Microstrategy Inc (MSTR) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MicroStrategy first quarter 2016 earnings call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, just press * and then zero. And now I would like to turn the call to Mr. Michael Saylor, Chairman, President and CEO of MicroStrategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi. I want to welcome all of you to today's conference call regarding our 2016 first quarter financial results. I'm here with our CFO, Phong Le. First I'd like to pass the floor to Phong who is going to read the Safe Harbor statement and make some comments on our results for the first quarter.

Thank you, Mike, and good evening, everyone. Various remarks that we may make about our future expectations, plans, and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provision 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 as of today and should not be reflected upon as representing our views of any subsequent date. 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's 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.

Let me turn to our financial results. Overall our first quarter results were generally in line with our expectations. We continue to deliver growth in the strategic areas of our business and continue to closely manage our cost structure while investing in key [departments]. We experienced lower operating income year-over-year as a result of capitalization of R&D costs, a lower net income year-over-year as a result of foreign exchange related losses. As a summary, year-over-year product license revenues increased 8%, operating expenses increased 3%, operating income decreased 13%, and diluted earnings per share decreased from $1.79 to $1.24.

I'll first focus on revenues. Total revenue for Q1 2016 was $119 million, 4% decrease year-over-year. We continue to experience foreign currency headwinds in Q1, which negatively impacted our revenues by $2.8 million, or 2%. Revenue excluding services, which are primarily consulting, was $98 million in Q1 2016, a 2% increase year-over-year with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenue by $2.3 million, or 2%. Product license revenue was $22 million in Q1 2016, an 8% increase year-over-year with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenue by $0.5 million, or 2%. Our international business continues to show strength and in Q1 2016 it represented 44% of our total product license revenue compared to 32% for the same period in 2015.

In addition to our 8% or $1.6 million increase in year-over-year product license revenue growth, we saw a $1.8 million increase in quarter-over-quarter gross deferred product license revenue. This number represents the net effect of new deferred product license contracts partially offset by the recognition of previously deferred product license contracts. We're able to continue to grow our product license revenue with a sales and marketing team that's 8% smaller in Q1 2016 compared to Q1 2015.

Our subscription services revenue, primarily driven by our cloud customers, was $17.4 million in Q1 2016. This was a 10% increase over Q1 2015. Our support revenue was $68 million in Q1 2016. This represents a 1% decrease year-over-year with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenue by $1.8 million, or 3%.

Our services business continued to decline in Q1. Services revenue was $21 million in Q1 2016 compared to $27 million in Q1 2015. This represents a 24% decrease year-over-year with foreign currency changes negatively impacting such revenue by $0.5 million, or 2%. We continue to focus on improving the key metrics in this business, bill rates, utilization and gross margin.

Turning to costs, we continue to remain disciplined as we start to grow our business. In year-over-year comparisons we should note that Q1 2015 was our first full quarter after our 2014 restructuring effort. Sales and marketing expenses as well as general administrative expenses for Q1 2016 were flat year-over-year. Research and development expenses were $18 million in Q1 2016, up 14% year-over-year. However removing the impact of $5.4 million in capitalized research and development costs in Q1 2015 would have resulted in a 15% decrease in R&D expenses year-over-year.

Total operating expenses were $76 million in Q1 2016, up 3% year-over-year, but down 4% when removing the impact from capitalized research and development costs previously described.

Our headcount growth has been focused on key areas of the business. We ended Q1 2016 with 2,005 employees, a 3% increase since the end of 2015. This increase was driven by an 8% increase in the number of research and development employees and a 4% increase in the number of sales and marketing employees.

We had income from operations of $20 million in Q1 2016 and an operating margin of 17%. This represents a 13% decrease in operating income from the same period a year ago, but would have been an increase of 14% when removing the impact of capitalized research and development costs. We had net income of $14 million in Q1 2016, which is a 30% decrease year-over-year. In addition to the impacts of R &D capitalization in 2015, this figure is also impacted by foreign exchange gains in Q1 2015 compared to foreign exchange losses in Q1 2016.

