Microstrategy Inc (MSTR) 2015 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MicroStrategy Q3 2016 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder this telephone call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Saylor.

Please go ahead.

I would like to welcome all of our investors to this call. I am the Chairman and CEO of MicroStrategy. Thanks for dialing in with us today to hear about our 2015 third-quarter financial results. I am here with our Presidents, Jonathan Klein and Paul Zolfaghari; our CFO, Phong Le; our Senior Executive Vice President of Finance, Doug Thede.

I'd like to thank Doug Thede for his service to the Company as CFO over these last six years. He's done an admirable job, and we all hate to see him go and wish him well. But as we announced at the beginning of the year, he was planning to retire at the end of the year. And we've worked together in order to find a new CFO, Phong. Doug has been working very dutifully with him for the past three months to effect the transition that we have today.

I'd like to pass the floor over to Doug, who will now read the Safe Harbor and say a few words.

Thank you, Michael.

Good evening. Various remarks that we may make about our future expectations, plans and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. These statements reflect our views only of today and should not be reflected upon as representing our views on any subsequent dates. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments may cause the Company's views to change.

While the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. Also, during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. There is a reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results currently available in our press release issued after the close of market today, which is located on our website at www.microstrategy.com.

Now before I turn the floor over to Phong to make some financial remarks, I too would like to thank the investors and analysts, as well as everyone here at the table, for all their help over the years. The investors and analysts, as we changed our policy a year and a half ago, I've talked to many of you. And candidly, I have enjoyed all those interactions; and I've learned a lot from you.

Working here for the last seven years, I've worked closely with Michael and Jonathan and Paul. And they've given me great support over the years.

And I truly appreciate all the opportunities I've had here -- especially that you gave me here, Mike. I think that's great.

Over the last few months, as Mike mentioned, I have been working closely with Phong. Actually, I am very excited over the fact that we found somebody who is really qualified to step in my shoes and do a better job than even I did. He has really taken the bull by the horns and immersed himself in the Company. I have worked closely with him, and I feel very confident that he's taken the baton and can move on from here and help the Company grow and become even more profitable.

With that, Phong, I will turn the floor over to you to discuss Q3.

Thanks, Doug. I appreciate the kind words and a very smooth and gracious transition over the last few months. It's been a pleasure to work with you.

I want to start by saying how excited I also am to be a part of the MicroStrategy team, and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to address everyone today.

Now onto our Q3 results. In Q3, we had revenues of $129.5 million; operating income of $30.7 million; net income of $23.9 million; and diluted earnings per share of $2.06.

I'll first focus on our revenues. Our total revenue of $129.5 million represents a decline of 14% from the third quarter of 2014. As with most multinational companies and corporations, we experienced strong foreign currency headwinds in the third quarter, which negatively impacted our revenues by approximately $9.1 million, or 7%, of that decline from 2014.

Our product license and subscription revenues were $34.1 million in Q3, a 15% decline year over year. With foreign currency changes negatively impacting revenues by approximately $2.0 million or 5%. Our product support revenue was $71.4 million in the third quarter, a 5% decline year over year, with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenues by approximately $5.3 million or 7%. Finally, revenue from our services business continues to see a decline year over year, due primarily to our strategic decision to focus on margin.

Services revenue declined 33% year over year, with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenues by approximately $1.8 million or 7%. We did see a favorable increase of gross margins and services at 35% in the third quarter 2015, as compared to 30% in the third quarter of 2014.

This continued focus on smart investments is evident throughout our Business. Operating expenses were $74.1 million in Q3 2015, down 40% year over year and 34% when excluding restructuring costs, which were $0.1 million in Q3 2015, as compared to $11.6 million in Q3 2014. Sales and marketing expenses were down 37% year over year. General and administrative expenses were down 20% year over year and were 15% of revenue in Q3 2015, down from 16% in Q3 of 2014.

