on our new product introductions, and on the plan for improving the productivity of the sales organization, particularly in the Americas. The market is undergoing unprecedented rapid changes driven by the cloud and mobile technologies. These shifts in the market are demanding changes to how applications are developed, and how data is captured, secured, indexed, stored, and protected. These changes are also driving significant transformations of the IT infrastructure, compute network and storage. Customers are demanding that the data be able to move seamlessly and securely from datacenter or mobile device to the cloud and from the cloud. This necessitates ubiquitous cloud data translation capabilities and new security enhancements for direct user access and multi-tenancy. It is also driving the change to managing secure objects of data versus volumes of data. These changes are accelerating the demand from what comprehensive holistic ways for companies to deal with legal and compliance requirements since data now resides in so many separate data repository such as clouds, geographically disbursed data centers, and mobile devices. These changes require new technologies for disaster recovery and for the test and development of new applications. Customers also want production-ready data copies that are always available, and which should not have to be restored from backup copies. Cost reduction is always the key objective for our customers. They are reducing costs by deploying private and public clouds and open systems that utilize much more cost commodity storage that has been to agnostic. They are also deploying converged infrastructures and by implementing software defined infrastructure elements. In addition, as the pace of technological change accelerates, the industry is also seeing the increasing emergence of new point product to solve those specific problems. Most importantly,…

Michael Picariello

Management

Operator, can you please open the lines for questions?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will not begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question is from Aaron Rakers from Stifel.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

Yes, thanks for taking the question. I actually have two, if I can. First of all, Bob, I just want to understand the commentary on a forward basis. I think in the press release you had noted that you'd expect the second half revenue growth to improve substantially on software license. Brian, I think you said a return to historical growth rates. Substantial seems like a little bit of a down tick relative to the prior commentary of historical. You also say that you're comfortable with where the street fits [ph] which I think is about 13% software license revenue growth. I'm wondering if you could help us understand a little bit the context of substantial versus historical, and also, are you saying that you're comfortable with the software revenue expectation that currently the street has for the second half of the fiscal year?

Bob Hammer

Management

Those are really good questions, Aaron. So I mean, you can see, now number one in this transformation, I just want to reinforce. The market is going through these radical changes, and the cloud and mobile are driving it, and they're driving changes in where value is derived, and how we monetize our products. We began this transformation going back about 18 months ago, beginning the platform which we had desegregated from a core into standalone solutions, bringing new products to market that better align for our -- I'll call it, high value monetization, align with how you can drive products with the channel, enable our enterprise customers to deal with these critical issues as they transform and bring both cloud, mobile, and business analytics solutions into their enterprises. We had to make really substantial changes to the company. The key point I made on the call is that most of those are in place now, as far as the products and the organizational structure. What's going on over the next couple of quarters is really driving distribution of those solutions into the market, because we've gotten really good response from the market in terms of market fit and competitive position. The odds are really high that we're going to achieve our -- and the third bullet here is that we reorganized the Americas in terms of getting the maximum use of our resources, and enable all sales teams to have really rich territories so they can hit their quarter objectives. And now, we're adding capacity, so it's product, distribution, and capacity additions that drive revenue growth. The odds are really high that we're going to get strong license revenue growth in the second half as we enable our distribution channels, and position these products in those channels. The message that's different from prior quarters is the FX, number one; and two, in realigning our pricing models to the market, we're going to see some negative impact on our maintenance stream [ph]. License revenue outlook looks good for the second half, and the growth rate on services revenue is going to be lighter because of our low license revenue growth in FY'15, and realigning our maintenance pricing models with the market. So in summary, the second half should be strong, particularly in the license revenue side, offset by a weaker than prior forecast on the services line. That was [indiscernible] and the second question was? Sorry.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

I think when we also look at -- you made the comment on sales capacity. One thing that we've recently has been some uptick in your open job listing. It looks like your sales and marketing expense were about 18% in fiscal '15. I'm just curious, are you still facing any challenges within the organization around churn? How do we think about the growth of sales and marketing expense relative to revenue this year, and I keep going back to the comment that this is more about productivity expansion, but we're still seeing the hiring be a necessity in the model. So I'm just trying to understand the trajectory of that hiring, whether or not you got any challenges internally in terms of the churn?