Moving to the balance sheet, we had cash, cash equivalence and short-term investments of $536 million at the end of Q1 2016 and continue to have no debt. Net cash from operating activities during the first quarter of 2016 was $51 million compared to $56 million during the same period a year ago.

Turning to the remainder of 2016, our financial direction of strategy remains consistent. We'll focus on growing the strategic areas of our business, investing in the business as appropriate, and executing on product and process excellence to build an even stronger foundation for long-term profitable growth.

Now I'd like to turn it back to Michael Saylor.

Thanks, Phong. My perspective on the quarter is I was really happy with the product license growth. This is the single most strategic thing for our company. I think over time our enterprise value is going to be driven largely by our product licenses and our product support revenues. In the other services category these are typically lower margin services and we could grow them or shrink them dramatically without having the same impact on enterprise value that we would have from our product license and our product support revenues, especially since if you want to grow those revenues generally you have to struggle with lower margins. And so our focus is to do everything we possibly can to drive product license and subscription services and product support services, and I liked our growth year-over-year in those areas.

With regard to earnings, there is some decrease in the EPS number but I think when you consider the impact of software capitalization and some of the currency hedge impact on our business, I think that it's not as big an issue as it might be otherwise. Those two line items are pretty large swings. And if we look past them, then the operating income number looked very healthy, $19.7 million in operating income for the quarter. And we're pleased to see that in the first quarter which normally is our seasonally weakest quarter.

If we look at the overall financials, it's within the realm of what we expect in terms of performance. And over the long term we expect we'll have some fluctuation plus or minus, but this was a healthy quarter and we thought a pretty strong one for our first quarter.

Putting all this in perspective, we're still in the middle of a 3-year turnaround. The first year is a restructuring year where we cut a lot of costs, we exited a number of businesses and we changed and restructured the way we approach large parts of our business and that was challenging. We're in the middle of the second year, and the second year is all about implementing new processes and systems and programs, and driving for more efficiency and productivity. And the third year we expect to be about disciplined growth. We are making targeted investments in sales and marketing and technology and are positioned for growth in the coming year.

I'm really pleased with our balance sheet. I think it's really strong. Generating more than $50 million in cash flow I think is a great result for the first quarter and is indicative of a number of good and healthy trends in the business.

With regard to what actually happened on the technology side and sales and marketing during the first quarter, we released 10.3 and that's the third upgrade to our version 10. We're now on a very comfortable cadence of releasing an upgraded version of our overall platform every 12 weeks, and we're pleased with that. 10.3 was an important event because it really was the first platform we've released in the market where we could say it's a truly unified platform for enterprise and Linux mobility and security. In 10.3 we incorporated all of our Usher security functionality on the server on the client side into our analytics and mobile functionality in a single install that you can install into a data center on Windows or on Linux. And that was a big improvement for us and it's making a big difference to our customer base.

I took a tour of the world over the past few weeks. I've actually flown 26,000 nautical miles and I went to Seoul, Korea and Tokyo, and then I went to Melbourne and then Singapore. And then I went to Abu Dhabi and then onward to Milan, Barcelona, then [Nance] France and Frankfurt, Germany and then to London before returning to Washington, DC. And during that tour I had the opportunity to speak to 2,000 or more of our prospects and customers and partners and present our 10.3 platform. I had somewhere between 50 or more one-on-one meetings with customers and prospects and 10 dinners with probably 50 or 60 different customers, and lots of one-on-one meetings, both with all of our employees in the various cities and also key strategic partners.

And the response to 10.3 is universally positive. We're seeing more enthusiasm for this than anything we've seen in the past. And also we're seeing a lot of enthusiasm for the mobility and the security portions of our product line not just analytics. So I was pleased to see that and I was also pleased to see that there doesn't seem to be any geographically specific affinities. Our message and our product is just as interesting in the Far East, as it is in the Middle East, as it is in Europe or the US.

