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Varonis Systems, Inc. (VRNS)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Mon, May 5, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Varonis Systems, Inc. First Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Staci Mortenson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Staci Mortenson

Management

Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today to review Varonis' first quarter 2014 financial results. With me on the call today are Yaki Faitelson, Chief Executive Officer; and Gili Iohan, Chief Financial Officer. After preliminary remarks, we will open up the call to a question-and-answer session. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that would be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws, including projections of future operating results for our quarter ended June 30, 2014, and our fiscal year ending December 31, 2014. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. Important factors such as risks associated with anticipated growth in our addressable market; competitive factors, including increased sales cycle time, changes in the competitive environment, pricing changes and increased competition; the risk that we may not be able to attract or retain employees, including engineers and sales personnel; our ability to build and expand our direct sales efforts and reseller distribution channels, general economic and industry conditions, including expenditure trends for data governance and data security software; new product introductions and Varonis' ability to develop and deliver innovative products; risks associated with international operations; Varonis' ability to provide high-quality service and support offerings; and macroeconomic conditions could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements. These factors are addressed in the earnings press release that we issued today under the section captioned Forward-Looking Statements, and these and other important risk factors are described more fully in the documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the final prospectus from our initial public offering and will be discussed in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission going forward. We encourage all investors to read our SEC filings. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. Varonis expressly disclaims any application or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements made herein. Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. A reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is also available in our first quarter 2014 press release, which can be found at www.varonis.com in the Investor Relations section. Also, please note that a webcast of today's call will be available on our website in the Investor Relations section. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Yaki Faitelson. Yaki?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

Thanks, Staci, and good afternoon, everyone. I would like to start by thanking all of you for joining us today in our first conference call as a public company. We are very excited to have [indiscernible] our IPO on February, we believe the IPO is an important milestone for Varonis and one that further enhances our brand awareness and increases the resources we have available to execute the company's long-term strategy. We are also very pleased with our strong first quarter financial results. The success of our business is driven by multiple factors, including our industry-leading solution, our Metadata technology framework, our large under-penetrated available market and our highly effective and scalable go-to-market model. Turning to the financial highlights of the first quarter. We reported total revenues of $17.5 million, representing a 39% increase over the Q1 last year and a non-GAAP loss per basic share of $0.30. These very strong results are directly related to the investments we have made in the last 2 years to grow our sales teams as well as expand product offerings to address ever growing set of new [ph] features. Gili will walk you through the financial details in a moment, but as this is our first quarter as a public company and some of you may be relatively new to our story, I wanted to provide a brief overview of the Varonis value proposition, our market opportunities and our business model. As I think, you all know, the relentless growth of data gives [ph] big opportunities for organization of all sizes, however, it also creates serious challenges and threats. We believe Varonis is unique among Big Data players because we thrive at the intersection of the opportunity and the challenges. Today's organization spends a fortune on managing, protecting and extracting value from the…

Gili Iohan

Management

Thank you, Yaki. Our first quarter results came in above expectations, and we continued to see strong momentum and demand in the marketplace. Total revenues increased 39% to $17.5 million. Growth was driven by solid new customer acquisitions, increasing penetration within our installed base, a large range of deals and consistently high maintenance renewal rates at over 90%. We delivered license revenues of $8.1 million or an increase of 37% from the first quarter of 2013. Our maintenance and services revenues were $9.4 million and also continue to grow at a rapid pace, increasing 40% compared to the first quarter of 2013. Looking at the business geographically, we saw booked broad-based growth. U.S. revenues increased 39% to $9.1 million or 52% of total revenues. EMEA increased 42% to $6.9 million or 40% of total revenues. And rest of the world increased 26% to $1.5 million or 8% of total revenues. For the first quarter, existing customer, license and first-year maintenance revenue contribution increased to 33% versus 24% in the first quarter of 2013. As Yaki mentioned, we have a land and expand model. We are making investments to increase new customer additions, as well as broaden our relationship with existing customers. Before moving onto the profit and loss items, I would like to point out that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward, unless otherwise stated, which for the first quarter of 2014, excluded a total of $646,000 in stock-based compensation expense. Please note that a detailed GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation can be found in the table of our press release, which is available on our website. Gross profit for the first quarter was $15.4 million, representing a gross margin of 88.4% compared to an 89.3% gross margin in the first quarter of 2013. In 2012 and 2013, we…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley.

Keith Weiss

Analyst

It seems like you guys put up this nice quarter in what was an uneven operating environment for a lot of infrastructure software vendors. Maybe just start out with you could tell us a little bit of that sort of selling environment in particular in the U.S., do you have any trouble with large deals. But overall, sort of how do you find the demand environment to be overall -- out there overall?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

Hi, Keith. We didn't have any concentration with a large deal in the first quarter. It was a fairly regular Q1 for us. It was a strong quarter, and it was -- mainly because of several drivers. The first one is really the relentless growth of data. It carries a big opportunity, but a lot of challenges and risk. And today, we are the only company that can really answer the data access usage and control questions regarding human-generated data. The other thing that we saw is that we really expanded the market opportunity with new product and use-case sales like data migration, restructuring and file sharing and customers are buying more -- to more use-cases and the sales one was really realizing the benefits of the investments that we were making in sales and marketing and R&D in the last 2 years. And I think that Q1 validated our strategy, and we didn't see any particular challenges in any of the markets.

