Commvault Systems Inc (CVLT) 2015 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning and welcome to the second-quarter 2015 CommVault earnings conference call. My name is Brandon, and I will be your operator for today. (Operator Instructions) Please note that this conference is being recorded; and I will now turn it over to Michael Picariello. You may begin, sir.

Good morning. Thanks for dialing in today for our fiscal second-quarter 2015 earnings call. With me on the call are Bob Hammer, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer; Al Bunte, Chief Operating Officer; and Brian Carolan, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made during this call, including in the question-and-answer session at the end of the call, may include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding financial projections and future performance. All these statements that relate to our beliefs, plans, executions, or intentions regarding the future are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are based on our current expectations. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties such as competitive factors, difficulties and delays inherent in the development, manufacturing, marketing, and sale of software products and related services, and general economic conditions. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties affecting our business, please see the risk factors contained in our annual report on Form 10-K and in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, in our other SEC filings, and in the cautionary statement contained in our press release and on our website.

The Company undertakes no responsibility to update the information in this conference call under any circumstance. In addition, the development and timing of any product release as well as any of its features or functionality remain at our sole discretion.

Our earnings call -- our earnings press release was issued over the wire services earlier today, and it has also been furnished to the SEC as an 8-K filing. The press release is also available on our Investor Relations website.

On this conference call, we will provide non-GAAP financial results. The reconciliation between the non-GAAP and GAAP measures can be found in Table 4 accompanying the press release and posted on our website.

This conference call is also being recorded for replay and is being webcast. An archive of today's webcast will be available on our website following the call.

I will now turn the call over to our CEO and President, Bob Hammer.

Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our fiscal second-quarter 2015 earnings call.

As I noted on our last earnings call, we knew this quarter would be challenging, given the size of our funnels and visibility entering Q2, and that it would take us several more quarters to get back to sustainable, consistent (technical difficulty) high-growth trajectory. There were some bright spots to report, such as our growth in EMEA and our cloud services group.

Throughout the second quarter, we continued to make progress on our planned transformation of CommVault, to enhance our product and related go-to-market initiatives, strengthen our strategic partner programs, and add additional field selling capacity. However, despite the strength of our strategic position, the depth and differentiation of our technology, and our strong financial position, we did not execute well enough to meet our own expectations for the quarter.

The good thing about execution issues are that they are within our control. Over the next few minutes I will have more to say about these issues, the specific action items that are already underway to address them, and the reasons we remain confident about CommVault's return to growth.

Let me briefly summarize our Q2 financial results. Total revenues were $151.1 million, up 7% year-over-year and down 1% sequentially.

Software revenue was $69.4 million, down 2% year-over-year and 4% sequentially. Services revenue was $81.7 million, and grew 15% year-over-year and 1% sequentially.

From an earnings perspective for the quarter, non-GAAP operating income, or EBIT, was $26.2 million, down 31% year-over-year and 21% sequentially. Non-GAAP EBIT margins were 17.3%. Diluted earnings per share were $0.35.

We generated approximately $32.2 million of cash flow from operations during Q2, ending the quarter with approximately $415 million of cash and short-term investments.

CommVault has a proud history of growth, and I see our correct execution challenges as difficult but resolvable over the next several quarters. We have the markets, the underlying technology, the products, the distribution, and financial wherewithal to solve these issues.

Importantly, we have been working for over a year to make the necessary changes to our business (inaudible) (technical difficulty) for future growth. We possess strong underlying business fundamentals; our target markets continue to have solid growth potential; and we are well positioned to take advantage of the increasing demand by both enterprise-level and midsize companies for products, solutions, and services that help to manage, protect, secure, and create value from their data.

We have innovative, differentiated technology that is recognized by our customers and third-party analysts as the best in the industry. We have industry-leading support, with a very large, satisfied installed base due to our best-in-class support and development organizations.

In parallel to improving near-term performance, our management team and the Board of Directors are absolutely committed to achieving our billion-dollar plan over the next few years, by building a strong foundation for growth based on: building on our strategic data and information platform; extending our solutions to cloud-based services; continuing to move to targeted, standalone solution sets that are priced and packaged for key markets; expanding our position in mobile, dev-test, DR, and analytics; as well as moving into selected vertical markets like healthcare; and continuing to develop strategic services and creating proactive automated support services. Underpinning these efforts is a strong pipeline of innovation, including our R3 release in fiscal Q4 and our next version of Simpana, which is scheduled to go into beta next quarter.

I mentioned on our Q2 FY14 -- that is a year ago -- earnings call that in order to take full advantage of the expanding market opportunities and deal with the expected rapid changes in our markets we needed to make major changes in how we package, price, deliver, and distribute our leading solutions. Making these changes has required us to add significant fundamental additions to our core capabilities across the Company, including product management, pricing, and our go-to-market and distribution capabilities.

We knew making fundamental changes would be difficult and have inherent risks. Fortunately, we took those risks.

We have made good progress on our initiatives and are now in a much better position to meet the new demands of our customers as well as put us in a stronger competitive position against both old and new competitors. I will provide further details in a few minutes on these issues.

Let me talk about the action plan for improving the Americas and global license revenue sales growth. I realize we have been talking about issues in the Americas for a couple of quarters now. The Americas problem has been a stubborn one to fix.

The underlying issues that are making it difficult for the Americas team to achieve their objectives are also impacting our sales teams globally. As a result, we have taken a comprehensive global approach to accelerate global license revenue growth as well as reignite growth in the Americas. It includes focusing our field leadership and resources where they can have the biggest impact and accelerating the core transformative product, pricing, marketing, and distribution changes.

In regard to field leadership changes, Pete Kobs, our VP of the Americas, will be taking a critical newly created position as VP of Global Accounts. This is a new senior management position, and we are fortunate to have Pete in this role with his experience, skills, energy, and commitment to CommVault.

Ron Miller, Senior VP of Worldwide Sales, will run day-to-day operations for the Americas and will immediately work to identify a new leader for the Americas theater.

