Five9 Inc (FIVN) 2018 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Five9 Inc.

Fourth Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call.

Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Ms. Leslie Phillips, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today's conference call to discuss Five9's fourth quarter and full year 2018 results.

Today's call is being hosted by Rowan Trollope, CEO; Dan Burkland, President; and Barry Zwarenstein, CFO.

During the course of this conference call, Five9's management team will make projections and other forward-looking statements regarding the future financial performance of the company, industry trends, company initiatives and other future events.

You are cautioned that such statements are simply predictions, should not be unduly relied upon by investors, and actual events or results may differ materially, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information in such statements.

These statements are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties that could adversely affect Five9's future results and cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate.

A more detailed discussion of certain other risk factors that could cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate that you should consider in evaluating Five9 and its prospects is included under the caption Risk Factors and elsewhere in Five9's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In addition, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures during this call.

Management believes that this non-GAAP information is useful because it can enhance an understanding of the company's ongoing performance and Five9, therefore, uses non-GAAP financial information internally to evaluate and manage the company's operations.

This non-GAAP financial information should be considered along with and not as a replacement for financial information reported under GAAP, and could be different from the non-GAAP financial information provided by other companies in our industry.

The full reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financial data can be found in the company's press release issued earlier this afternoon, and is also available on the Investor Relations section of Five9's website.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Five9's CEO, Rowan Trollope.

Thank you, Leslie, and thanks to all of you for joining our call this afternoon.

We closed 2018 with our strongest quarter ever as a public company with $72.3 million in revenue, up 31% year-over-year, and $16.4 million in adjusted EBITDA, representing a 22.7% margin.

That's up 3.1 percentage points sequentially, which achieves our intermediate term target a full year ahead of plan.

I want to give you a few thoughts on these results.

First, our standout performance is representative of the large market opportunity we're addressing, and our continued momentum in the enterprise.

Our role as a trusted partner to increasingly larger enterprises continues to accelerate as customer experience transformation becomes a strategic objective.

Now our teams executed well, and we have attracted top industry talent to our leadership team.

Next, the enterprise segment will continue to drive our growth.

With only 10% to 15% of the market transitioned to the cloud, we're just in the second innings.

Our enterprise business grew to 77% of LTM revenue.

Our enterprise subscription business grew at 36% on an LTM basis, and importantly, customers over $1 million in ARR represent one of the fastest growing parts of our business.

In fact, we now have more than 40 customers generating over $1 million in Q4 annualized ARR.

That's approximately doubled over the last 2 years, and we're going to report this number to you annually.

Finally, we continue to expand our existing customer relationships.

Dollar-based retention rate accelerated to 103% largely due to a recent record in enterprise where it remains well above 100%.

It's a simple equation really.

We land the Five9 platform in a new customer and then begin to help them improve their customer experience and productivity.

So that in turn, combined with the trust that we built in terms of uptime and support, helps us drive our expansion within that customer as they look to add seats and buy more products and services from Five9.

Our progress with enterprises and our overall go-to-market and services support motion is led by our President, Dan Burkland, who can give some specific examples of customer wins this quarter.

Dan?

Thank you, Rowan.

I'm very proud of our team for executing unbelievably well.

In Q4, enterprise bookings hit an all-time record for any quarter and our pipeline reached another all-time high, while we continue to gain strong traction from our partners who, once again, influenced over 55% of our deals.

This quarter, we continue to see larger and larger deals coming in.

For example, the first is a cable television, Internet, wireless and home security company, serving customers throughout Canada.

They were looking to modernize an outdated premises-based solutions from Cisco along with several disparate solutions for e-mail, chat, social, WFO and CRM.

Once they evaluated the depth of the Five9 omnichannel solution, including voice, e-mail, chat, social, along with Five9 WFO powered by Verint and the powerful APIs to integrate to their proprietary CRM solution, they chose Five9.

They signed a 5-year contract estimated at nearly $2 million in annual recurring revenue to Five9.

The second example is a private university who also was using an on-premises solution, which was due for a large hardware and software upgrade along with the ongoing maintenance cost.

The driving factors in their decision were Five9's end-to-end omnichannel solution, our flexible APIs, and the ease to customize and integrate to whatever solutions the University chose for their CRM and back office systems.

They also purchased our visual IVR and visual customer feedback, both our mobility applications that their students can leverage from their smartphones.

This initial order is expected to result in nearly $1 million in annual recurring revenue to Five9.

The third example was a national health insurance company.

They were using a premises-based solution, which they acquired from their carrier several years ago that had become outdated.

When they chose Five9, in addition to core capabilities like omnichannel, quality and reliability were key factors, and they implemented our MPLS Agent Connect to enable superior voice quality throughout all of their contact centers.

We anticipate this initial order will generate over $1 million in annual recurring revenue to Five9.

Now as we normally do, I'd like to share an example of an existing customer who continues to expand with Five9 as we help them execute on their customer experience strategy.

This financial services company has been with Five9 for over 3 years and has experienced unprecedented productivity from their workforce by leveraging Five9's unique, intelligent blending for both inbound and outbound calling.

