SailPoint Inc (SAIL) 2019 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to SailPoint Technologies Holdings' Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Josh Harding, Vice President of Financial Planning, Analysis and Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today to discuss SailPoint's fourth quarter and full year 2019 financial results. Joining me today are Sailpoint's CEO and Co-Founder, Mark McClain; and our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Ream. Please note, today's call will include forward-looking statements and because these statements are based on the company's current intent, expectations and projections, they are not guarantees of future performance, and a variety of factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Since this call will include references to non-GAAP results, which exclude special items, please reference this afternoon's press release in the Investors section of sailpoint.com for further information regarding forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP results to GAAP results. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Mark McClain.

Thanks, Josh, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining the call today. I'm pleased to share our results from the fourth quarter of 2019, where we delivered $89 million of total revenue, ahead of our guidance, driven by continued market demand for identity governance, our laser focus on innovation and solid execution by the SailPoint team. I'd like to spend a few moments adding some color around these results. Looking back at the year we just completed, we believe our success was fueled by our long track record of innovation in the identity market.

In 2019, we delivered innovation across 3 areas of our business. First, we redefined the direction of the industry with the unveiling of our AI- and ML-enabled identity platform, SailPoint Predictive Identity. With SailPoint Predictive Identity, which can be leveraged by both our SaaS and on-premise customers, we're evolving identity governance to be more automated, adaptive and predictive. This speeds important identity decisions, freeing up IT and Identity teams to focus on the areas of greatest risk to the business. It also introduces a simpler way of doing identity, inviting a more productive, efficient and secure workforce. This new way of doing identity ensures that everyone and everything, whether that's employees, contractors, partners and even nonhuman entities has exactly what they need, exactly when they need it seamlessly and automatically.

Second, we expanded the scope of our core SaaS identity governance platform to more comprehensively address the complex enterprise use cases we see among customers around the world. In fact, we are beginning to see more companies who have traditionally leaned towards an on-premise identity platform, now leaning more and more towards SaaS. As an example from last year, one of the world's largest multinational mass media and entertainment organizations opted for our SaaS identity platform, IdentityNow, to form the foundation of their identity program. This customer was drawn to the functionality available out of the box and the ongoing operational benefits of a SaaS-based approach to identity governance, having spent years running CA's cumbersome and highly complex on-premise solutions.

Third, with the acquisitions of both Orkus and OverWatchID, we are delivering deeper governance for all cloud applications and infrastructures. This is increasingly important as the majority of today's digital businesses have been built on cloud infrastructures. The need for fine-grained governance over who has access and how that access is being used across these cloud environments has never been more critical.

Now let's shift gears to our 2020 focus. The SailPoint team remains wholly committed to driving the identity market forward, both from a visionary and leadership standpoint. I'd like to spend a few minutes discussing our product strategy going forward and our vision for identity in the year ahead. In 2020, we expect an increasing number of the enterprises we target to lean towards SaaS for all aspects of their identity program. To address this shift, our product strategy is twofold: Accelerate innovation, delivering on our vision for SailPoint Predictive Identity. We intend to deliver these and other new capabilities through our SaaS platform. These innovations, while delivered as SaaS, will interoperate with both our IdentityIQ software platform as well as our IdentityNow SaaS platform.

As a result, all of our customers, new and existing, whether on-premise or cloud-only will have access to the full benefit of SailPoint Predictive Identity. This SaaS-driven approach will further accelerate our pace of innovation, while continuing to support all of our customers' hybrid environment, and ensure that they are all able to build a next-generation identity program with SailPoint. While we believe that an increasing number of enterprises will start to lean towards our SaaS solution, we fully acknowledge that some enterprises will still prefer to run a software-based identity program for the foreseeable future. We'll remain focused on making our new SaaS offerings easily consumable by these customers with on-prem deployment.