Finally, I'll touch on research and development, where R&D expenses decreased 38% year over year. With our recent major product releases, we did not capitalize any R&D expenses in Q3 of 2015. This compares to Q3 2014, where we capitalized $2.3 million in R&D expenses. Our focus on cost management contributed to Q3 operating income at $30.7 million and an operating margin of 24%.

Moving to the balance sheet briefly, at the end of the third quarter of 2015, we had cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments of $456.9 million and continue to have no debt. Net cash provided by operating activities was $31.4 million for the three months ending Q3 2015, compared to $2.0 million for the same period 2014.

Our total gross deferred revenue balance at the end of the third quarter of 2015 was $182.4 million, compared to $192.9 million at the end of the third quarter of 2014. This change in year-over-year deferred revenue is largely due to FX changes. Furthermore, at the end of the third quarter 2015, we had additional future minimum commitments by our customers to purchase our goods and services of $138.4 million, as compared to $132.8 million as of the end of the third quarter of 2014.

Now I'll turn it back to Michael Saylor for comments on our quarter.

Thanks, Phong.

Our plan for the Business since we began focusing upon this turnaround about a year-and-a-half ago has been in three parts. It's really a three-year plan.

The first year plan has rationalized the business by streamlining the products and the product line by exiting markets where we didn't think we could be cost effective; by cutting costs where we saw it was appropriate; and by installing new types of fiscal disciplines. We've moved through that first year.

The second year was all about new people, new processes and new systems in order to drive sustainable, profitable growth. Over the past year, we have replaced or augmented every single department head in the Company, brought in a lot of talented new executives. And we have consolidated our operations to our headquarters in Northern Virginia in order to achieve a new degree of coordination and effectiveness.

Our third year of this three-year plan is going to be all about growing the Business and accelerating our initiatives. So that is the big picture.

If I look at what has happened over the most recent time period, I think our strong focus has continued to be to rationalize our business. We are pleased with the financial results in the third quarter. We've worked really, really hard to consolidate product initiatives, to streamline various departmental efforts in order to find a new source of synergies and efficiencies throughout our entire business. And I think the result shows in the finances. We generated $111 million in cash over a four-quarter time period, which is up $100 million or so over what we were doing in the previous four quarters.

So the Business becomes much more efficient, a much better cash generator, much more profitable. We didn't do that just to generate a healthy operating income and a healthy cash flow. We did it with the observation that we had too many initiatives in the Business and too many disparate executive teams and too many different product families in order to grow the business sustainably at a comfortable level of profitability. This rationalization stage we've gone through has made the Company leaner, meaner, much more tightly coordinated. We've created new degrees of transparency that we just couldn't achieve before.

And now our focus, although it continues to be on streamlining our operation and driving that efficiency, it's also beginning to move forward to driving growth and driving velocity. Those initiatives to drive growth and drive velocity and competitiveness are really across three different areas. I

n the technology area, we're really excited about the delivery of Version 10 and enthusiasm that our customers have for it. We've got a great release that came out during Q3, and we have continual release plans during the coming 12 months for Version 10. We'll continue to polish that and to streamline it.

We've got some exciting developments in our Cloud business, and our secure cloud just keeps getting better -- more streamlined, easier-to-use. And we are enthusiastic about that. And in the area of Enterprise Security, we've made some great strides with Usher. Both getting it to run more effectively out of the cloud, as well as improving the platform reach. Usher now has gateways that support physical access against Lenel controllers, Honeywell controllers and also Tyco controllers.

To my knowledge, we're the first enterprise security company that actually has access to all of the major physical access controllers built into the platform itself. Since a huge number of the buildings in the United States all operate on one of those three controllers for physical access, I think that opens up a lot of opportunities for us. And it's a very differentiating thing for our platform.

We also have an exciting new client application for digital badges for Usher that just came out. We think that's going to streamline physical and logical access. And it's going to drive adoption among some of our customers.

I am pleased to announce that we've now obtained our first set of enterprise customers for Usher and their organizations across governmental agencies. We have some retail customers. We have education, and then we have the finance sector, including one of the major stock markets as a customer.