They expanded in Q4 by opening an additional international contact center, which now bring them well over 1,000 agents and over $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue to Five9.

They also have plans to continue with additional expansion in 2019.

I am very pleased with our performance as we continue to execute and create momentum upmarket by signing larger customers, gain validation from leading industry analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and build strong, loyal customer base who look to Five9 as their long-term strategic partner for their contact center.

So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Rowan.

Thanks, Dan.

You guys did a phenomenal job this quarter and this year, well done.

It is great to see more large enterprises on the Five9 platform.

And as I've been out on the road talking to executives in large enterprises, the consistent theme that I'm hearing is a recognition that the customer experience can be a strategic differentiator for their business.

And consequently, there is an increased sense of urgency to drive that transformation.

In fact, reflecting that increased urgency in one recent survey of 100 contact center buyers, 88% of them said that they were very or somewhat interested in a Cloud Contact Center for their next upgrade.

The customer experience becomes a strategic priority.

And as the market shifts towards the cloud, we believe Five9 is extremely well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.

I was talking with an executive from one of our largest customers recently, and he told me that he doesn't see Five9 as just another vendor, but as a trusted strategic partner, who has helped his company at every stage of the customer experience journey.

In fact, he went on to articulate a shift that I have heard from many C-suite executives, which is that the contact center can be an invaluable center of customer data.

Now as I've shared on previous calls, we believe that artificial intelligence will put that data to work in new ways and will have a profound impact on how businesses deliver service to their customers.

While many companies have metadata around customer experience such as satisfaction surveys and statistics around website usage and so on, Five9 has access to the best experience data because we have what customers are actually saying in real-time.

As an indication of the volumes of data, we've got more than 5 billion minutes of customer conversations recorded and moving across our platform each year.

With recent advances in real-time, accurate and increasingly economical automatic speech recognition, data, such as voice recordings, are quickly becoming a source for training machine learning models.

That data at scale, combined with machine learning, makes the data useful and turns it into actionable insights and the ability to drive automation that's never been possible before.

This puts Five9 at the nexus of a transformative opportunity for every business in the world.

And we plan to be a leader in the field of AI for the contact center.

Moving forward, product innovation is going to be critical to capitalize on this opportunity, and we recently filled 2 top technical leadership roles.

David Pickering, our new EVP of engineering joined us in December from Intuit.

Now Dave is well-respected in Silicon Valley as a hands-on leader with a very long track record of success.

And in January, we appointed Jonathan Rosenberg as our CTO and Head of AI.

Jonathan is a well-known pioneer in our industry and he is the co-author of SIP protocol along with many other technologies that are foundational to the modern Internet.

And finally, to help us scale and grow our business, we hired Jim Doran to lead strategy and operation.

I worked with Jim for many years helping transform numerous multibillion dollar businesses.

Now our go-to-market organization led by Dan continued to accelerate their momentum.

I regard this team as the best in the industry, and we are going to continue to invest aggressively and gain market share.

Our ecosystem of partners continues to grow, attracted by our growing installed base.

We plan to pursue these products and go-to-market initiatives while maintaining the expense discipline that we are known for.

And we're very fortunate to have strong revenue growth and unit economics as well as continue with year-over-year margin expansion, which allows us some latitude to make those necessary investments.

Now to expand on our financial performance and guidance, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Barry Zwarenstein.

Barry?

Thank you, Rowan.

Before going into specifics, it is reminded that unless otherwise indicated, all financial figures are discussed below are non-GAAP.

Reconciliations from GAAP to non-GAAP results are included in the appendix of our presentation on our website.

This was another excellent quarter.

Revenue grew 31%, our fastest growth rate as a public company.

This growth was driven primarily by our enterprise subscription revenue, which is the fastest growing and most profitable part of our business.

Enterprise subscription revenue continued its multiyear performance of growing in the 30s, posting growth of 36% on an LTM basis under 606, and 38% on a more comparable basis under 605.

Our Enterprise business in total, which includes not just subscription but usage of professional services as well, made up 77% of the LTM revenue.

Additionally, for our commercial business, which represents the other 23%, the strength we started seeing earlier in the year continued in the fourth quarter with year-over-year growth of over 10%.

Recurring revenue accounted for 93% of our revenue.

The other 7% of our revenue was comprised of Professional Services.

Fourth quarter adjusted gross margin was 65.1%, an increase of nearly 150 basis points year-over-year.

Adjusted gross margins have now increased each quarter for the last 24 quarters.

Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $16.4 million, representing a record 22.7% margin, surpassing, as Rowan mentioned, our intermediate terms targets a year earlier than anticipated.

The 22.7% was an increase of 10.3 percentage points year-over-year, of which 3.4 percentage points was due to the accounting transition.

Adjusted EBITDA has now increased year-over-year for 21 consecutive quarters, driven by the strong revenue growth, excellent unit economics, and the ongoing operating leverage.

Fourth quarter GAAP net income was $3.7 million.

This marks our first materially profitable quarter on a GAAP basis.

Fourth quarter non-GAAP net income was $14.5 million, a year-over-year increase of $10.5 million.