As an example, a large multinational energy transportation company we worked with this past quarter is now leveraging SailPoint Predictive Identity services within their existing IdentityIQ-based program. This customer was excited about the ability to extend their on-premises identity program to take advantage of our recently launched SaaS capability.

Moving forward, we remain committed to fundamentally evolve the identity landscape with SailPoint Predictive Identity. We believe the market is ready for a new approach to identity, one that we drove last year with the initial introduction of the solution. Since then, we've made this vision a reality for our customers by extending beyond the initial functionality we brought to market. For example, we've just introduced a new patented Access Modeling Service that makes it easier for customers to both create and update role models dynamically as their organization changes. This, coupled with the patented Recommendations Engine and Access Insights services, which are already available, delivers an intuitive and adaptive approach to identity.

The early interest and response from customers has been strong. For example, one of our customers, a large retail propane distributor, recently extended their investment in SailPoint, fully recognizing the value of AI to their existing IdentityNow SaaS-based identity program. With SailPoint Predictive Identity, they now have clear visibility into user access and anomalous access privileges across their entire population of users and can now take action on risky access privileges that previously were not apparent.

In closing, we are in a solid position as both the industry leader and visionary in identity governance, as evidenced by our extended leadership in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for identity governance and administration. We have the domain expertise, coupled with strong business fundamentals in place to continue to deliver the most comprehensive approach to identity. As in past years, we will continue to execute in a way that benefits our customers around the world and deliver innovative identity solutions that address our customers' digital transformation needs. Now let me hand it off to Jason, who will discuss our financials for the quarter and the year.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you to everyone on the line for joining us today.

As Mark noted earlier, we saw a number of positive trends in the fourth quarter and are pleased to have exceeded our guidance on both the top and bottom line. Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $89 million, an increase of 10% over Q4 of 2018. Subscription revenue increased 37% year-over-year to $40.5 million and represented 45% of total revenue for the quarter. If you will recall, in the third quarter, subscription was just under half of our total revenue at 49%. In Q4, some large license deals at the end of the year moved that percentage down despite higher year-over-year growth in subscriptions this quarter. We expect that this may be one of the last times that subscription is less than half of our total revenue.

Renewal rates remain consistent with historical trends, which we believe to be attractive relative to industry norm. License revenue of $38 million was down 6% year-over-year but up 42% compared to prior quarter and ahead of the expectations that were built into our guidance. The better-than-expected license performance was driven by strong execution across all 3 geographies.

As I transition to the remainder of our income statement, I want to note upfront that unless otherwise stated, all references to expenses and operating results are calculated on a non-GAAP basis and exclude the items outlined in the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations provided in today's press release.

On a combined basis, total gross margin for the quarter was 83% compared with 84% in Q4 of 2018. Gross margins for each of our revenue streams continues to improve independently, but the overall gross margin change reflects the continued mix shift towards SaaS revenue versus the year ago period. Operating expenses for the quarter were $58.2 million. This is up 15% sequentially from $51.7 million in Q3, primarily driven by an increase in sales commissions in our seasonally largest quarter of the year, by corporate bonus accruals based on our operating income outperformance, and due to the addition of the 2 acquisitions that we made in October. On a year-over-year basis, operating expense is up 21% from $49.5 million. And we ended the quarter with 1,168 employees, a 4% increase during the quarter itself and up 16% from the end of 2018.

For the full year of 2019, total revenue was $288.5 million, an increase of 16% over 2018. License revenue was $102.8 million and services revenue was $42.3 million. Subscription revenue was $143.4 million or 50% of total revenue and up 38% year-over-year.

As we look forward to 2020 and beyond, I want to lay out a few of the beliefs shared by our management team as we look at the business. First, we are very excited about our market opportunity. We believe that identity is the key to securing the enterprise as it moves to the cloud and that governance is the critical piece in managing identity. We are the market leader in identity governance and are best positioned to capitalize on this growing opportunity. Second, we believe that we are well positioned to execute on this opportunity. The additions that we have made to our team and the tuning we have done to our operating model put us in an excellent position to accelerate our business. Notably, we have seen meaningful improvement in pipeline quality and growth over the last several quarters.

