Commvault Systems, Inc. (CVLT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. My name is Kath, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Commvault Q1 Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to our earnings conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements made on today's call will include forward-looking statements about Commvault's future expectations, plans and prospects. All such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Please refer to the cautionary language in today's earnings release and Commvault's most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to be materially different from those contemplated in these forward-looking statements. Commvault does not assume any obligation to update these statements. During this call, Commvault's financial results are presented on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation between the non-GAAP and GAAP measures can be found on our website. Thank you again for joining us. And now I'll turn it over to our CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, for his opening remarks. Sanjay?

Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. Q1 was an outstanding quarter and start to our fiscal year. We saw great momentum across all our primary KPIs this quarter. Total revenue increased 13% to USD 225 million. Total ARR rose 17% to USD 803 million. Subscription ARR accelerated 27% to USD 636 million. SaaS ARR jumped 66% to USD 188 million, and we did this profitably while investing in growth initiatives and hitting record Q1 free cash flow margins. Our Commvault platform continues to accelerate our growth as more companies turn to us for industry-leading cyber resilience. We're rapidly becoming an integral part of the security conversation. In Q1, we had more conversations with CISOs and CIOs than ever before, which contributed to our record results and set the stage for continued momentum through the fiscal year. The need for resilience is paramount, whether that's recovering from a cyber-attack, a natural disaster, human error, or as we've recently seen, a massive global outage from a faulty patch. We help our customers navigate these challenges in 3 critical areas: risk, readiness and recovery. Let's discuss each one. First, we help businesses reduce their risk. According to our recent Cyber Resilience Readiness report, 83% of organizations have experienced a material security breach with over 50% occurring in the past year alone. Capabilities like Commvault ThreatWise reduce risk by providing advanced threat detection. In Q1, sales of our ThreatWise offering doubled year-over-year. Additionally, while AI enhances cyber resilience, it can also create a bigger attack surface for organizations. Our AI-enabled Active Insights technology is helping customers conduct real-time threat analysis to address their cyber resilience. Second, in addition to managing their risk, businesses need to be ready. That includes being ready for the type of global outage we saw a week ago, which includes having an immutable air gap copy of your data. We provide that to over 3,000 of our customers every day with our Air Gap Protect offering. That said, research shows that bad actors are going to get in. So how do businesses know that they could be ready when that happens? It comes down to regularly testing cyber recovery plans. We revolutionize how that's done. Our Cleanroom Recovery offering enables businesses to easily, frequently and affordably test their cyber recovery plans in advance in good times, across workloads at scale on demand. Nobody else does this. While this offering is new to the market, global pharmaceutical, health care and transportation organizations have already invested in our Cleanroom technology and are taking advantage of it. And at the RSA conference, Commvault was named a winner for Trailblazing Cyber Resilience by Cyber Defense Magazine. Third, when breached, businesses need to recover their data and rebuild their cloud applications fast. Traditionally, this has taken weeks or months, not anymore. The Appranix technology acquired at the start of the quarter is allowing customers to reduce that time to days or hours. We'll have much more to say about this groundbreaking capability in the coming months as we integrate and enhance this offering within our Commvault Cloud platform. Our ability to help customers reduce their risk, enhance their readiness and quickly recover is critical to enabling their resilience. However, customers also turn to us to help securely accelerate their hybrid cloud modernization journeys. I'm proud that as of today, we have enabled customers to move approximately 5 exabytes of data in the public cloud. That's nearly a tenfold increase over the past 5 years. And we do this while enabling them to do it efficiently while minimizing the total cost of ownership. For example, we recently helped Lendlease, a global real estate lender, migrate its data center footprint on to the cloud while reducing complexity and gaining significant operational efficiencies. As a result, they achieved a 50% lower total cost of ownership for data management using Commvault Cloud. Additionally, ENOC Group, a leading global energy provider, harnessed Commvault Cloud to modernize its on-premise and cloud infrastructure to drive improved operational efficiencies, reduce overhead and enhance business continuity across its network. It now takes them 67% less time to restore their data while achieving an 88% cost-to-system recovery and a 40% reduction in operating expenses. And being a trusted, proven partner doesn't stop there. During the quarter, we also extended our cyber resiliency leadership for government organizations. Among our top competitors, we are the only company to achieve FedRAMP high authorization. With this, Commvault Cloud for government can now securely handle controlled, unclassified information in cloud computing environments for government agencies and contractors. Additionally, Commvault Cloud is now on the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. federal government. Finally, during the quarter, we continued to strengthen our executive bench to drive our next wave of growth and evolution. A few weeks ago, we announced that Gary Merrill will become the company's first Chief Commercial Officer, leading our sales and partner teams. Throughout his tenure at Commvault and as our CFO, Gary has worked closely with our sales and partner teams globally. In this new role, we believe he is ideally suited to lead the charge for Commvault. With this change, we're excited to announce that Jen DiRico will join us as CFO on August 12. Jen spent close to a decade at Toast, where she was instrumental in its successful IPO. As a member of the Toast senior leadership team, she contributed to the company's significant success and expansion, including growing its ARR to over USD 1 billion. We believe Jen's extensive financial and operational experience will enable us to accelerate growth here at Commvault as well. Jen will lead our earnings discussion after she officially joins the company in a couple of weeks. Today, Danielle Abrahamsen, our Chief Accounting Officer, who I've worked with on earnings calls for 22 straight quarters will lead this discussion as Gary tends to a personal family matter. With that, I will now turn the call over to Danielle to discuss our results. Danielle?