I want to talk about accelerating the core transformative product pricing, marketing, and distribution changes. As I mentioned earlier, we are in the process of accelerating our corporate-wide changes to products, pricing, channel, and marketing initiatives that are being rolled out now. The objectives of these changes is to provide our sales teams with products and pricing that make it easier for customers to buy, along with adding products and services that will open up new market opportunities.

We are making good progress in our corporate-wide transformations. It includes augmenting our senior Singular platform capacity-based pricing model with standalone products with their own value propositions. These solutions are technically optimized to solve today's discrete customer problems.

Product pricing is aligned the way customers want to acquire their solutions and are delivered via different delivery models including appliances, the cloud, or as on-premise software solutions. These products can be purchased through our expanded distribution channels and supported with more sophisticated marketing.

The first series of these products began rolling out late last quarter. There will be another series of new targeted solutions that will roll out in our next quarter, our fiscal Q4.

These products can be seamlessly integrated into our Simpana data and information platform and will allow customers to easily build towards a smarter long-term vision. This is true especially for large, complex organizations who are tired of managing a series of point solutions and are looking for ways to consolidate their key suppliers, facilitate and simplify the move to the cloud and the move to mobile, all to better manage their solutions.

We are forecasting that the results of these product additions, combined with increased distribution leverage and better organizational focus and alignment, will begin to positively impact our revenue starting in our Q4 fiscal 2015. These product additions will provide a stronger foundation for growth for FY16.

We expect that it will take CommVault two or three more quarters to get back to improved levels of revenue and earnings growth. As a result, we are lowering our revenue and EBIT expectations for the balance of fiscal 2015.

Specifically, we believe revenues will be flat to slightly up sequentially for Q3 2015. We are forecasting improvement in Q4 over Q3.

Our objective is to return to our historical growth rates within the second half of FY16. We are forecasting improved revenue and earnings growth trends throughout FY16 based on the successful implementation of our go-to-market model and productivity improvements in our largest and most mature markets, the Americas.

In summary, we see our current challenge as difficult but resolvable. We have the markets, the products, the distribution, and financial wherewithal to significantly improve revenue growth and profitability.

Our vision and strategy are clearly defined, and we have made structure changes across the Company to better execute on that strategy. Although we are not at all satisfied with our Q2 2015 results, the senior management team is united, committed, and focused.

I will now turn the call over to Brian.

Thanks, Bob, and good morning, everyone. I will now cover some key financial highlights for the second quarter of fiscal-year 2015.

Total revenues for the quarter were $151.1 million, representing an increase of 7% over the prior-year period and a decline of 1% sequentially. For the quarter, we reported software revenue of $69.4 million, which was down by 2% over the prior-year period and down 4% sequentially.

Revenue from enterprise deals, which we define as deals over $100,000 in software revenue in a given quarter, decreased by 5% over the prior-year period and 14% sequentially. Our average enterprise deal size was approximately $281,000 during the current quarter, compared to $295,000 in the prior-year period and $356,000 in the prior quarter.

We continue to see strong utilization of our capacity-based licensing models, which has a direct correlation to the underlying volume of data under management. Capacity-based license sales represented 82% of our Q2 software revenue, compared to 80% of software revenue in the prior-year period.

For the quarter, software revenues derived from indirect distribution channels decreased 8% over the prior-year period and represented 88% of software revenue. As a reminder, most sizable deals are driven by our direct sales force, even though they are often transacted through the channel.

The revenue mix for the quarter was 46% software and 54% services. Please remember, services revenue is a combination of both maintenance and support revenue and professional services revenue.

From a services revenue perspective, our maintenance attach rates and renewal rates remain strong. Services revenue for Q2 was $81.7 million, an increase of 15% year-over-year and 1% sequentially.

For the quarter, total revenue from US operations generated 58% of total revenues, resulting in a 5% year-over-year increase, while revenue from international operations generated the balance, resulting in a 9% year-over-year increase. Internationally, EMEA had a very good quarter.

We added approximately 300 new customers in the quarter. Our historical customer count is over 20,000 customers. Our breakdown of license revenue from new and existing customers was in line with historical ratios.

Arrow, our largest distributor, continues to be a key partner for CommVault. For the quarter, revenue transacted through Arrow was approximately 36% of total revenue, growing 18% year-over-year and 6% sequentially.

Our partnership with Hitachi Data Systems, or HDS, also continues to strengthen in all of our regions. For the quarter, revenue transacted through HDS was approximately 11% of total revenue, growing 56% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. This year-over-year increase was primarily in EMEA and the Americas.

We also had solid year-over-year growth in revenues from our NetApp partnership and view them to be a key strategic partner of ours in the near- and longer-term.

Our resellers and distribution partners are very important to our growth and market reach. We have various programs in place with our resellers, systems integrators, and storage partners and will continue to invest in such programs throughout FY15. Some of these strategic initiatives we are working on will strengthen these relationships, and we expect that these distribution partners will play an important role in our transformation.

We also continue to add new strategic managed service providers and cloud service providers who use our products as the engine for them to provide data and information management services to their customers. With over 200 service providers already delivering cloud and managed solutions powered by Simpana, we are building a meaningful subscription revenue stream for CommVault.

There is an increasing customer demand for such subscription-based pricing models, and this will continue to be a major area of focus for us during FY15 and into FY16. It should be noted, however, that our gradual shift to more subscription-based revenue is not fully predictable and may have an impact on in-period recognized revenue.

Now moving on to gross margins, operating expenses, and EBIT margin. Gross margins were 87.1% for the quarter. Total operating expenses were $103.8 million for the quarter, up approximately 22% year-over-year and 6% sequentially. Sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of total revenues increased to 51% in the current quarter, which was up from 44% in the prior-year period.

Non-GAAP operating margins were 17.3% for the quarter, resulting in operating income or EBIT of $26.2 million. On a year-over-year basis, Q2 EBIT decreased by 31%. Q2 EBIT margins decreased by 930 basis points year-over-year and 430 basis points sequentially.

Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $16.5 million. And EPS was $0.35 per share, based on a diluted weighted average share count of approximately 47.2 million shares.