Bob Hammer

Management

Well, the bulk of the hiring in marketing is behind us, there will be some incremental, but not a lot. In sales, we did almost no hiring in the Americas, net hiring in the fourth quarter, as Ron Miller and the team realign those -- the structure in sales territories. We differed that hiring, actually, for more than a quarter. Probably for four or five months, not that we didn't do any, but we cut it way back, and now we are hiring, and particularly in the Americas, but also internationally to set us up for the second half of FY'16 and FY'17, so that's going on. On a relative basis, relative to FY'16, the increase of marketing expense will be lower, and the increase in sales expense net-net would be, I think, similar.

Aaron Rakers

Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Jason Ader from William Blair.

Jason Ader

Analyst

Thanks, hi, guys. Obviously, a massive amount of change going on at the company, and I think, Bob, you framed it that way. Good to hear about the VM products doing well. Can you give us any more evidence of the turnaround in real concrete terms, some of it could be anecdotal, any specific products, things that are going on inside the company that point to the early signs that things are turning around. Then maybe some color on the funnel, and to the sales force morale.

Bob Hammer

Management

Okay, that's a bunch of questions, but I think the keys here are on the -- from a product standpoint, getting our profit [ph] position, we've gotten extremely strong response from our channel and strategic partners, and these are the high velocity partners in the channel. This is from their CEOs on down [ph] who have committed substantially to complement [ph] growth in this going forward; that wasn't there before, there are new programs. We've gotten significant uptake from some of the big strategic partners out there, particularly in the cloud, the big cloud providers. We've have initiated combo programs that are -- where there are mutual programs tied to their channel partners themselves and ourselves to drive new cloud-based solutions into the market. It's a good response from the channel. In general, good response from strategic, and what we're seeing from the customers is a pretty significant shift in what they're looking for in terms of their data protection technologies, particularly in the areas of compliance, and legal, and business analytic. As these infrastructures get a lot more complicated, the company is having real difficulty automating their processes tied to nothing like core data protection, but now legal and compliance, and Always, may want to jump in here and expand on this, because we're seeing this as a trend that's accelerating right now.

Al Bunte

Analyst

Yes, in fact, I was just going to interrupt you, but thank you. Yes, I was going to say, Jason, particularly taking with a number of accounts, and this is myself and Bob talked probably a couple of dozen accounts just during the last couple of months, but the prevailing need especially an enterprise coming in, as Bob said, is one, RTO or recovery time objectives, and two, really in scale and size and as he indicated [ph] complexity of the operation. Our full suite, all the investments we've made in the operational side, be it through our cloud offering, through our managed service provider offering, our enterprise account is all really, really resonated. It feels like it's bright on the money particularly for enterprise. It tends to also be very unique there from a competitive standpoint. We don't see anybody doing like functionality in size, so to speak, in a lot of these capabilities. And then, as Bob said, if you take it beyond recovery capabilities in the cloud solutions, be at dev [ph] test or DR; take into compliance of archive capabilities, again, the automation and the ease of going from one new space to another just form a policy perspective tends to really resonate.

Bob Hammer

Management

That functionality resonates extremely well with both Microsoft and Amazon as well, Amazon AWS, as we bring these solutions to market. I think one way I would summarize it, in the fall of 2013, and I keep repeating this but it's a fact, we said we had fundamentally changed our products pricing and distribution. We had changed the fundamentals of the company going forward. And that was a concept, and now it's a reality, and now we've disaggregated the platform, and that was not easy. So we separated a lot of the high value functionality from the core platform, and basically changed the pricing of that platform along with that and then we had to change distribution as we shifted from Dell and we had to move to the cloud, we had to make massive changes to our whole distribution network. And we've got that in place. The objective now, Jason, is to take all of this and now drive this into revenue and earnings. And what I said on the call, our confidence is way up, because all the pieces are now in the hand, but it will take us about two more quarters, and then we think that we can build -- you were asking about funnels, we are building funnels, but it's going to take us about until the end of September to get the funnels with these new products, and then just to fusion [ph] models to the levels we want to drive substantial software license revenue growth. That is all in motion now, and it's not theoretical.