Before turning to our full year performance, I would like to add some color to the average concurrent seat count for the fourth quarter, which grew to 105,320 seats.

The 28% year-over-year increase is an acceleration from the annual increases in the last 4 years, which range between 19% and 23%.

Please also note that we estimate that this concurrent seat equates to approximately 158,000 seats on a named seat basis.

As a reminder, we are providing the seat count metric only on an annual basis.

And now, for a closer look at key full year 2018 income statement metrics.

For the year ended December 31, 2018, revenue was $257.6 million, up 29% year-over-year, driven by the high 30s growth rate in enterprise, and complemented by the stronger growth in commercial.

Adjusted EBITDA for the year ended December 31, 2018, was $46.4 million, an increase of $28.7 million over the $17.6 million earned in 2017.

$8.4 million of the year-over-year increase in EBITDA was due to the accounting change and the remaining $20.3 million was due to the increased revenue and margins on a 605 basis.

Finally, before turning to guidance, some balance sheet and cash flow highlights.

DSO for the fourth quarter was 29 days.

Our operating cash flow for the year ended December 31, 2018, was $38.6 million, a year-over-year improvement of $27.5 million.

We're optimistic about our potential for continuing cash generation given our long-term model, and substantial NOLs, and our low DSO.

Capital spending in the fourth quarter was $5.7 million, essentially all of which were paid for in cash.

I'd like to finish today's prepared remarks with a brief discussion of our expectations for the full year and the first quarter 2019, and to reiterate our long-term model.

For 2019, we expect revenue to be in the range of $298.5 million to $301.5 million.

GAAP net loss is expected to be in the range of $22.1 million to $19.1 million or $0.36 to $0.31 per basic share.

Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $36.8 million to $39.8 million or $0.58 to $0.62 per diluted share.

Consistent with our previous discussions, this bottom line guidance reflects expected increases in various growth investments, particularly in R&D and in go-to-market initiatives to go after this massive market opportunity that is coming towards us.

For the first quarter of 2019, we expect revenue to be in the range of $70 million to $71 million.

This reflects a typical impact of the expected fall off from strong seasonal tailwind in the fourth quarter.

GAAP net loss is expected to be in the range of $5.7 million to $4.7 million or $0.10 to $0.08 per basic share.

Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $7.1 million to $8.1 million or $0.11 to $0.13 per diluted share.

Net guidance for the current quarter includes the impact of the expected increase in growth investments I mentioned a moment ago, and the impact of the annual restart of the FICA obligation.

With respect to our expected revenue trends by quarter, for the remainder of 2019, consistent with the guidance in past years, we do not expect sequential growth in revenue in the second quarter.

However, following the seasonal business patterns we have experienced in the past, we expect revenue to increase sequentially in the third, and particularly in the fourth quarters.

Given the shape of this revenue curve and the ramping of expenses, investors should expect our bottom line to be weaker sequentially in the second quarter and stronger in the second half.

In short, our bottom line will not increase linearly during the year.

Most of the year-upon-year improvement will occur in the fourth quarter.

To illustrate this point in a different way, consistently for each of the last 4 years, 53% of our revenues have been recognized in the second half of the year and that we enjoyed very high margin profitability on incremental revenue.

In other words, we have a natural lift in adjusted EBITDA margins in the second half of the year.

Now that we have achieved the intermediate term model a year early, we would like to reiterate our long term model with remains to reach an adjusted EBITDA margin of 27% plus in about 4 years.

We'd also like to mention that while the growth investments will pressure the first half and likely the third quarter margins, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins to be at 20% plus in the fourth quarter.

For modeling purposes, we'd like to provide the following additional information.

For calculating EPS, we expect our diluted shares to be $63 million and basic shares to be $60 million for the first quarter of 2019, and $64 million and $61 million respectively for the full year 2019.

We expect our taxes, which relates mainly to foreign subsidiaries to be approximately $75,000 for the first quarter of 2019 and $310,000 for the full year 2019.

Our capital expenditures for the first quarter of 2019 are expected to total approximately $5 million to $6 million.

For the full year 2019, we expect capital expenditures to be between $20 million $24 million.

In summary, we are very pleased with our fourth quarter and full year performance.

Our customers, our partners and our employees place a high value on consistent execution in all key areas of the business.

We have a hard-earned reputation for showing up and delivering.

We plan to guard that reputation.

Operator, please go ahead.

(Operator Instructions) We will take our first question from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Rowan, like we had another very, very strong quarter on the enterprise side and looks like the deals are getting bigger.

Can you talk a little bit about adoption momentum you see on enterprise?

Have you kind of hit some sort of inflection point there that your -- the customers comfort around kind of picking hard solutions in the enterprise level and bigger, bigger accounts is coming through?

And then, question for Barry.

If you look through the investment, is it just -- can you talk a little bit about each of what it is, that we understand better, why it's so back half loaded -- back end of the year loaded?

Sure.

So I'll jump in, Raimo.

On enterprise strength, it has actually been fairly consistent as we've explained over the last probably several years.

