睿科網路 (ATEN) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the A10 Networks Q1 2016 financial results conference call and webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. (Operator instructions.) Please also note today's event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to Ms. Maria Riley, Investor Relations for A10 Networks. Ma'am, please go ahead.

Thank you all for joining us today. I am pleased to welcome you to A10 Networks first quarter 2016 financial results conference call. This call is being recorded and webcast live, and may be accessed for one year via the A10 Networks website, www.a10networks.com.

Joining me today are A10's founder and CEO, Lee Chen; A10's CFO, Greg Straughn; and our VP of Worldwide Sales, Ray Smets.

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that shortly after the market closed today A10 issued a press release announcing its first quarter 2016 financial results. Additionally, A10 published a presentation along with its prepared comments for this call and supplemental trended financial statements. You may access the press release, presentation with prepared comments, and trended financial statements on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website, www.a10networks.com.

During the course of today's call, management will make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our projections for our second quarter operating results, our expectations for future revenue growth, profitability, and operating margin, expectations of customer buying patterns, and the general growth of our business. These statements are based on current expectations and beliefs as of today, April 28th, 2016.

A10 disclaims any obligation to update information contained in these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control, that could cause actual results to differ materially.

We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements as a result of future events or otherwise. For a more detailed description of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our most recent 10-K filed on March 1st.

Please note that with the exception of revenue, financial measures discussed today are on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude certain charges. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in the press release issued today and on the trended quarterly financial statements posted on the Company's website.

We will provide our current expectations for the second quarter of 2016 on a non-GAAP basis. However, we will not make available a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance measures to corresponding GAAP measures on a forward-looking basis due to high variability and low visibility with respect to the charges which are excluded from these non-GAAP measures.

Before I turn the call over to Lee, I'd like to announce that management will present at the JPMorgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston on May 24th and D.A. Davidson annual Technology Forum in New York on June 1st, and the Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference in San Francisco, also in June. We hope to see many of you there.

Now I would like to turn the call over to Lee for his opening remarks. Lee?

Thank you, Maria. I would like to thank you all for joining our first quarter 2016 financial results conference call.

The first quarter was a strong start for the year, as we continued to build on our solid momentum. Total revenue in the quarter grew 22% year-over-year to $53.8 million.

Our growth was driven primarily by the continued adoption of our platform in public and private cloud deployments and high-end security focused Thunder products. This includes continued strong growth of our Thunder TPS DDoS protection solution and 29% year-over-year enterprise growth.

With our continued top line growth and disciplined approach to managing costs, we improved our bottom line by 55% year-over-year and generated strong cash flow from operations. Looking at our top line in more detail, product revenue grew 19% over last year to $36.4 million, which is our second highest level coming off our record performance last quarter.

From a geographic standpoint, we achieved 29% year-over-year revenue growth in the US and 23% growth in Japan. We are particularly pleased with our performance in Japan, as we closed a new TPS deal with one of our marquee service provider customers, as well as achieved 31% enterprise bookings growth in this region. Overall we delivered a strong quarter, added more than 150 new customers, and continued to grow our footprint within our existing customer base.

To expand on this, I would like to share with you a few recent customer wins that demonstrate the power of our ACOS platform in building application networking solutions, software as a service, and public and private cloud infrastructures.

A US-based online digital content provider deployed A10's Thunder ADC with SSL offload to replace an incumbent solution and efficiently scale their network to manage a large increase in SSL traffic.

They were particularly impressed with our auto-generating open API capabilities and command line interface. They also have confidence that our ACOS platform has the flexibility to meet current and future requirements as their business continues to grow.

We continued to expand our footprint within one of our security as a service customers. This customer was looking for a new IPSec solution because the incumbent vendor was losing packets between global data centers. In this win, we displaced the competitor with our Thunder solution to help improve the security performance while meeting their high traffic demands.