Interest income, net of interest expense on the revolving credit facility, was nominal in the quarter. While there have been no borrowings on our credit facility to date, we do incur interest expense related to the commitment fee. We anticipate that we will have no net interest income for the remainder of FY15, and net interest income before any potential borrowings will be minimal for FY16.

On a year-over-year constant currency basis, foreign currency movements did not have a significant impact on Q2 revenues and earnings per share. On a sequential constant currency basis, total revenue was impacted by 100 basis points.

As such, total revenues would have been flat quarter-on-quarter. EPS would have been minimally impacted on a sequential constant currency basis.

I would now like to spend a few minutes discussing our operating expense investments and EBIT margins. We had declining operating margins in Q2 mainly due to the shortfall on the top line.

In addition, we had planned aggressive headcount additions as well as increased targeted spending on several investment initiatives, such as our cloud services group, our product management function, our go-to-market and partnering capabilities, and continued investments in product development, consulting services, and support. We added 122 net employees in fiscal Q2 and ended the quarter with 2,195 employees. Most of the net new employees hired in Q2 2015 were field-facing sales teams.

Year-to-date, we have made some good progress in hiring quota-carrying sales teams globally and will continue to do so throughout FY15. We are also keenly focused on sales employee enablement, retention, and redeployment in order to make sure we are ramping our headcount resources effectively and aligning them with high-impact priorities.

As we have stated in prior quarters, newly hired sales reps typically take about 12 months before they become fully productive. In the short term, as we continue to hire and before the sales teams become fully productive, they will have a negative impact on short-term margins.

As Bob indicated, we believe it will take a few quarters to put the Company back on a growth trajectory. As a result, we believe Q3 2015 revenue will be flat to slightly up sequentially. Our objective is to return to our historic growth rates within the second half of FY16.

As a reminder, FY16 is the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016. Given the adjusted revenue growth rate and planned investments we're making now for FY16 growth, we expect fiscal 2015 operating margins to be down by approximately 650 to 750 basis points on a year-over-year basis, which would indicate an annual operating margin range of approximately 18.4% to 19.4%.

Let me now comment on tax rate and share count. We will continue to use a pro forma tax rate of 37% for FY15.

Our GAAP tax rate for the first half of FY15 was 34%. We expect our cash tax rate to remain lower than our GAAP tax rate for fiscal 2015 and to be approximately 32%, excluding any potential benefit from pending federal tax legislation. Our cash tax rate will approach our long-term GAAP tax rate over the next 1 to 2 years.

For fiscal 2015, we anticipate that our annual diluted weighted average share count will be approximately 47.5 million to 48.5 million shares.

Now, moving on to our balance sheet and cash flows, as of September 30 our cash and short-term investments balance was approximately $415 million, down 15% year-over-year, primarily due to cash outlays for the new headquarters buildout and share repurchases. Free cash flow, which we define us cash flow from operations less capital expenditures not related to the new headquarters, was $31.1 million, which is up 34% year-over-year and down 9% sequentially.

As of September 30, 2014, our deferred revenue balance was approximately $218.8 million, which is an increase of $27.6 million or 14% over the prior-year period and up $4.9 million or 2% sequentially. On a constant currency basis, the year-over-year growth of deferred revenue would have been 17% and the sequential growth would have been 5%.

Please remember, the vast majority of our deferred revenue is maintenance and support revenue, not software revenue. As of September 30, 2014, our deferred software revenue balance represented less than 1% of total deferred revenue or approximately $950,000.

For the quarter, our days sales outstanding or DSO was 62 days, which is down from 66 days in Q1 FY15 and up from 53 days in the prior-year quarter. The change is due to linearity within the quarter.

During Q2 FY15, we expended approximately $17.3 million on construction costs for our new campus headquarters. Our estimate of the total cost of this phase of the project remains to be approximately $135 million. Through September 30, we have spent approximately $107 million on this project, and we expect to spend an additional $28 million during the remainder of fiscal 2015, with most of this being disbursed in calendar 2014.

We expect to move into our new headquarters during the third fiscal quarter. As a result, we will likely incur approximately $4 million of expenses in the second half of fiscal 2015, which represent lease termination, moving, and other nonrecurring costs related to our existing corporate headquarters. These nonrecurring expenses will be excluded from non-GAAP earnings.

As a reminder, our annualized cost of the new headquarters, which we will own outright, will be approximately $8.5 million, of which $5 million will be reflected as depreciation expense, with the remainder being operating expense.

That concludes the financial highlights. I will now turn the call back over to Bob. Bob?

Thanks, Brian. As I already provided an overview of our strategy, I will now provide a brief overview of the changes in our organization required to successfully execute that strategy, as well as more detail of our near-term initiatives tied to improving near-term performance.

We have strengthened our organization's structure to successfully achieve our goals, improve performance, and take advantage of the opportunities that lie in front of us. These changes include a new business unit structure, which we have been working on for approximately a year.

Moving from a product management structure to a business unit structure to better focus on each unique market segment, we recruited business unit heads who have very specific expertise in our key target market areas. We just appointed a new Chief Technology Officer, Brian Brockway, who will support our business unit structure from a technology perspective.

As we already reported, we have a new Chief Marketing Officer. Our introduction of standalone products has enabled us to develop much more targeted go-to market strategies, which are being driven by our new CMO.

We have established a much more sophisticated pricing function. We have established a new program management function to ensure better alignment for broad Company-based initiatives.

We have also increased investment in our distribution organization, which will establish tighter alliances with certain strategic partners, build a growth foundation with the MSP and cloud providers, establish a much stronger foundation with major systems integrators, and establish much more proactive relationship with the public cloud providers.

I want to talk about our business unit structure, which has replaced the existing product management function within CommVault. The business unit structure is responsible not only for the technical roadmap but to also make sure that all the elements are in place to ensure that the strategic and revenue objectives of that unit are met. The business unit leaders are responsible to make sure all their standalone solutions have the elements in place for success in the market, including functionality, pricing, packaging, messaging, lead generation, channel programs, and enablement.