Third, we are seeing the market shift towards cloud and SaaS and believe that is a shift we are ready to address. Most importantly, it serves as an opportunity to accelerate our market penetration and our competitive advantage. We've felt an increasing level of pull towards SaaS by the market, and believe that 2020 is the right time for us to lean in.

And lastly, through our Predictive Identity vision, we believe we can change the game for enterprise customers, meaningfully improve their security and compliance posture and dramatically simplify management of their identity programs. We believe that Predictive Identity will further differentiate us in the market, bolstering our competitive position and will enable us to increase the rate at which we can capture market share. As such, we intend to continue to invest in our ability to deliver this vision more comprehensively and efficiently through our SaaS platform.

Based on these beliefs, our plan for 2020 aligns with the following core tenets: We expect that our bookings growth will accelerate from 2019 growth rate, driven by a strong market and the better execution we're seeing across the business. We believe our bookings mix will accelerate its shift towards SaaS over the course of the year and expect that the majority of new customer bookings will be SaaS by the second half of 2020. And we intend to accelerate investment in our products with the majority of our investment focused on our SaaS platform and on expanding the capabilities of Predictive Identity.

Our current expectations for 2020 are as follows: revenue in the range of $320 million to $325 million, representing 11% to 13% total revenue growth over 2019. While we expect a higher bookings growth rate in 2020 than 2019, the accelerating shift towards SaaS has a dampening effect on recognized revenue. If we were to execute our 2020 bookings plan at the same license subscription mix as 2019, we would have expected revenue growth of approximately 18% to 20%.

Subscription revenue will continue to be our fastest-growing revenue stream and should be more than half of our revenue throughout 2020. For the full year, we expect subscription revenue to be approximately 57% to 58% of total revenue up from 50% in 2019. That represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 28% to 30%. Subscription revenue includes both maintenance and SaaS, but SaaS is rapidly becoming a larger portion of that revenue stream. We expect license revenues to be down from 2019 by approximately 5% to 8%. We expect to continue to sell perpetual licenses to existing customers that wish to expand their deployment and to certain large enterprise customers that want an on-premise deployment or need specific functionality that is currently only in our on-prem products. However, we expect that a majority of our new customer sales will be SaaS by the second half of this year and beyond. Lastly, we expect our services revenue to be approximately $41 million or approximately flat with 2019.

On expenses, we are growing our investment primarily focused in 2 areas. On the product side, we are investing in our SaaS governance platform, which we believe is already the leading SaaS identity governance product, to bring it to a level where it's capable of solving the majority of the complex use cases of any enterprise customer in the world. Additionally, the 2 acquisitions that we made last fall, which together represented $2 million to $2.5 million of incremental operating expense in the fourth quarter of 2019, will continue to be a net investment in 2020. We have seen significant demand for those capabilities, but obviously don't expect meaningful revenue contribution from those products in 2020 itself.

And finally, we expect to significantly grow our sales capacity in 2020, doubling down on the execution strength that we have seen in the team and based on the confidence that we have in the market opportunity. Taken together, our outlook for recognized revenue, which is dampened by the accelerating shift to SaaS; and our investment plan, which includes the full year of the 2 acquisitions we made late last year; as well as a proactive push to ramp our sales capacity and to bolster our SaaS capabilities, we expect total non-GAAP expense approximately in line with total revenue, or in other words, breakeven non-GAAP operating income for the year.

As referenced earlier, the mix shift we're expecting this year reduces expected revenue growth by roughly 7 percentage points or roughly $20 million. Given the nearly 100% gross margins on license revenue, almost all of that revenue would have been expected to fall to the bottom line.