So we are not prepared to break out financials or give a lot of detail on our Enterprise Security offering right now. But suffice it to say, we are obtaining prestigious enterprise customers. We're refining the product, and we are enthusiastic about what the future holds during the coming year.

In the area of sales and marketing, our focus is upon streamlining and improving our operational execution in areas of business development and account management and sales operations and partner operations. As we continue to gain new global alliance partners on the strength of our technology, we are equally focused upon establishing great sales and marketing processes in order to maximize our joint success with those partners.

A third area of focus for us is services. Especially continuing to integrate our services with our software sales and with our customer base; streamline our service offerings; and offer continued value-added and differentiated expertise types of services that customers will value more highly and will benefit them more.

The entire management team, I think, is enthusiastically embracing all of these initiatives. We're through with the heavy cost-cutting. And now this is really rolling up your shirt sleeves and going to work in order to increase the velocity of the Business and to be more efficient and to be more effective at everything we do. I think execution is really paramount at this point.

We expect we will be hard at work at this through the end of the year. And then in 2016, our expectation is that the Company is going to return to revenue growth. And we'll start to grow in a consistently profitable fashion from this rationalized base that we've established over the past 16 to 18 months.

And with that, I'd be happy to open the floor to questions from any of the analysts on the call.

(Operator Instructions) Greg McDowell, JPM Securities. Your line is now open.

This is Rishi Jaluria dialing and for Greg from JMP Securities. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to start out first looking at the cash in your balance sheet. Heading towards and ending the year with $0.5 billion in net cash and no debt. Any thought on capital deployment strategies. I know in the past you've alluded to a possibility of doing maybe a buyback or do you have any thoughts on special dividends? Any other sort of ways to return value to shareholders?

Yes. I think we're very enthusiastic about generating cash and maintaining a strong balance sheet so that we have the option to buy back the shares if market opportunity presents itself. As we go into 2016, we will be watching the marketplace and considering a variety of factors as we make those balance sheet decisions.

Got it. Okay. And looking in terms of the numbers, it looks like there is a sequential drop in subscription. I just want to know what was behind that? And what was behind of the year-over-year decline in license revenue?

As I said before, we're in the process of rationalizing the business, and we took a very, very hard look at every single line of business we were in and every single market we were in and every single technology initiative we had. In some cases we've chosen to exit those particular lines of business or markets we feel are not strategic.

In the cloud business, in our recurring revenue business lines, we are in the midst of a product transition from hosting our own cloud operation on a variety of different hardware platforms that we owned or operated to hosting our cloud offering on Amazon AWS environment, which is a much liquid, homogeneous environment. As we go through that, we think there are some adjustments to take place in our recurring revenue stream. On the whole if I look at changes or reductions in either the license business or the recurring revenue business, my general view is it's in the best interest of the Company for us to make sure that we focus upon strategic revenue streams. There are certain parts of the business that are certainly going to be easier for us to grow and more profitable for us to grow. And they leverage our core assets better.

Other parts of the business tend to have a higher -- or lower gross margin, a higher variable cost, and they're not quite as leverageable for us. So all revenue is not created equal. While it is true, I do think going forward we want to establish a consistent silhouette where we have a growing and consistently growing profitable revenue stream. I think in this transition it was necessary for us to make some hard choices about where we're going to focus. So decreases of revenue generally represent those choices that we've made.

Okay. Very helpful. Thank you.

Also speaking specifically to the quarter over quarter drop, I would say first of all it's hard to evaluate the business on a quarter-to-quarter basis. I wouldn't emphasize too much drop there. But you did see on product licenses and subscription services quarter over quarter went down about 7%, and there were some incremental changes in terms of both net deferrals and commitments to the business that impacted that on a quarter over quarter basis.