Corporate morale is good and I think it's improved dramatically year-over-year. What you can't see in the numbers is the reaction of the employees, the customers and the partners to the business. But our attrition is down, morale is up, excitement is up. And as we start to shift more resources into sales, marketing and technology area, which you can even see with our headcount numbers, we're moving from a defensive mode to an offensive mode in I think very healthy and constructive yet disciplined way.

And so we're looking forward to the rest of the year. We think we've got a good corporate organization. We've got better processes and systems in place than ever before. And we've got the best product that we've ever had, and enthusiasm is high. So that is my summary for the quarter and with that we'll go ahead and take questions for the analysts.

Thank you. (Operator instructions) And we have a question from the line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Michael, I've got one for you and then, Phong, a follow up. Michael, just on the revenue growth outlook, in prior calls you've expressed a desire to grow total revenues in 2016. You're not that far off in Q1, I guess you were negative [$2 million] in constant currency, but I wanted to ask you if you're still as comfortable as you were before around growing the business in 2016. And then maybe a follow up for you. On the services line, that's where I think maybe MicroStrategy, you know quote, missed the street number in Q1. Just so all the analysts on the call are sort of level set on how we should model that line item going forward, could you offer a little color on whether this is a trough on services or do you expect the company to sort of move off the services a little bit more, hence we might see that line item decelerate a little further going forward? Thank you.

Well I think we're comfortable shifting low margin services to our partners when it presents itself. I think we are enthusiastic about building a high margin expert services business and that means transitioning out of long-term staffing engagements and focusing more on expert services. Where we have any decisions to focus our general priority is to focus upon product licenses and subscription revenues and it's our intent to grow the product license and subscription business and of course to over time grown the product support business. And we're taking an opportunistic view toward the other services areas and we'll grow them to the extent we think it's prudent we can manage it well, but if not we'll allow that to go to partners.

Okay, so -- go ahead, Phong.

One thing I'll point out is if you look at where we're deploying our headcount, especially in Q1, the consulting sort of headcount is the one area where we continue to see a decrease from Q4 to Q1 versus other areas of the business where we're seeing a headcount increase. And that's a conscious decision in the business as far as where we want to deploy our resources in the short term.

I think to Mike's point, you know as we look longer term and we see the product license get very healthy, it will inevitably drive more growth in the consulting business, but we see product license as the strategic place to invest and drive growth right now.

Got it. Makes sense. Okay, and my follow-up to you, Phong, is just on the margins and the seasonality, last year obviously 2015 Q1 marked the low point on non-GAAP operating margins and then it ramped to 2Q, 3Q and then you had your highest operating margin percentage in 4Q. Do you expect 2016 to play out in a similar manner in terms of margin percentage by quarter? Thank you.

Yes, I think looking at 2015 as an indicator of sort of how our margins change and frequently how our revenues change from quarter to quarter is a pretty good indication, and I think if you go back further you'll see the same thing. You know, Q1 is definitely our lightest quarter overall historically speaking. Q2 and Q3 are interchangeable depending on the year and then Q4 is the strongest. And even if -- you know, we've talked about, and I've talked about with a bunch of folks, sort of the choppiness in our business, if you will. And one way to look at it is if you combine Q4 and Q1 and then you combine Q2 and Q3 it takes a little bit of that choppiness away overall. But I think the way you're looking at it, Karl, makes sense.

Got it. Thank you both.

And our next question is from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Maybe just to put a finer point on the services side, could you quantify what percentage of the services you'd consider these expert services?

What percentage of our services right now we consider to be expert services?

Yes. Yes.

I couldn't give you a number on that right now because I just don't have that prepared. What I could --

Is it order of magnitude? Is it a majority or is it a minority or any sense?

It's a reasonable mix of the two.