You have a consistent and steady move of enterprises and larger and larger enterprises getting more and more comfortable and we're certainly seeing the benefits of that.

We talked about, I guess, one of the data point would be the survey that was run at the beginning of the year of buyers who said that -- 88% of them said they were somewhat to very interested in switching in their next upgrade cycle.

So there is definitely -- the interest is there, and we're through that evangelism phase.

So there's no question at least in the people -- the big companies that I talk to, there's really no question about the viability of a cloud SaaS contact center offer anymore.

That question is off the table.

It's just a question of when is the next upgrade cycle?

When did they need to make a move there?

And increasingly, we are seeing pressure on the need for these businesses to modernize their customer experience.

And so that's the one new wrinkle, I think, customers are feeling more and more, especially in the large enterprise, that they've got to do something here.

Barry?

Yes.

So broadly speaking, Raimo, the investments are in R&D and in go-to-market, broadly described.

In R&D, it's to continue with the innovation on the platform.

Prominent amongst that will be the AI initiative although that's not a large investment, but it's a good example.

And in addition to that, the integrations with different systems, particularly CRM are really key.

In terms of go-to-market, Dan can fill in, if necessary, but basically, this is -- broadly speaking, it's on the direct side, the channel side.

It's developing additional business partnerships.

Our ecosystem is very important and is growing.

And also associated with that our professional services people because, as you know, we distinguish ourselves with on-site, 6-step, high-performing professional services implementations.

We will take the next question from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.

I just wanted to kind of get a sense of where is there is anything as far as usage trends in Q4 that contributed to the upside?

Or was it really just from kind of strength in bookings?

And then maybe to kind of put a finer point on the previous question.

Should we expect that in 2019 like that margin leverage would largely come from gross margins in 2019 kind of looking at it today, that's where we should expect any leverage to come from as opposed to R&D or sales and marketing where you are noting increases in estimates?

Yes.

Meta, so in terms of usage, Q4 was down the fairway.

I think, particularly the overall business prominently including the subscription remained strong.

In terms of the leverage, you put your finger right on it.

The gross margin is a big daddy there.

We've been increasing year-over-year gross margins now for basically for 24 quarters, 6 years in a row, every quarter.

We also [continue to get that] might not be every single quarter, it might be a little bit lower for a little while because in part of those professional services investments I talked about, but that would be the major area rather than sales and marketing or R&D.

Got it.

And if I could just sneak one more in.

Rowan, you talked about kind of being on the road and meeting with customers.

Is there any trends of, as you talk to them about AI, like specific areas where they're interested in, or particular verticals that they are kind of more interested early -- in early days?

Yes.

Definitely.

There's a very strong interest in AI.

I think folks see that as a horizon to.

A lot of them are we need to get on to the cloud.

And increasingly what they're saying is, getting onto the cloud gives us access to -- like we think that gives us access to the next wave of AI-driven innovations.

And so we kind of help them get onto the cloud.

And -- so there is interest in hearing and understanding folks.

We are doing proof of concepts with customers and the interest is in the area of interactive voice assistance.

So instead of having press 1 for this, press 2 for that, essentially something you speak to and it answers you in plain English or whatever your language of choice is.

That's one area.

Another one is just getting insight.

The contact center folks that I speak to see that there is tremendous value in the information that they have, specifically the voice of the customer.

And how to extract that in a meaningful way to provide insight back to the business.

And -- so that's a second area.

And then the third one is really about making agents more productive.

A lot of the agents are today answering the same question over and over again, and it takes a bit of time to get people up to speed.

So if there is a way that we can use AI to help train agents faster.

And sort of in that order, that's where I see the interest from our customers.

We'll take our next question from Brent Bracelin with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Rowan, will start with you, and one for Barry.

Want to talk about kind of international.

I know today it's less than 10% of the business.

But if I look back, it looks like you're starting to see some acceleration there, meaningful acceleration.

You talked about at NICE expand with the financial services firm expanding international.

Could you walk us through kind of your international strategy, Do you think that could be another lever of growth in '19?

Or is that probably more likely a 2020 growth driver?

Any color on international, I think, would be helpful.

And then again, one follow-up for Barry.

Sure.

On international, it's clearly an area of opportunity for us and it's just very early days at this point.

From a planning perspective, one thing is fairly clear is the channel is going to play a very prominent role there.

If you look at the success we've had to date and clearly strong performance coming off a small number though, that is heavy involvement from the channel.

And so, we're in the early days of planning.

I would just reiterate that our U.S. opportunity is still massive.

We still haven't penetrated Pittsburgh and saturated San Francisco.

We're just at the early days of that.

So I think that is a long-term opportunity to shift into international.

In terms of when that will have material impact on our revenue and whether that would be in '19 or '20 in terms of an additional lever, we'll stick by our guidance on that front.

Just -- but we feel like it's still early days in international for us.

And then, Barry, just for you, love to get your thoughts just on the pace of investments?

And if I just look at OpEx, 10% growth this year.

You hit your long-term kind of -- your midterm EBITDA target, good work there.

But as you think about the business here, accelerating revenue growth back above 30% for the first time in 5 years.