An online gaming company selected our Thunder ADC with SSL offload to process the high volume SSL traffic that is generated in their worldwide data centers. I would like to point out that we first won this customer's business in 2015 with our Thunder TPS solution.

Their adoption of our ADC demonstrates our ability to grow within our customers as they recognize and appreciate the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency inherent in the A10 platform.

A large global video sharing website selected our Thunder TPS DDoS protection solution to protect against a growing quantity of attacks. A10 was selected given our ability to scale against growing DDoS attacks, integrate with their existing tools using our open API, and improved overall network visibility.

And lastly, a cloud infrastructure service provider is rolling out our Thunder CGN solution globally to all new data centers as part of their critical infrastructure. This rollout continues to demonstrate A10's value in building out top public cloud infrastructures.

We ended the quarter with a strong backlog, and our opportunity pipeline has continued to grow. Contributing to our success is our ability to partner with our customers to drive innovation that addresses their evolving needs and influences the direction of the industry. We continue to execute on our technology vision and leverage our ACOS Harmony platform to expand our high performance security and software solutions.

During the quarter, we brought several new products to the market. We launched our Thunder Convergent Firewall, an inclusive, standalone, high performance security product built on A10's ACOS Harmony platform.

Thunder CFW is a software-based converged security solution for service providers, cloud providers, and large enterprises that helps stop cyber attacks and Web application attacks at scale. CFW became available for purchase in April, and we are encouraged by the early interest from our large installed base.

We also recently launched Thunder SSL Insight, a new standalone security product. This new appliance is built on our advanced SSL inspection technologies and the ACOS Harmony platform. A10's SSL Insight solution offers high-performance SSL decryption and comprehensive policy management.

Encrypted Internet traffic has grown significantly in recent years due to security and privacy concerns. Our standalone Thunder SSL Insight solution is designed for customers looking for a high volume dedicated SSL solution to eliminate blind spots in corporate defenses.

We also kicked off the first phase of our fourth generation hardware refresh with the launch of six new Thunder Series appliances, including the industry's fastest single rack unit ADC. These fourth generation appliances offer more options for entry level, upper mid range, and high-end appliances, and greater price performance and scalability.

And lastly, we recently launched Thunder ADC for Bare Metal. Our newest ADC software offering can be deployed on commodity off the shelf servers without using a hypervisor, enabling on-demand deployment. This provides large enterprises and cloud service providers the ability to streamline their data center operations by choosing their own bare metal hardware and still gaining the flexibility and scalability of A10's ACOS Harmony platform.

In summary, we believe our product vision, built on our ACOS Harmony platform, is in direct alignment with the trends we see in the market today. We are encouraged by our continued progress in the market and pleased with our execution and the first quarter results. We continue to make solid strides in executing our growth strategy to build a strong foundation for long term growth, while at the same time improving our bottom line.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to Greg to review the details of our first quarter financial performance and the second quarter guidance. Greg?

Thank you, Lee, and thank you all for joining us today.

First quarter revenue grew to $53.8 million, up 22% compared with $44 million in the prior year. Deferred revenue grew 25% year-over-year and 3% sequentially to reach a record $74.8 million.

First quarter product revenue grew 19% year-over-year to reach $36.4 million, representing 68% of total revenue. This compares with $30.5 million, or 69% of total revenue, in the prior year first quarter.

Service revenue grew 29% year-over-year to reach $17.4 million, or 32% of total revenue, compared with $13.5 million, or 31% of total revenue, in the first quarter of 2015.

From a geographic standpoint, first quarter revenue from the United States grew 29% year-over-year to reach $29.6 million, representing 55% of total revenue. First quarter revenue from Japan was $10.9 million, or 20% of revenue, and increased 23% year-over-year.

Revenue from APAC excluding Japan was up 47% year-over-year to reach $6.7 million, or 13% of total revenue. And revenue from EMEA was $5.1 million, or 9% of total revenue, compared with $6.2 million, or 14% of total revenue, in the first quarter of 2015.