Okay. Great. Thank you. In terms of Usher, it looks like you're getting some good progress there and I know you mentioned there's some agencies and customers and not going to name names. I'm just wondering how close are we to getting a referenceable enterprise customer? In terms of Usher, I know in the past you've called out, I believe, a $10 million run rate. Do you have any updates on just the general Usher run rate or maybe when we can start getting a little more clarity into that revenue stream?

I think we'll have more clarity to the revenue stream in 2016.

Okay. Great. Then last one and I'll jump into the queue. More from a housekeeping perspective, it looks like we had a pretty significantly lower effective tax rate overall, about 24%. I'm just wondering what was kind of the driver about that? How should we be thinking about tax rates going forward?

I think there were two drivers to that. One, is just the distribution between US and international income on any particular quarter would drive the effective tax rate. So we did see a little bit more income distributed to the US in Q3. The second piece is really a return to provision true up that took place also in the third quarter that affected the tax rate. As far as thinking about the tax rate going forward, I think what we've seen this year obviously is more representative of the taxes that we would end up incurring on a go forward basis.

Okay. Great. Thank you. I'll jump back into the queue.

Karl Keirstead, Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Okay. Thank you very much. Michael or Phong, if we could just drill a little bit deeper into the license and subscription performance in the third quarter. Is there any way to bracket what the revenue impact was from MicroStrategy exiting certain line of businesses versus how the core products and business did? Then secondly, if there's any other comments that you can provide in terms of geographic performance or, Michael, just in general or Paul, how the environment felt during the third quarter? Any real change from 2Q? Thank you.

I think the changes in the subscription and recurring business are largely related to our transition from an on-premises hosted cloud solution to the AWS hosted secure cloud solution. I think that with regard to the software business, the software business is inherently lumpy for lots of reasons that we've all seen over the course of many years now. So I wouldn't counsel anybody to infer too much from a quarter over quarter change without putting it in the context of an entire year.

Okay. And then Michael or Paul, in terms of added color. I think last quarter you highlighted big growth in North America. Was there any geographic performance in 3Q that's worth calling out? Or any change in the environment worth flagging for everyone?

Can you say the question one more time?

The geographic performance, whether there was a big diversity in the terms of the 3Q license performance in the US versus Europe or elsewhere? Last quarter you had a very strong recovery in North America. Was there any big difference in performance by geography in 3Q?

I think we are pleased in our international performance in the third quarter. In general I think there's good strength across all the various parts of the world right now. I don't think I would highlight anything as particularly weak nor would I say that the opportunity has shifted dramatically in any particular direction.

Okay.

I think a lot of it has to come down with the timing of certain large deals that happens in any particular quarter. You may have seen a shift towards more large deals in international business in the third quarter versus more large deals in our domestic business in the second quarter. But again to Michael's point, looking at it quarter over quarter I would say is not very meaningful. If you were to break down the numbers, you'd see a little bit more shift towards international in the third quarter. I don't think it points to any particular trend.

Yes. That's helpful. Then maybe one last one for me. Michael, you mentioned on a couple of occasions your optimism around the business returning to growth in 2016. Yet you haven't said much about the pending fourth quarter. I wanted to ask you how you feel heading into 4Q? Obviously version 10 will have been in the hands of the reps for long enough it seems to make an impact in the fourth quarter, and I wanted to gauge your confidence or would you steer us a little bit more towards 2016 being the inflection point as opposed to 4Q. Thank you.

The fourth quarter always turns out being an interesting quarter and a decisive one for companies, especially in the context of how we do for the entire year. It's been that way for as long as I can remember, and I suspect it will continue to be that way. We're enthusiastic about the product line, and I'm confident that in 2016 we'll be seeing some revenue growth from the core business. I think that if I chop up results in a fine enough fashion down to the smallest increment, it gets difficult to forecast with the same degree of confidence.

So I won't normally choose to give those forecasts, but not because I don't have confidence, just because just the Stochastics of it make it likely that if you make enough forecast eventually you'll be wrong on one of them. Whereas over the course of a longer period of time, I generally can get the trend just right.

Okay. Very helpful. Thank you both.