Jason Ader

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Srini Nandury from WR Hambrecht.

Srini Nandury

Analyst

All right. Bob, Brian, thank you for taking my call, I really appreciate it. Actually hopping out to the same question from Jason; can you talk about your business visibility, now you have your prime products and you have personal product and how do you look -- when you come up with a guidance, are you in assemblance [ph] of guidance as you just did on the call, and how should we be looking at it?

Bob Hammer

Management

Well, I think what I've said is that all the stuff is in place but as we looked out, I've been pretty clear our visibility for the next two quarters and -- Brian, did flat it down for a Q1, that's where it is. But the way we're building momentum underneath that, the odds are highly likely now that we can achieve our objectives and have a -- put this business on a -- what I call a new sustainable model. But it's not there yet, I mean, but the pieces are there. But the funnel, the cadence, the predictability of that new model, it's coming together, it's not where we want it where I can say with assurance, hey, we're going to hit 20% license, we're having a growth like we did in our prior model, and we can predict it quarter-to-quarter, and we had 10 years of that predictability. It's not there yet. Are the odds that will be there? Yes, we are internally -- you can probably get the idea from the call, our confidence keeps going up because we put the pieces together, but we are not at this stage yet where we can say confident to you that, hey, we've got the funnel. We know what the conversion rate looks like, and we can tell you what the numbers are going to be two to three quarters after this we can. But there's a lot of momentum happening underneath that. But until we translate that into high revenue growth and earnings [indiscernible], but their heads are pretty good right now. And I'm not making a big deal about our next-generation platform, but there's a substantial -- well, we'll get a substantial uptick in the second half in that as well. And that's coming because that's in beta and that's doing well. So, this is kind of where we are.

Srini Nandury

Analyst

All right, thank you so much, gentlemen.

Bob Hammer

Management

Yes, okay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Abhey Lamba from Mizuho Securities.

Abhey Lamba

Analyst

Yes, thanks. Well, Bob as you pointed out, it's been more than a year since we started seeing these issues, and you highlighted a lot of things that you've done internally that could help in second half. And they all make sense. Can you talk about what are the general factors in terms of what you're seeing from customers, partners, and competitors that gives you confidence that all the things that you're lining up will actually yield results in the field?

Bob Hammer

Management

Yes, I think I haven't named these partners, but they're programmed in place now by the major high velocity channel partners in the field. And we have people in there, there are programs, and probably, again, I'm not going to name the partner, but the largest high velocity partner. We've got people, programs, and they are committed to substantial growth. I mean that's happening as we speak. The second one is basically a partnership with them, one of the major cloud providers and ourselves to drive solutions into the marketplace as if the third. We've got an increase in the step-up from the -- I'll call it the more independent cloud providers, and we have -- without all the enablement in place, the channel, a number of those 500 accounts that are new, come from our standard reseller channel. And there's an area where we've got lot more work to do. So I would say in terms of hard data, the high velocity channel partners, for sure. The enterprise sales teams and the solutions are in place and will drive -- those will drive including some of our new strategic partners. On cloud provider, we continue to build and expand our partnerships in the cloud with some major strategic partners who have recently committed to CommVault, and now we strengthen our channel organization globally, so we can get more leverage from the channel, and we've got the product to do that. So I mean it's -- the financial results in are pretty and we don't hike them. So internally we're feeling pretty good about the business. I mean fundamentally, probably a strong -- what we're building now is going to be stronger and more sustainable than what we've built before, but it's on a different model and substantially different from the way we've built the company over the past 15 years. And these are -- I'm not messing around with it either, I mean you can tell from my voice and from what we've done, we're here to play to win and make sure this company has a really strong position in the market, and we're not kidding around with it either. And we've got the weapons in our hand to do it, so watch out. That's my attitude on it. So we're feeling pretty good about it right now.