Okay. And then just maybe for both of you on your forecasting and I know you put in the systems in the last 12-18 months to help with predictability in forecasting. Can you help us understand kind of where you are along your evolution of the end state there and your ability to kind of forecast within the quarter some of the deals, which I know large deals in the past have been a challenge and may always remain a challenge, but just generally your forecasting ability and kind of where you are in that evolution?

Yes, we started an official, I'll call it budgeting and planning process with forecasting really in the end of last year and Q1 was the first time we started using it. As you can imagine, the cost side is a lot easier to predict than the revenue side. And on the cost side, I think we came in pretty much about where we expected overall as a business in Q1.

On the revenue side, the recurring revenue items, cloud subscription have less volatility, as you know, and those are easier to predict within a quarter. And then product license revenue is a little bit of a, I won't call it a wildcard, but it's definitely something that's harder to predict, especially because of its size as, you know, a $1 million or a $2 million deal swings significantly from a percentage perspective and a dollar perspective on a product license revenue. So we look at pipeline. We look at opportunity stages. But, you know, the predictability -- the best forecast in the world will still not necessarily make that that predictable.

Got it. Okay. Thank you.

And our next question is from the line of John Rizzuto with SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon fellas. Just a couple of questions and really about this return to growth. If you had a look at where you are as far as restructuring the new product really going forward, and just trying to get the transition to MicroStrategy 10, right, where do you think the inflection point in the upgrade cycle might be? Have you hit it already or is it still ahead of us? And how do you think about that?

Yes, I think it's sometime in the coming year, if I had to pick an inflection point. We feel like this is, you know this year is a year for us to be driving the message throughout the market, and I think we're doing a decent job of that. We've got probably you know 80 symposiums we're doing around the world over the course of four quarters. The product we're getting pretty good response on. We've been retooling all of our education courses. We've been retooling all of our sales engineers and all of our sales people. And we've been retooling all of our processes. So I feel like allowing that to run over the course of a decent year should allow us to find the inflection point.

Okay. The change in your marketing program and the more [effectiveness] is I've noticed it. You know, with that marketing emphasis, and this might be for Phong, it seems -- I mean it seems you are doing a more aggressive job. It seems, from my perspective, to be a more effective job of marketing. Certainly you're out there a lot more. You've raised it modestly in the first quarter, do you think the marketing sales expense, how can I think about that going forward?

Yes, so if you think about marketing in general, you know the big pieces that we end up spending money on are field marketing, which is where our symposiums are, and also our world event in the first quarter, digital marketing, and then just headcount associated with marketing, whether it be business development folks or product marketing folks, et cetera. I think as we go through the course of the year, just to give you a sense, you know on each of these items every couple of weeks we sit down and review the progress, especially on something like digital marketing, and then we decide how much we want to spend for the next two weeks. But I think it's fair to say that over the course of the year that we expect that the expense associated with marketing in general will start to increase as we want to develop more pipeline and get more sales out of the business.

Okay. Thanks, that's quite agile to change your budget every two weeks, but I know you were telling us about all your dashboards being in place. Just one more or -- one more question about product license, and this is s a two-part question. Can you -- do you know or can you characterize how much of that license revenue was actually driven by 10? And then the second part is, Phong, I'm trying to -- or Michael -- is trying to match your foreign install base versus your domestic. In other words, you said about 40% of your license growth was from the -- was from foreign accounts. I'm just curious, does that pretty much match your mix of your install base being more foreign than domestic or just they're outhitting [their weight] if you will?

Yes, so we don't have an explicit breakdown of licenses that are driven by 10 versus driven by version 9, although there's healthy demand across both platforms. Generally net new wins where we're winning new customers is driven by 10, so I would have to say a good portion of our license, our new license sales is driven by 10, but I wouldn't want to give you an exact number for fear of being wrong.

