NASDAQ:QLYS Qualys Q1 2024 Earnings Report $10.96 +0.07 (+0.64%) As of 03:58 PM Eastern Earnings HistoryForecast Adient EPS ResultsActual EPS$1.05Consensus EPS $0.88Beat/MissBeat by +$0.17One Year Ago EPSN/AAdient Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$145.81 millionExpected Revenue$145.67 millionBeat/MissBeat by +$140.00 thousandYoY Revenue GrowthN/AAdient Announcement DetailsQuarterQ1 2024Date5/7/2024TimeN/AConference Call DateTuesday, May 7, 2024Conference Call Time5:00PM ETUpcoming EarningsAdient's Q2 2025 earnings is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7, 2025, with a conference call scheduled at 8:30 AM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Q2 2025 Earnings ReportConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptSlide DeckPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfileSlide DeckFull Screen Slide DeckPowered by Adient Q1 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMay 7, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualys First Quarter 2024 Investor Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer To ask a question during the session, you would need to press star 11 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Operator00:00:25Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Blair King. Please go ahead. Speaker 100:00:35Good afternoon, and welcome to Qualys' Q1 2024 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Sumit Thakkar, our President and CEO and Jumi Kim, our CFO. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward looking statements that generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. The factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and our filings with the SEC, including our latest Form 10 Q and 10 ks. Speaker 100:01:10Any forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. And as a reminder, the press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Hugh Smed. Speaker 200:01:40Thank you, Blair, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. Qualys delivered another quarter of healthy revenue growth, strong profitability and cash flow generation reflecting our ongoing commitment to rapid innovation and customer success. Given the accelerated growth in scope and complexity of cyber threats alongside an intensifying regulatory environment, boards and C level executives are increasingly focused on the business outcome of cybersecurity. This requirement makes seamlessly integrated security solutions a necessity for customers to effectively measure, communicate and fortify the security posture. We believe the Qualys Enterprise Truist platform designed to reduce friction, risk and cost provides organizations with a foundational risk management platform for the future and serves as a structural competitive advantage for both our customers and for Qualys. Speaker 200:02:30As a result, our VMDR solution with TrueRisk is not only fueling new logo lines, but also increases platform adoption, especially in the areas of cybersecurity asset management with external attack surface management, patch management and cloud security. In Q1, healthcare, technology, retail and financial services verticals all demonstrated strong VMDR demand with large deal sizes. Further underscoring the power of our platform, I will take a moment to share couple of examples of how our customers and partners continue to expand their use of Qualysys capabilities to consolidate their security stacks. On the customer front, a marquee high 6 figure bookings enterprise customer win in Q1 was with a leading business services company in the Forbes 1,000. The customer expanded its VMDR with Truisk and Patch Management deployments with while adopting cybersecurity asset management with EASM as part of an initiative to detect end of life and end of service software and monitor sub domains of its infrastructure and transform its IT security architecture while replacing point solutions from 3 vendors with a single platform. Speaker 200:03:38The ability for this customer to significantly enhance its security program with comprehensive internal and external asset criticality, holistic risk scoring, ticketing and automated patching across its on prem cloud and container environments through a natively integrated platform and unified dashboard were all key differentiators compared to alternative next gen and legacy technologies. The next win demonstrates how Qualys helped a existing Forbes 100 manufacturing company standardize on Qualys Enterprise tourist platform and consolidate risk factors from different Qualys modules into a single risk score with business context. This existing VMware and TotalCloud customer was struggling with connecting desperate asset management tools and business processes across several subsidiaries and environments and needed to gain better visibility into its attack surface to uniformly communicate and manage risk. Recognizing the increased value they would gain by further consolidating on Qualys, this customer replaced its existing asset management tool and adopted our cybersecurity asset management with EASM solution in a 6 figure bookings upsell. This customer is now leveraging multiple aspects of Qualys Enterprise to its platform spanning on prem cloud and multi cloud assets to quantify and prioritize risk reduction initiatives, increase organizational resilience and give its CISO peace of mind. Speaker 200:05:04Investing in our partner program continues to be a key pillar of our go to market agenda as it bolsters our capacity harness transformative solution sales and brings new business to Qualys. Through these investments, we continue to advance our evolving partner ecosystem managed service providers in America. 1 recently expanded its offering beyond Vmdr to include our patch management capability and the other standardized on Qualys as its preferred partner for Vmdr cybersecurity effect management with EASM and Patch Management spanning both its federal and commercial verticals. The latter of these two wins is a testament to the investment we are making to expand our federal business and we're looking forward to hosting our 1st Public Sector Cyber Risk Conference later this month. And with nearly 50 partners already on our recently announced new MSSP partner portal to simplify their operations, launch and manage Qualysys capabilities and significantly reduce remediation times for their customers, we are increasingly well positioned to expand our reach to customers of all sizes. Speaker 200:06:11Additionally, we strengthened our alliance with a leading system integrator, which is now actively bringing our total cloud CNAP solution to its customers. We believe the broad expansion of our partner program over the past several quarters continues to reflect our strengthening brand awareness, strategic position and value position in the market. With tightly integrated solutions delivered through a natively integrated platform to solve modern security challenges, more and more Qualys customers are beginning to understand how cybersecurity transformation drives better security outcomes, saves times and costs less. As a result, customers spending $500,000 or more with us in Q1 grew 19% from a year ago to 192. Since our inception, driving innovation is at the core of Qualysys' mission. Speaker 200:07:01We are excited with our upcoming enterprise risk management application, which marks the next phase of expansion of our platform, building on top of the success we have seen with the VMDR with TruRisk. The ATM capability will enable VMDR customers to upgrade to a more holistic cyber risk management platform that goes beyond vulnerability management. The enterprise to risk management solution holistically aggregates and normalizes trillions of first and third party data signals, correlates risk factors with assets, threats and business context, detects, visualizes, quantifies and prioritize risk and makes remediation frictionless with immediate and immediate with simple click of a button. With these newest capabilities, all natively integrated on single unified dashboard, Qualys is once again well armed with powerful new platform capabilities that broadly measure, communicate and remediate risk across the entire attack surface, including IT, OT, applications, cloud and multi cloud assets. Moreover, our comprehensive AI powered insight are now converting detected risk into optimized remediation actions across our platform solutions with our out of the box instant and actionable insights map to an organization's own data to preemptively reduce risk in their environment. Speaker 200:08:18The feedback from many of the CISOs I met at our recent QSC MEI event in London has been very positive with respect to the deployment agenda, the excitement about