Earnings Labs

Pegasystems Inc. (PEGA)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 26, 2014

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Transcript

Rafe Brown

Management

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Certain statements contained in this presentation including but limited to statements related to future earnings, bookings, revenue and mix of license revenue may be construed as forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words anticipates, projects, expects, plans, intends believes, estimates, targets, forecasts, and could and other similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date the statement was made because such statements deal with future events that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results for the fiscal year 2014 and beyond could differ materially from the company’s current expectations. Factors that could cause the company’s results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements are contained in the company’s press release announcing its Q4 2013 and fiscal year 2013 earnings and in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2013, and other recent filings with the SEC. Although subsequent events may cause the company’s view to change, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise since these statements may no longer be accurate or timely. And with that, I will turn the floor over to Alan Trefler, Founder and CEO of Pegasystems.

Alan Trefler

Management

Thank you, Rafe, and welcome to everyone. This call is quite special for me. in 2013, Pega passed many important and exciting record milestones. Accustomed to the tremendous success that clients are having in their use of Pega software while even more significantly for the call, I want to talk to you about Pega’s go forward strategy and we believe can take advantage of a tremendous opportunity. First, let mebriefly reflect on 2013, Pega has now surpassed $0.5 billion mark, this record revenue was achieved despite an environment of great economic challenge in every part of the world and business shake up in almost every industry we serve. In becoming a $0.5 billion business, we achieved record profits earning $1.50 a share on a non-GAAP basis, which was a 38% increase over 2012. We surpassed the 2500 head count milestone, and we achieved a record level of license backlog by adding $58 million of license backlog in Q4. You may remember that on our Q3 call, we pointed out that while the revenue was strong to that point of the year, we had consumed $27 million of license backlog. Not only do we make up that deficit within Q4, we increased total backlog by $31 million on a year-over-year basis. As Rafe will discuss, we saw a lot of ratable business in Q4, which we actually prefer as it contributes to the increasingly impressive committed license backlog numbers over time, and that should improve on quarterly revenue consistency, but please recall that offering both perpetual and ratable models to our clients does increase the lumpiness of profitability as well as revenue as the selling effort and expense stay in the period even though the revenue moves out. The effect can be significant. For illustration, if the full increase of $31…

Rafe Brown

Management

Thank you, Alan. Let me take you through our fourth quarter and year end results starting with revenue. We reporting both GAAP and non-GAAP income which captures among other things the impact to the Antenna acquisition accounting, a full reconciliation of all GAAP to non-GAAP measure is provided in the financial tables of the press release issued earlier today and is available online on our website. As we have discussed in the past, quarter-to-quarter comparison do not generally reflects that underlying momentum of our business due to the timing of when our large transactions close. What is most important from our view is how our business performs and more over trendy on a full year basis, and our future outlook which I will discuss in detail in a momentum. For the full year, 2013 non-GAAP revenue was $511 million up a 11% year-over-year. This includes the contribution of approximately $6 million from Antenna, which we acquired on October 9 of this last year. Most importantly full year non-GAAP license revenue, was $192 million up 17% over the prior year even as we meaningfully increase backlog. Over the course of 2013, we generated a higher mix of license and maintenance revenue relative to services revenue. As a percentage of 2013 full year non-GAAP revenue license and maintenance revenue stood at 69% up from 64% in 2012. In dollar terms non-GAAP services revenue were $161 million in 2013 down slightly from the prior year. As we have previously discussed this change in mix of revenue is consistent with the company’s stated strategy to focus on growing the number of implementations performed by our partners and clients. Looking forward, our strategy of building a vibrant partner ecosystem will lead us to grow services at a slower rate than license revenue which allows us…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). We have a question from Steve Koenig with Wedbush Securities. Your line is open. Steve Koenig – Wedbush Securities: I wanted to ask you, Rafe, to answer a question and one quick follow-up for Alan. In terms of the term contracts, can you remind us of what’s the average length of the term contract and how much of that contract is usually billed upfront?

Rafe Brown

Management

That’s a great question, Steve. Our term contracts do cover a number of different ranges in life. I would say roughly speaking, the average term is approximately three years. Now, we have traditionally billed not that much upfront, they would often be billed either annually or quarterly, and so that you would find that cash flow coming in over the life of the term contract. Steve Koenig – Wedbush Securities: And Rafe, when you say traditionally, it is – does that imply is there any shift or is there upfront (inaudible) to shift how you’re billing that term contract at all, lengthen it perhaps or anything different?