There will be five business units: data protection, cloud ops and orchestration, information compliance, mobile and vertical solutions. Four of those business units have already been established.

The individual unit heads are all new to CommVault and bring very specific market expertise and fresh thinking into our expanding businesses. In order to help ensure coordinated alignment among the individual business units, these heads shall report to Al Bunte, our COO.

I will provide an overview of key initiatives that we already implemented to positively impact growth in the near term. I will also provide a brief overview of the next version of Simpana.

The first thing I want to talk about, the introduction of Simpana standalone Solution Sets. As I mentioned earlier we are focusing on key actions in our core data management business that will enable us to rapidly build funnel and reestablish solid license revenue growth in the near term.

These programs, being launched this quarter, are based on our R2 release and include targeted virtualization solutions, appliances, and new NetApp and HDS strategic partner programs. All of these programs are focused on specific segments of the data protection and management market.

These solutions address many new key customer requirements both in the enterprise and the SMB segments of the market. They include new innovation as well as simplified packaging and new pricing. All of the Solution Sets are being launched with much more sophisticated, aggressive messaging, channel, and lead-generation programs.

The first one I will talk about is data protection management and virtualization initiatives. CommVault has long been recognized as a leader for virtualized environments.

We are now launching best-in-class, standalone solutions for virtualized environments including VM provisioning and orchestration, data management and protection, and VM archiving for on-premise and in the cloud. Data protection in virtualized environments is the fastest-growing segment of the data management market. We have now enhanced that functionality to include VM management combined with advanced data management functions.

All this functionality is priced and packaged as standalone products, which make it easier for customers to buy and partners to sell. The initial response from the market on our standalone VM protection solutions has been positive and is a good early validation that we deliver best-in-class products that are priced and packaged correctly.

Next I want to talk about our CommVault NetApp-based appliances. Increasingly, end-users in most segments of the market are looking to address their data management challenges through fully integrated backup appliances.

CommVault's strategy on appliances has always been to engineer a series of industry-leading innovative appliances that enable our channel partners around the globe to build and deliver those appliances with partner-chosen hardware and embedded Simpana software. The newest appliance being released in the US and Canada this quarter is a CommVault backup appliance in partnership with NetApp that combines Simpana software and NetApp E-Series storage.

The appliance will be configured and delivered by our trusted distribution partners, beginning with Arrow and Avnet. These partners will offer a single bundled partner SKU from distribution that also includes CommVault's industry-leading first-line support. We will recognize the software only.

The international launch of the CommVault backup appliance is targeted for Q1 FY16. Fujitsu is also launching a CommVault-branded appliance in Europe this quarter.

This is all part of our broader strategy, working with multiple partners in multiple geographies to offer our appliance options across a variety of data management areas such as backup, de-duplication, archive, cloud gateway, and native copy. CommVault will continue to focus on software innovation, delivery, service, and support.

Let me also talk about fast access and native copy. There are many use cases where users want very fast data access and quick recovery. In order to do that, customers want data stored in native format so that it can be instantly available for use.

Native copy allows data to be stored in the same format as it was created by the original application, so that it can be recovered without having to recover from the data from a backup copy. We have had native copy recovery capabilities embedded in our software for some time and have championed its use with customers.

In R2, we delivered native copy capability for virtual environments including live browse, live recovery, and live sync. We do the best of both worlds in that we provide native format capabilities with very efficient cost-effective storage infrastructures.

In addition, we store data that is fully secured and indexed and can be used for long-term retention, compliance, search, legal, and analytics. We are delivering this functionality with our platform as well as standalone solutions that are packaged and priced the way customers want to buy, with significantly more functionality, scalability, and much lower cost of ownership compared to the new entrants in the market.

There will be additional new standalone solutions. In the near future we are planning to introduce additional R2 and R3 standalone solutions including disaster recovery, dev-test, enhanced mobile capabilities, and cloud archiving.

In addition to all this, we have been working on a major new version of Simpana. The next version of Simpana, which will be released in FY16, is a major rewrite of the platform that will create an open platform from which -- which customers are demanding as they shift to building IT infrastructures on open components that they perceive will get them out from under vendor lock-in. By open we mean anyone will be able to access and read data that we store under more sophisticated security functionality, and there will be APIs throughout the stack.

In the next version we will also be making substantial changes in how we index and transport data. These enhancements will have significant cost, performance, scale, access recovery, and security advantages.

When we are able to share with you the increased depth and breadth of the next Simpana, I promise that we will continue to technically distance ourselves from our competition with innovative, high-value solutions. I will address this further on our next earnings call. Please note that the development and timing of any release as well as any of its features or functionality remain at our sole discretion.

So let's talk about our plan to reignite growth in the near term. We have implemented a corporate-wide comprehensive plan for our business with a specific focus on enabling our global sales teams to increase growth, reignite growth in the Americas, and build the foundation for getting back to historic growth rates.

Specifically, the plan includes initiatives to improve field leverage and productivity, the introduction of new standalone products to provide more channel leverage and provide many more entry points to the enterprise. We have added targeted resources and established aggressive incentives to drive near-term growth from our channel partners.

We are launching new strategic partner initiatives. We are implementing new demand-generation capabilities. We are adding additional incentive for our salesforce globally tied to the new product and partner initiatives, and we are continuing to focus on enablement and increasing sales capacity through both retention and recruiting.

In closing, our vision and strategy are clearly defined. We have taken comprehensive, aggressive actions to improve near-term and long-term performance.

We continue to have expanded market opportunities along with an increased set of leading products and services. We have developed a deep product pipeline that includes the next generation of Simpana.

We have made a lot of progress in making our core transformative changes. However, making these changes is complex and it will take us several more quarters to see significant financial impact from our transformation initiatives. As a result, we have lowered near-term expectations.

We believe the actions we are already taking and the plans we have developed will enable us to significantly improve our performance. All of these things together have put us on a course to get back to historical growth rates in the second half of FY16 and achieve our billion-dollar plan objectives.