John Rizzuto, SunTrust. Your line is now open.

Thank you. A couple of questions. Usher, you said were one of the security companies -- I can't remember the exact phrase -- but positioning yourself as a security customer or security vendor. That was one of the questions I always had. Will people buy security from what is perceived historically as a BI vendor, how has that changed? Are you starting to break out of being perceived as a BI vendor first and then get security? Or are people looking at Usher and your security products outside of your install base for BI and on it's own merits? What the trends are there.

Yes. That's a good question. First, I want to take the opportunity to note that MicroStrategy has rationalized its entire business down to a single platform, which is version 10.1 right now. When you buy at MicroStrategy's platform, you get all of the tools, servers, and client software necessary to deploy a suite of unique applications. Those applications may have enterprise analytics capabilities. They may have enterprise mobility and they may have enterprise productivity and they may have Enterprise Security capabilities built into them. So we're selling a platform.

It turns out that we market that platform on microstrategy.com under the MicroStrategy brand. If you go to microstrategy.com, you're going to see it's going to say an enterprise analytics platform. That, of course, is our bread and butter. If you go to Usher.com, we have a secondary brand and if you go to Usher.com you will see an Enterprise Security platform. It turns out that we're selling the exact same software.

We characterize Usher as Enterprise Security because people looking for multi-factor logical authentication or mobile building access normally want to see a much quicker, tighter message. In fact, our view is we're selling one thing.

Now, why do we actually see success in the business that's dominated by enterprise analytics customers? Oftentimes it's the CIO or the CISO that's being drawn into this discussion of security. So if you look at our MicroStrategy brand, we are actually selling to the IT departments of thousands of companies, and we have enterprise sales reps that are selling to those CIOs and directors of IT. Enterprise Security is actually not so strange a proposition for them. In many cases, they've got that somewhere in the IT portfolio.

It's just you sometimes have to approach them in a different buy cycle, but it's not a different person. I think what's special about our offering and the reason we characterize it is Enterprise Security and not just security or mobile security or the like is, there are players out there -- I'll call them niche solutions -- they're point solutions like a [Duomo] or the like. They would give you a piece of mobile software that would let you use it as a multifactor to login to a logical application in lieu of a password or to add additional factor to a password.

We're actually offering people the accommodation of logical authentication and physical access. You could use our software to open a door or unlock a parking garage or an elevator. You could also use it to unlock a website or an enterprise application.

The third thing you do with our software is you can use it for enterprise productivity apps running on mobile devices. The last thing that we're doing with our software is giving you enterprise analytics where you can join all of this logical and physical access data into your enterprise databases.

In order to actually meet the needs of an enterprise, you need to support the enterprise directories like active directory; the enterprise databases, like Oracle and Teradata; you need to run an enterprise-grade cloud which is what AWS is. You need to be able to support enterprise devices and mobile device managers like AirWatch, which we do. You need to be able to support enterprise access controllers from Tyco or Honeywell Lenel, which we do. You need to have support for enterprise productivity like transaction services or communication services, which we do.

So taken as its whole, MicroStrategy's offering is we'll give you a full suite of analytics, mobility, security, productivity apps on a single platform. And you can bet it's that it's an IT executive that is going to buy that. Before a company deploys a suite of applications like that, then the IT department going to have to sign off on it. Maybe the CISO is going to sign off on it. The CIO is going to sign off on it.

We have, for the past 15 years, been selling to those organizations about half of that suite. We've been selling the analytics, the web, the productivity, and the mobility part. We just haven't been selling logical and physical access.

So we add those two things, and we take it into the marketplace and we feel really good about that. We've gotten generally a pretty good reaction. Sometimes we'll find that a customer started looking at logical access and then they switched to physical once they realize that we can do that.

And how that -- what that does for us, is this allows us to differentiate against point solutions. If you're a point data discovery solution, like Tableau, well you don't have mobile and you don't have security, that we can offer. And you don't have productivity and enterprise reporting that we can offer.