Rafe Brown

Management

Well, in terms of the contract life, there is nothing like a long contract to really help alleviate the renewals anxiety one has, so we’re always anxious to do a longer contract life, so it makes sense economically. And in terms of billing terms, we are looking at – watching cash flow closely and so we’ll take advantage of opportunities to bill upfront when that makes sense for both parties. Steve Koenig – Wedbush Securities: Okay, great. Thanks. And then just one last follow-up for Alan if I may. Alan, I liked your description of the alphabet soup of acronyms, you described some of the silos technology and you’re focused on model driven development. What do you think is necessary in terms of getting that message across to the business buyer? And how is Pega progressing on getting that message out and what are you seeing in terms of your kind of sales cycles as well? Are you still seeing as much in missionary selling that you had in the past, how do you expect that to go?

Alan Trefler

Management

So, relative to the last question, I am expecting at some part, as I said, it’s hard to predict what the point is, but there is a chasm here to be crossed where the market will increasingly turn from the push market to missionary selling to more of a pull market. We see that in some of our customers, and we actually had a recent set of articles about the State of Maine which is now one of our largest customers. There was a customer that actually initiated sort of a whoosh of five different projects last year and self-published this incredible story about how they’ve been getting all this benefit, some folks maybe picked up from the press, from the technology as they try to be customer centric. Sometimes, organizations that are a little more, what I would describe is forward thinking can adopt this more quickly. With organizations that have large traditional IT shops, we often find that there is going to be missionary work, and I think it’s going to be a lot of education there. Now, in terms of getting the word out, the strategy that we have had is one that we’re following. We started a couple of years ago deciding we wanted to engage a lot more partners and develop channels for delivery that’s both to get the word out and also to make sure that we don’t become an impediment to our own success. We’ve done a lot of work around education. I’m very optimistic that having Robert Tas on is going to really help us dial up our marketing which is something that I figure is going to be key. And the successful partnerships with Accenture, the Mackenzie, the Cap Gemini, and some of the folks who are seen by their clients as more sort of leaders than just delivery shops, I think is also a terrific vehicle to be able to get the word out. The best thing we can do and we’re going to see us doing a lot more of this is to get great customer stories into mainstream so that people can see what other fronts are doing. And you’re going to see us continuing to leverage with tremendous customer case studies. I think we can do a lot better at being able to get those flowing through the earned media and the rest of the sort of marketing ecosystem. I’m thinking that that’s going to be one of our big missions for this year. Steve Koenig – Wedbush Securities: Thanks a lot, gentlemen.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Raghavan Sarathy with Dougherty & Company. Your line is open. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: Yes, hi. Good afternoon and thanks for taking my questions. Couple of questions, first one is for Alan. Alan, you mentioned that last quarter, you had number of whales in the pipeline. And then Rafe said that you closed two whales in the quarter. I am wondering whether you closed as many whales as you had anticipated, was there any sort of push out in the quarter? And how does the pipeline look?

Alan Trefler

Management

So, we got about the level of whales than I was – than I was sort of expecting. And we got a couple that are still swimming out there, and we’ve got a few that – as often is the case, sometimes it will turn into a non-whale, so they buy in chunks which I actually think is just fine, as we think about growing our business that in some ways is a lot healthier than being dependent on. I was actually very pleased with the course of the year that we did so well and we’re so balanced throughout the year without the traditional whale – whales alliance. Moving to the pipeline, what I’ll tell us is that we’re going through the ordinary deal reviews. There’s calls that is (inaudible) periodically where the sales force goes through the North America and the European sort of active pipeline. And they have – despite the fact I think they run very efficiently, they’re becoming numbingly long and all the stuff is real. So, we’re seeing that some of the increases to the sales force that we’ve made is starting to create good results. We’re obviously going to have to change some of our internal practices as we grow the business bigger because we cannot have the calls to be able to continue to grow in early based on the number of deals. I would say, I think the pipeline both quantitatively and – is often very important, qualitatively is quite healthy for the year. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: And then, second question to Rafe. So, you mentioned that antenna software contributed $6 million in revenue. So, can you give us some sense for the revenue mix, I presume it’s more weighted towards services. And then what is your expectation for antenna software contribution this year?

Rafe Brown

Management

Well, I appreciate that. As we filed an 8-K in December where we have provided the antenna’s financial statements for the pre-acquisition period and if you look at that, they’re heavily skewed towards services. We do expect them to end up with a healthy lane between license and services in the coming year. And obviously the business is in transformational period of time where we’re making some changes to it and also investing in that technology. So, I think in the coming year, they will still have certainly more services in the rest of Pega but that will change over time. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: Just, so that I understand. So, looking at that filing, you had through September of 2013 $20 million in service, does it also include maintenance or it’s purely service?