the rapid pace of new capabilities that we are delivering and their ability to monitor and measure risk reduction ROI for the cybersecurity spend. Further advancing our true risk capabilities, I'm pleased to announce we recently brought MITRE ATT and CK Matrix Prioritization into the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk platform. By combining over 25 sources of threat intelligence with the MITRE ATT and CK framework, we are now further enabling organizations with a holistic attacker centric view to predict and identify critical risks to their business based on the attack tactics and techniques. While this advancement with this advancement, we believe Qualys stands out as the only enterprise scale solution to combine contextualized risk quantification and the MITRE ATT and CK framework to help organizations proactively prioritize, manage and reduce cyber risk with enhanced detection, integrated risk quantification and automated response for a threat informed defense in a single platform. Continuing the pace of disruptive innovation, we are now organically unifying cloud and title management CIEM into our total cloud CNAP solution. Speaker 200:09:37With this new capability, customers can manage cloud entities, entitlements and enforce the principle of least privilege access to cloud infrastructure and resources. Combined with additionally newly introduced capabilities such as container, runtime security and Kubernetes, partial management, They've created what we believe is one of the most comprehensive cloud native security solutions in the market with a unified actionable dashboard for immediate threat prioritization and remediation for a build through runtime with built in trip detection capabilities. Finally, we as we continue to extend our technology leadership across the entire platform, I'm pleased to announce our Cybersecurity Risk Management 3.0 solution with highly differentiated new capabilities in external tax office management and third party integration for comprehensive asset inventory. With these innovations, security teams can now leverage our patent pending technology to reduce accuracy and detection gaps with immediate lightweight vulnerability scanning, seamlessly attribute previously unmanaged external assets to the organization with confidence and evaluate asset based business risk per subsidiary or acquired entity. Combining this unique approach to EASM with integrated 2 risk scoring capabilities and actionable dashboards to proactively manage tech debt further strengthens our position in the market while enabling customers to derisk the entire attack surface. Speaker 200:11:05In summary, a company's uniformly recognized security transformation is fundamental in combating today's heightened threat and regulatory environment. As a result, customers are increasingly looking to reduce the risk exposure through the adoption of natively integrated risk management platform instead of deploying a collection of disparate point solutions stitched together through the invoice. We believe that with our organically integrated cloud native platform built to holistically measure, communicate and ultimately eliminate cyber risk, Wallace is laying a foundation for future growth and is well positioned drive long term shareholder value with a balanced approach to growth and profitability. With that, I will turn the call over to Jumi to further discuss our Q1 results and outlook for the Q2 and full year 2024. Speaker 300:11:52Thanks, Annette, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue, all financial figures are non GAAP and growth rates are based on comparison to the prior year period unless stated otherwise. Turning to Q1 results. Revenues grew 12 percent to $145,800,000 with channel continuing to increase its contribution, making up 45% of total revenues compared to 43% a year ago. As a result of our continued commitment to leverage our partner to drive growth, we were able to grow revenues from channel partners by 18%, outpacing direct, which grew 7%. Speaker 300:12:33By geo, 13% growth outside the U. S. Was ahead of our domestic business, which grew 11%. Looking ahead, we expect our U. S. Speaker 300:12:42And international revenue mix to remain roughly at 60% 40% respectively. Turning to land and expand results. We continue to witness deal scrutiny, persisting for many organizations with the upsell environment remaining challenging, resulting in 104% net dollar expansion rate, down from 105% last quarter. Offsetting this was a positive growth trend in new business, achieving double digit growth rate for the 3rd consecutive quarter. As we continue to prioritize increasing market share in 2024, we plan to launch new customer acquisition campaigns and incentives in addition to streamlining sales cycle and operations with better use of technology and systems. Speaker 300:13:27In terms of product contribution to Booking, Patch Management and Cybersecurity Asset Management combined made up 13% of LTM bookings and 23% of LTM new bookings in Q1. With the rapid pace of innovation associated with our total cloud CNAP offering, our cloud security solutions made up 4% of LTM bookings. We attribute this success to an increasingly complex threat and regulatory environment that underscores the relevance of our enterprise true risk platform to holistically assess, manage and remediate risk. Turning to profitability. Adjusted EBITDA for the Q1 of 2024 was $69,000,000 representing a 47% margin compared to a 45% margin a year ago. Speaker 300:14:16Operating expenses in Q1 increased by 5% to $56,800,000 primarily driven by an 11% increase in sales and marketing investments. As we continue to increase our investment intensity and focus on sales and marketing enablement, customer success and productivity, we believe we will be able to drive wallet share and long term returns while balancing growth and profitability. EPS for the Q1 of 2024 was $1,450,000 and our free cash flow was $83,500,000 representing a 57% margin compared to 48% in the prior year. In Q1, we continue to invest the cash we generated from operations back into Qualys, including $2,100,000 on capital expenditures and $18,000,000 to repurchase 105,000 of our outstanding shares. As of the end of the quarter, we had $265,700,000 remaining in our share repurchase program. Speaker 300:15:17With that, let us turn to guidance, starting with revenues. For the full year 2024, we are now expecting our revenue to be in the range of $601,500,000 to $608,500,000 which represents a growth rate of 8% to 10%. This compares to revenue guidance of $600,000,000 to $610,000,000 last quarter. For the Q2 of 2024, we expect revenues to be in the range of $147,500,000 to $149,500,000 representing a growth rate of 8% to 9%. This guidance assumes continued deal scrutiny, resulting in a tougher upsell environment, partially offset by investments in the business to drive new customer growth. Speaker 300:16:03Shifting to profitability guidance. For the full year 2024, we continue to expect EBITDA margin to be in the low 40s and free cash flow margin in the mid-30s. We expect full year EPS to be in the range of 5.06 to 5.30 up from the prior range of 4.95 to 5.27. For the Q2 of 2024, we expect EPS to be in the range of $1,270,000 to $1,350,000 Our planned capital expenditures in 2024 are expected to be in the range of $13,000,000 to $18,000,000 and for the Q2 of 2024 in the range of $4,000,000 to 6,000,000 dollars Consistent with prior guidance for the remainder of 2024, we intend to align our product and marketing investments to focus on specific initiatives aimed at driving more pipeline, enhancing our partner program, expanding our federal vertical and supporting sales while maintaining a disciplined approach to unit economics. As a percentage of revenues, we expect to prioritize an increase in investment in sales and marketing as well as related support functions, systems and people with more modest increases in engineering and G and A. Speaker 300:17:18In conclusion, in Q1, we delivered healthy top line growth and industry leading profitability, while making progress executing our long term strategic agenda. With our comprehensive risk management platform delivering immediate time to value for our customers, We're confident in our ability to deliver on our growth opportunity long term and remain committed to maximizing shareholder value. With that, Smed and I would be happy to answer any other questions. Operator00:17:49Thank Our first question will come from the line of Mike Walkley from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Speaker 400:18:21Hey, guys. Good afternoon. It's Daniel on for Mike. Thanks for taking the question. So it seems like that dollar retention came down a little bit to 104%. Speaker 