If on the other hand, your enterprise reporting solution you often times don't have that flexible data discovery or that mobility. If you're an enterprise mobile customer, you don't have analytics. And if you look at the logical access players, they don't have physical access or analytics or mobile productivity suites, and that leaves you with the physical access controllers and the physical access people. They would never think about deploying an analytic solution that runs on an iPad that will ring the people on the phone that just walked into your facility a few minutes ago.

So we are carving our own way in this marketplace. We really passionately believe that an enterprise platform makes the most sense for deploying this suite of unique applications. And we will continue to compete against point solutions which range from Excel and Tableau to Duo or RSA or Click or the like. And we like to think that we are the smart customer's choice. If you are a sophisticated, smart customer around for the long term, you're going to want a single, unified platform that does all of this stuff so that you're scalable and maintainable and extensible.

And there's a place for the point solutions as well. If your departmental and you're in a hurry and you just want to get one thing done fast. But we've always carved our own way in the marketplace, and hopefully that answers your question.

It does. Quickly, because I want to get into that segue into the MicroStrategy 10, of that platform. Do you sell Usher through the same channels with the same sales force? Do you specialize or anything different there?

We sell Usher as an Enterprise Security platform using our same exact sales force to the same exact customers that we are selling our analytics offering. So Usher represents an upsell opportunity to all of our existing customers. We also have cultivated another set of alliance partners, large system integrators and defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, for example, that are enthusiastic about physical access or logical access or security. And have an interest in integrating that with an enterprise analytics and mobility platform.

So I would say there are a good dozen or more Enterprise Security partners that we would call global alliance partners that have reach everyone in the world that we're enthusiastic about. There's another set of focused specialists in the marketplace for security. And then we have enterprise analytics specialists and enterprise analytics global alliance partners as well that we have been working with over time.

I would say is right for you to point out. There are new channel distribution opportunities for us that are opened up with Usher, but they are completely accretive, I believe. All the things we do with Usher accrete to our relationships with our existing channel partners or existing customers. If anything, it just gets us more attention.

For example, we get more attention from Apple Computer because of the things we're doing with Usher and the Apple Watch or Touch ID than we would otherwise get. And I think we get more attention from the business physical access control companies or from the big defense contractors because of things we're doing with Usher. I think that they would be much less interested in working with us if that didn't exist.

Great. Now following on MicroStrategy 10, obviously one of the most important releases, if not the most important release, in the MicroStrategy history. It seems from our perspective you nailed it. What are the things that you look at to see that you're gaining confidence in it, you're lacking confidence in it, or it's going better than expected and the things that you say, hey this really works. We like it. We did it right. Or we need to do these things better. If you can help us understand MicroStrategy 10, the impact it's having for the Company, which obviously will set the future performance of the Company.

Well with MicroStrategy 10, one of our key things is to continuously benchmark it against the other point data discovery solutions in the marketplace and to hear from our customers how they compare it. What we like to see a customer say they evaluated 10 versus the other solutions and it's better or it's comparable to some point solution. I think our install base has large volumes of mission-critical enterprise analytics applications deployed on generally the MicroStrategy version 9 platform. Oftentimes with those companies we'll run those for many, many, many years. If they are not broken oftentimes they won't change them.

That's a great thing for us to have that kind of stability, but we also spend time and are now spending more and more time introducing version 10 to our existing customers and then going through and doing analysis in order to figure out which of those customers have applications or new applications that make more sense to deploy on version 10 than version 9. And as we start to see the results of that, it gives us more confidence as to what we have.

I think generally whenever we see a new application area that's commercialized or a new competitor that we compare with more favorably because of version 10 functionality, that makes us confident. So right now I think generally we are working through those exercises and, of course, we are working through a fairly comprehensive customer communications campaign to introduce version 10 and to demonstrate the value of version 10 everywhere within our installed base and then, of course, to the install base of our competitors.