With regard to the international versus domestic issue, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes, I can talk to that, John. I think roughly, you know if you look at our product support base as an indicator in terms of dollars as an indicator of domestic versus international, roughly about 40% of our product support is coming from our international business. So it is pretty similar to the distribution that we've seen. I think the last three quarters we've seen greater weighting and product license revenue from the international business, but it's driving that up to that 40% level. So that gives you a bit of a sense of how we break that out.

Great. Thanks, fellas. And congratulations on return to growth.

Thank you.

And our next question is from the line of Abhey Lamba with Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Mike, you just mentioned the inflection point with version 10 customers you expect in about a year or so from now. What type of revenue uptick do you think you can get with that? And as you are getting into some of those conversations, what type of competitive environment are you seeing?

Yes, we actually think that we've got good revenue growth opportunity because as people adopt version 10 they tend to both be deploying it more broadly on the desktop for desktop analytics. And also version 10 has built into it our identity management and our security wallet, and that has an impact on our mobile application deployment. So 10 is driving mobile applications and 10 is also driving some security applications, and that also differentiates us against most of the competition.

In terms of, you know, how we sit versus the competition, you know right now we have a set of enterprise BI companies we compete against, you know the divisions of Oracle, SAP and IBM. And they don't really have a cutting edge new message being delivered to the marketplace so 10 helps us compared to those businesses and it's positioned us as being a tech leader. And most companies like to buy from a technology leader and someone that's going to be progressing forward as opposed to just buying from an enterprise software company that's maintaining the same product line year after year after year.

And I think the other benefit of 10 is against the up and comers, the QlikTechs and the Tableaus, 10 positions us pretty strongly because we have the mobility and the security components that they don't have. And we also have in 10 a decent desktop analytics environment which is the appeal that they do have.

So those two things allow us I think to get market share from one part of the market, the desktop analytics players, and also to get market share from the enterprise analytics players while pursuing a third market, which is kind of greenfield, it's the enterprise mobility, enterprise security market where people are really enthusiastic about deploying mobile apps to store managers and sales people and service managers, and integrating those tightly into their customers. And that's all what 10 does quite nicely.

Got it. That's helpful. And Phong, on the capitalization of R&D expense, what were the factors that kind of, because of which you couldn't -- you didn't capitalize this quarter and how should we expect it to continue for the rest of the year?

Yes, as you know in the first quarter of last year we were really working on a culmination and the release of our version 10 software. At that point in time we were releasing major incremental versions of software on a multi-year basis where now we've changed to, you know, an agile development methodology, which releases software incrementally every three months. So at this point in time we don't expect significant capitalization of software R&D costs going forward. If at some point in time we see a major release of new feature functionality, you know an 11 or 12 or something like that, we'd consider capitalization at that point but it's not in the immediate future.

Got it. Thank you.

And our next question is from the line of Frank Sparacino with First Analysis. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Two questions. Phong, maybe first with you. Just on the G&A line, I mean I understand [the world] was in Q1 as it was a year ago I believe, but you know that number was much higher than I expected. Is there any one time items in that?

Yes, there were a couple of I'll sort of call them onetime items, but you know they're onetime items that go up and down. I think as you go through our Q, which we happened to also release today, it does outline some of the details of the onetime items that occurred.

Okay. And then maybe, Mike, just in looking through the Q it looks like on the product side, you know international was up very strong, nearly 50%, but on the domestic side you know down 11%. And I'm just curious, Mike, when you look at the US, you know how would you characterize sort of overall demand? Do you see caution or points of maybe softness in the overall market in any particular vertical? Thanks.

Yes, you know when I look at where we're selling -- first let me preface it with there is volatility quarter to quarter in our business. And second, you know Phong was talking about forecasting. We actually -- we have a good handle on every deal we're doing, and even sometimes we have a good handle on when we think it's going to close. But it's possible you could close a real mega deal and in the last two hours of the negotiation agree to a concession which causes the deal to get recognized a year from now or six months from now, or [ratably] over 12 months as opposed to upfront. And so that's the thing that we don't always forecast very well. You could actually have a perfectly fine quarter and find that you've got a few deals that you recognize in a more conservative fashion because of some other nuance of the business.