I will now turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Bob. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?

(Operator Instructions) BMO Capital Markets, Joel Fishbein.

Good morning, guys. Just, Bob, on one thing. Last quarter you guys implemented a new or increased buyback program; and I noticed in this quarter you didn't buy back any stock. Was there any reason for that?

We always take an opportunistic approach in our share buybacks, Joel. We certainly have the wherewithal to do it; and using some common sense I would say that, given that opportunistic approach, we will act appropriately.

Okay. Then one follow-up for Brian. Brian, deferred revenue was up nicely. I know a majority of that is driven by services and maintenance. But was there anything specific in there that drove the 14% growth in deferred?

Hey, Joel. Yes, I would say in the long-term, maintenance contracts we saw a tick up there nicely this quarter. We had a sale of multiyear maintenance contracts this past quarter.

Would that be on new sales? Or was that on existing customers that just renewed?

On both. That would be both. Both new sales and existing.

Okay. Then one just quick follow-up for Bob. Hey, Bob, clearly you outlined some initiatives to obviously reaccelerate the growth and position the Company.

What gives you the confidence that this is not a secular issue and more an execution issue internal to CommVault?

Well, one, it is an execution issue if you think about it. We have been highly focused on the enterprise in the cloud and have moved resources there. The cloud business is going pretty well, and the buying for the big enterprise sales clearly has been off industrywide.

That is not as an excuse; it is just a fact. And we left ourselves more wide open both from a resource standpoint and from a product standpoint in the midmarket.

We knew that; there is nothing new there. I mentioned it a year ago. It has just taken us a long time to get these products to market, change our pricing, change our packaging, build our appliances, and get all that out to market, which is rolling out this quarter.

In addition to that, when you're making these substantial changes, we had to put the organizational structures in place to execute all that. And we are doing all that in parallel.

I use the term we are doing knee surgery on ourselves while we are running a marathon.

The good news is all that is in place, and now all that is rolling out. And we are getting good response from our customers and partners.

And proof of all that is: how do we do? Internally, from the management team, we don't like the numbers; but we feel really good about where we are in the industry and our ability to bring products to market with this structure significantly faster than we have before, because it is all in place and we are moving right now.

So the odds are certainly way with us versus against us right now. I think you can tell from just our attitude here that we have -- our feet are firmly planted; we know exactly where we are going; we know how to get there; and we have got all the capabilities to do that.

So again, not happy about the numbers but we are feeling really good about where we are from a strategic and tactical position.

William Blair, Jason Ader.

Yes, thank you. Bob, if you just zoom out and look at the last several years, what do you think went wrong to get you to the point where you need to do such a significant reset in the business?

Yes, I mean clearly we should be growing north of 20%, not 7%. We knew we had to make these changes, Jason; we have been talking about it. It just took us too long.

So what I am summarizing is we shifted resources at the enterprise; left the mid-market open, so we became more vulnerable there. Didn't get our products out in time, and didn't get the growth in the midmarket that we had previously.

So it is just a question of -- it is tech. And if you are not moving extremely quickly when you see these things, you run into some issues. And we did.

In the large enterprise, what do you think has gone wrong in the last -- I guess it has been more mixed in the large enterprise. But is there something you need to fix there?

Well, I think on the large enterprise, certain segments of our theaters, we are doing extremely well in the enterprise. When you get underneath the numbers -- I know it doesn't show up in just how we report, but underneath our enterprise business in general is okay.

There are clearly some things we can do better on execution there. But we have got the platform, we've got the people in place.

And the other thing we have now which we didn't have is a much better ability to gain entry to -- when enterprise spending slows down, which it is right now, there is still lots of business in the enterprise. It may be in -- to solve discrete problems. And when we had our capacity-based pricing model and didn't have standalone products and didn't get our messaging crisp, it was more difficult for us to get business for those discrete, standalone customer -- solve those customer issues.

Now we've got the product. So it allows our -- whether it is mobile or whether it is in a virtualization space or whether it is for native copy, for things like dev-test, now we have got the ability to give our sales teams standalone solutions that they can build them in an enterprise account without just doing a major rip and replace.

So, I don't think there is anything really fundamentally wrong with our enterprise strategy. We just enhanced it, and now we are going to be a lot more aggressive in our midmarket.

If you look at the numbers, round numbers, 60% of our business comes from enterprise and 40% comes from the midmarket. And the issue, if you get underneath it, has not been so much an enterprise problem; it has been a mid-market problem.

And now -- what we are doing now is enhancing our ability to improve growth in both those segments.

Stifel, Aaron Rakers.

Yes, thanks for taking the questions. When I look at the commentary with regard to the current quarter expectations of being flat to slightly up, it would seem to imply that you are assuming as much as a double-digit year-over-year decline in software license revenue.

So how do I think about that relative to what was a prior expectation of building your pipeline and funnel for the second half of the year? What has changed relative to that commentary coming out of the June quarter? Then I do have a follow-up.

Good question, Aaron. Clearly we had seen strong pipeline build early in Q2, and we saw that decelerate as we came out of the quarter. So our outlook for Q3/Q4 changed, negatively changed, as a result of that lack of significant pipeline growth -- which was surprising to us, to be honest with you.

We started to see it sometime in the late August/September time frame: that funnel growth momentum slowed down. It is now picking back up again, by the way; but we had that period of slower growth and that changed our outlook.

So that few months of not achieving our funnel objectives was a surprise.

Bob, with that you would say that your funnel and your pipeline is equally down double digits year-on-year? Is that a fair assessment?

No, it's not. No, that is not correct. In fact, I think our funnel is starting to pick up and improve year-on-year now.

I am just looking at the numbers. Yes, our funnel is -- look back a year ago; it's I would say relatively flat, but it's improved.

And our funnel for the -- if I can look at these numbers for the -- yes. For the third quarter it's flat, but at a decline and now it is improving I guess would be the best way to describe it.

Okay. As the follow-up to that and I think tied to that, clearly we have had now three quarters where you have reignited or focused on reigniting your sales hiring, which looks like it is showing up. So two questions with that.