What's the appetite to kind of reinvest in the business?

And is there plans to kind of accelerate specific investments in sales and marketing and R&D.

It sounds like there is an appetite there, but give us a little more color on, how you think about balancing, kind of this accelerating growth profile, the opportunity and, obviously, still maintaining kind of that 18% EBITDA margin target that you have?

Yes.

So in broad strokes, Brent, we've -- within our guidance for the top and bottom line, we're clearly anticipating meaningful increases at a faster pace than we've done in the past, and particularly in product, in R&D, and in go-to-market.

We remain focused on giving a balanced approach to our business.

That is why we made a point of saying that by the fourth quarter, the EBITDA margin would have a 2-handle.

And yes, in the interim, in the first 2, maybe 3 quarters, per our guidance, there will be some pressure on the bottom line, but something that we think is absolutely warranted given that the market is coming towards us, we've got an imminently scalable go-to-market machine.

Some people objectively say that if we exclude those verticals and developer led models that we have one of the more efficient go-to-market machines in the industry.

And we've got an expanded and very talented leadership team that Rowan has built, and we feel we can do that.

We will take our next question from Scott Berg with Needham & Co.

This is Ryan MacDonald, on for Scott.

First off Rowan, you have made some impressive senior level technology hires over the last couple of months.

With these people in place, how should we think about the timing of some of the new AI-based products that you've discussed building?

No change to what I've talked about earlier that you shouldn't anticipate any meaningful contribution to revenue from AI anytime soon.

We are in the stages with Jonathan joining and Dave Pickering on board, heading up our technology organization.

We've got 2 incredible talents there, as you mentioned, they've hit the ground running.

So really, really solid and impressive start for both of them.

Jonathan is off to the races form a hiring perspective.

He has already brought on board his first data scientist and starting to build out that team.

He is engaged with customers already and been out on the road, talking about, back to the previous question on AI and where we see the interest there?

I think it was from Meta.

We really see the strong interest from customers.

So Jonathan is planning to continue to move forward with those POCs pretty aggressively and starting to get feedback from customers.

But I would say anything accelerated beyond what have I've said before.

2019 is going to be the year of engaging with customers, building out our team, looking to leverage the data, and then we will see where we go from there.

Got it, and just a quick follow-up.

Obviously, with this strong top line growth and the continued acceleration there, we're seeing some nice moves in ASPs.

How much, if you can talk about from a balance perspective or mix perspective -- is that coming from selling simply more seats initially versus customers purchasing more modules upfront?

Yes, this is Dan.

I'll take that one.

Yes, we had originally given out an average deal size as an indicator to show our move upmarket.

We certainly did that and we're continuing to see more and more million dollar plus customers.

So what you're seeing is larger and larger deals that are happening.

That's not at the expense of that mid-market, that 50- to 500-seat market that's just coming towards us with great momentum, and we continue to execute very, very well there.

There is more deals in that mid market than in the large end of the market.

So what we like to emphasize is a number of larger and larger customers that are coming, and that includes initial deal size, and includes add-on business, and to your point, it's also a combination of them having more seats and buying more SKUs, and more capabilities as we move further and further upmarket with those large customers.

We'll take our next lesson with Sterling Auty with JPMorgan.

This is actually Ugam Kamat on for Sterling.

So you mentioned about increasing investments in 2019.

But just to get more color on how much you are investing in S&M, what capacity expansion and sales hiring are you planning in 2019 as compared to what we saw in 2018?

And I have a follow-up.

Yes.

So in terms of, Ugam, the rate of hiring, we will hire at the rate that will allow us to continue this multiyear growth rate of enterprise subscription revenue in the 30s.

We have grown enterprise subscription rate on a consistent 605 basis at 38% year-over-year plus or minus 1 percentage point for the last almost 2 years.

The rate of hiring will depend on a number of factors, including, I am sure Dan can further elaborate, if necessary, things like the productivity, things like in the last question about the deal sizes and so on.

And as a follow-up, what percentage of leads are coming from partners?

And any change in source example like salesforce.com or others that you have seen in the quarter?

Yes.

No real dramatic changes.

This is Dan speaking.

There is lots of leads and opportunities coming from us -- from throughout, not only our ecosystem which includes the CRMs and all the other ISV partners as well as our channel partners and resellers, but also from our marketing efforts whether those be events, whether they be our digital marketing activities or other things that we are doing to increase our brand and awareness.

So we are getting leads from all different sources and we tightly measure and monitor the performance of those leads.

We will take our next question from David Hynes with Canaccord.

So I want to follow up maybe on the last question a little bit, which was tied to partners.

And I guess, if you think about kind of SI and VAR relationships that may be a little bit newer to Five9, have those folks expressed interest in kind of offloading some of the professional services work that you guys are managing?

And as you think about funneling money back into the business to fund growth initiatives, is there any more interest on your end to pushing some of those lower margin services work off?

I know it's been a competitive edge in the past.

Just what are the puts and takes as you think about that evolution?

Yes.

So DJ, this is Dan.