Thank you, Sanjay, and good morning, everyone. As Sanjay mentioned, we had a record start to the fiscal year, delivering our third consecutive quarter of double-digit total revenue growth, with accelerating momentum across all our key metrics. I'll recap our Q1 results before providing our Q2 outlook and increased guidance for the full fiscal year '25. As a reminder, all growth rates are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. For fiscal Q1, total revenue growth accelerated 13% to USD 225 million, driven by a 28% increase in subscription revenue, which now exceeds 55% of total revenue. Subscription revenue growth was fueled by increased contributions from our SaaS portfolio and continued double-digit growth in term software licenses, well ahead of the market growth rate. Our software revenue growth reflected a healthy balance between renewals and another strong quarter of land and expand [ fitness ]. Once again, we saw revenue from term software transactions over USD 100,000 increased by 13% as we close an accelerated volume of larger deals. From a product perspective, our Commvault Cloud platform is resonating in the market as we have started to monetize our cyber resilience offerings. From a geographic perspective, we were also pleased as both the Americas and international regions had impressive growth with each achieving double-digit term software and total revenue growth. Q1 perpetual license revenue was USD 14 million as perpetual licenses are sold in limited verticals and geographies. We believe we are approaching a steady state run rate of perpetual license sales. Q1 customer support revenue, which includes support for both our term-based and perpetual software licenses was USD 76 million, down 1% sequentially and year-over-year. In Q1, we reached the key inflection point where customer support revenue derived from term software and related arrangements crossed over 50% of total customer support revenue compared to 44% in Q1 of the prior year. Now I'll discuss ARR. Q1 total ARR growth accelerated 17% to USD 803 million. Subscription ARR, including term-based licenses and SaaS contracts, grew 27% year-over-year to USD 636 million or 79% of total ARR. This includes USD 188 million of SaaS ARR, which jumped 66% from a year ago. SaaS continues to be the primary driver of our new ARR growth, contributing over 60% of our total ARR growth in the quarter. SaaS now represents 23% of total ARR compared to just 17% a year ago. From a customer perspective, we added approximately 600 subscription customers during the quarter and ended the quarter with 9,900 subscription customers, representing over 65% of our installed base. Existing customer expansion was strong with Q1 SaaS net dollar retention of 127%, being benefited by both upsell and cross-sell activities. We saw accelerated growth in SaaS ARR from hybrid cloud workloads and our newer workloads such as Active Directory and Cleanroom. Now I'll discuss expenses and profitability. Fiscal Q1 gross margin was 83%, roughly flat year-over-year, benefiting from continued SaaS gross margin improvement and the growth in term software licenses. Fiscal Q1 operating expenses increased 15% to USD 137 million, including costs associated with our appearance at the RSA conference, a live in-person sales kick-off event and higher commissions and bonuses on record revenue. We ended the quarter with approximately 3,000 employees, an increase of 4% sequentially, including strategic resource investments and onboarding the employees brought over through the Appranix acquisition. Non-GAAP EBIT for Q1 was USD 48 million and non-GAAP EBIT margins were 21.5%, demonstrating our commitment to a responsible growth philosophy. Moving to some key balance sheet and cash flow metrics, we ended the quarter with no debt and USD 288 million in cash. Our Q1 free cash flow grew 16% year-over-year to USD 44 million, reflecting continued growth in SaaS deferred revenue and the strength of our software subscription business, which typically includes upfront payment on multiyear contracts. In Q1, we repurchased USD 51 million of stock, representing 117% of free cash flow. We now have USD 205 million remaining on our existing share repurchase authorization. Now I'll discuss our outlook for fiscal Q2 and our improved guidance for fiscal year '25. For fiscal Q2, we expect subscription revenue, which includes both the software portion of term-based licenses and SaaS to be USD 120 million to USD 124 million. This represents 25% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. As a result, we expect total revenues to be USD 218 million to USD 222 million with a growth of 9% at the midpoint. At these revenue levels, we expect Q2 consolidated gross margin to be in the range of 81% to 82%. We expect Q2 non-GAAP EBIT margin to be in the range of 19% to 20%. Our projected diluted share count for fiscal Q2 is approximately 45 million shares. As you saw in this morning's press release, we have raised our outlook for the full fiscal year '25. We now expect fiscal year '25 total ARR growth of 15% year-over-year. We expect subscription ARR to increase in the range of 23% to 25% year-over-year. From a full year fiscal '25 revenue perspective, we now expect subscription revenue to be in the range of USD 522 million to USD 527 million, growing 22% year-over-year at the midpoint, with strong contribution from both term software licenses and SaaS. We now expect total revenue growth to accelerate and be in the range of USD 915 million to USD 925 million, an increase of approximately 9.5% at the midpoint. Moving to our updated full year fiscal '25 margin, EBIT and cash flow outlook, we continue to expect gross margins to be in the range of 81.5% to 82.5%, inclusive of the accelerating contribution of our SaaS business. We also continue to expect non-GAAP EBIT margins to be in the range of 20% to 21%, inclusive of certain focused investments to continue our revenue momentum. From a free cash flow perspective, we continue to expect full year free cash flow of at least USD 200 million. And lastly, we expect to continue with our existing practice of repurchasing at least 75% of our annual free cash flow. As a reminder, for fiscal year '25, we lowered our non-GAAP tax rate from 27% down to 24%. We believe that a 24% rate more closely aligns with our effective tax rate expectations over the next few years. Given our initial momentum to start fiscal year '25, our updated fiscal year '25 outlook, the current cyber market tailwinds and our execution momentum in the field, we remain confident that we can deliver on our fiscal '26 ARR aspirations of total ARR of USD 1 billion with subscription ARR representing 90% of total ARR, including an accelerating SaaS contribution ranging from USD 310 million to USD 330 million. For additional details and trends on all of our key metrics, please take time to review our earnings presentation contained in the Investor Relations section of our website. Operator, you can now open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo.