Abhey Lamba

Analyst

Yes, that's very helpful, Bob. My last point is on EMEA and APAC, what is making transition a bit slower over there and what specific steps have you taken on those regions that should help improve performance in the second half? That's it from me, thank you.

Bob Hammer

Management

Yes. Certainly EMEA is a really good solid team over there, and they had a relatively weak quarter in general, and it was exacerbated by FX. I think you'll start to see [ph] the funnel is coming back, and I think that on a relative basis they'll start improving right now. I think we did some things that -- again, same things, strengthening channel. They've already had a good solid core -- the enterprise teams are now given expanded product and services that drive revenue there. The appliance program we're in EMEA is off the ground. So I think they're in pretty good shape and are making some additional changes in APAC over the next month or so. That's in motion right now. And we should have with one of our strategic partners in APAC a new agreement signed that's pretty substantial. So on balance, I think we'll do okay. I think we've set ourselves in a pretty good position. Aaron asked a question, the one area that we've got to step-up right now is hiring in Americas, because we deferred that for over a quarter, and now we got to bring out that sales capacity up to speed. That's our next area of major focus; almost everything else is basically in place.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Andrew Nowinski from Piper Jaffray.

Andrew Nowinski

Analyst

Oh, great. So just a few questions on distributions, I know a number of large channel partners are now engaging with CommVault due to your expanding relationship with Microsoft, so just wondering if you could update us on the traction you're having with Microsoft, and then remind us what percentage of your license revenue is attributable to call providers in general.

Bob Hammer

Management

Yes. I'll be a little careful here, Andrew, but I will say this, that our relationship with Microsoft has become substantially stronger. It's a really good alignment between our technology and what they're doing with Azure. They are engaging with us globally in the field and with their partners. They are doing a lot of work with us internally, and that partnership is just getting stronger, and that's really good both near-term and long-term alignment there. And yes, and they have brought us into some of the major channel partners as well. So that partnership is strong and getting stronger, and that's I think will play a major role going forward in terms of strengthening our distribution position in the market. I'll also mention, if not as developed, that we are also getting good traction with the team we are at Amazon and AWS.

Operator

Operator

And we have a question from Greg McDowell from JMP Securities.

Greg McDowell

Analyst

Great, thank you very much. I wanted to ask about the strategic realignment in maintenance pricing, I was hoping you could just give us a little more detail. For example, will existing customers who don't add any new combo products, will they be potentially renewing at lower rates, or is this more sort of maintenance rates as a percentage of new product revenue maybe being lower because of the repackaging and re-pricing? Thank you.

Brian Carolan

Management

I'll take that. This is Brian. Just like we have to get creative with the re-pricing of our solutions steps and it's been from early success from that we need to evaluate our overall maintenance pricing models both for existing and new customers, and really align them with the reality with what's going on in the market. We believe the changes will not only drive increased customer retention and loyalty. And we have some early examples of that based on a beta program we've done, but also enable us to increase our win rate of new customers. Our goal going into this is to remain cash-neutral as possible, and give our customers more for the same dollar spent the more value, but if not, without risk certainly. So these changes will likely result in a lowering of our maintenance support [ph] prices for existing and new customers in relation to the dollar spent on software. And that's been factored into our outlook for FY'16.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Brad Zelnick from Jefferies.

Brad Zelnick

Analyst

Thank you very much for taking my question. Can you talk a little bit about the factors that will have you finishing this year with more or less term and subscription in the mix and what is your mix assumption baked into your comments for double-digit license growth in the second half?

Bob Hammer

Management

Yes. I think at the margin you will see a shift to more term and subscription, but to be frank, we're managing that internally to make sure from -- as a public company that we achieve our license revenue's growth objectives as reported. In other words, we are not being as aggressive as we could be in that transition and the near-term can make sure we get our revenue or earnings growth in line. There was no question over time that we're doing some very aggressive things on the flipside of that internally to move a lot of our value into the market as a service. And you will see that also begin accelerate in the second half of FY'16. Right now I'd call that an adder to our growth, but my friend, Al Bunte, sitting right next to me here and his team being extremely aggressive in coming up with some very unique service capabilities, and before the end of this calendar year those new capabilities will be in the marketplace. So in summary, we have forecasted some marginal increase in subscription or term for FY'16. By going forward beyond that you will see that whole area accelerate as we go forward.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Michael Turits from Raymond James.