Great question, and yes, there is very much interest on our part to leverage partners, especially to perform some of the systems integration work or PS work, if you will, for our customers.

And it's not that we were reluctant to do in the past.

We wanted to make sure that if we were going to extend that out to partners that it was done so without sacrificing quality.

It's so important to make sure that these customers take on a really a solution that's -- can be very custom, but it's also very mission-critical to them delivering the experience of the uptime and the reliability that they need to operate their business very efficiently.

So we've kept a very close eye on that.

As we do more and more business with SIs, especially some of the global SIs like Deloitte and Accenture and others, we absolutely are interested in moving some of that professional services work to them, and they're very interested in taking that on.

So the answer is yes.

Stay tuned as we continue to move up markets into those accounts that they control.

And then maybe a follow-up for Rowan, if I can.

Rowan, you've talked about this huge kind of data edge that you guys have, right?

5 billion of -- minutes of calls in the platform each year.

And one of the things that's enabling you to get at that is, the declining costs in speech-to-text translation.

So I'm curious, how much of that volume are you kind of turning into analyzable data today?

How far off are we from a cost perspective, enabling you to get at more?

And as you get at the whole data set, what does that enable you to do with it?

It's a bit of a far reaching question, but if you can wrap the context around it?

Yes.

No.

It's a terrific question.

We can talk for a long time about it, but let me summarize.

The speech-to-text at human level of access.

Speech-to-text obviously is there and is affordable today.

The latest advances really that come out of Google and some of the open-source work that has happened, gets that now up to human level of accuracy or better.

And that is really, was the key from my perspective is that once you saw us cross that threshold that we'll really be able to make use of this stuff and have it be that much more interesting.

So from that perspective, that technology is still a little bit out of the reach of, it's about penny per minute.

And so if we wanted to do that for all 5 billion minutes, obviously, you can do the math, would be somewhat expensive, and we would need to monetize that pretty significantly through AI-based offers.

I don't think this is going to be a problem for us though.

So that's what the price is today.

We're already having -- that's by the way for the best-in-class technology.

Open source, of course can be done much -- at the cost of compute.

And so that can be done at a much lower cost.

And so I don't believe that we see that as an inhibitor in any way, shape or form for us to be able to translate what is today analog voice into digital data.

And that's something we're racing forward essentially on, let's go build out the use cases, assuming we can do this in a cost-effective way and we think that's imminent.

And so early days still, we're still evaluating the open source technology to see where that lands.

And it's not just Google, who is out there in front of everyone else, I think, the others have caught up pretty quickly.

So this is kind of one of those commodity-based services, especially with the rise of conversational interfaces on computers in general, it's driving that cost down to near 0 or free.

So I think, we'll -- we're not seeing that as an inhibitor anytime soon.

In terms of how much have we translated or actually leveraged?

Well we do actually do stuff today, but we haven't yet started to implement the new technology to translate into text and take advantage of that.

So that's something that's coming, as we scope out which technology to use.

We will take over next question from Terrell Tillman from SunTrust.

This is Courtnei Sanders on for Terrell.

The first question is a follow-up to the earlier question on sales capacity.

In the prepared remarks, you touched on increased leverage from your ecosystem.

So as it relates to your thinking about sales capacity growth into 2019?

I think historically, you've talked about growing capacity in enterprise in line with top line growth.

Does that change any, as you get incremental leverage from the ecosystem?

Are you still going to be growing that enterprise capacity along that same guideline?

So the 2 interplay with one another.

The more strong the ecosystem is, it can lead to higher quality and more numerous leads and a there is a need for expanding the sales capacity.

And that's why we reiterate, saying that our focus is on taking advantage of the growth in the enterprise market.

We're consistently growing in the 30s, and we'll expand our capacity in such a way that we can maintain those types of growth rates.

And then the second question would be on the commercial business seeing growth above 10% now for a third consecutive quarter.

Just if you can give any thoughts with regards to whether maybe that could be sustainable now?

If that's a trend that could continue into 2019?

That would be helpful.

Yes, this is Dan.

We're cautious on that one.

Certainly, we've exceeded the 10% and gotten it into double digits for last several quarters.

But again, it was against an easy compare last year.

So we want to make sure we continue to monitor that and stay tuned for whether that becomes a trend that we can sustain long term, but remember, it's only 23% of our businesses as well.

So we're placing our investments in the enterprise business and really going after that market wholeheartedly.

And we obviously bring along a lot of the commercial business or SMB business with that.

We will take over next question from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum.

First, Dan, just along the lines of the sales side.

I know, you've been real keen on not only meeting the numbers, but having the right people in the seats and they have been very particular about how you do that.

Can you just talk about how, obviously, getting bigger and bigger scale here, just the challenges and how you are coping with respect to finding the right people?

And where are you finding them?

Yes.

Very well said, Jeff.

I appreciate the question.

And it's something that we pride ourselves on year in, year out, quarter in, quarter out, and that's being very selective at attracting the right quality of people.

Not only that bring the right business acumen and experience, but really what we did was we hired ahead of the curve.