Are you not seeing necessarily the productivity ramp, albeit understanding it is a 12-month ramp to get to full productivity? But are you not seeing those hires start to contribute to that pipeline and funnel?

And then on top of that, is there anything to be said about possibly whether or not there is some churn within the Company? Any commentary on that would be helpful. Thank you.

In regard to productivity, you are correct. We did not see the normal productivity gain in our salesforce.

And if you get underneath it, given the current market dynamics out there, this is not -- the underlying cause is primarily in product pricing and packaging tied to shifts in the market versus poor sales execution. So from a senior management team we're trying to look at this fundamentally on how do we solve the fundamentals and enable our sales teams to be more productive.

And now we just rolled out a series of products and initiatives that help them do that. So we are on the path, and we are seeing funnel turnaround and the outlook improve.

But until we validate all that with hard performance, we are resetting expectations. What I would say is realistically that's how we see it right now.

Piper Jaffray, Andrew Nowinski.

Good morning. I am just wondering; where are you at with regards to hiring in your base, getting to your baseline sales capacity level? I understand the productivity isn't quite there yet, but are you done with the hiring phase yet, or are you at the baseline where you want to be at?

Globally we have made progress for our global salesforce, international salesforce. We are pretty much there. But to hit our numbers we will be continuing to hire.

In the Americas we made progress, but not enough, and we will be continuing to hire in the Americas. The pace of hiring, however, relative to what we did in Q2 will decline corporate-wide pretty significantly over the next two quarters. We will be hiring, but at a lower pace.

Okay. Then in the midmarket space you noted that you are more vulnerable there. Which vendors do you think were exploiting that vulnerability and making it more difficult on CommVault in that market?

Well, there are a lot of new vendors in that market. What's disappointing internally is our technology on a relative basis is significantly better than anybody else out there; so it was a packaging, pricing, go-to market issue not a technology issue.

I am not going to go through them all, but there are a number of smaller competitors that have done pretty well in the midmarket. And now we are moving very aggressively not only on the product side but on the go-to-market side, to make sure we achieve our midmarket growth objectives.

It is very doable, because we've got the channel partners; we've got the products now; we have got the salesforce. And now we've just got to execute.

Pacific Crest, Brent Bracelin.

Thanks. A couple questions from me, one on the quarter and then on the outlook pipeline funnel. On the quarter itself, I wanted to better understand and decompose what exactly happened.

As I look at license revenue, down for two straight quarters, first time since the banking crisis, I get the external environment story in that period. But as we think about this environment the last 6 months, two straight quarters of license declines, how much of it is tied to internal sales execution; two, a change in packaging/pricing; or, three, other external factors, be it large enterprise deals downticking here or the midmarket erosion?

My view is that, in spite of some decline in corporate spending on big deals and things like that, the bigger issues are CommVault. They are ours. We own it.

They are execution issues. It has nothing to do with our underlying technology or strategy.

Clearly we could have done a much better job faster in bringing to market standalone products that are priced and packaged the way customers want to buy, make it easier for channel partners to sell. And this is both in the midmarket and as entry points in the enterprise.

So this was, I will call it 90% a CommVault product pricing, packaging, marketing, go-to market issue. And then these other issues were secondary to that.

That's helpful. Then on the outlook, as a corollary to that, obviously 20% increase in sales and marketing over the last 6 months. Little surprised you are not seeing the normal productivity gains given the level investments you are making in sales and marketing.

How do you know the change in product pricing and packaging isn't resulting in a lower net spend by your customers? I am just trying to understand here the disconnect.

Yes. Okay, let's just separate that, because we knew when we did this we would take some risk. Because we had -- these are -- we had to make very significant change in the Company in terms of just how we approach our market. Not the underlying technology build, which is still really awesome.

But in order to do this, we knew we had to change the way we develop products -- not the underlying technology -- and move that to business units, to individuals who really understood how to take that technology, package it, price it right, and bring all the other elements to drive revenue in these different market segments.

We didn't have that here. We had to build that.

We had to build a much more sophisticated pricing function. We had it; but to do this across four or five business units you needed to bring additional expertise in here. We had to make that investment.

The go-to-market -- once you have standalone products like this in addition to the platform, our whole -- the way we manage our go-to-market capability had to change. So in a Chris Powell, we have a CMO that is tied to those initiatives.

Our alliances and how our partner programs work had to change. So those are big fundamental core investments.

Look, I knew there was some risk that we would make the investments and our product wouldn't catch up. That is not what our plan said, but there was some risk attached to that.

Those products and those initiatives are starting to roll out this quarter, all those capabilities. So the expense is there and the sales teams are there; now the products are there, and they are starting to roll out at a pretty fast cadence.

The other thing we wanted to do, by the way, is basically significantly increase the pace in our product introduction to the market: much more faster. Much faster than we've been doing.

That is all in place. The initial response to those product [initiatives] -- they haven't been out very long. We are talking about weeks, not months.

So if you think about the initial response has been outstanding and it's going to take us a couple, three quarters to put all that together so it turns up in license revenue growth and productivity growth.

Raymond James, Michael Turits.

Hey, guys -- Bob and Al and company. You have gone over this I think in a number of different ways, but if you could again at a high level, could you just be as clear and simple as possible about exactly what you saw change in the market in terms of pricing and packaging that you needed to respond to?

And which, specifically, are the standalone products that you felt like you needed to get out sooner?

Okay, I am going to summarize it and then I'm going to let Al talk for a minute.

It was in the midmarket and some entry points in the enterprise. If you look at the big enterprise account dynamics and who we compete against, fundamentally it is Symantec, IBM, EMC. The dynamic there has not changed very much, and fundamentally our position over time has really strengthened.

So it is the entry points, whether it is mobile or it is compliance or it is virtualization or native copy capability. It is in those discrete areas where we didn't have standalone capabilities and where we were selling everything, as I have been talking about for the last couple, three quarters, everything is in our capacity-based platform model. That model does not work very well when you're competing against a competitor who is pricing on a -- like in mobile, on a price per user per month; or a virtualized competitor who is pricing by socket; and we are trying to price a capacity-based platform by price per terabyte.