Turning to the first quarter of 2020, we expect total revenue of $71 million to $72 million, representing 17% to 19% growth over the first quarter of 2019. Subscription revenue should be approximately 60% of total revenue, representing roughly 36% growth year-over-year. In addition, we expect a non-GAAP operating loss of $4.5 million to $3.5 million due to the accelerated rate of investments referenced earlier. With that, we'll open up the call to questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Melissa Franchi with Morgan Stanley.

Okay. I wanted to start maybe on the topic of sales execution. So the new Chief Revenue Officer Matt Mills has been onboard, I think, for about 2 quarters now. So can you talk about the changes that he's been able to make to the sales organization? What you're seeing in terms of sales productivity this quarter? And what is still getting worked on for 2020?

Thanks, Melissa. It's Mark. In general, I'd say, largely unchanged. I think Matt felt like he inherited a machine that was up and running pretty well. He's certainly fine-tuning some of our processes, thinking about how to build in better scaling capabilities and everything from how we onboard and enable our team, how we work through our selling processes and how we work through our contracting processes. But I think his assessment would be that this was a pretty well-running machine, but it can certainly be tuned up and get better. I think a lot of his focus in this first part of 2020 is really to build the team and get the capacity up early in the year to capitalize on the opportunity we see in front of us.

Okay. That's helpful. And then on the kind of leaning more heavily into the SaaS part of the business, how are you doing that exactly? Is it more customer-driven where you just anticipate customers are more willing to buy SaaS, or are you making any changes to the sales force to incent them to sell that?

Yes. Well, Melissa, look, it's a little bit of everything. As you know, we've been transitioning somewhat over the past several years, right? SaaS has become an increasingly larger part of our business. We're getting a lot of pull from the market. And that is -- I think customers all over -- in almost every industry vertical have been looking at SaaS for a long time. And maybe security was a little bit further behind in some places because some customers felt like they had to have that on-prem.

We're seeing a lot of acceptance now of something even as mission-critical as identity governance, being a SaaS-delivered product and in fact, proactive interest in that direction. You combine that with the fact that our product, which we launched I think 5.5 years ago, at first, obviously, that was not ready to serve the majority of the market. Today, it can serve really customers of almost any size. Mark referenced one example of a huge multinational corporation that went with our SaaS product in Q4. We're to the point -- we're close to the point now where just about any customer in the market could use our product. There are a couple of use cases here and there that are only in the on-prem product, but that's part of the investment we're making in -- on the R&D side in 2020 to where it can serve any customer in the market.

You put all that together and that's what's leading to our beliefs about what's going to happen in 2020. I think we have -- as Mark referenced in his part of the script, our approach here is it's not a 180-degree pivot. One, we think there are some customers who will continue to want the on-prem version or just want an on-prem deployment, and we'll still serve that demand. And second, obviously, we've got on-prem customers, existing customers who continue to buy more from us. And so that will be part of our business for some period of time to come.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

This is actually Matt Swanson on for Matt. Mark, you did a great job explaining kind of the competitive differentiation of the Predictive Identity platform. But could you dive a little bit deeper on how this could help you expand within your existing customers? Just in terms of the number of identities that your customers can manage, especially when we start thinking more about adding bots into the equation?

Yes, it's a great question, Matt. We always count on some Matt dialing in from RBC, how is that? Look, I think a couple of ways I would say that this is going to help us with our existing installed bases, right? What we hear continually from customers is the -- there's a lot of challenge getting their arms around the scope and complexity of their environment. And at the end of the day, part of the challenge is just understanding where they should spend their time and energy and focus. Part of what we're delivering with Predictive Identity is helping them automate and streamline a lot of the relatively repetitive, rote parts of identity governance, of which there's a lot, so that they can focus on the real risk and security concerns that the organization has.

And as you pointed out, Matt, one of the newer risk that's emerged is the concern over software bots or robotic software processes, where more and more work is being driven into an automated software program to take the load off of people. But those programs, those bots behave very much like a human in regards to systems and applications. And so customers are absolutely expecting a product like SailPoint to help them govern who and what, in that case, has access to those questions or to those issues. And therefore, we can kind of work our way through it with the Predictive.

