Michael Saylor
Analyst · Abhey Lamba with Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead
Thanks, Phong. I’d like to share a few thoughts on my view of 2016 and the year in review and then I will speak about our prospects in 2017. With regard to 2016, I believe we made a number of strives forward in the business. We strengthened our product offering through a series of feature releases each quarter and we also delivered a platform release midyear, which provided a stable platform for our customers to migrate from 9 to 10 on. And that resulted in superior scalability, stability and deployability on our platform and I believe it’s been well received. We extended our product offerings in 2016. On the Desktop, we improved our desktop product dramatically and functionality as the year progressed. And Phong quoted out we got to the point where we’ve had 60,000 plus downloads of the product and we see this as a great tool for us to make entrées into the desktop analytics space and bring more people into the MicroStrategy ecosystem. We also improved our mobile offering in 2016 incorporating support for Version 10.4 into our mobile product improving functionality for offline, online access and parity between Android and iOS devices. And I have anecdotally heard from many of our customers that they are pleased with the improvements we made in the products and it’s made it much more deployable. So, I think we’ve positioned ourself well for a continued growth in mobile going forward. We improved our cloud offering in 2016 moving from what was really a package of technique that we sold as a service at the beginning of the year to the point where we actually have the set of deployment tools, administrative tools and management tools that we can distribute to our customers so that they can deploy our platform on AWS Cloud themselves without our assistance. So we believe we made good strides in moving from cloud as a service to cloud as a product in 2016. And we dramatically improved our Usher offering in 2016 incorporating additional functionality for fast data, batch access to devices, improved communications functionality and mobile application functionality as well. And so, in each of other four area our product offering and our value proportion was materially extended. In 2016, we also upgraded our team. We added new executives in the sales function, the marketing function, the IT function, the technology function, services, support, education and finance and we strengthened our middle management layer in a meaningful fashion. We also added to overall headcount to the tune of our about 10% as Phong has pointed out. And we improved the moral amongst all the employees in the company and we decreased attrition at the same time and we are pleased with these developments. In 2016, we improved our relationships with our customers. We implemented new account management programs and new customer success programs that resulted in many, many constructive actions in order improve our customer relationships that that did and will result in higher renewal rates and greater customer satisfaction and greater customer deployment of our software. We implemented a new customer validation support program sending our professionals on-site in order to validate our platform and that was big success with our customers and I got much positive feedback with regard to that. We upgraded our support management program and we installed new leadership in our customer support function and the result was a dramatic decrease in outstanding cases and also the time to close cases. And in our own customer success process, we implement health check and we collected 8,000 of these health checks and we monitor them and we’ve observed customer stratification ratings moving up as the year progressed in a meaningful fashion, we are happy about that. In 2016, we upgraded our internal information systems migrating to a cloud implementation of Office 365, implementing SharePoint as the common portal for the company, migrating a large numbers of our employees onto the sales force architecture and implementing service cloud for case management tightly integrated into our sales and account management activities in Force.com architecture. And we began to adopt MicroStrategy 10.4 technology, which we only just released with Version 10 and we started building V10.4 for many of our business processes and deploying them broadly throughout the company embracing our own technology in order to MicroStrategy efficiencies forward. In 2016, we implemented a number of new global corporate programs that resulted in improved coordination around the company and more transparency and agility. In sales, we implemented business development, sales planning, account planning, global alliances, services integration and sales engagement program changes and in many cases installing new leadership, upgrading the methodologies, improving the tempo and the effectiveness of those programs. In marketing, we rolled out an upgraded set of field marketing, digital marketing, product marketing and telemarketing program. In technology, we upgraded our product development, product management, quality assurance and advanced technology programs. In service, we refined our support management, engagement management, customer success, service delivery and customer education program. And in corporate, we polished our business planning programs, our employee performance programs, employee development recruiting and the like programs in order to improve effective across the board. Finally, we rolled out three new successful marketing program in 2016. One of them, the Symposium Series, was scaled up from about 15 symposiums to 70 symposiums in 2016 and that’s proven to be a big success and attracting customers and prospects and integrating [indiscernible] message into the field and integrating our field message back into corporate. We also rolled out our Desktop, our free standalone desktop program, and as Phong pointed out, we’ve had tremendous number of downloads of that and it’s open doors for us. And we implemented a free education