I guess that's the third area I didn't really mentioned but it's an important one. Version 10 is special because you can actually build applications and you can use competing BI tools as the data source. We can actually run applications against business objects, schemas, and data structures. So as we work in the market and go out to some of the legacy BI vendors, customers, they are now starting to look for alternatives. We use version 10 as our primary weapon in those competitive evals and you can bet that we're really watching very carefully how all those competitive replacement sales cycles go and how version 10 performs in ahead of the competition.

Great. That would be -- the fact that Desktop 10 is a standalone solution gives you the flexibility to actually do that -- go in on a desktop -- that's actually how some of these other point solutions have started to gain traction. Do you see an emphasis and an opportunity for you to take some of these point solutions and just go in with the MicroStrategy 10 desktop as that front end with some of these more larger back end solutions and actually an opportunity for MicroStrategy even to be that type of front end on whether it is a Cognos back end or a BOBJ back end to that extent, much like, quite frankly, the point solutions have grown their businesses. But you still have that back end to do it. I just don't know if you're trying or you're able to say, look we can be that front end as well as these enterprise platform. If you have any thoughts around that?

We've had pretty extensive discussions with industry analysts, and generally they identify two parts to the market of interest. One, all of the existing enterprise customers that made commitments to some of the legacy BI vendors over the past 10 to 20 years that are now going long of the tooth, there's probably 90 legacy BI vendors that were installed across the global 2000 from 1995 to the year 2010. And of the 90, there's only a handful that are still viable choices moving forward.

So that's one interesting market and there's a clear need which is we want a modern platform that's going to grow with us, and we need to migrate our dashboards or enterprise reports or productivity apps or our analytic apps forward on a new horse. I think the other market that analysts point out is the point solutions, the Tableaus of the world and the QuickTechs that have gotten some quick attention in the marketplace. They are now struggling to enter the enterprise market. We're pretty confident that we've got the whole enchilada here.

We got a unified platform that covers every single base, and in 2016 our plan for version 10 is to start to use a version 10 that's seasoned harnessed with a set of sales and marketing programs that target the legacy base and target the point solutions install base. I think that will be a focus of our sales and marketing energy, and I think those are two areas where we can actually find revenue as we go forward in the coming year.

I appreciate the questions. I think we have a couple more analysts that need to ask questions too.

I'm all done, Phong.

Thanks.

Yun Kim, Lake Street Capital. Your line is now open.

Thank you for taking my questions. Following up on Usher discussion you had, Michael. Obviously I've been hearing a lot of great feedback on the product over the past several years. It sounds like there was some change in the marketing strategy behind the product recently. You put it into the platform.

Are you targeting maybe a different opportunity by incorporating the product into your platform? Perhaps targeting smaller initial opportunity within the BI deployment? Or are you still largely focused on -- continuing to focus on targeting large enterprise opportunities for Usher?

Our focus is still on large enterprise opportunities. We've just continued to refine and polish the product. We've been polishing the client interfaces. We've been polishing the productivity offering. We've been polishing analytics. And we've been integrating the product.

It's become pretty clear to us that it's very important that we integrate our Enterprise Security into our overall enterprise platform. It's very important to us that we go to market with a single direct sales organization and not have multiple sales organizations.

We do have some Usher specific product marketing. In general our focus is an enterprise platform that you can use to deploy a unique suite of applications that provide security, that provide mobility, that provide productivity, that provide analytics. The products become more streamlined and more integrated into MicroStrategy sales, marketing, services, and technology. But otherwise it's an enterprise sell.

Okay. Great. Thanks for that feedback. In terms of you guys do a great job of providing us with a lot of business and operational matrix from the Qs and Ks, but one thing that is missing that I think that probably can help me better understand your business is really the mix between new and existing customers. Trying to understand whether you are now more focused on targeting existing customers given the rationalized sales and marketing capacity? Thanks.