400:18:31I think you guys called out the tough upsell environment despite the new or I guess improvements in new additions. Can you just provide maybe some color for us on what's impacting your upsell business and some of the changes you're making to make some improvements here? Speaker 200:18:48That's a great question. So with existing customers who have invested with Qualys and other security platforms, they are continuing to work with us to, in many cases, sort of optimize the spend that they have done with Qualys, continuing to get additional value. We talked a little bit about this last time. In some cases, they might be looking at adjusting some of the VMDR licenses, but bringing in Patch Management and Cybersecurity Asset Management as part of that, which is where you see the percentage of bookings that are going up. So which overall in the longer term is good because it gives us an opportunity to introduce additional products in smaller quantities right now that will help us get the upsells to be better and increasing in the future. Speaker 200:19:30But currently, it is the review times are long as they have been and customers just continue to take longer to make decisions on larger projects where they're looking to bring on like a whole new product from Qualys. And that's where we are working with them to, first of all, make sure that we are putting some of our marketing engine behind generating additional opportunities. We are doing a lot of CISO education right now. The CISO Connect programs we have recently launched have been quite helpful as we talk the language of risk management, which is really where our ATM platform is quite interesting for the CISOs, which is all our CISO events recently have been completely overbooked because they really want to comment and talk more about how policy is going to help them with cyber risk quantification and being able to look at cyber risk holistically and then eliminate that. So there's a few things that we're doing on that side. Speaker 200:20:26But right now, while new business we're seeing good execution, we do definitely see opportunity for us to execute better in the tougher climate that we are seeing for ourselves with existing customers. Speaker 400:20:40Great. And just as a quick follow-up, maybe Jubi for you. Maybe could you maybe walk us through some of the assumptions within your decision to narrow the full year revenue guidance band? Speaker 300:20:54Yes. The primary reason why we decided to narrow it was just because Q1 became in more or less in line with what we had anticipated at the midpoint of the revenue guidance. And the way we see it right now is, of course, we had hoped to do a little bit better with the net dollar expansion having ticked down by a percentage. And the underlying assumption for the full year revenue guidance is that we don't anticipate any material improvement in the net dollar expansion rate today, especially because we do see continued challenges kind of at least continuing into Q2. So because of that, we're assuming that net dollar expansion rate stays as is or maybe tick down a percentage. Speaker 300:21:33On the new business though, we are seeing some trends and we are pleased to see the traction in the business today. But a lot of smaller numbers, it is a smaller portion of our business. So even if it continues at the current growth rate that we see today, it won't have a material impact in terms of the uplift to Speaker 400:21:51revenue. Right. Thank you very much. Operator00:21:56One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from the line of Suneet Kothari from Baird. Your line is open. Speaker 500:22:11Hey, thanks for taking my question. So for Sumit, you mentioned that you're looking to expand the federal business and expand the public sector presence and kind of hosting your 1st public sector conference. Just curious, like can you elaborate on the traction of the GovCloud platform so far? What trends are you seeing there? And how does it perform relative to your expectations? Speaker 500:22:38And can you discuss like the opportunity that you see in terms of expanding it within the public sector? Speaker 200:22:47Yes, great question. Look, the opportunity in the federal is definitely large, and we are really working towards investing in the right way so that we can take advantage of that opportunity. And so from that perspective, we recently hired a leader for federal that we're happy about. We have expanded our federal team. We have hired somebody to focus on federal marketing. Speaker 200:23:07As you can see, we're really putting in place our first conference for federal, which already we have over 200 people who signed up kind of more than what we were anticipating from a capacity perspective. So those are really positive signs. In the last few quarters, we've talked about certain wins that we have had with government, federal government agencies. So the way we look at that is, it's an extremely small percentage of our overall bookings and we have a good opportunity to grow in that direction. And so we're making the right investments. Speaker 200:23:35But of course, as it is with the federal market, it is something that takes time and we are building the relationships with partners. As you can see, we signed up our federal partner that's taking Polis and our Patch Management along with the MDR to agencies. We invested in the FedRAMP program. So we have already FedRAMP moderate, which we have a large number of ATOs from many government agencies that are providing us ATO. And then we are on track now working with the PMO's office to get our FedRAMP high final certification. Speaker 200:24:09We already FedRAMP high ready right now. And so once you get our FedRAMP High certification, which we anticipate towards the end of the year, That is something that will give us even additional opportunity to take our GovCloud platform deeper into more agencies that are looking to go and modernize their infrastructure and go into a federal sort of a SaaS platform and move out of current very heavily on prem solutions. And so with the FedRAMP High that will enable us to be the only FedRAMP High vulnerability and Patch Management combined solution together that will be available for these customers. And as we saw with some of our federal wins as well, the reason for them to change out the current provider is because the current providers are only doing scanning and they have to have separate patch management tools. So even in the federal government, some of the recent wins that we have seen have enabled us to feel confident in our direction so that we can continue to take the Qualys combined platform with Patch Management, etcetera. Speaker 200:25:18And this is something that federal agencies are also looking for to reduce their tools sprawl, as well as expanding to the cloud environment as well. So it's an area that we are continuing to invest. We're just at the very early stages of that investment and we are pleased with the traction that we are seeing in this early stage. Speaker 500:25:40Got it. Helpful. Thanks for the detailed color, Sumit. And quick follow-up for Jumi. So you mentioned that you guys of course plan to launch new customer acquisition campaigns. Speaker 500:25:51Can you elaborate kind of who are you targeting and where is the increase in investment intensity in SNAM going in? Is it going to be more focused on sales incentives geared towards new logos, much more headcount growth, partnership investments, of course, public sector. So just curious like how are you increasing the investment intensity there? Speaker 300:26:18Yes. So our priority has been for a while to grow our new business. And it's part of the reason why we were really pleased to see the continued traction and the momentum. And the way we see it right now, where we've been really successful is on the enterprise side because that's where our strength is. However, we're pleased to see traction on both the enterprise and SMB and SMB. Speaker 300:26:37And the way we are planning to continue to invest to support that growth is, number 1, we are planning to hire more sales reps to support that growth and that's one of our initiatives. We are planning to increase our sales and marketing headcount by double digits this year as we had planned before. So that hasn't changed. And number 2, our partner channel, it's been really successful for us. We're seeing increase in investment in several different fronts, including the MSSP portal that we just announced as well as DLReD, it continues be healthy and continues to increase and our continued kind of we've been in the incentive structure, whether it's partner or direct to make sure that it's structured in a way to incentivize both direct and indirect sales force to really drive the new local growth. Speaker 500:27:25Got it. Speaker 200:27:26Thanks, Stuart. Appreciate Operator00:27:29it. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. Your line is open. Speaker 600:27:43Hi, this is Joe Vandrick on for Patrick Colville. So it seems like cloud security is a big opportunity for Qualys. And you've mentioned the CNAP solution getting some solid market traction. Are you typically selling it as a bundle or are customers kind of deciding to buy each solution separately? And then part 2 of that question, are you seeing stronger demand within any one area of CNAP? Speaker 600:28:11For example, CSPM or workload protection or maybe something else? Speaker 200:28:18Yes, that's a great question. Look, I think there is no organization out there that is cloud only. And so every time they look at their infrastructure, they have to do cloud and non cloud assets together. And that's really where we see the advantage for Qualys is when they combine the VMDR capabilities on on prem assets and then are able to use the exact same platform and expand that licensing into the cloud as well. It just makes it a lot more seamless. Speaker 200:28:42They get the benefit of higher volume pricing and it gives them the ability to combine the risk from their cloud and on prem platforms together in one place. And so from and that's why it's interesting for us to see that why even in our new logo lands, customers are starting to buy the total cloud solution combined with VMDR upfront in the first purchase itself. And so while it's early days, that's quite encouraging for us. We continue to work with our existing customers who have VMDR to expand those capabilities into cloud. In some cases, they don't have any good cloud security solution. Speaker 200:29:15In other cases, we are displacing some of the cloud only solutions because they need a visibility that is broader than that. Our pricing for the cloud solution given that the assets are so ephemeral, agents are so ephemeral in the cloud environment, It allows them to be flexible with the way that they can consume the cloud licenses. And so that way they can use for CSPM, they can use the same credits that they have purchased for container security, they can use the same for cloud identity. So the recent cloud identity module that we just announced is another expansion into the cloud native platform. And so it's a maturity level question for organizations, organizations that are very early in the journey right now are focusing initially on the CSPM part of total cloud. Speaker 200:30:03Those who are more mature are also taking the workload protection part. And then those who are going beyond that are also looking at other things like our ability to detect malware in the cloud in real time, our ability to expand uniquely into SaaS environments for SSPM, which is also part of our total cloud where we can do SaaS posture assessment. And then now we are looking forward to getting these customers access to our cloud identity entitlement management as well. And so there's a lot that we are now focusing on driving both from marketing and sales enablement perspective for us to create more opportunities on the total cloud side. But we definitely are pleased with the conversations and traction that we're seeing in the early days of this push that we are making across our sales force. Speaker 600:30:55That's helpful. Thanks, Sumit. And maybe one for Jumi, if I could. How should we think about capital allocation priorities over the next year? It looks like you bought back about $18,000,000 worth of shares in the quarter, which is a bit of a step down compared to last quarter last year. Speaker 600:31:13So just curious what it would take to see you get more aggressive on share buybacks? Speaker 300:31:19Our share buyback is based on the grid that we have in place right now and that we really think of it from the perspective of making sure that we can offset the equity dilution from the brands that we're making. And as you can see in the last couple of years, our dilutive also has been decreasing consistently incrementally. So the way we think about our cash and the utilization of excess cash is really looking at into 2024, we are anticipating more and more M and A opportunities, especially at evaluation that we think that makes sense for us. And so we are going to be taking a look at potential acquisition target opportunistically and then taking action on leveraging our balance sheet. Speaker 600:32:03Got it. Thank you. Operator00:32:07Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from the line of Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Speaker 700:32:22Hey guys, can you hear me? I apologize in the background noise. I missed this small cybersecurity conference called RSA. Speaker 200:32:28We can hear you. Speaker 700:32:30Two quick ones for me. The first one is just, could you maybe talk about how the billings growth in the quarter, whether that was how that shook out relative to your expectations and how you see billings maybe growing for the rest of the year relative to the revenue guidance you just gave? And then my follow-up is great traction on the new customer the new growth customer side of the business. I think you called out 3 straight quarters of double digit growth. How do we see that? Speaker 700:33:02Like where am I looking for that in what you guys disclosed so that I can kind of see this coming through in the numbers? And how and I guess is that on the partner is that coming from the partner side? Is that coming from the direct side? Just maybe a little bit more color on where that new customer growth is coming from? How durable is it? Speaker 700:33:24And how I can better see it in the numbers would be helpful? Thank you. Speaker 300:33:29Yes. In terms of current billings, 8%, we were hoping to do better. But honestly, I think that it's a fair representative of the business momentum that we see today because it does reflect the net dollar expansion rate having gone down by another percentage in Q1, offset partially by the traction continuing traction in the new business. And so I would say that if you were to look for guidance in terms of the calculated current billings for the full year, we would say it would be roughly in line with our revenue guidance today, which is 8% to 10% for the full year. In terms of the new business, the reason why we decided to talk about new business this quarter is because we are seeing a trend like 3 consecutive quarters is something that we thought was meaningful enough for us to talk about and disclose. Speaker 300:34:16And majority of that is driven by our channel partners. So the growth is coming from channel partners. And I think that if you were to look at the magnitude of it, you can probably tell based on the current billings growth of 8%, net dollar expansion rate of 4%, the risk would be coming from the new business. Speaker 700:34:35Super helpful. Thanks guys. Operator00:34:40Thank you. And I'm not showing no further questions in the queue. With that, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program and you may now disconnect. Operator00:34:53Everyone have a great day.Read moreRemove AdsPowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallAdient Q1 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2xRemove Ads Earnings DocumentsSlide DeckPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) Adient Earnings HeadlinesLe PDG de Qualys, Sumedh Thakar, vend des actions pour 866.664$April 15 at 9:06 PM | fr.investing.comQualys (NASDAQ:QLYS) Raised to "Buy" at StockNews.comApril 14 at 1:31 AM | americanbankingnews.comM.A.G.A. is Finished – This Could be even BetterYou’ve no doubt heard Trump’s rally cry: Make America Great Again. But recently the President made a big change. Make America Wealthy Again (M.A.W.A).April 16, 2025 | Paradigm Press (Ad)Qualys price target lowered to $131 from $135 at RBC CapitalApril 12, 2025 | markets.businessinsider.com3 of Wall Street’s Favorite Stocks That Concern UsApril 11, 2025 | msn.comQualys, Inc. (NASDAQ:QLYS) Given Average Rating of "Hold" by AnalystsApril 10, 2025 | americanbankingnews.comSee More Qualys Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like Adient? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on Adient and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About AdientAdient (NYSE:ADNT) engages in the design, development, manufacture, and market of seating systems and components for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and light trucks. The company's automotive seating solutions include complete seating systems, frames, mechanisms, foams, head restraints, armrests, and trim covers. It serves automotive original equipment manufacturers in North America and South America; Europe, Middle East, and Africa; and the Asia Pacific/China. Adient plc was incorporated in 2016 and is based in Dublin, Ireland.View Adient ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Tesla Stock Eyes Breakout With Earnings on DeckJohnson & Johnson Earnings Were More Good Than Bad—Time to Buy? Why Analysts Boosted United Airlines Stock Ahead of EarningsLamb Weston Stock Rises, Earnings Provide Calm Amidst ChaosIntuitive Machines Gains After Earnings Beat, NASA Missions AheadCintas Delivers Earnings Beat, Signals More Growth AheadNike Stock Dips on Earnings: Analysts Weigh in on What’s Next Upcoming Earnings Netflix (4/17/2025)American Express (4/17/2025)Blackstone (4/17/2025)Infosys (4/17/2025)Marsh & McLennan Companies (4/17/2025)Charles Schwab (4/17/2025)Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (4/17/2025)UnitedHealth Group (4/17/2025)HDFC Bank (4/18/2025)Intuitive Surgical (4/22/2025) Get 30 Days of MarketBeat All Access for Free Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools. Start Your 30-Day Trial MarketBeat All Access Features Best-in-Class Portfolio Monitoring Get personalized stock ideas. Compare portfolio to indices. Check stock news, ratings, SEC filings, and more. Stock Ideas and Recommendations See daily stock ideas from top analysts. Receive short-term trading ideas from MarketBeat. Identify trending stocks on social media. Advanced Stock Screeners and Research Tools Use our seven stock screeners to find suitable stocks. Stay informed with MarketBeat's real-time news. Export data to Excel for personal analysis. Sign in to your free account to enjoy these benefits In-depth profiles and analysis for 20,000 public companies. Real-time analyst ratings, insider transactions, earnings data, and more. Our daily ratings and market update email newsletter. Sign in to your free account to enjoy all that MarketBeat has to offer. Sign In Create Account Your Email Address: Email Address Required Your Password: Password Required Log In or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google Forgot your password? Your Email Address: Please enter your email address. Please enter a valid email address Choose a Password: Please enter your password. Your password must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least 1 number, 1 letter, and 1 special character. Create My Account (Free) or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google By creating a free account, you agree to our terms of service. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualys First Quarter 2024 Investor Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer To ask a question during the session, you would need to press star 11 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Operator00:00:25Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Blair King. Please go ahead. Speaker 100:00:35Good afternoon, and welcome to Qualys' Q1 2024 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Sumit Thakkar, our President and CEO and Jumi Kim, our CFO. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward looking statements that generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. The factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and our filings with the SEC, including our latest Form 10 Q and 10 ks. Speaker 100:01:10Any forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. And as a reminder, the press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Hugh Smed. Speaker 200:01:40Thank you, Blair, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. Qualys delivered another quarter of healthy revenue growth, strong profitability and cash flow generation reflecting our ongoing commitment to rapid innovation and customer success. Given the accelerated growth in scope and complexity of cyber threats alongside an intensifying regulatory environment, boards and C level executives are increasingly focused on the business outcome of cybersecurity. This requirement makes seamlessly integrated security solutions a necessity for customers to effectively measure, communicate and fortify the security posture. We believe the Qualys Enterprise Truist platform designed to reduce friction, risk and cost provides organizations with a foundational risk management platform for the future and serves as a structural competitive advantage for both our customers and for Qualys. Speaker 200:02:30As a result, our VMDR solution with TrueRisk is not only fueling new logo lines, but also increases platform adoption, especially in the areas of cybersecurity asset management with external attack surface management, patch management and cloud security. In Q1, healthcare, technology, retail and financial services verticals all demonstrated strong VMDR demand with large deal sizes. Further underscoring the power of our platform, I will take a moment to share couple of examples of how our customers and partners continue to expand their use of Qualysys capabilities to consolidate their security stacks. On the customer front, a marquee high 6 figure bookings enterprise customer win in Q1 was with a leading business services company in the Forbes 1,000. The customer expanded its VMDR with Truisk and Patch Management deployments with while adopting cybersecurity asset management with EASM as part of an initiative to detect end of life and end of service software and monitor sub domains of its infrastructure and transform its IT security architecture while replacing point solutions from 3 vendors with a single platform. Speaker 200:03:38The ability for this customer to significantly enhance its security program with comprehensive internal and external asset criticality, holistic risk scoring, ticketing and automated patching across its on prem cloud and container environments through a natively integrated platform and unified dashboard were all key differentiators compared to alternative next gen and legacy technologies. The next win demonstrates how Qualys helped a existing Forbes 100 manufacturing company standardize on Qualys Enterprise tourist platform and consolidate risk factors from different Qualys modules into a single risk score with business context. This existing VMware and TotalCloud customer was struggling with connecting desperate asset management tools and business processes across several subsidiaries and environments and needed to gain better visibility into its attack surface to uniformly communicate and manage risk. Recognizing the increased value they would gain by further consolidating on Qualys, this customer replaced its existing asset management tool and adopted our cybersecurity asset management with EASM solution in a 6 figure bookings upsell. This customer is now leveraging multiple aspects of Qualys Enterprise to its platform spanning on prem cloud and multi cloud assets to quantify and prioritize risk reduction initiatives, increase organizational resilience and give its CISO peace of mind. Speaker 200:05:04Investing in our partner program continues to be a key pillar of our go to market agenda as it bolsters our capacity harness transformative solution sales and brings new business to Qualys. Through these investments, we continue to advance our evolving partner ecosystem managed service providers in America. 1 recently expanded its offering beyond Vmdr to include our patch management capability and the other standardized on Qualys as its preferred partner for Vmdr cybersecurity effect management with EASM and Patch Management spanning both its federal and commercial verticals. The latter of these two wins is a testament to the investment we are making to expand our federal business and we're looking forward to hosting our 1st Public Sector Cyber Risk Conference later this month. And with nearly 50 partners already on our recently announced new MSSP partner portal to simplify their operations, launch and manage Qualysys capabilities and significantly reduce remediation times for their customers, we are increasingly well positioned to expand our reach to customers of all sizes. Speaker 200:06:11Additionally, we strengthened our alliance with a leading system integrator, which is now actively bringing our total cloud CNAP solution to its customers. We believe the broad expansion of our partner program over the past several quarters continues to reflect our strengthening brand awareness, strategic position and value position in the market. With tightly integrated solutions delivered through a natively integrated platform to solve modern security challenges, more and more Qualys customers are beginning to understand how cybersecurity transformation drives better security outcomes, saves times and costs less. As a result, customers spending $500,000 or more with us in Q1 grew 19% from a year ago to 