I said this a year ago. That model just doesn't work, and we got caught in two ways.

One, we didn't have very many resources focused there; and we didn't have the products that fit that market. And we didn't move quickly enough.

I will let Al take it from here and give you a little more color on this.

Yes, Michael. One, what Bob just said, one, it doesn't work, particularly in midmarket. I would argue it continues to work fairly well in enterprise sectors, where they are interested in a combination of use cases.

And as Bob said, the ones that are coming out are primarily the virtualization products, both protection and broader VM management capabilities. Those we move from a terabyte front-end, metered, and licensing model to a VM or socket perspective.

We made some slight changes to our staff management programs. We changed the mobile pricing from, again, terabytes to per user per month.

And even on our email archiving, we changed that again from front-end terabytes to number of users, number of mailboxes.

Bob also alluded to some of the products we are going to launch next quarter: dev-test, DR, etc. Most likely most of those will have different metering than just front-end terabyte.

The other last piece I will mention is the appliance products that are coming out this quarter. Obviously, when you are bundling the pricing, if you will, to the back-end appliance, it tends to be back-end capacity is what the metering will shift to. We have always been in the mode of front-end terabytes.

Again that is one of those practical -- here is how the market, particularly midmarket, wants to buy things.

Summit Research, Srini Nandury.

Thank you for taking my call. Bob and Brian, I've got a question on sales productivity of your legacy salesforce. We have seen anecdotal reports that some of your best salespeople have been siphoned off by the upstarts in the industry. The first question is, is that true?

Then the second thing is that, with all this new licensing, pricing, solution bundles you put in, are the salesforce adequately trained? It looks like to me that the sales process has become a lot more cumbersome for these people to be effective.

I think those two statements are accurate. One, when you don't have the products that fit the market and it is difficult for those midmarket sales teams -- and this is upper midmarket now, it's not the lower end of the market -- to achieve their objectives, then they are going to look elsewhere to make money.

It is pretty simple. It is the way sales works. So I think that is true.

On educating the salesforce, it is a lot easier now to enable a salesforce when you are dealing with discrete products with a discrete message in that midmarket. It is just a much simpler process.

So to your point, not only are these products coming out, but there is a lot more aggressive enablement tied to these launches. And these are rolling out this quarter, so I would say there is still work to do there, but we are well on the path on both of those.

Srini, I think your comments are absolutely correct, and the good news here is we have been working on this. It has just taken us a long time to put all these pieces in place.

But it's rolling out now. We are not starting from zero here. We have been at this for quite a while, and all the elements are in place and now we are regaining momentum, which is critical.

Mizuho Securities, Abhey Lamba.

Yes, thanks. Bob, I know you have spent a lot of time discussing this. You have discussed a lot about your internal factors that you are changing, and product placement and all, how you are changing that.

But are there really no external issues like customer demand, or competitive landscape, or move to the cloud, and demand for new functionality, anything like that that is acting as a headwind to your business, which is really making it harder for all these internal changes to take effect?

I might look at it a little differently. Clearly, there are big changes in the competitive environment and landscape.

The move to the cloud, we have been working on that for a long time. We put together about a year and a half ago our cloud services group. They are doing really well.

So that initiative with our MSPs, and combined with that we've had a much stronger focus on the systems integrators, those programs -- the underlying growth there looks really good.

In the big enterprise, fundamentally we have got reasonably good growth there, when you get underneath it, in terms of what is going on. And the funnel for big enterprise looks pretty good. We just need to get it to be better, but it is not bad.

The dynamic in the midmarket clearly changed. You had a lot of new competitors coming in there, and as I said earlier, we left it wide open: wide open meaning we didn't have as much resource focused on it and we didn't have the products -- I call it fit to market, price to market, and go-to-market capabilities in that area until just now.

And again, we have been -- it is not something that we didn't understand. It just took us too long to put all this together along with all the new organizational changes to have an impact on our license revenue growth. It is there now, and we're rolling it out now.

But you are correct. These were -- it is tech. Stuff changes, and if you are not on top of it and you are not moving really aggressively to address changes like that, you have issues. And we did.

So yes, there is certainly a market-shift competitive element of this. But the other point I made is it is not that we don't have underlying technology to address all of this. We're technically more advanced than anybody.

But -- that is really nice; but if you don't take that technology and package it right and tie it to these shifts, you're not going to get revenue. And now we are in a position to do that.

But clearly -- look, I identified at a year ago. I said if we don't change how we price, how we package, how we market, we are going to run -- and everybody said: but you guys are on autopilot. I said: yes, but if we don't make these changes we are going to run into some trouble.

And we did make the change, we didn't just didn't make it quite fast enough. And now we are back on a path.

Macquarie, Rajesh Ghai.

Thanks. I had a couple of questions related to the product strategy and business unit changes that you are rolling out. You are launching standalone products; you are instituting module-specific business units.

I think they are essentially targeted at addressing your midmarket growth. What gives you confidence that this is the right strategy for the midmarket?

Also, how do you make sure that this new business infrastructure does not hurt your execution in the enterprise and positioning related to a single platform architecture that has worked really well in the past?

That is a really, really good question. I am going to answer it, and I'm going to let Al answer it.

So number one, and I will be really clear here, our core strategy on our Singular platform and innovation for the enterprise remains. A lot of the underlying structure that we have put in place deals with the platform itself; and Al will talk about that in a minute.

So in our Simpana 11, which is going into beta next quarter, has a significant amount of new technology changes tied to the platform approach. So the point, Rajesh, is we do not want to lose and we are going to continue to emphasize that Singular platform.

A lot of the moves in these business units also include platform initiatives, like our vertical solution initiative. So clearly that is still a foundation point.

With that, I am going to turn this over to Al and let him give you more color on the structure.

Yes, a couple more points, Rajesh. First of all, the business unit structure is not intended for just midmarket. It is across the Company: enterprise, midmarket, even SMB. So the individuals in those groups have responsibility for product lines or vertical solution sets, again, across the spectrum.