And I just throw that out there because sometimes when you're looking at a quarter like Q1, which is always a seasonally light one, if you had a few large deals that got recognized differently it would change the results and you might come to some conclusion like you like international or you don't like America but in fact you can't really come to any conclusion like that if you're looking at the overall flow of the business over 12 months.

When I look at our business, I think America is a good market and we're just doing fine here. And I think that you know we did some of our best deals in America and we generate nice revenue. I think international is working well too. We are seeing strength in markets like the Far East and the Middle East that normally software companies don't get strength in. We saw some nice deals in Europe. We saw some really nice large deals in the US but you know in some cases we don't recognize them as aggressively, in other cases we do.

With regard to the mixture across various markets, good demand in the insurance businesses, some great insurance deals. Some great business we're doing in the airline business. Some really good business in retail and banking and government. So I feel like the product has good enterprise appeal across all the various marketplaces and all the various industrial segments, but that's the nature of our business you're going to have some choppiness from quarter to quarter and I think we're comfortable with that, you know.

I think, you know, Jeff Bezos said the famous line, he says, and he wrote it in his annual report, he said, when we have to choose between maximizing revenue and cash flow, we'll always opt to maximize 36 month cash flows. And I think the way we run our business when we're actually doing deals, we look at the business and we try to maximize our cash flows over 36 months. So in some cases, if we were you know desperately trying to get a deal to be all recognizable upfront in the quarter in question, we have to sacrifice some business and we have to sacrifice a lot of financial terms. We might make it look better in the near term, but we'd be sacrificing the long term.

So I think we have a very balanced view to the business. I think that's why, you know, we generated more than $50 million in cash flow in the quarter in question. And it's a matter of substance being the most important thing. And I think the substance is the US is a good market, international's a good market, and most industries are really good customers for us and the product's a great product.

Thank you, Mike, that's helpful.

And our next question is from the line of Yun Kim with Brean Capital. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hi, Michael and Phong. Following up on the question asked two callers ago, is there any way you guys can quantify the license revenue mix between new and existing customers and how that's been trending?

We don't have a concrete number for you there, but we've got some good business with new customers and we're pleased with it. But we're also pleased with the business we're getting from existing customers.

Yes, I think we've talked about it in the past and we don't disclose it on a quarterly basis but we've talked about it in the past roughly about a third of our software business is coming from new customers versus existing, but we don't break it down on a quarter to quarter basis.

Okay. Thanks. And, Michael, you know you highlighted certain verticals that you are seeing strength, such as aerospace and insurance and such. Are you at all interested in pursuing a more vertically focused solution and maybe marketing those vertically focused solutions? For instance, I think one of your largest verticals is retail, and obviously there's a very strong [cycular] spending trend around (inaudible) going on in that vertical. You know is there any way for you guys to kind of (inaudible) perhaps provide the analytics around the (inaudible) platform and such?

Well first of all we have a unified platform for enterprise analytics mobility and security. And the very compelling position that I think all of our customers and prospects like is that you can use our platform to deploy any mixture of unique applications to your enterprise. And that will be our technology strategy going forward. We like the niche we're in, which is we are an enterprise software platform for building unique applications that you can't buy off the shelf.

With regard to marketing and sales, the theme of our worldwide symposium series earlier this quarter was product solutions that you can implement with the MicroStrategy platform. But the theme of our symposium series next quarter, where we'll go to 20 or 25 different cities around the world, is industry solutions, particularly you know smart retail solutions you can deploy with our platform out of the box, and smart healthcare solutions, and smart city solutions, and smart banking solutions. And so we actually have a really good story to tell around the full suite of security, mobility and analytics applications you can build on our platform if you are a bank, or if you are a retailer.