192. Since our inception, driving innovation is at the core of Qualysys' mission. Speaker 200:07:01We are excited with our upcoming enterprise risk management application, which marks the next phase of expansion of our platform, building on top of the success we have seen with the VMDR with TruRisk. The ATM capability will enable VMDR customers to upgrade to a more holistic cyber risk management platform that goes beyond vulnerability management. The enterprise to risk management solution holistically aggregates and normalizes trillions of first and third party data signals, correlates risk factors with assets, threats and business context, detects, visualizes, quantifies and prioritize risk and makes remediation frictionless with immediate and immediate with simple click of a button. With these newest capabilities, all natively integrated on single unified dashboard, Qualys is once again well armed with powerful new platform capabilities that broadly measure, communicate and remediate risk across the entire attack surface, including IT, OT, applications, cloud and multi cloud assets. Moreover, our comprehensive AI powered insight are now converting detected risk into optimized remediation actions across our platform solutions with our out of the box instant and actionable insights map to an organization's own data to preemptively reduce risk in their environment. Speaker 200:08:18The feedback from many of the CISOs I met at our recent QSC MEI event in London has been very positive with respect to the deployment agenda, the excitement about the rapid pace of new capabilities that we are delivering and their ability to monitor and measure risk reduction ROI for the cybersecurity spend. Further advancing our true risk capabilities, I'm pleased to announce we recently brought MITRE ATT and CK Matrix Prioritization into the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk platform. By combining over 25 sources of threat intelligence with the MITRE ATT and CK framework, we are now further enabling organizations with a holistic attacker centric view to predict and identify critical risks to their business based on the attack tactics and techniques. While this advancement with this advancement, we believe Qualys stands out as the only enterprise scale solution to combine contextualized risk quantification and the MITRE ATT and CK framework to help organizations proactively prioritize, manage and reduce cyber risk with enhanced detection, integrated risk quantification and automated response for a threat informed defense in a single platform. Continuing the pace of disruptive innovation, we are now organically unifying cloud and title management CIEM into our total cloud CNAP solution. Speaker 200:09:37With this new capability, customers can manage cloud entities, entitlements and enforce the principle of least privilege access to cloud infrastructure and resources. Combined with additionally newly introduced capabilities such as container, runtime security and Kubernetes, partial management, They've created what we believe is one of the most comprehensive cloud native security solutions in the market with a unified actionable dashboard for immediate threat prioritization and remediation for a build through runtime with built in trip detection capabilities. Finally, we as we continue to extend our technology leadership across the entire platform, I'm pleased to announce our Cybersecurity Risk Management 3.0 solution with highly differentiated new capabilities in external tax office management and third party integration for comprehensive asset inventory. With these innovations, security teams can now leverage our patent pending technology to reduce accuracy and detection gaps with immediate lightweight vulnerability scanning, seamlessly attribute previously unmanaged external assets to the organization with confidence and evaluate asset based business risk per subsidiary or acquired entity. Combining this unique approach to EASM with integrated 2 risk scoring capabilities and actionable dashboards to proactively manage tech debt further strengthens our position in the market while enabling customers to derisk the entire attack surface. Speaker 200:11:05In summary, a company's uniformly recognized security transformation is fundamental in combating today's heightened threat and regulatory environment. As a result, customers are increasingly looking to reduce the risk exposure through the adoption of natively integrated risk management platform instead of deploying a collection of disparate point solutions stitched together through the invoice. We believe that with our organically integrated cloud native platform built to holistically measure, communicate and ultimately eliminate cyber risk, Wallace is laying a foundation for future growth and is well positioned drive long term shareholder value with a balanced approach to growth and profitability. With that, I will turn the call over to Jumi to further discuss our Q1 results and outlook for the Q2 and full year 2024. Speaker 300:11:52Thanks, Annette, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue, all financial figures are non GAAP and growth rates are based on comparison to the prior year period unless stated otherwise. Turning to Q1 results. Revenues grew 12 percent to $145,800,000 with channel continuing to increase its contribution, making up 45% of total revenues compared to 43% a year ago. As a result of our continued commitment to leverage our partner to drive growth, we were able to grow revenues from channel partners by 18%, outpacing direct, which grew 7%. Speaker 300:12:33By geo, 13% growth outside the U. S. Was ahead of our domestic business, which grew 11%. Looking ahead, we expect our U. S. Speaker 300:12:42And international revenue mix to remain roughly at 60% 40% respectively. Turning to land and expand results. We continue to witness deal scrutiny, persisting for many organizations with the upsell environment remaining challenging, resulting in 104% net dollar expansion rate, down from 105% last quarter. Offsetting this was a positive growth trend in new business, achieving double digit growth rate for the 3rd consecutive quarter. As we continue to prioritize increasing market share in 2024, we plan to launch new customer acquisition campaigns and incentives in addition to streamlining sales cycle and operations with better use of technology and systems. Speaker 300:13:27In terms of product contribution to Booking, Patch Management and Cybersecurity Asset Management combined made up 13% of LTM bookings and 23% of LTM new bookings in Q1. With the rapid pace of innovation associated with our total cloud CNAP offering, our cloud security solutions made up 4% of LTM bookings. We attribute this success to an increasingly complex threat and regulatory environment that underscores the relevance of our enterprise true risk platform to holistically assess, manage and remediate risk. Turning to profitability. Adjusted EBITDA for the Q1 of 2024 was $69,000,000 representing a 47% margin compared to a 45% margin a year ago. Speaker 300:14:16Operating expenses in Q1 increased by 5% to $56,800,000 primarily driven by an 11% increase in sales and marketing investments. As we continue to increase our investment intensity and focus on sales and marketing enablement, customer success and productivity, we believe we will be able to drive wallet share and long term returns while balancing growth and profitability. EPS for the Q1 of 2024 was $1,450,000 and our free cash flow was $83,500,000 representing a 57% margin compared to 48% in the prior year. In Q1, we continue to invest the cash we generated from operations back into Qualys, including $2,100,000 on capital expenditures and $18,000,000 to repurchase 105,000 of our outstanding shares. As of the end of the quarter, we had $265,700,000 remaining in our share repurchase program. Speaker 300:15:17With that, let us turn to guidance, starting with revenues. For the full year 2024, we are now expecting our revenue to be in the range of $601,500,000 to $608,500,000 which represents a growth rate of 8% to 10%. This compares to revenue guidance of $600,000,000 to $610,000,000 last quarter. For the Q2 of 2024, we expect revenues to be in the range of $147,500,000 to $149,500,000 representing a growth rate of 8% to 9%. This guidance assumes continued deal scrutiny, resulting in a tougher upsell environment, partially offset by investments in the business to drive new customer growth. Speaker 300:16:03Shifting to profitability guidance. For the full year 2024, we continue to expect EBITDA margin to be in the low 40s and free cash flow margin in the mid-30s. We expect full year EPS to be in the range of 5.06 to 5.30 up from the prior range of 4.95 to 5.27. For the Q2 of 2024, we expect