Yes. Congrats on the solid results here in the quarter. Maybe I'll just start by asking the current macro environment, maybe the deal activity flow pipeline discussion and then kind of tied to that, Sanjay, I'd be interested in kind of what you're hearing from customers following the CrowdStrike downage. Obviously, the cyber resiliency strategy for Commvault's resonating, but curious of what your customer engagements have been like, I know be it early, but since that outage a week or so ago?

It's been a good quarter because fundamentally, we're solving a hard problem for our customers with resilience in general, but cyber resilience in particular. And what we're seeing is macroeconomic situation is we're kind of -- we're drawing a straight line as it was from the previous quarters. Our pipeline looks good. We're having a lot of conversations with CISOs and CIOs at the same time around resilience and what the CrowdStrike incident really brought to the floor wasn't so much of a direct line to us in what we do outside of our secure cloud capabilities, Air Gap Protect, which had this been a malicious thing, customers would have had an off-site secure copy. It's bringing up the conversation repeatedly around resilience. And this was not a malicious situation. It was a trusted environment that went wrong. And you need to be resilient to recover from that, just as you would with cyber. Had it been a cyber situation, we'd still be sort of scrambling trying to figure out what happened, what our environment looks like, what do we need to do to fix it? So the conversation around resilience is categorically resonating and making a difference.