And in general I think the scaling up, like, as we've said many times, sometimes customers will license for their entire enterprise. But quite often, a large enterprise will license for something less than that, maybe a geographic region, maybe a division and so the speed with which we can help them deploy and roll out the solution in their enterprise, which we believe Predictive Identity will accelerate, that will help them get to more identities under governance sooner. So that will certainly be an assist in helping us drive more product capabilities into these customers.

That's really helpful. And then -- since the SaaS portion has been growing, I think something that we've thought about some is how to think about balancing the investments in IdentityIQ versus IdentityNow? Could you just talk about how something like Predictive Identity that can be leveraged by both platforms? Maybe you can bridge that gap from an R&D investment capabilities?

Yes, absolutely. Matt, this is Jason. That is the core to our strategy there, is that as we build out significant new capabilities, we're building that out in SaaS, but in a way that it can be leveraged by both existing on-prem customers as well as existing SaaS customers and future customers of either side, really. Obviously, there's some work that we need to do in the on-prem product to be able to make it work with those capabilities, but that's relatively minimal. And we still have some ongoing investments we need to make into the -- to the on-prem product to keep it current and keep existing deployments functional with new minor releases.

So I think the right way to think about it is that we're making the necessary investments in the on-prem side. And most of the forward leaning, forward-looking and speculative investments are more on the SaaS side, whether that's in the SaaS governance platform or in the additional modules, so to speak, that will work with both on-premise and SaaS.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski with D.A. Davidson.

Great. And congrats on the quarter, good quarter relative to your guidance. I guess I just had another follow-up question on the sort of the SaaS investments you're making. So you said all customers will have access to the full benefits of Predictive Identity. I guess is that the same as saying that IdentityIQ and IdentityNow will be at feature parity by the end of 2020 so that customers will get the same functionality, regardless of the form factor they deploy?

Andy, it's Mark. I wouldn't -- we've always avoided saying full parity because the truth is when we built IdentityNow, we intentionally took some different approaches to how we thought customers would want to do things in a SaaS-centric environment. And so we tend to talk about use case coverage rather than feature parity to say we're -- our goal is to make sure we cover the use cases our customers think are relevant. And increasingly, as Jason said earlier, we believe our IdentityNow SaaS platform will cover the bulk of requirements for the bulk of the customers we serve.

I think there's still going to be a number of cases, incredibly large, complex global organizations for whom some of them -- IdentityIQ will still be the right fit. But what we mean by that is saying whatever we deliver in Predictive and that's going to be encompassed in things like the IdentityAI platform -- we've already launched some of the new services we're adding to that; we just announced Access Modeling last week that we'll be delivering more capabilities to the technology we acquired through Orkus and OverWatch -- all of those capabilities will be delivered as SaaS services, but we'll ensure that a customer, whether running IdentityNow or IdentityIQ, will be able to leverage all of that new functionality. And as Jason said, sometimes that involves us making some changes in those core platforms to make sure that's true. And that's the ongoing commitment of investment we're making in both those existing platforms is that everything new that we do should be leverageable by both platforms.

Okay, that makes sense. And then maybe just a clarification. As it relates to your 2020 outlook, can you give us any color in terms of how much contribution from Orkus and OverWatch you added to that outlook? Just trying to understand sort of the organic growth rate versus the contribution from the acquisitions?

Yes. Andy, it's almost 100% organic. Those products, one, are SaaS, and so the recognized revenue effect in 2020 would be pretty minimal. But they're really launching actually this quarter. And so the sales team knows about them and the market knows about them, and there's a lot of excitement out there, but we don't really have a formal pipeline built yet. So I'm sure we'll sell some this year, but I don't expect really revenue contribution.

Our next question comes from the line of Yun Kim with Rosenblatt Securities.