Hired a lot of enterprise sales folks that have been used to selling upmarket, and partly that comes from my background of having sold upmarket as well.

But brought a lot of folks over and said be patient, it's more transactional than you might like today, but it'll get there from an enterprise standpoint, lo and behold!

Here we are.

And the ones that hung on and really went through the years of the evangelistic stage, as Rowan had alluded to earlier, and evangelized the cloud, they're now reaping the benefits of more and more larger enterprises, which is who they're used to selling to.

So long winded answer to your question is, we're not only attracting enterprise folks and we have done so for years, but now more than ever, we're getting more people coming at us because of our success, because of our growth, because we are recognized as truly an enterprise brand, we're getting those people in droves, so we can be even more selective.

Got it.

Got it.

And then the dollar-based net retention, if I look back at least the last, say 2.5 years or so up until Q2, you are pretty fairly consistently in the 98% to 100% range.

And then you jumped from 99% to 101% in Q3, and then Q3, if I have it right, from 101% to 103%.

So the last 2 quarter, really kind of break out and I heard this, you guys touched on it a little earlier, but maybe just circle back to that and in particular just a little deeper dive on what's changed here because there are some real nice upticks for the last few quarters?

Yes.

And we're very, very pleased with that because it's manifestation of not just the customers wanting to expand, but the customers trusting us because, obviously, prerequisite for that expansion is that they like our uptime and our service and our product and support.

Jeff, it's in both areas, enterprise and commercial.

We don't give out the spot rates, but I will tell you that the recent quarters has been amongst the highest we've had in both areas.

And it's really just something that reflects the way we go about treating these customers, both enterprise and commercial.

Great.

If I could sneak one last quick one in.

On the Capex number, how do you think about it longer term in terms of the ability to offload maybe some of your CapEx on to, say, cloud infrastructure providers versus spending on your own?

Are there opportunities to put more of this on a cloud infrastructure provider?

As you kind of -- what are the puts and takes, when you talk about them internally?

This is Rowan.

There absolutely is that opportunity.

In fact that's currently in our plan that the team is working through.

And so we do see opportunity there.

The main driver though of moving into public cloud, DCP Amazon et cetera, is not cost saving so much as it is flexibility and speed, the ability to deploy in new regions.

We had the question earlier about international.

Given that these companies have already built out those data centers, you get a running start when you jump onto their infrastructure on that side.

So that's the primary driver.

There -- clearly, we've seen other companies that have moved -- other public SaaS companies that have moved from their own data centers to public cloud and there has been noted improvements in gross margins.

And so we've looked carefully at that, although I would point out that out that every business is different.

We run a real time SaaS business, which is unlike most Saas businesses that don't actually deal with live voice, and -- live voice, which has a different impact in terms of the cost model.

So we're looking at it.

The primary driver is speed, flexibility and our ability to expand internationally.

We'll take our next question from Matt Van Vliet with Stifel.

I guess, first off, sort of dovetails on one of the last questions here.

But just curious where you guys stand, as you take a look at maybe total wallet share that your existing customers are currently spending with you?

And what sort of upside opportunity do you feel like there is to cross sell both total seats, but then also additional modules at the moment?

Okay.

Yes, let me take that one.

We do see that opportunity, and we actually are seeing some of that in our numbers already because we've been pretty aggressively extending the number of offers that we have to our customers, including WFO, WFM, quality management, dash boarding, extended reporting offers, et cetera.

So we really have a strong portfolio now built up.

And you saw over 2018, us start to sell more and more of that into our base, and you can see that reflected in the DBRR in part, as we were able to sell more higher total share of wallet -- as we were able to sell more dollars per seat.

And you see that per seat ASP continuing to sort of drift up which is now at -- Barry what we have added in the ASP per seat MRR?

We have -- somewhat over $200 per seat.

Just over $200?

Yes.

So the question that we do get asked sometimes is around some of the technology we OEMs, some of it we build ourselves.

Is there opportunities from an M&A perspective on anything like that?

And I would say, we are happy with the arrangement that we have now.

We are able to have best-in-class offers that are delivered on our paper that are delivered through our data center as a service to our customers, and our customers love that.

In fact, it's one of our differentiating points that we -- we have, for example, multiple different WFO offers in our portfolio.

And that really helps us cover, not only different segments of the market, but also customer buying preferences.

In some cases, the WFO buyer will swing a deal because they've got a history and a preference for one or the other vendors.

So we end up being in a stronger position because of that strategy.

But at the end of the day, it all comes from Five9, right?

The whole technology stack, everything that we deliver is backed by us, it's hosted by us and delivered by us.

And that's what our customers like the most.

And then just as a quick follow-up, maybe a little more granularly there.

You announced a good cross-sell win in the quarter.

Just curious as you get more penetration at customers and you become a more trusted partner, are there elements that they're more willing to rip out existing vendors whether that's on WFO and saying look we want it all on a single platform now and that migration has come to Five9 and we're at a point in that life cycle that it makes sense to do it now?

Are you seeing that sale potentially more often?

Or is it really just the focus on customer engagement and their satisfaction with Five9 as a vendor that they are choosing to do that not necessarily, and the overall strategic outlook that they may have had a couple of years ago?