Keith Weiss

Analyst

Got it. And then in terms of those investments in sales and marketing, particularly on the sort of the partner enablement and adding new partners with -- I know this is an important part of the distribution strategy. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you're looking to do in 2014 in terms of the pace of investments and perhaps any targets you have in terms of how many new partners you want to get onboard or is there any sort of metrics or sort of milestones you could lay out for us, too, what you're trying to do on the distribution investments in 2014?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

There is not any particular metrics that we can share. But the key is to bring this partner, which -- these infrastructure partners on board, and we are doing it every quarter and the second aspect is to get them more and more productive. And we are getting a lot of our leads from the channel distribution, and this is what we will keep doing by adding more partners, but also we have several hundreds of channel partners and we also make sure to make them more productive and make sure that most sales people within our partners will participate in selling Varonis.

Gili Iohan

Management

I can add that almost all our business is to channel partners, and we expect them to stay at the same trend. We are not dependent on any one partner. We are several hundreds like Yaki said. This is a significant portion of the sales that is done by Varonis.

Keith Weiss

Analyst

Got it, got it. And maybe just one last, wrap-up question. As you guys get more well-known in the market as sort of the partner base builds out, any shortening of the sales cycle that you're seeing, or is it still very much sort of those long sales cycles as you evangelize what is essentially a new platform out there in the marketplace?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

It stays fairly the same. I think not just for Varonis, I think the problem is becoming more known, just customers are now struggling with enormous an amount of data and they have more and more budgeted projects to solve these kinds of problems.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays.

First one, Yaki, can you talk a little bit about on the up-sell, cross-sell opportunity. How does it work in terms of the different buying centers that you are touching here. I would assume like some of them are kind of going to the same people, but especially thinking about DatAnywhere, is that kind of the same buying center and hence, is that kind of a straightforward up-sell, or how does it work for you there?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

So for all of our products, we usually -- there is a same buyer that owns the budget is CTO, the person that owns the infrastructure. But with DatAnywhere, it extends really the total available market because the use case we cater to the business. And this is also something that we are doing now with DatAnswers. You'll see that we are going also to give more and more value to the business people. So it's the same buyer that needs to install it and deliver the value to the business, but more business people are touching our products and what we see there, we had good volumes with DatAnywhere and the Data Transport Engine really brings us into these migration and restructuring projects. We just see that it really expanded the overall use cases and because of them, customers are buying more and more products.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays.

Yes. And so DatAnywhere, as a product, hasn't been in the market for that long. So how do you see -- what do you see in terms of customer reception and how customers are using it and is that kind of a standalone mobile solution or do they have still have other guys like in use as well, and you guys just used this for the legacy data that are on premise?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

What we see with it is that most of these human-generated data files are just on file shares, and customers are starting to understand that in order to make sure that employees can access the data from anywhere and any device, they need to take this enormous complexity to further the permissions, the massive data volumes and cloud-enable them, make sure that people can access them from anywhere and any device. So they will not stop in using them and what we see with DatAnywhere is that sometimes, they're starting with a small portion of the organization, and then they expand, but we definitely see that there is a lot of interest, the mobile access is driving it and we believe that it's a product that will do very well for us, but sometimes we are starting department by department with limited number of users. So we didn't see that budgets for initial purchase is a big challenge.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays.

Yes. And last question from me. If you look at -- and obviously, you had a very healthy run rate in Q1 and then we saw the guidance for the full year. How do you think about like investment into growth versus kind of delivering EPS numbers? How do you think about that dynamic in terms of what's the trigger for you to say, look, I need to invest more or the guidance is the guidance. How do you -- I mean, I'm just kind of thinking since this is the first quarter for all of us with you, just how do you think about that dynamic?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

We have very high gross margins, and we have a very strong earning power in our model. We run the company close to breakeven and generated cash for several years. We have a management that know how to manage a profitable business. But now we strive to profitability at much greater scale, and for us now, it's just to capture a market share and invest in the business, obviously, in a sensible way to make sure that the new hires that we will bring are productive, it's a capacity play to bring the right people, but you can do margin extrapolation fairly easily and understand the earning power that this business has in scale and this is what we are starting to do.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Aaron Schwartz with Jefferies.

Aaron Schwartz

Analyst · Jefferies.

Just a question, sort of a follow-up there, but you mentioned a couple of times that the strong results here show the benefit of the sales reinvestments you've made over the last 2 years or so. Can you talk about sort of where that capacity play is from your -- maybe the sales or investments in 2013, where that productivity level is? Is there still sort of way to go in terms of seeing the contribution from some of the hires over the last 12 months, or maybe can you just kind of walk through how you see some recent investments playing out this year?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

I think that all of our investments came to fruition in sales capacity and in R&D. And we see it in new customer growth and in the expansion with our customers. We have good programs to on-board a new hire in sales/marketing, a seasoned and an inside sales, and all of them are trending well for us.