Rafe Brown

Management

Yeah. So, their services included both professional service as well as their hosting services. So, some of that lumped together there if you will. I think one way to think about it is their business will be roughly split between license and maintenance at 50% and services, hosting services as well professional services for 50%. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Our next question comes from Mark Schappel with Benchmark. Your line is open. Mark Schappel – Benchmark: Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my call – my questions excuse me. Rafe, you may have mentioned this in your prepared remarks, but maintenance revenue was particularly strong in the quarter. I was wondering if there is any particular reason why that was?

Rafe Brown

Management

That was – we did have a very good maintenance quarter in it’s reflective of the business as a whole growing. I think we did receive one prepayment that allowed us to do that we took as revenue when it’s paid for the quick up to slightly. But, on the whole it is just the run rate of the business that is showing up there, so we feel good about that.

Alan Trefler

Management

I think one of the thing that’s different this year from previous years is we just delivered better results outside of the fourth quarter and a bunch of that ends up reflecting itself in stronger Q4 maintenance. Mark Schappel – Benchmark: Okay, great. And then, Alan I think couple of quarters ago, you thought that the company needed to ramp up its marketing and its message around at the bigger grant, a grant that you just had somewhere in that area. I was wondering if you just give us a few hints or few ideas what we can expect here in the messaging front in the years to come?

Alan Trefler

Management

Well, I think you’ve heard pieces of it this evening. And if you take a look at where we’ve been going, it actually started little bit over a year ago, we went out and hired a Board Member Larry Weber, who was a very well regarding marketing professional, he was the CEO of SanDisk which was the largest PR firm in the world. And Larry has been really instrumental and helping us to rethink what we need to do from both the messaging point of view and composition of the marketing team perspective. From that we obviously been engaged in a search for CMO, we haven’t really want to ramp up too fast until we have the right person on board and done some of the other light work but I feel we’re really now at a point where between now and PegaWORLD, you’re going to see us become very aggressive about positioning this IT of the Build for Change platform positioning the ITA of the digital enterprise as being the things that we empower which everybody we tested on has really liked it, existing customers et cetera. So, I think you should see us once again entering June go from the soft launch which we’ve just gone of these concepts as I spoke about the ultimate soup talked about elementary conservation to what we’re doing with combination of partners some things in the media but also a lot of the messaging that you’ll see coming out of the company. And I think you’re going to find the real heavy duty launch is going to be the second week of June at PegaWORLD. Mark Schappel – Benchmark: Okay, great. Thank you, very much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Raghavan Sarathy with Dougherty & Company. Your line is open. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: Yes, thanks for taking my question again. So, one thing I notice is the deferred revenue software jumped up 55% year-over-year also sequentially nearly doubled. So, the question is the deferred revenue software that you disclosed is that term or perpetual I think historically I assumed it was perpetual. And then what led to the strong sequential increase in deferred revenue software as compared to historical what we are seeing third quarter to fourth quarter?

Alan Trefler

Management

Indeed of that, that revenue is principally term revenue that has – that is already that is they’ve been build and but has not yet come to the income statement as revenue so our deal could go out for a term arrangement and it creates deferred revenue but that revenue would be recognized over the coming months or whatever period of time of the contract. Also, keep in mind there are perpetual deals where with the complexities of accounting you don’t take all of that revenue upfront and we generally call those ratable deals. So, they’re perpetual in nature but that revenue gets spread out. So, with that almost two detailed accounting answer, we saw some big transactions where we were able to get invoices out early in the contract life which obviously is a good thing from cash flow perspective, it helps jump that number out. The way as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I think one of the good ways to look at the business is to look at both deferred revenue which is as to say on balance sheet deferred revenue and then those committed license arrangements that we disclosed in our 10-K where you can really see the details and get a good view of our total backlog change, we even break that out by years to have a good indication of when that income is going to turn into revenue. Raghavan Sarathy – Dougherty & Company: Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Our next question comes from Jim Gentrup – we have a question from Jim Gentrup with Discovery Investment Research. Your line is open. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Good afternoon. Rafe, we talked little bit about the – can you talk little bit about the cash flow and free cash flow projections or expectations for 2014?

Rafe Brown

Management

Yes. So, we don’t give cash flow guidance and we’ve – we haven’t in the past and we’re not given it out this year. We were certainly pleased with our cash flow for 2013 and so that was a good year for us. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Perhaps, you could just give us some – just general color then on how about it might improve in 2014, what needs to happen?

Rafe Brown

Management

Well obviously, our hope is that the business continues to grow, the very nice thing with our business is we – it does produce a nice cash flow as the company grows. And so I think we just keep executing on the fundamentals selling and watching our expenses as we have in the past we would expect cash flow to follow into.