Our enterprise and service provider revenue split this quarter was 60% and 40% of total revenue respectively. We achieved record enterprise revenue of $32.2 million, representing a 29% increase from Q1 of last year. Service provider revenue came in at $21.6 million, up 14% when compared with $19 million in the first quarter of 2015.

As we move beyond revenue, all further metrics discussed on this call are on a non-GAAP basis, unless stated otherwise.

We delivered first quarter total gross margin of 76.1%, within our expected range of 75% to 77%. This compares with total gross margin of 76.6% in Q1 of 2015 and 76.4% in Q4 of 2015.

Product gross margin was 76.2% in Q1 of 2016, down roughly 80 basis points from Q1 of 2015, and up 40 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2015. Our services gross margin came in at 75.9%, an increase of 40 basis points versus Q1 of 2015, and down 190 basis points versus Q4 of 2015 as we continue to invest in professional services.

We ended the quarter with staff of 831, up slightly from 826 at the end of Q4.

First quarter non-GAAP operating expenses were $44.9 million, or 83.5% of revenue, compared with $46.4 million, or 82% of revenue, in the prior quarter.

Operating expenses grew 5% as compared with the first quarter of last year.

First quarter non-GAAP operating loss was approximately $4 million, compared with the loss of $3.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. It is worth noting that our first quarter GAAP operating expenses included legal fees and a settlement payment related to a securities claim that was recently settled.

Our non-GAAP net loss in the first quarter was $4.1 million, or $0.06 per share, beating our guided range of $0.07 to $0.09 per share. Q one's net loss represents a 55% improvement when compared with the loss of $9.1 million, or $0.15 per share, in the first quarter of 2015.

Basic and diluted weighted outstanding shares for the first quarter were approximately 64.3 million shares.

Moving to the balance sheet, at March 31, 2016 we had $107.5 million in total cash and marketable securities, a $9.4 million increase from the end of December, and up $21.9 million compared with March 31, 2015.

During the quarter, cash generated from operations was $10.4 million, reflecting a strong collections quarter. Average days sales outstanding were 85 days, up four days from the prior quarter.

Moving on to our outlook, we are entering Q2 with a very strong and diversified backlog, and are pleased with our strong start to the quarter. We currently expect second quarter revenue to be in the range of $55 million to $57 million. At the midpoint, this represents 18% year-over-year revenue growth and 20% growth for the six month period.

We expect gross margin to remain in the 75% to 77% range, and operating expenses to be between $45 million and $46.5 million. We expect to report a non-GAAP net loss of between $0.04 and $0.06 per share using approximately 64.9 million shares on a basic and diluted basis.

We are maintaining our commitment to become profitable on a non-GAAP operating basis by the end of the calendar year.

With that, I would like to open up the call for your questions. Operator?

(Operator instructions.) Rod Hall, JPMorgan.

Hi. This is Ashwin on behalf of Rod. Thanks for taking my question. Greg, could you comment on the nature of those investments in professional services you are making? Do you see some revenue opportunities ahead of you? How should we think about those investments and implications?

And also, I was wondering if you could comment on your traction with financial customers. Are you seeing any share gains there? Any kind of strategy or any color you could give there would be helpful. Thank you.

Hi, Ashwin. This is Greg. I'll address the professional services question and then I'll toss it over to Ray to address the financial services customer traction.

So, the professional service investment is basically adding people to the team ahead of demand. So, as we geographically put our professional services organization into new markets and feet on the street, it takes a while for them to fill up from a demand capacity.

So, there's really no hard investment to it. It's just people. And so, we do expect growth in that line item and for the margins to improve over time. It's just we need to have capacity in the field.

Hey, Greg, can you clarify something there? When you said timeframe, should we be thinking like maybe one or two quarters down the line or maybe potentially 2017? How to think about that?

Yes, we won't be too specific on that. But, I think certainly as we finish out this year we should see that be in a better position than it is today, what it was for Q1, I guess I'd say.