Yes.

And this is Dan.

We're certainly seeing it more.

And that's one of the reasons Rowan mentioned that we continue to expand our portfolio and bring offerings to our customers that may be historically, were immediate adjacencies, they have now become part of what the customer wants from one vendor, and in particular Five9.

They have a great deal of trust in us, and they're buying our brand and our support and our execution to do that successfully for them.

That becomes especially true as we move up market into larger and larger enterprises.

So when you see the large enterprises, they really look to figure out how they can have a complete offering and a bundling-in effect, if you will.

And again, regardless of whether that's something that we build and that we skew from our own technology and IP or whether it's something that we choose very carefully to OEM and bring into our offerings.

And so yes, it runs the gamut, and we're seeing more and more of that as we move upmarket.

We will take over next question from Catharine Trebnick with Dougherty.

Yes.

Quick question, you had said that this quarter you had new products entering into driving sales, but also a broad ecosystem of partners.

Any particular verticals that you see fire or contribute more in Q4 than on other quarters?

Yes.

Thanks, Catharine, this is Dan.

Nothing in particular in Q4.

It's the same typical verticals.

If you look across contact centers, very horizontal application when it comes to who needs contact centers to service their customers.

And so, typically, it's the financial services, the healthcare, education, technology, retail, you name it.

And we just continue to see more and more from those folks.

It does give us an ability to really make sure that we're tailoring the products that will fit into those industries, and we've done so.

And some of our partnerships have some vertical specialization that they can help take us into and present us as a -- as an example of healthcare expert or an application that fits very well within healthcare.

And then a follow on is, last quarter you cited the channel contributed 30% of the revenue.

Since that's becoming more and more important, you've gotten relationships with several of the resellers.

Any -- any -- are you providing that number for us this quarter?

Yes, was it continues to grow.

We don't give out the particular number, but it continues to increase as we continue to leverage more and more channels.

And that includes both master agents as well as resellers and VARs.

And then -- and that's separate from the rest of the ecosystem, where we got lots of referrals and lots of endorsement from the CRMs and ISV partners.

We will take our next question from Dmitry Netis with Stephens.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can, Dmitry.

So a couple of questions.

Once -- maybe 1 or 2 for Barry and then for Rowan as well.

Just want to make sure, I see -- let me make sure I'm not missing anything.

I see you've nicely sort of accelerated revenue from 25% to 28% to 30% to 31%.

Those -- sort of the progression that we saw in 2018, which is a nice momentum in obviously, sales motion there.

So I look at the guide and I see kind of 20% growth.

And if I heard you Barry, correctly, you were guiding for pretty much flat growth in Q2 and then reacceleration in the second half of the year, which will put you right in line with what you're guiding for the full year, call it, maybe upper end of that guidance to $301 million, $302 million, which will end up at a 17%, give or take percent, year-over-year growth rate from '18 level.

So -- is it just conservatism?

Just kind of starting out the year and seeing how it progresses?

Or is this something else you're seeing that sort of gives you a little bit of -- let's not get ahead of our skis here yet?

And I'm only asking this question because your growth rates are spectacular in '18 and why aren't we seeing a little bit of a better momentum there on the growth -- on the top line in 2019?

Dmitry.

Thank you very much indeed for that question.

So over the last many years, 4 years or so, we have adopted a prudent guiding philosophy and that philosophy is unchanged.

So each of the last 4 years we've guided to 16% year-upon-year growth, and we've ended up somewhere in the mid-20s, and are a bit higher this past year, which was complemented by a resurgence in the commercial side.

And so we're very happy, as you alluded to, to raise that guidance as the year unfolds.

We do have a degree of seasonality.

This H1, H2 split is consistently have been 47%, 53%, but we don't know that it's going to be that this year again, and we have extremely high marginal profitabilities on any incremental revenue.

So we tend to take the prudent approach.

There's no hidden signal here about the strength of our business that which -- and the business is strong.

We have a leading competitive position.

We have positive market signs across-the-board from enterprises, from our ecosystem partners, from the field sales, and if anything, the market demand is accelerating and it's just saying the whole Five9 story.

We will take our final question from Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets.

Just on the AI-based services.

I assume those have sort of above corporate gross margin as they kind of get layered in here?

So, Mike, Rowan and the rest of the team has been at pains to say that, don't expect revenue from those anytime soon.

Certainly, not in 2019.

-- but -- and so it's a little bit premature for us to get confident about the gross margin rates, Mike.

But given the value add to our enterprise customers, it likely would have above average margins when they do start generating revenue.

Mike, you there?

That's all the time we have for questions.

I'd like to turn the conference back to the presenters for additional or closing remarks.

Thank you, operator.

So in closing, I'm pleased with the record quarter and year and our continued momentum.

We're making good progress against our strategic priorities led by our focus on product innovation and go to market.

There's tremendous opportunity for Five9 and we believe we are well positioned to take advantage of the growing strategic importance of the contact center.

Thank you.

This concludes today's call, you may now disconnect.

Thank you.