Yes. I think we're targeting both new customers and existing customers. I think as we go into 2016, as I was saying, our focus in sales and marketing is going to be -- I would say on the following areas. We'll focus upon targeting the existing enterprise customers of the legacy BI vendors because they tend to be big, rich companies with mission-critical enterprise needs. Our message resonates with them nicely, and we are able to check the box on all of their various requirements. So I think that will be a focus for us.

I think that a second focus for us will be Enterprise Security customers and that's pretty much anybody on Earth has an Enterprise Security problem. I think that 2016 will, if anything, be a year where people have more insecurity about their physical and logical access than ever before. That can be easily predicted, and security will continue to grow and people are going to want more security if they can buy it from a software vendor.

I think the third area is going to be companies that have dabbled with the point solutions like Tableau and Click that have found that they ran out of gas. Many, many people are saying we rolled it out but we can't actually deploy it to the enterprise and we are stuck. Now they are looking for the next thing that will meet all of those needs but provide them with some more scalable enterprise. I think we're well positioned for that.

Great. A last question for Phong and John. Is it safe to assume that you will start to capitalize again on R&D capitalization starting in the current December quarter now that you'll be working towards the next release?

I don't think that's necessarily safe to assume. Obviously we'll look at our capitalization on a quarter to quarter basis but subsequent to our big MicroStrategy 10 release we're now doing minor point releases that include bug fixes, et cetera, which would necessarily be capitalized.

Okay. Great. Thank you so much.

Frank Sparacino, First Analysis. Your line is now open.

Hi, guys. I'll keep it short. Curious, Michael, if there's any way to quantify the level of churn and maybe new leadership across the sales organization? Secondly, related to that, where do you feel like you're at from a productivity standpoint right now with a relatively new team? And when do you think you hit your stride?

We have since the beginning of the year, ahead of worldwide sales. We've replaced the heads of international and Americas and we brought in a new head of worldwide services just recently. So those are four of the most senior positions and they all are new talent.

In terms of quantifying the rest, I think the turnover in the middle levels, of course, is not nearly so much and we've got a lot of industry veterans that have been with us for a while and they are strong players and we are pleased with them. So I think our primary interest is at the senior management level. What was the second part of your question?

Just from a productivity standpoint, Michael, where you're at right now and when do you think the new team will be up and running at full capacity so to speak?

I think productivity has marched forward pretty consistently for the past four quarters. And I think productivity will continue to improve over the next four quarters. And I expect that probably, if you look out more than four quarters, we'll start to approach something which is more stable and balanced and from that point forward we'll be relying upon our product to drive productivity north more so than our leadership team.

Thank you. Greg McDowell, JPM Securities. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Rishi Jaluria again. Two quick ones for you. In terms of MicroStrategy 10 and then the desktop, to parts to that. Have you seen a significant amount of new customer interest as opposed to existing customers who maybe on 9 or in some way in the MicroStrategy ecosystem? And then have you seen desktop be a significant part of any deals, especially any large ones?

Regarding the first question, I think the version 10 has contributed or resulted in more interest in the Company than anything we've released in the past five years or so. So there's been a huge amount of interest. I think a lot of people are giving us another look now because of version 10. So it's been a great door opener. I see a lot of activity and a lot of traffic.

Of late I've taken the reading the lead logs that are coming in. The lead logs are looking longer to me, so I'm very interested in that. Regarding desktop, I think desktop is a part of some of our deals, and it's more and more often that people are asking us to include it. It's been helpful.

Great. Last one. I'll jump off. In terms of headcount it looks like it was still down a little bit for this quarter, significantly less of a reduction than we've seen in the past. Is that, I think, stabilized off here and don't expect any more? Is there still little bit more to come in terms of reducing the headcount?

I think the general headcount levels have stabilized. We look from time to time at anything we might do to be more efficient. As a practical matter, I think we are at a stable point and our focus right now shifts to growth.

Great. Thanks a lot, Michael.

I want to thank everybody for your time today. Thanks for being a shareholder. If you're a shareholder, we think appreciate your support. I will look forward to speaking with you again in 12 more weeks. Have an excellent holiday season. All the best.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.