program called Jump Start, which have been very popular and been well received by our customer base. And so, I think we have a lot to be happy about in 2016. As I look at the beginning of the year status of the company, as we enter 2017, we are coming off of two strong years of financial performance and if we were to measure and evaluate operating results based upon operating income or operating cash flows, I believe these are the two best years in the history of the firm and so they were very, very strong years in terms of operating income and cash flow and they materially improved our balance sheet and gave us a good degree momentum going into 2017. I think we’ve done a decent job managing costs and the capital structure. We’ve maintained our share counts at controlled levels and even thought we’ve been building our headcount, we’ve controlled cost in a number of areas like G&A expenses in order to create an opportunity for us to grow as we look forward in 2017. I’m pleased with the cash generation of the company and I’m pleased with the balance sheet and I think that this is viewed as an asset by most of the customers that I speak with and our partners and having a strong balance sheet I think is very helpful for us, it sends the message that we are committed long-term with the industry and that our customers can make long-term commitments to our platform. We entered the year 2017 the most focused that I can remember the company being in 20 years. We are single minded in our focus on the MicroStrategy platform as a unified platform for analytics and mobility. So starting the year off with a strong balance sheet, strong operating performance, a single platform and these metrics of customer satisfaction moving in the right direction and employee satisfaction, I think, gives us auspicious beginning to the year. As we look at 2017 and our plans and outlook, our plan for 2017 is, first of all, to focus upon our compelling technology solutions. We believe that we have a very compelling enterprise analytic solution and we had some very strong high quality deals with companies in 2016 and even in the fourth quarter where it was pretty clear that they are very competitive and we were chosen because we have the best enterprise analytics offering and I believe that there is still lots of growth available in the enterprise analytics solution space. We are also going to be driving the enterprise cloud message because we’ve got some good reference there, we’ve had some good competitive wins and we are very pleased with the way that our tool set is evolving and we can put this tool set in the hands of our partners and our customers to drive enterprise cloud. In my meeting with customers, I have anecdotally asked them about their agenda for 2017 and one of the more popular things I hear is they are interest in deploying mobile applications. And so, we are going focus upon enterprise mobile in 2017. It’s our third niche tech solution area and we’ve made great strides there and we’ve got a very credible offering in fact, we believe the best-in-class. And then, finally, our last tech solution is enterprise big date and we see lots of our existing customers and prospects looking to do something with big data and they want to do that without sacrificing enterprise scalability and security and maintainability. So our solutions focus is right there, enterprise, analytics cloud, mobility and bid data. We are going to build and amplify our marketing campaigns in 2017 in order to drive this message further and louder. Our Symposium Series will expand from 70 events to 100 events and we will focus and polish those symposiums to get even more productivity out of them. We will continue with our free Desktop campaign and we think if we run it for the entire four quarters, we should see an increase in downloads and again more prospects and leads coming into our system. We will run the entire Jump Start program for four quarters and based upon the success of the last quarter, we believe that will continue to be very popular and a door opener for us. We are going to increase the volume on our digital marketing, so that the MicroStrategy brand and the message is louder and seen in more places. And we built up our teleprospecting team 2016. They are larger, they are better integrated and we expect to drive more results and better results in 2017 using that team. So, the third prong of our plan in 2017 after solutions and marketing is to improve our sales execution and we will deliver some new products to market in 2017, new client products, new server products, new gateway and driver products, these are new software items that our sales team will be able to sell to customers and we believe that those new products will provide us with opportunities. We are going to sharpen and deliver new expert services in 2017 and we believe these will be new items for us to sell in our marketplace. We are going to hone sale techniques, upgrading our tools, our methods and our training to be more precious and more agile. And we are going to integrate some programs to drive closer coordination between our field sales organization, our professional services organization, our technical support organization and our marketing organization and we believe that those things will drive better sales execution. And fourth, we are going to continue to upgrade our underlying systems and our operational procedures in 2017. We are rolling out our new project management system, financial force. We will be upgrading the MicroStrategy community platform in order to encourage more participation and a better output. We will continue with our campaign to distribute MicroStrategy Version 10.4 throughout our enterprise and tie them into every single process. And we are going to move forward with our own internal cloud migration and we are moving all MicroStrategy operations off of our data centers and we are moving them to the AWS Cloud at a more rapid rate than ever before. And we think that these things are going to give us more options and agility. So with that, I’d like to go ahead and open the floor for questions.