EPS to be in the range of $1,270,000 to $1,350,000 Our planned capital expenditures in 2024 are expected to be in the range of $13,000,000 to $18,000,000 and for the Q2 of 2024 in the range of $4,000,000 to 6,000,000 dollars Consistent with prior guidance for the remainder of 2024, we intend to align our product and marketing investments to focus on specific initiatives aimed at driving more pipeline, enhancing our partner program, expanding our federal vertical and supporting sales while maintaining a disciplined approach to unit economics. As a percentage of revenues, we expect to prioritize an increase in investment in sales and marketing as well as related support functions, systems and people with more modest increases in engineering and G and A. Speaker 300:17:18In conclusion, in Q1, we delivered healthy top line growth and industry leading profitability, while making progress executing our long term strategic agenda. With our comprehensive risk management platform delivering immediate time to value for our customers, We're confident in our ability to deliver on our growth opportunity long term and remain committed to maximizing shareholder value. With that, Smed and I would be happy to answer any other questions. Operator00:17:49Thank Our first question will come from the line of Mike Walkley from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Speaker 400:18:21Hey, guys. Good afternoon. It's Daniel on for Mike. Thanks for taking the question. So it seems like that dollar retention came down a little bit to 104%. Speaker 400:18:31I think you guys called out the tough upsell environment despite the new or I guess improvements in new additions. Can you just provide maybe some color for us on what's impacting your upsell business and some of the changes you're making to make some improvements here? Speaker 200:18:48That's a great question. So with existing customers who have invested with Qualys and other security platforms, they are continuing to work with us to, in many cases, sort of optimize the spend that they have done with Qualys, continuing to get additional value. We talked a little bit about this last time. In some cases, they might be looking at adjusting some of the VMDR licenses, but bringing in Patch Management and Cybersecurity Asset Management as part of that, which is where you see the percentage of bookings that are going up. So which overall in the longer term is good because it gives us an opportunity to introduce additional products in smaller quantities right now that will help us get the upsells to be better and increasing in the future. Speaker 200:19:30But currently, it is the review times are long as they have been and customers just continue to take longer to make decisions on larger projects where they're looking to bring on like a whole new product from Qualys. And that's where we are working with them to, first of all, make sure that we are putting some of our marketing engine behind generating additional opportunities. We are doing a lot of CISO education right now. The CISO Connect programs we have recently launched have been quite helpful as we talk the language of risk management, which is really where our ATM platform is quite interesting for the CISOs, which is all our CISO events recently have been completely overbooked because they really want to comment and talk more about how policy is going to help them with cyber risk quantification and being able to look at cyber risk holistically and then eliminate that. So there's a few things that we're doing on that side. Speaker 200:20:26But right now, while new business we're seeing good execution, we do definitely see opportunity for us to execute better in the tougher climate that we are seeing for ourselves with existing customers. Speaker 400:20:40Great. And just as a quick follow-up, maybe Jubi for you. Maybe could you maybe walk us through some of the assumptions within your decision to narrow the full year revenue guidance band? Speaker 300:20:54Yes. The primary reason why we decided to narrow it was just because Q1 became in more or less in line with what we had anticipated at the midpoint of the revenue guidance. And the way we see it right now is, of course, we had hoped to do a little bit better with the net dollar expansion having ticked down by a percentage. And the underlying assumption for the full year revenue guidance is that we don't anticipate any material improvement in the net dollar expansion rate today, especially because we do see continued challenges kind of at least continuing into Q2. So because of that, we're assuming that net dollar expansion rate stays as is or maybe tick down a percentage. Speaker 300:21:33On the new business though, we are seeing some trends and we are pleased to see the traction in the business today. But a lot of smaller numbers, it is a smaller portion of our business. So even if it continues at the current growth rate that we see today, it won't have a material impact in terms of the uplift to Speaker 400:21:51revenue. Right. Thank you very much. Operator00:21:56One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from the line of Suneet Kothari from Baird. Your line is open. Speaker 500:22:11Hey, thanks for taking my question. So for Sumit, you mentioned that you're looking to expand the federal business and expand the public sector presence and kind of hosting your 1st public sector conference. Just curious, like can you elaborate on the traction of the GovCloud platform so far? What trends are you seeing there? And how does it perform relative to your expectations? Speaker 500:22:38And can you discuss like the opportunity that you see in terms of expanding it within the public sector? Speaker 200:22:47Yes, great question. Look, the opportunity in the federal is definitely large, and we are really working towards investing in the right way so that we can take advantage of that opportunity. And so from that perspective, we recently hired a leader for federal that we're happy about. We have expanded our federal team. We have hired somebody to focus on federal marketing. Speaker 200:23:07As you can see, we're really putting in place our first conference for federal, which already we have over 200 people who signed up kind of more than what we were anticipating from a capacity perspective. So those are really positive signs. In the last few quarters, we've talked about certain wins that we have had with government, federal government agencies. So the way we look at that is, it's an extremely small percentage of our overall bookings and we have a good opportunity to grow in that direction. And so we're making the right investments. Speaker 200:23:35But of course, as it is with the federal market, it is something that takes time and we are building the relationships with partners. As you can see, we signed up our federal partner that's taking Polis and our Patch Management along with the MDR to agencies. We invested in the FedRAMP program. So we have already FedRAMP moderate, which we have a large number of ATOs from many government agencies that are providing us ATO. And then we are on track now working with the PMO's office to get our FedRAMP high final certification. Speaker 200:24:09We already FedRAMP high ready right now. And so once you get our FedRAMP High certification, which we anticipate towards the end of the year, That is something that will give us even additional opportunity to take our GovCloud platform deeper into more agencies that are looking to go and modernize their infrastructure and go into a federal sort of a SaaS platform and move out of current very heavily on prem solutions. And so with the FedRAMP High that will enable us to be the only FedRAMP High vulnerability and Patch Management combined solution together that will be available for these customers. And as we saw with some of our federal wins as well, the reason for them to change out the current provider is because the current providers are only doing scanning and they have to have separate patch management tools. So even in the federal government, some of the recent wins that we have seen have enabled us to feel confident in our direction so that we can continue to take the Qualys combined platform with Patch Management, etcetera. Speaker 200:25:18And this is something that federal agencies are also looking for to reduce their tools sprawl, as well as expanding to the cloud environment as well. So it's an area that we are continuing to invest. We're just at the very early stages of that investment and we are pleased with the traction that we are seeing in this early stage. Speaker 500:25:40Got it. Helpful. Thanks for the detailed color, Sumit. And quick follow-up for Jumi. So you mentioned that you guys of course plan to launch new customer