And then just as a quick follow-up. You mentioned the 127% net dollar retention number and you mentioned good upsell, cross-sell opportunities. I'm curious with Metallic, is there any kind of added commentary or quantification that you could give us in terms of what you're seeing from a cross-sell opportunity perspective as that business continues to grow rapidly?

Let me give you a little bit of color, and then Danielle will fill in some numbers for you. What we're seeing is our new workloads, our hybrid workloads growing quite substantially. So outside of the Office 365 type workloads, we're seeing our secure storage Air Gap Protect, Active Directory and our Kubernetes container cloud-based workloads growing handsomely. That bodes well for us because that shows mission-critical, cloud-native applications being backed up and secured in the cloud. We've got over 3,000 customers using Air Gap Protect, which is substantial, okay? And we talked about ThreatWise, our threat deception capability doubling year-on-year, we've seen Active Directory get off to a great start. So we're seeing that there's a lot of -- 1/3 of our customers tend to have more than one product out of the door, okay? So there's good traction. I'll let Danielle add some more color there, if you want to.

Yes. Yes, thanks, Aaron. Thanks for the question. So when we launched our Commvault Cloud platform, our objective was really to create one unified platform that allowed our customers to easily navigate between their software and their SaaS offerings. And so what that did is it allowed us a natural opportunity to monetize on that navigation. And we've really seen the traction in that, in particular, about a year ago. We sold about, call it a 1/4 of our cross-sell opportunities, coming from -- out of our expand revenue. That number is closer to 1/3 today. So we are really seeing the way that customers are buying, changing, the way that Sanjay spoke about in his opening remarks.

Your next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities.

I want to ask you about investments in 2 areas that may be underpenetrated for Commvault. And those are the government vertical and the Asia Pacific region. So Commvault Cloud recently achieved FedRAMP High authorization, as you just mentioned in your prepared remarks, you also expanded your partnership with Carahsoft, targeting at the U.S. intelligence community. And then in Asia Pac, you recently hired a field CTO, focused on security in that region. So my question to you is, how impactful are those investments? And should we expect them to bear fruit this year?

So federal government, governments around the world are a definite area of focus. We went through the long journey of getting our technology FedRAMP High certified. And we're in a very rarefied space with that certification. Most of our competitors don't even come close on the level of certification that we have. In addition, we're making our technology far easier to obtain and access by being on marketplaces like the AWS federal marketplace, government marketplace that we just announced. So, from a safety level and that federal government agencies are looking for, we have it. Access, we're getting there. And we're also investing in specialized field resources as you've observed with our field CTO community that are deep, deep, deep, deeply rooted in security issues, cyber issues and can take some of our capabilities from a compliance point of view and standards point of view to governments around the world. So it's an active area of investment for us, mostly on the product side, now a little bit on the go-to-market side, okay? So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. If you look -- also in the channels, so Carahsoft, et cetera, that's the go-to-market side that we're enabling and making sure we're close with. On APAC, we are doing some modest growth there. Our focus has historically been Asia Pacific as it is ANZ and Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Southeast Asia and a little bit in Mainland China. That's been our focus area. We're continuing to go deeper. But just there's a lot of opportunity for that coming up, and we're investing there. So -- but it's -- again, it's part of our plan, and it's part of everything we've shared as part of fiscal year [ '21 ].

Got it. And I want to ask Danielle as well. I was trying to figure out the strength in the subscription and SaaS and specifically new term license, at least the way that we try to back into it. And the question for you is that it makes me wonder, has your gross renewal rate, has that been ticking up? And also, are you benefiting more from 1-year subscription renewals this year?

Thanks, Howard. Thanks for the question. So the first thing I want to say, right, this quarter, Q1, we saw a very balanced contribution from all the items on our subscription line, right? So that's our software renewal, our software land expand opportunities and our SaaS. When I think about term in particular, and I think I mentioned this in my prepared remarks, right, we actually saw a 13% growth rate on our large deals on our over $100,000 deals. And much of that was actually driven by volume. So you mentioned our GRR rate. We are seeing our GRR rate strengthen. So we are seeing good signs, but I really want to highlight the fact that the success of the quarter really came from that balanced contribution of all those pieces in the subscription line.

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler.

Actually wanting to go back to last quarter a little bit where you guys had another good quarter and actually that Dell announcement kind of went fairly unnoticed. Just any update on how that relationship has kind of gone out of the gate and the ability to hit milestones from here?