The other piece that Bob didn't mention on the platform side -- because he is right; we are very insistent on you have to market standalone products and packages, as well as you can still buy all these capabilities through platform bundles and packages. Technically we also, as we said, are moving Mr. Brockway to a CTO function; and there is a number of people in our product organization that will simply focus on the platform, its technology, the opening up of the platform, the APIs -- all those elements that are beyond the scope of just standalone product sets.

Sterne Agee, Alex Kurtz.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Just two real quick ones.

I get a lot of questions from investors about Veeam Software. Can you just tell us what percentage of your midmarket deal flow you are seeing of Veeam and win rates of deals above $1 million? If you could give us some color on either of those, that would be great.

We see Veeam in the midmarket, in the virtualization space. They are at the lower-end midsize of the market. I will let Al talk about technology positioning versus Veeam.

Clearly they have done well in that market segment. Our technology is significantly broader. It has got much lower cost of ownership and better functionality than Veeam. We just haven't packaged it to compete against them until recently.

And with that I will turn that over to Al.

Yes, I think that hits it pretty well, Bob; and a couple more points there. One, they are not our biggest competitor even in the midmarket space. Some of our bigger -- the traditional top three guys are still bigger in terms of size there.

And at the enterprise level, I don't recall seeing them at all, a larger-scale environment or proposal. Again, as Bob mentioned, we generally scale better; we have more automation; we are more -- a much better fit solution-wise for large organizations than those folks. So those are generally the differences there.

Yes. Your big market, you are dealing with many, many petabytes -- 10 petabyte, 20 petabytes, 50 petabytes. You don't seem these new competitors in those kind of big environments and where users want to consolidate multiple-use cases.

That is where our big multimillion deals come from. We don't see guys like that in those deals.

The other point Al made, it is not Veeam but you've got other competitors. For example, appliances have -- there's a lot of use cases out there where customers want to use appliances for a consolidated infrastructure. It makes it easier for them to deploy.

We are just rolling out our appliances, so -- but we didn't want to be in the hardware business. So it took us more time to put those programs together with our hardware and distribution partners so we could bring world-class technology in the market and set up all the distribution capabilities tied to it.

It took us a long time, but now we are.

And lastly, we also don't tend to see the new guys in the cloud space or the managed service provider space very often. Because again that space, it looks like a big organization, number one. Number two, there is an intense focus on operational and labor efficiency.

So again, those type of solutions usually are not too popular in the larger service providers.

Oppenheimer, Ittai Kidron.

Thanks. A lot of the questions have been asked, but I do want to focus again, Bob, on that competitive point. Can you tell us if there were some notable customer losses in this quarter, or long-standing big customers of yours where you have seen competitors make their way in and eat a little bit of the pie that up until now has been potentially exclusive to you?

We don't -- our competitive loss has not changed, per se. Our competitive loss statistics are pretty consistent.

It is just that, to your point, on these midmarket deals that are mainly driven through channel, we don't see them. We don't see them because we didn't have the products or the channel programs to compete against them; or we didn't have those products in the hands of our sales teams that focus on the higher end of the midmarket.

So the answer to your question is yes. I mean, it is not a question of competitive loss; it is just a question of not being positioned to win.

Clearly there is no question that some of those products have gotten into our installed base on a departmental basis where we don't even see it. We are changing that now, because we have put all this together. But clearly that did happen and is happening out there.

That is being shut down pretty quickly, by the way, as we bring these products out. But it was an issue.

Credit Suisse, Philip Winslow.

Hi, guys. This is Siti Panigrahi for Phil. Just since you missed your internal expectations, just wondering how much of that miss in license revenue attributed to your [policy] in spending prior to the new release of your Simpana and the new pricing model?

I also had a follow-up. Like, what sort of feedback have you got so far with your Simpana release and that new pricing model?

The miss had nothing to do with new products coming out. I mean zero.

It had nothing to do with that. It was the other things I was talking about.

In terms of the initial impact from our customers and partners on these new products, they have been extremely good; but it is very early. What I said in the earnings script is we expect to see some good uptake in our next quarter as we build momentum.

And clearly these products, combined with the new products we are introducing next quarter, will set the foundation for growth for the first half of FY16. And there is additional product coming out that will establish a foundation for growth for the second half of 2015.

So the plan is all there. The models are reasonable. We've got enough sales capacity in place to do that; and now it's executing the plan.

So we have got lots of ways to succeed here now, if that answers your question.

JMP Securities, Greg McDowell.

Hi, this is Rishi Jaluria dialing in for Greg McDowell. Thanks for taking my questions. Two quick questions for you. First, you had mentioned the appointment of Peter Kobs as VP of Global Accounts.

I just wanted to get your feedback. How do you expect this to change you go-to-market strategy and maybe help with some of the issues that you've discussed on this call?

Second, you had mentioned 300 new customers in the quarter. Can you give us some color on these customers, maybe in terms of geography, US versus international, as well as customer type, enterprise versus midmarket? Thank you.

On Pete, we are still doing quite well with big, large global enterprise accounts. We as see more and more of them as we tie into the global systems integrators. They're adding to our pipeline of global accounts.

And managing these global accounts across our different theaters, we have done okay with it. But as the number of those accounts increases we just needed a lot more senior management oversight and structure in dealing with accounts that are rolling out significant amounts of our technology across the globe.

So it is a -- there is no question in my mind with Pete's skills and the increased momentum in that area that we will see good growth in these. And these are deals when I -- we want to focus on the 7- and 8-figure deals here, and they are there. So we are happy to have Pete in that position.

In terms of the number of new accounts, I will let Brian Carolan give you perspective on that.

Yes, just in terms of new customer growth, we saw a better relative quarter out of EMEA and APAC than the Americas.

Lake Street Capital Markets, Eric Martinuzzi.

You referred to historical growth rates in some of your prepared remarks. When you speak of historical growth rates, what is the number that you are thinking of?

High teens, 20%.

Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.