acquisition campaigns. Speaker 500:25:51Can you elaborate kind of who are you targeting and where is the increase in investment intensity in SNAM going in? Is it going to be more focused on sales incentives geared towards new logos, much more headcount growth, partnership investments, of course, public sector. So just curious like how are you increasing the investment intensity there? Speaker 300:26:18Yes. So our priority has been for a while to grow our new business. And it's part of the reason why we were really pleased to see the continued traction and the momentum. And the way we see it right now, where we've been really successful is on the enterprise side because that's where our strength is. However, we're pleased to see traction on both the enterprise and SMB and SMB. Speaker 300:26:37And the way we are planning to continue to invest to support that growth is, number 1, we are planning to hire more sales reps to support that growth and that's one of our initiatives. We are planning to increase our sales and marketing headcount by double digits this year as we had planned before. So that hasn't changed. And number 2, our partner channel, it's been really successful for us. We're seeing increase in investment in several different fronts, including the MSSP portal that we just announced as well as DLReD, it continues be healthy and continues to increase and our continued kind of we've been in the incentive structure, whether it's partner or direct to make sure that it's structured in a way to incentivize both direct and indirect sales force to really drive the new local growth. Speaker 500:27:25Got it. Speaker 200:27:26Thanks, Stuart. Appreciate Operator00:27:29it. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. Your line is open. Speaker 600:27:43Hi, this is Joe Vandrick on for Patrick Colville. So it seems like cloud security is a big opportunity for Qualys. And you've mentioned the CNAP solution getting some solid market traction. Are you typically selling it as a bundle or are customers kind of deciding to buy each solution separately? And then part 2 of that question, are you seeing stronger demand within any one area of CNAP? Speaker 600:28:11For example, CSPM or workload protection or maybe something else? Speaker 200:28:18Yes, that's a great question. Look, I think there is no organization out there that is cloud only. And so every time they look at their infrastructure, they have to do cloud and non cloud assets together. And that's really where we see the advantage for Qualys is when they combine the VMDR capabilities on on prem assets and then are able to use the exact same platform and expand that licensing into the cloud as well. It just makes it a lot more seamless. Speaker 200:28:42They get the benefit of higher volume pricing and it gives them the ability to combine the risk from their cloud and on prem platforms together in one place. And so from and that's why it's interesting for us to see that why even in our new logo lands, customers are starting to buy the total cloud solution combined with VMDR upfront in the first purchase itself. And so while it's early days, that's quite encouraging for us. We continue to work with our existing customers who have VMDR to expand those capabilities into cloud. In some cases, they don't have any good cloud security solution. Speaker 200:29:15In other cases, we are displacing some of the cloud only solutions because they need a visibility that is broader than that. Our pricing for the cloud solution given that the assets are so ephemeral, agents are so ephemeral in the cloud environment, It allows them to be flexible with the way that they can consume the cloud licenses. And so that way they can use for CSPM, they can use the same credits that they have purchased for container security, they can use the same for cloud identity. So the recent cloud identity module that we just announced is another expansion into the cloud native platform. And so it's a maturity level question for organizations, organizations that are very early in the journey right now are focusing initially on the CSPM part of total cloud. Speaker 200:30:03Those who are more mature are also taking the workload protection part. And then those who are going beyond that are also looking at other things like our ability to detect malware in the cloud in real time, our ability to expand uniquely into SaaS environments for SSPM, which is also part of our total cloud where we can do SaaS posture assessment. And then now we are looking forward to getting these customers access to our cloud identity entitlement management as well. And so there's a lot that we are now focusing on driving both from marketing and sales enablement perspective for us to create more opportunities on the total cloud side. But we definitely are pleased with the conversations and traction that we're seeing in the early days of this push that we are making across our sales force. Speaker 600:30:55That's helpful. Thanks, Sumit. And maybe one for Jumi, if I could. How should we think about capital allocation priorities over the next year? It looks like you bought back about $18,000,000 worth of shares in the quarter, which is a bit of a step down compared to last quarter last year. Speaker 600:31:13So just curious what it would take to see you get more aggressive on share buybacks? Speaker 300:31:19Our share buyback is based on the grid that we have in place right now and that we really think of it from the perspective of making sure that we can offset the equity dilution from the brands that we're making. And as you can see in the last couple of years, our dilutive also has been decreasing consistently incrementally. So the way we think about our cash and the utilization of excess cash is really looking at into 2024, we are anticipating more and more M and A opportunities, especially at evaluation that we think that makes sense for us. And so we are going to be taking a look at potential acquisition target opportunistically and then taking action on leveraging our balance sheet. Speaker 600:32:03Got it. Thank you. Operator00:32:07Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from the line of Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Speaker 700:32:22Hey guys, can you hear me? I apologize in the background noise. I missed this small cybersecurity conference called RSA. Speaker 200:32:28We can hear you. Speaker 700:32:30Two quick ones for me. The first one is just, could you maybe talk about how the billings growth in the quarter, whether that was how that shook out relative to your expectations and how you see billings maybe growing for the rest of the year relative to the revenue guidance you just gave? And then my follow-up is great traction on the new customer the new growth customer side of the business. I think you called out 3 straight quarters of double digit growth. How do we see that? Speaker 700:33:02Like where am I looking for that in what you guys disclosed so that I can kind of see this coming through in the numbers? And how and I guess is that on the partner is that coming from the partner side? Is that coming from the direct side? Just maybe a little bit more color on where that new customer growth is coming from? How durable is it? Speaker 700:33:24And how I can better see it in the numbers would be helpful? Thank you. Speaker 300:33:29Yes. In terms of current billings, 8%, we were hoping to do better. But honestly, I think that it's a fair representative of the business momentum that we see today because it does reflect the net dollar expansion rate having gone down by another percentage in Q1, offset partially by the traction continuing traction in the new business. And so I would say that if you were to look for guidance in terms of the calculated current billings for the full year, we would say it would be roughly in line with our revenue guidance today, which is 8% to 10% for the full year. In terms of the new business, the reason why we decided to talk about new business this quarter is because we are seeing a trend like 3 consecutive quarters is something that we thought was meaningful enough for us to talk about and disclose. Speaker 300:34:16And majority of that is driven by our channel partners. So the growth is coming from channel partners. And I think that if you were to look at the magnitude of it, you can probably tell based on the current billings growth of 8%, net dollar expansion rate of 4%, the risk would be coming from the new business. Speaker 700:34:35Super helpful. Thanks guys. Operator00:34:40Thank you. And I'm not showing no further questions in the queue. With that, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program and you may now disconnect. Operator00:34:53Everyone have a great day.Read moreRemove AdsPowered by