So as we said when we announced it right around this time last quarter, it was -- we said it was a long-term initiative for us to go after the installed base, the Veritas installed base and partnering with Dell on their data domain installed base. This is a -- we're going to compete till we decide, until the customer decides they want both of us. So that's how it's working. We're in situations where customers want us to come in, want us to do a proof of concept, want us to help them move. We're in the throes of it. And I never expected to be a 60, 90-day big hit. This is a ramp that is picking up and in turn sort of installed base that will take a little bit of time, and it's moving exactly the way we'd expect and want. So nothing yet, but more down the road, we will share more data down the road.

And Danielle, thanks for all the color and for jumping on the call here with us. But as we think about this fiscal Q2 guide, why the sequential drop on subscription, understanding the duration on term deal sits --is getting closer and closer to 2 years. But if we look back 3 years ago, when deals were kind of being signed at 3-year durations more so, it was better than down sequentially and Metallic spend actually accelerating. So, is this just being prudently conservative? Or is there something on the macro side that you guys are a little bit more cautious on?

Jim, thanks for the question. So I wouldn't say we're being prudently conservative. I mean we raised our guidance going into Q2. And a lot of that -- a lot of what you see is actually the momentum that we're seeing in SaaS right? So there's a couple of pieces that go into that subscription line I mentioned, right, the subscription renewals, which we're going into at slightly -- we have a slightly smaller renewal pool in Q2, right? So we're factoring into that. But really, it goes back into the momentum and the capitalization of SaaS in that line, right? And obviously, SaaS is recognized ratably. So we don't see the benefit of that in the following quarter, but instead over time. And I think you can really see that in the growth rate we're seeing in our SaaS ARR.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with D.A. Davidson.

These -- the net new ARR figures especially look very, very impressive. I know it sounds like you're saying strengthening the quarter was kind of broad based. I want to maybe narrow in on two issues. Firstly, cyber resilience, I believe I heard you say you're starting to monetize that. Could you just expand on that, how materially did that contribute in the quarter? And is there any color you can share just on the type of ASP uplift you're seeing in deals that include some of your cyber resilience products?

Thanks, Rudy, for the question. Maybe I'll start and talk about the quarter, and then I'll hand it over to Sanjay to talk about what we're seeing in the broader market, right? So we had a material contribution from our cyber resiliency offerings this quarter, in particular, our cyber recovery and our autonomous recovery bundle. And actually, that traction that we saw this quarter is part of what gave us the confidence to raise the guidance for the rest of the year. Sanjay, do you want to talk through?

Yes. So really, the way to think about our cyber resilience, it isn't 1 SKU, it's an overall platform with Commvault Cloud that delivers services that are integrated. So in other words, a customer using our software, let's say, our Cyber Resilience SKU, can avail of services that are delivered through the cloud through our SaaS-based capabilities like Air Gap Protect or ThreatWise, okay? So it's an integrated play. And what we're seeing is that the uplift we're getting is that customers actually looking at the platform in its entirety for that solution. And since we released the autonomous and cyber resilience SKUs, which integrate these services, we've seen a marked uplift in the pipeline and to some level even in Q1 on the contribution. So it's -- that's the way to think about it.

Okay. Got it. And I know James just asked about Dell and it sounds like -- you sound [indiscernible] on it, but [indiscernible]

It's work in progress. We are competitors, we are also collaborators, so it's a relationship that we're building out, and we're excited about it. I think the potential is massive, and the work is going on. The teams are working…

The broader question, I guess, is going to be just the pace of legacy displacement between Dell and obviously, a couple of others, have you seen any increase in the pace of legacy displacements over the last couple of quarters? Or has it been kind of steady state?

No, no, we have. Whether it's ransomware or it's now resilience, there is a marked focus by boards, by audit committees, by leadership teams inside companies to say, are we resilient? Do we have the best technology and the best capabilities to protect ourselves? And some of the legacy stuff is incomplete. And so there is -- a big part of our pipeline is a refresh of some of the installed base.

That concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the conference back over to Mike Melnyk for closing remarks.

Thanks for everyone for joining us today. As a reminder, we have a presentation on the Investor Relations website. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, and we will look forward to seeing you at some upcoming conferences. Thanks very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.