Aaron Schwartz

Analyst · Jefferies.

Okay. And second question, if I could. If we look at the reinvestments in 2014, I believe some of your plan was to maybe front-end load the year a little bit and you wanted to sort of -- you're going to take some of the hiring in the first half. Can you talk about how you think about current hires you're making today on the land, I guess, versus the expand, especially with the expanding product set. Will there be any more specialization in order to drive penetration or a standardization on your broader product set or should we expect a -- the similar sort of sales model that you've had over the last year or so?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

It will be a fairly similar sales model for most of our products because there is really a logical correlation between all of them. You have the same people usually in the organization with 5,000, sometimes 10,000 employees, the same people that are on the file share, also the Internet and the e-mail systems. So it's really a standardization play there. What we'll do, we also build a small team of overlays [ph] that will help us push DatAnywhere because we believe -- we call it the routing framework, another big platform for us, and we can execute it well. In few years, we think, we can do this -- in terms of the platform play, similar things that we are doing with DatAdvantage to attract more use cases and bring more value to our customers. So most of it is we are not going at this point to say, there are reps that are running after new business, and other salespeople that are going to up-sell. And they're doing both, also running after new customers and up-sell to the current base.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

Matthew Hedberg

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

I wanted to dig into DatAnswers a little bit more, which at first glance seems like a great new product. I know it's still early, but could you give us a sense for the value of that product and perhaps what the competitive environment looks like for that product?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

What happened to us that was a bit mind-boggling is that we have more than 2,500 customers, and we just saw that almost all of them don't have Search on their filesystems. And then we started to dig in why because if you look at the Internet, everybody going to Google or Bing several times a day. And we just understood that current technology is having a hard time to be very effective on flat filesystems or they cost too much or they're having a hard time to scale or they are not secure. And we just understood that on top of our Metadata Framework, we can deliver a search engine that is secure, scalable and affordable. And even though enterprise search market is an established market, we believe that we are approaching it in a different way, and we are not going to experience a lot of competition.

Matthew Hedberg

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

And then maybe one more on the competitive side. DatAnywhere, again, a newer product. That's another crowded space as well. Can you help us with -- it's been out there a little longer now. What's its traction this quarter in terms of up-sells?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

Both up-sells and new customers, the product did very well for us. I think that it's a crowded place, but the ability, we are among the very few companies that can come and cloud-enable the massive amount of data shares that the organization of every size has today. So people are using these file shares, enormous amount of data, they have to map drives, very complex permissions and folder structure, and we just come and we build -- well call it a user-mode file system with proxy, you can publish it to all the people that consume the data without changing the infrastructure and without changing permissions and really capitalizing on the investment that they have in place. So it's a crowded market, but also here, we don't see a lot of competition in the way that we are approaching it.

Matthew Hedberg

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets.

And then maybe one last one. You guys just put up great growth, 39%. I'm wondering what level of conservatism is embedded in your full year guide? I think it calls for about 30% at the midpoint.

Yakov Faitelson

Management

No. We did a very thorough analysis of our business. And we have an experienced management team. We are many years together, and we have a good track record against setting goals and delivering against them.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We will take our next question from Scott Zeller with Needham & Company.

Scott Zeller

Analyst · Needham & Company.

I wanted to ask about the typical most common use cases, Yaki. And if you saw any shift amongst those, maybe the -- how common each was, like you mentioned the migration projects, for instance. Did you notice a shift at all? And if there was a shift, does that change deal sizes at all?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

No. We didn't see a shift, and we didn't see a change in deal sizes. It is important to understand that visibility to who can access data and auditing is the first building block of everything that you will do. If you want to classify the data, if you want to do -- and if you want to do data migrations. And usually, our customers are buying one of the licenses of DatAdvantage. So regardless if -- and on top of this, they can buy the DCF, and they can buy the Data Transport Engine, and it can be an up-sell -- an up-sell or cross-sell. So we didn't see any change in the core use cases. What we saw is an expansion of use cases and sometimes we want to be a Big Data migration and restructuring, but first unit DatAdvantage to have visibility to understand who can access the data, who owns the data. And on top of it, you build Data Transport Engine to do the actual migration. So just really, it's a very logical buildup from the base products in the platform to the additional products.

Scott Zeller

Analyst · Needham & Company.

Okay. I wanted to ask about the pipeline. I think you talked about your visibility a number of times. But when we look at the coverage you have, the ratio for coverage in the pipeline, could you just comment on how that has been to start off the year versus other periods?

Yakov Faitelson

Management

We did just a thorough analysis of the business, and we looked at the pipeline. And according to that, we gave the guidance.

Operator

Operator

And it appears we have no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Yaki for any additional or closing remarks.

Yakov Faitelson

Management

Thank you. Before we end the call, I would like to thank all of our employees for their hard work and amazing dedication. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Gili and her team for all their hard work on our successful IPO. Thank you for joining us today. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And again, this does conclude today's Varonis Systems Incorporated First Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. We thank you, again, for your participation, and you may now disconnect.