Thank you. Okay. And the financial customers?

Yes, Ashwin. This is Ray Smets, just a quick comment on financial customers. Yes, we are gaining new financial customers every quarter. We did in Q1 as we have in past quarters.

I'm not sure I can really represent that as a share gain because I don't know what the actual market share looks like in that particular sector. But, I can tell you that we are winning some very attractive opportunities with existing financial customers that we have already announced in the past as well as expanding customers.

Thank you.

Catharine Trebnick, Dougherty.

Thank you. Nice prints, and we like the guide. I just have a quick couple of questions. Could you give us a little bit more color on what people are really spending on and what applications they're spending on? I think that would be very helpful since the ADC growth is expected to be pretty flat. It seems that you guys seem to be doing well in this area. So, could you maybe give us more application related successes? Thank you.

So, Catharine, this is Ray. I'll comment on kind of the larger, more macro sector initially.

We're definitely seeing a very nice catalyst across the board in terms of approaching the private and the public cloud area. And we're seeing some very attractive opportunities related to our security portfolio and selling into the high end of the marketplace.

I would say in general from a service provider perspective we're seeing a nice catalyst in that area around increase in bandwidth requirements and obviously, from a performance perspective, devices attached to their network. So, that does catalyze our CGN product area as well.

But, we're also seeing also a very nice catalyst in the cloud deployment area, where you see a higher demand for higher performing solutions in the ADC space as well as in the security domain as they begin to pick up a bit more of the market opportunity.

So, I'll just add in the -- in general, I think we see the growth in both ADC and our security portfolio, but especially in the high-end security products such as TPS and SSL Insight.

All right. Thank you.

Itai Kidron, Oppenheimer.

Thanks. Hi, guys; a couple things. First, can you give us some color on Europe? It seems like it's the only region that's been down on a year-over-year basis. What are the challenges you're seeing there?

Hey, Itai. Ray Smets here. Yes, I would say we did see some -- a little more than normal weakness in EMEA, but mostly in the Middle East. And I would say nothing more than we had anticipated, though, just pretty much what others have been reporting.

We try to keep a bead on what others are talking about in the marketplace, and we didn't see anything dramatically different. Some other areas that we happened to notice as others have reported are areas like LATAM, specifically in Brazil.

But, I would say that it was within the range of what we expected. So, although it was a little bit weaker in Q1 year-over-year, it was within our expected area.

Okay. And Greg, is there any way you can give us some color of security as a percent of revenue? And perhaps more specifically, is there any concentration in your -- I mean customer concentration within your security revenue? I think everybody recognizes that clearly you're doing a very good job over there. I think some of the concerns would be that it's driven by one or two very large deals that -- as always when you ramp on a new product, sometimes those large deals upfront kind of get a little bit harder to fill at the beginning before you start getting into broad distribution.

Yes. I can definitely give you some color on that, not some specific numbers. But, from a security perspective, let me talk first about TPS and then go a little bit broader.

At the end of last year, we talked about TPS being 10% of our product revenue -- or of our total revenue, and that we had seen growth quarter-over-quarter and we'd continue to see growth into Q1. So, Q1 was positive growth on the TPS side.

In addition to that, we actually had more TPS customers by count this quarter than we've had previously. So, we're not just seeing the dollars increase, but the customer penetration by numbers increase.

And then, add to that that we have continued to see movement on our SSLi product. It's too early for CFW, but -- so, when we look at our security portfolio, we're seeing growth in both dollars and in numbers.

Okay. So, that growth that you mentioned, that was sequential from the fourth quarter, you mean?

Yes.

Yes, our TPS did well in Q1. Its revenue grew sequentially and also on a year-over-year basis.

Got it. And so, that implies that it's somewhere in the low/mid-teens as a percent of revenue. Greg, correct me if I'm wrong.