Congrats on a solid quarter and your progress towards the cloud. If you can talk about what has changed in terms of your go-to-market as you shift more towards the cloud and SaaS solutions, obviously, you probably will be focusing more on the land-and-expand going forward rather than -- probably a large -- one large replacement opportunity that you saw -- typically saw in the on-prem world. Do you expect the initial land deal size to be more modest going forward as a result?

I'll take a first shot at that and let Jason jump on. I think in general, we've always had a bit of a land-and-expand approach where we thought it made sense. As I referenced earlier, even historically as IdentityIQ, it was not uncommon for a global enterprise to start using either a subset of our functionality, like just the governance compliance or just the provisioning side, or to apply that just to a division or maybe to a subsidiary in one country when they have global operations. So there's always been some flavor of land-and-expand. Quite typically it's been rare as we like to say that we would back up the truck and unload everything for a large global customer.

So there's always been some aspect of that, given the nature of what we do. I do agree with you that we would expect that in a SaaS realm it's more typical for customers to start with the 1 or 2, maybe 3 services they need out of what will certainly be about 9 services and grow toward that over time. So I think you're right. I don't know if Jason would have any comments on how that would affect the kind of financial picture we've been talking about but...

Yes. Yun, I mean what I would say is to date, we've seen not actually as much variance between our SaaS offering and our on-prem offering as you might think. Customers usually are looking proactively to revamp their -- either build or revamp their identity program and know that they're going to want various components and so tend to come in and purchase the components that they want.

To Mark's point, we tend to start with a portion of an enterprise and then expand to additional identities, additional users as that deployment rolls out and matures. And the dynamic has played out pretty similarly on both the SaaS and the on-prem side. I think we're cognizant that this industry is shifting generally in that direction and that people associate SaaS to that shift as well. If that turns out to be the case, we're happy for that to occur and will just take advantage of shorter deals -- shorter sales cycles and more rapid transaction velocity, if that's the case.

But to date, we haven't seen a significant difference between those -- between the 2 sides.

Okay. Great. In terms of the -- I mean, it seems like we're -- just kind of curious, are we at an inflection point between the on-prem and the cloud where you might -- can we expect to see certain on-prem installed base or install customers to start thinking about migrating over to the cloud starting this year?

Yun, this is Mark again. No, not particularly. We -- all of our on-prem customers, many of whom have been with us over a decade -- obviously, some signed up in the last quarter -- they're aware of our SaaS offerings. And for the most part, as they look at this in their own software environment, if a product is meeting their needs, they're not necessarily motivated to move from 1 product to another just to make it SaaS. What we do see, and we've commented on this I think in prior calls some, more and more when people have our on-prem software product, we could say on-prem, but say software, quite often now they will deploy that product that software from IdentityIQ in the cloud: Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, et cetera. So it's very common for the customers to have a mandate not to do new deployments in their own data centers, but that doesn't necessarily drive them to SaaS.

And so what we've found is the customers who have IdentityIQ and are generally quite satisfied -- we've talked for years about our incredibly high renewal rates from a maintenance standpoint -- they're not necessarily pushing on us to migrate towards SaaS. We get a handful of those discussions every year. And I would expect that may increase a little year-over-year as we go forward. But it's not a significant part of what's happening in our installed base. The great majority of our IdentityIQ customers are perfectly content and have sometimes addressed their cloud concerns by just moving that deployment from their own data center to the cloud.

(Operator Instructions) Since there are no further questions left in the queue, I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Mark McClain for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much, operator. Yes, we appreciate everyone's time and interest on the call. We kind of expected that there might be a little challenge doing the call in the middle of RSA. So many of the folks in our industry are probably quite busy with that. So we do know some set of folks may have dialed in and not been able to do much on Q&A today, but we still appreciate the time that everyone took to listen in. Please do follow up with us if you have questions that we can answer later. Thanks for your continued interest in SailPoint. Thanks, and have a great day.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day.