Michael Turits

Analyst

Hey, Michael Turits, thank you. Guys, just trying to get some detail on FX, can you just be a little bit more specific in terms of the quarter in revenues, how much of the shortfall relative to consensus from the change in FX compared to where you were when you announced last quarter, versus how much was fundamental issue, and what those fundamental issues were? And same question on the margin guide for next year, which is below the previous?

Brian Carolan

Management

Hi, Michael, this is Brian. Yes, since the last call, most of our shortfall was related to other issues besides FX. So it is really the mix [ph] on the top line that was driving the bulk of that since the last earnings call.

Michael Turits

Analyst

So what really were those fundamental factors relative to what you saw at that point?

Brian Carolan

Management

Just weaker than expected results particularly in EMEA and APAC.

Michael Turits

Analyst

Okay. And then how about looking into next year since you guided revenues, same growth rate as the street, overall it basically puts the street revenues for next year, but you went from guidance of margins flat to slightly up to 100 to 150 bips down, obviously, again some of that's going to be currency, but how much is currency and then how much of that change the fundamentals, and what are they?

Brian Carolan

Management

Yes. So the majority is a combination of currency and also the lower services revenue growth rates that we are anticipating for next year, that's going to have a dampening effect on overall revenue. So that has accelerated since the last call in terms of our move to new pricing models from a maintenance perspective. But our goal is to still get back during the second half of our historical software revenue growth rates prior to FY'16.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Rajesh Ghai from Macquarie.

Rajesh Ghai

Analyst

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Bob, you talked about a more complicated competitive landscape, I was wondering if you could comment on the potential impact of the launch of these enterprise products in November last year. Secondly, on VDPA, which is I believe [indiscernible], and the trend that we are seeing at the EMC World this year, which is that EMC seems to be getting a lot of backup of data services functionality into the storage arrays and saying that essentially all creates the need for backup software? Thank you.

Bob Hammer

Management

Okay. Clearly it means it had an impact in the market, in the mid market and through that mid market distributors, they have gotten from an admin standpoint they have gotten themselves positioned in the enterprise, not big scale, but position there and they are viable competitor in the market, and they have done pretty well. On the EMC side, in terms of our ability to compete and the things that they're doing in terms of including backup as part of their converged solutions set; I think I have a different perspective on that, I mean clearly your data protection market is being commoditized and being substituted with this base [ph] replication or things like that. But from a customer standpoint and the way this market is going to move and what you need to do with the data, I think that's only a part of the story, and I think we believe that at the end of the day, how data is captured, indexed, and managed is not going to be done through this base replication over the long-term. Mid-term, yes; longer term, I think the technology we are developing and managing -- maybe I can put it this way, you're dealing with massive scale and you can't just be putting data inside, at a box inside an array, because data is moving, you're going to have massive data moving into the cloud, you got data in array, you got data mobile devices, and doing a backup or doing a replication. If you think about a long-term it's just not going to work. It is a key technology for today, but I think if you look at what we're doing with our H-drive which we just launched this quarter is a pretty good indication of that in terms of a new and different way of managing data like our next-generation platform which I just talked about. It's got a much different way of managing data. So I think -- those are good things what EMC is doing for their customers, but I think we have a different view on how this market is going to evolve and the fundamental technologies that we've built to more align with a big scale cloud environment, which makes things lot more complicated because you got your data center, you got your private cloud, you got your public cloud, you have virtualization, and you got containerization coming in. so you got a lot of technologies that need to be dealt with seamlessly and holistically, but if it's for a relatively small enterprise or a large enterprise, and I think -- we have a -- let's just break this way, a different view on how data should be managed in those new emerging types of environment.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street Capital.