But what makes it powerful is that we give you the platform, you integrate it with your enterprise, and you deploy custom, unique solutions rapidly. And so we won't be selling a product which is vertical, we'll be selling a platform to build unique solutions for your enterprise. But we will actually be driving our marketing message and our industry solutions marketing messages because the CEOs of retail would like to see the dozen retail apps they can build on MicroStrategy. And the CEOs of healthcare companies want to see the dozen healthcare apps they can build on MicroStrategy. And we have seen that that resonates very well and we're gearing up our third quarter marketing to go chase after that.

That sounds great. Good luck. Wish you a lot of success on that. Phong, just can you just talk about the drop in the stock based comp? So we saw a pretty big drop from last year to this quarter, on a quarterly basis, and where do you expect that to normalize this year?

Yes, sorry. I didn't quite catch the question. What line item -- what (multiple speakers)

Stock based compensation. I think you guys saw about $1.5 million this quarter. I think you guys were doing about somewhere in the $4 million plus three quarters of last year.

Yes, that's right. The big drop there was an adjustment we took related to cost accruals for stock options for certain members of our executive team who are no longer here and so we backed out the costs associated with those.

Do you expect that number to come back up to $4 million plus next quarter?

I expect the number to normalize again back to what you've seen previously.

Yes, okay. Great, thank you. And then lastly, in terms of headcount growth, do you expect to continue to show modest growth in your sales and marketing and product development as you [continue] to show revenue growth, especially in your license business?

I think we expect to modestly grow the organization still going forward on a quarter-over-quarter basis. And I think your question around sort of doing it as we grow product license revenue is the right thought process there.

Okay. Great. Thank you so much.

And our next question is from the line of Greg McDowell with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you very much. A couple questions. First, one of the themes at the analyst day at MicroStrategy world this year was sales productivity. And I was just wondering if you could comment on sales productivity in Q1 and whether or not it met your expectations in light of all the structural changes in the sales organization last year. That's my first question.

You know, I think we continue to make strides on improving sales productivity. And as Phong had pointed out, our sales organization is really focused upon the product license and the subscription sales. And, you know, we were -- we had an increase year-over-year in that line item in Q4, and we had an increase year-over-year in that line item in Q1. And on the other hand, we're doing it with a smaller, tighter sales organization that I think is running more efficiently. So if I were to look at raw productivity numbers, I'm sure we'd see that our productivity per account executive or per sales professional is improving pretty consistently.

And that is -- it's also consistent with all of the corporate process initiatives we have. We've had a lot of process initiatives to improve sales management, account management, business development and field sales, and of course marketing initiatives to increase productivity. So those things are all working together in order to drive productivities up.

Yes also, if you look at the headcount levels, Greg, we decreased our sales headcount year-over-year by about four to six people, and yet we continue to increase both our product license revenue number and also, as Mike inferred a little bit, our product bookings number was even more of an increase when we look at bookings per sales person.

Great. And then my last question, just any commentary you can provide on MicroStrategy's security or Usher, and maybe the progress you're seeing on more security standalone deals where customers are just adopting security but maybe aren't adopting the entire analytics platform. I think that was, you know, something you guys were pretty laser focused on in 2014 and 2015 but the pipeline was building strong and there were lots of proofs of concepts out there. But anything you could comment around the security business would be helpful. Thanks.

I think we saw our early enthusiasm and customer success in markets like Singapore and UAE and some in New York and the East Coast of the United States. But what I can see right now is I feel like there's great enthusiasm that's starting to bubble up from a grassroots level in Korea and Japan and Australia and parts of Europe and other parts of the United States. So I feel good that the entire offering is spreading throughout our install base. It's starting to spread throughout our sales organization in a more broad based fashion.

And whereas last year we had a specialized sales organization driving this, specialized sales people and specialized sales engineers and you kind of had to be a specialist to install this, this year we've rolled this out broad based to our entire sales organization and our entire sales engineering group so that all of the field engineers are now qualified to install and start to build pilots and deploy applications. And so I expect that we'll continue to see a healthy spread of this technology to the benefit of our entire sales organization and our customer base.