I guess when I look at SSL and I look at your converged firewall ramping, is there anything in those products that makes you think that they are not going to ramp like TPS did? Meaning are they products that you think naturally start at smaller deals, smaller customers or they, from a consumption profile, have a similar consumption profile to TPS, meaning you do expect to get some million dollar type of deals, that is a possibility? How should I think about the ramp in those two products?

I think for the CFW it's too early to tell the revenue contribution in 2016. So, we are not putting a timetable on this at this point, but we are real encouraged by the early interest from our installed customer base.

And the same for SSI. We did see nice revenue in Q1. But, again, it's too early to tell.

Why do you think this is not going to be a material contribution? What is it about the product or the market that makes you feel -- doesn't give you the same confidence level, like TPS did, that you'll get traction right away?

It's simply too early in its life. You look at TPS. It took almost nine months before it started to really contribute significantly to the revenue, right? I think the -- and also in the TPS, we had a marquee customer before the product made the general availabilities. So, that's a nice start for TPS.

But still, we see really early interest from our customers. But, it's too early to tell really.

Okay, very good. All right. Good luck, guys.

Thank you, Itai.

James Faucette, Morgan Stanley.

Hey, this is Meta Marshall for James; a couple of quick questions. On the refresh that you guys mentioned, is there any intention to kind of end of life previous appliances, or is it just kind of a natural upgrade? And kind of what percentage of your installed base would you expect to upgrade?

And then the second is just kind of housekeeping about what was the impact of the strengthened yen in the quarter to financials.

Sure. I'll answer the first. Greg, you answer the second about yen.

Yes.

So, the new hardware refresh is really a -- continues to execute on our technology vision and leveraging the scalability and flexibility of our ACOS platform. It's really no different than in the past when we released products.

Then the product is in market long enough, and then we will announce end of sales for some appliances, but not all the old appliances. So, we will have the old appliance, also the new appliance on the market for most of the entry level, midrange, and the high-end.

Meta, and then on the yen question, this is actually the first quarter where the yen was not measured as a headwind. And so, as it's going through this transition, the effect was fairly negligible in the quarter.

It was modestly positive, but kind of in the $100,000 range additive to revenue versus the million dollar detriments that we would see as it went the other direction.

Okay. Thanks, guys.

(Operator instructions.) Ryan Flanagan, Buckingham Research.

Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about customer concentration. I know we had a customer last quarter, I believe, that approached around 20%. Were there any outsized customers this quarter, or are there any baked into the guidance?

And then secondly, I wanted to ask on DSOs ticked up here. And we're not in the triple digit level we were a few quarters ago, but just curious if you can add some color there given SPE is now at 40% versus 52% last quarter. Thanks.

Yes, this is Greg. So, on the concentration, no, we did not have anybody who is really approaching the 10% level in this quarter.

And so, I think as we've talked about, as we participate in these markets, we will occasionally see large customers. We look at them as ways to create upside unless they're kind of booked by the time we have this call. And so, we tend not to be as reliant on them as we were a year or 18 months ago.

And as to guidance, we tend not to be quite that specific as to whether we're looking at 10% customers within the quarter. But, from a forecasting methodology, the way we've set our guidance for the quarter is very consistent with the way we've been doing it for about the last year and a half. So, we're methodologically the same there.

As far as the DSOs go, from a math perspective when we do it in Q1, we came out with a very high receivable number in Q4 because of the maintenance renewals and the bookings there. So, that's still part of the average, and then our revenue is down seasonally for Q1.

So, from a total AR value perspective, we're basically at the same level we are today as we were at the end of Q3. So, what you're seeing in the DSO number is really the Q4 impact of high receivables. But, when we get to our cash number for the quarter being cash flow positive by $10 million, that's really the result of great collections of those receivables.

So, we look at that number as kind of a blip and not something that warrants any kind of concern on our part.

That's helpful. Thanks, guys. Good luck.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference call back over to Mr. Lee Chen, CEO of A10, for any closing remarks.

Thank you, all of our shareholders, for joining us today and for your support. Thank you and good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded. We do thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.