Eric Martinuzzi

Analyst

Yes, [indiscernible] for the coming year, it looks like you did not -- there were no repurchases in Q4, what your thoughts are?

Bob Hammer

Management

A good question. So as we have gained more confidence in this transition, another major initiative here is healthcare and business analytics, and what we're doing today and with the new technologies we're going to bring them out to market later this calendar year, it's pretty clear to us that as we go forward that we see more and more opportunity in the business analytics area, and the unique things we can do with the platform we've developed which is unique in the market. This is clearly going to open up opportunities. We've always been a company, by the way that's developed -- 100% of our growth has been organic. And it looks like with the new technologies that we have developed here, we're going to have opportunities in selected areas of business analytics, and then may be some acquisition opportunities. And as we think about creating shareholder value, we think it would be prudent and smart on our part to keep our powder dry, because the odds as they're opening up as we can move to this year are high. And we think that would be a better use of creating value than share repurchase business, it doesn't mean we won't do share repurchases by the way, but I think our point of emphasis and priority is going to be more on building the company for longer term growth, and some of that will be in unique, I'll call it, business value-added solutions in the business analytics area is likely over time.

Eric Martinuzzi

Analyst

So some more tech [indiscernible] or more kind of a bigger footprint?

Bob Hammer

Management

No, I think it's -- no, I think this would be selective niche acquisitions that we can add to our platform in certain markets, and healthcare is certainly one of them, and we -- I've mentioned it on the call, but we have launched our healthcare platform, and we're going to be expanding that as we move through this year. We're getting good traction on that, and that's going to become a number one as our third largest vertical today. We're making a big investment there and we're expanding partnerships there. And there's big opportunity in that market, and we've got a good leader driving it for us. So I think there would be some good opportunity for us to tuck in some analytics capability in that market and some others as we move forward.

Eric Martinuzzi

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We have a question from Philip Winslow from Credit Suisse.

Siti Panigrahi

Analyst

Hi, this is Siti Panigrahi for Phil. Bob, I wanted to ask about overall market, I mean you talked about some of your internal challenges that's impacting CommVault's growth, but if the market is doing well in terms of demand, who is winning, I mean gaining share in the market in your vision?

Bob Hammer

Management

Well, gaining share, you've got -- none of our large competitors are gaining share. You had just a massive shift in this market on the core data protection market, some of it have gone to dis-replication, some has gone to [indiscernible], some has gone to converge. But that -- some of it's gone to -- yes, as I mentioned, some of it's gone to the cloud. This is what we are talking about a year and a half ago, I mean you can see the shift, and these are substantial changes. I just went through this on the call, it wasn't -- these were not tweaks of the business, this was substantial changes to our technology monetization models, pricing, distribution tied to these shifts. So yes, there are a number of competitors, smaller ones, cloud that are gaining share in the core, but the market is, I won't say completely wide open, but pretty wide open for these other area, whether it's healthcare, or it's compliance, or it's legal, or I call it inside the firewall mobile applications. So I think you got to look beyond the core. If you talk to a CIO, they are going to tell you that in a big enterprise they want their data protected. So data protection is still important, and in the big companies -- these big deals, they still like to do that on a holistic global basis, the big banks, we had two of the large banks in here recently that wanted all tied together. So data protection -- they need that locked down, but they need compliance, they need legal, they need business analytics, they need all their operations with these more complex environments automated. I mean this whole process automation managed service space becomes more important. So it's a significant shift in the landscape of where the value is going in the market and how do you monetize that to maximize your revenue and earnings growth. I mean it's different. It's taken us a while to put all this together, but we're getting pretty close, but it's a substantial change.

Siti Panigrahi

Analyst

Thank you.

Bob Hammer

Management

Maybe not exciting at your end, but pretty exciting at this end because we got that foundation right there [ph] to build a pretty interesting company going forward, but it's -- and companies that aren't making these mass radical changes end up where we are right now, where you spill out your revenue and earnings growth, but the market has got massive potential in front of us here if you position yourself to take advantage of it.