Thank you very much.

And we have a follow-up from the line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. I just want to ask a follow-up, Michael, on the subscription line. If you could offer an update on the transition of your cloud BI product to AWS. And that number, the growth rate has slowed a little bit. Do you think there's any demand issue with cloud hosted BI, maybe a perceived performance latency issue, or maybe it's just sales execution and cloud hosted products just taking time to garner enterprise adoption? Thanks for any thoughts.

Yes, we used to operate the cloud business as a single business unit and we split it into an enterprise cloud unit and into an AWS based cloud unit. And so the AWS cloud unit operates wholly in the AWS cloud, and the enterprise unit is still running certain hosted applications on our own hardware and our own datacenter for customers. And we shifted some of our more talented executives to start running the AWS part of the business and be dedicated to it. And so we have been gearing for more growth. We see a steady migration out of the enterprise into AWS and a steady increase in activity in the AWS cloud.

10.3 was a dramatic improvement in the secure cloud offering over the previous version. We've been doing a lot of work to automate our creation of AWS instances. And I would say one of the important objectives of ours is to provide our customers with a single tenant managed environment where if you were a retailer you could create your own cloud instance where you have complete control over the resources and the elasticity and the power and the location of that instance, or even a number of them. And that is distinguished from our competition because competitors like Tableau and Qlik and the like, while they sometimes offer a cloud opportunity, they don't give you the same degree of elasticity or configurability of the cloud environment that I think a very serious enterprise would require. There's no way that a real mission critical application is going to be deployed out of the cloud if the enterprise doesn't feel that they can completely control and tailor that configuration based upon their enterprise needs over time. That might mean scaling it down, but it might mean scaling it up, and it might mean placing it in a different place.

With regard to 10.3, we released a lot of upgraded administrative capabilities and automation tools to make it easier for enterprises to do that. And I think that we'll continue to add some cutting edge enterprise cloud capabilities with future releases as well. And as we do that, I think that accelerates the migration into the cloud. Certainly, in terms of creating demand, the most useful thing we could do to create demand is to make it easy, and easier for enterprise customers to migrate MicroStrategy applications into the cloud that they have running in the enterprise. And we are steadily improving that toolset as quarters to by.

Okay. Great. Thanks a lot for that.

And we have a follow-up from the line of John Rizzuto with SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Hi, fellas. Thanks for taking a follow-up. Phong, if you could just work through a little bit for us again the dynamics around the deferred revenue and why that number was strong and what that actually means.

Yes, sure, John. If you look at our deferred revenue detail in our press release, and also it's also in our 10-Q, you know the way I look at it, just to simplify it really, is looking at the total current and non-current. What you'll see there from December 31st, 2015 to December 31st, 2016 our deferred product license revenue increased by roughly $1.7 million, $1.8 million. So that increase effectively is revenue that was booked in Q1 but not recognized [minus] revenue that was booked in a previous quarter that was recognized in Q1. And so a positive number there indicates that we had more bookings that were not recognized (inaudible). And so that's what I think Mike alluded to a little bit. Some of the deals that we end up closing are although they don't show up on the product license revenue line show up in that change in deferred revenue line, and we had a few substantial deals that looked like that.

Okay.

(multiple speakers) depends on the kind of customer that we're selling to, depends on the contract arrangement whether we defer the revenue or not.

Right. And that's all for new products, right? That's new product license, correct?

Yes. Yes. Yes, and there's other lines there, subscription, services, products support, other services.

Right.

Those changes are less meaningful because they're not necessarily just because of revenue recognition. So I would focus on that first row there, the deferred product license revenue, to indicate sort of an additional color on the shrink in the quarter.

Okay. Great. Thanks for that.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A for today. I will turn the call to Michael Saylor for any final remarks.

Well, I want to thank all of you for your time today. And we'll look forward to speaking with you again in 12 weeks. All the best.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program and you may all disconnect. Have a wonderful day.