Alan Trefler

Management

I think if you take a look at that page I think 59 is the magic page is here. We show that expectations for cash flow and it’s pretty clearly up year-over-year respective year. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Alan, page 59 on what document? I’m sorry.

Alan Trefler

Management

Well that’s probably…

Rafe Brown

Management

On the 10-K. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: 10-K, okay.

Alan Trefler

Management

If you haven’t seen it, we put it in the rates in the team we put our rate details year by year liquidity expectation of commitments. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Okay. And – thank you for that. And Rafe, did you have a CapEx number expectation for this year?

Rafe Brown

Management

Yes, we don’t break for 2014 we do not break that out. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Okay. And then Alan, I’m just wondering if you could comment on the different verticals and weakness or strength in some of the verticals during the quarter and year for that matter?

Alan Trefler

Management

Government was terrific for the year as a whole and as I kept talked in earlier conversations for several years I had been sort of saddened by the different that we’ll be breaking into government we seem to have cracked the code and are now finding it both the state and federal level and even international we’re having really quite good success there. I think that another one that I was very pretty happy about with healthcare. We gone through some periods of slowness with healthcare I think around the antiquity around the [indiscernible], we’ve now had a number of healthcare providers understand that they’ve got to change what they’re doing. And that puts us some pretty meaningful upticks in relationships and that’s an area where you’re going to see us both investing a lot that can getting a lot of good returns in the healthcare space. So, I think across the board the verticals are generally pretty strong and we got good potential going into this year. Finally I talked about the emerging vertical for us is manufacturing where we really had not established that as a vertical previously second half of 2013 we actually hired a strong leader for that vertical, we broke it out and started creating some emerging materials and I’m really pleased and we’re seeing ongoing use of our technology and manufacturing. We’re seeing customers trying to use us are not just some of the traditional service settings but in even some of the in and out of things machine to machine quite stuff we’ve actually had some interesting developments there. So, I think that’s going to end up being a very good vertical for us somewhere it’s [indiscernible] institute than some of the other businesses that you’d expect to be further along. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: And then the other question – I appreciate that by the way. The ratable deals I think you mentioned Rafe I believe that your 2014 expecting those types of deals to pick up. And I just wonder what gave you that confidence to make that statement and what some of the things if you can talk about that’s you’re doing to move people more to ratable?

Rafe Brown

Management

Sure. And it’s our intention to have them pick up, there is always two parties every contract and if it makes sense for our customers, we’re going to make sure we do what’s right for that arrangement. So, we do have some ability to influence it, we have that preference out there with the way we compensate our sales team is slightly more favorable on a ratable arrangement. So, there is ways we can influence a process that we think should help us gradually shift that mix more towards ratable. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: And finally if I may ask one more, when you even talked about these different verticals Alan if I go back to that for a minute. Are you seeing kind of the first strings being loosened up here little bit more or with kind of all these areas may be willing to spend more or is it still you’re taking market share from the incumbents?

Alan Trefler

Management

Well, we’ve always been in a position where in additions to market share from the incumbents. We can get things live fast enough but sometimes okay from the selves within the same fiscal year. And since 2008 that’s been a big, big part of our ability to grow that we can actually save them enough money, they can start in chunks and then build up to some of these more enterprise digital sorts of platform. And that can be a pretty important model. I think that frankly the recovery is choppy, we see some evidence of improvements in some areas but it’s not something we have a lot of confidence in. Having said that, we haven’t seen growing our sales force faster than our license revenue really if you look at the – if you look at it. And I think it’s time for us to start doing that because there is a lot of accounts still even in the Fortune 300 that we don’t think we’re covering fully. And as I talked about in the past it’s our intention over the next two years to start to open the opportunity and begin to create a much greater level of coverage. We got the partner ecosystems who can help us deliver, we’ve got the real time online training that can help us educate the customers themselves. You’re going to see us I believe with Robert put out a real push around digital marketing and all of these things ultimately should make it possible for us to leverage ourselves so we’re not as constrained as we were say two, three years ago and so that’s when we talk about doing some investments, I think it’s going to be something we can be very successful at opening that opportunity. Jim Gentrup – Discovery Investment Research: Okay. Thanks guys. I’ll get back in queue.

Rafe Brown

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And this ends the Q&A portion of the day. I’ll turn it back to management for closing remarks.

Alan Trefler

Management

Well, I’ll just end by saying that we were pleased with the way 2013 ended. We feel incredibly excited about this new positioning about the ability to go after the other opportunities as digital enterprise. We’ve got a team that’s working really hard and is very engaged. And I would like to thank you all for investing and listening. Have a good night.

Rafe Brown

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for participating in today program. This concludes the program. You may call disconnect.