Jamf Holding Corp. (JAMF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Hamza from Morgan Stanley. And with me, I have the pleasure of having the team from Jamf here. We have John Strosahl, CEO; and David Rudow, CFO, as of the last 6 months, I believe. Before I begin, just a brief disclosure. For important disclosures, please go to the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. With that, John, David, thank you so much for joining us.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Maybe just on a high level, it'd be great, John, to get a sense of Jamf, the company, what the core products are, for those investors who may be relatively new to the story.

Sure. We provide management and security products for over 33 million devices across 76,000 customers in over 100 countries. And so we have quite a large footprint. We have 75% of the Fortune 100 as customers as well as a pretty broad small- to medium-sized user base as well. We have -- we serve both the education vertical as well as the commercial vertical on the Mac, all the way -- and as well as the mobile devices.

Great. Great. So yes, you mentioned a very large installed base. Starting off in device management, really specializing on the Mac ecosystem. In recent years, you've also expanded into the security arena, which is now close to $160 million ARR, 25% of the total business. Curious what that entails, what the composition of that is and how the upsell momentum has been going there within your device management base?

Yes. I mean, I think it's important to note that we didn't decide to go into security. Our customers really asked us to. And they said, we have these Apple footprints, and we would put more Apple devices in our ecosystem if we trusted all of those devices could access our corporate resources. And so they really pushed us toward what we call a Trusted Access outcome. And that's when we started to get into security, not just on the device security on the Mac, but also on the mobile device, network security, mobile threat defense. So we have all of those things. And most recently, we just added dynamic identity to that as well.

Yes. Can you maybe explain a little bit on that recent acquisition that you made? What is identity automation exactly? How does it differ from maybe some of the access management providers that we know like Okta, et cetera?

Sure. Well, we partner with Okta very closely, with Microsoft enter as well. So it's not meant to be a replacement or either one of those identity providers. What this -- what RapidIdentity is, is a product that we've gone to market with for quite a while with the company's called Identity Automation. And we've gone to market with this, primarily in the education space, because they have a unique need in the education space that we also see applying to some of our commercial customers as it relates to the iOS and deskless workflows like you'd see in retail or transportation. And what it provides is identity that's specific to the person that is -- that can change. If a kid graduates from one grade to the next, their identity and provision authorization will change. And because they integrate into the school information system or it could integrate into a commercial HRMS system as well, it really helps identify that person, what their authorization and provisions level should be and as it changes. And it can change on where they're at, contextual, location-wise. It can change on the role that they have or if they've graduated from that, and they don't have to do anything manually on the device. They can actually do all of that through integration with the system, and it becomes automatic. So it's a touchless workflow. And that's really benefited the education space. And like I said, I think there's some application in our commercial customers as well.

Great. Great. David, maybe to shift the conversation to you. So you've been at Jamf now a little over 4 months actually. But just curious, as you've been here now for 4 months, what are some of the immediate priorities that you have? And what have been your first impression so far?

Yes. Yes. No, it's been a great 4 months. I think any time you enter a new company, there was on, okay, what am I going to find? It was actually refreshing. So we have, as John said, very good customer base, blue-chip customers. We sell security, mobile. We have the management piece, too, international. The team is great. I have a very good team. And I think it's only gotten better. Like I look at the opportunity for us around the world, and I mean there is a huge opportunity on Apple. And like this Identity Automation acquisition, it's user-based so now we can access any device on the identity side. We did deploy a new ERP. We went with Oracle Fusion, and we deployed a new version of Salesforce. And so I think that -- I knew that coming in. That's been a lot of hard work by the team. I mean any deployment, of course, is difficult and this is no difference. We have 76,000 customers. So you think about the idea of doing a quote-to-cash test for every single permutation, it's just really hard. But we are well through our way with the system issues that we've run into. We had some billings issues that increased DSOs. And look, now it's kind of like tweaking around the edges, move on to Phase 2 over the next couple of months, too. So I look at the thing. I mean this is a great company. It's been a lot of fun getting to know it, and I enjoy talking to investors about it. So in terms of priorities, of course, the system, we're going to continue to work on that. I think with that system, we have the ability now to be even more strategic with the -- with each and every division, we get slices of data, we can look at ARR differently. We can look at sales differently because we have a lot more detail now. So really have the team become a lot more strategic with the organization and help grow and increase margins as well. I think that is -- those are probably the priorities and then, of course, going and telling the story. So Jen, who's here, too, she's been here a lot longer than me, much more smarter on Jamf. We're hitting the circuit. We're talking to investors, telling the story we're going to Europe next week and go tell the great news about Jamf.

Great. I definitely want to come back to that. So John, I had the pleasure of going to your user conference some months back, and it was really great to hear the customer feedback, 76,000-plus customers, not all of them were there, obviously. But they love the core device management product. Maybe a big tailwind for Jamf has been Apple's share gain in the enterprise. It really seems like Jamf is very much the category leader there, very much aligned with that trend. What would you think -- what are sort of the 2 or 3 differentiation points that separates you from competitors who are also trying to align themselves with the trend?

Sure, sure. Well, we've been doing it for 2 decades and partnered very closely with Apple all along the way and which Apple is -- and they've said it publicly, they are a customer of ours. They use our product to manage Apple devices within Apple. So there's certainly a vested interest and a very close partnership as we progress toward new product lines and customer needs and things like that. On the enterprise side, there are customers that do endpoint management that go across all platforms. And they tend to be a jack of all trades, master of none. And there are some things that happen in the Apple ecosystem that are very specific, especially as it relates to the interoperability between the devices. And that's something that we -- that really sets us apart and being Apple-specific. And the fact that our customers asked us to add security to that and that we did, both on the network and on the device, and Apple-specific security. And so there are some things that happen in the Apple ecosystem that are designed that way that a security product written for another platform may not recognize or, say, that something is going on when that's just how a Mac is supposed to work. So there's some false positives. So I think there are some things that set us apart with both management and security that no other company does in the Apple ecosystem at scale, full stop. There are some smaller competitors on the management side that are Apple-specific but very subscale. In fact, I think the largest one has about as many devices under management as we have Apple TVs under management. And that's a very small portion of our business. So we've got the scale, we've got the management and security, and we've got the Apple ecosystem specificity.

Got it. And then as far as the growth drivers are concerned, I mean -- so most recently, you exited last year with about 10% ARR growth, a lot of improvement in the profitability, which we'll get into as well, David. But I think this is a business that was growing much faster, probably can grow much faster. So when you think about some of the exogenous factors from a macro standpoint as well as things that you're trying to do, what are some of the things that -- levers that you have that can get you back to a mid- to high teens growth rate over time?

Yes. I think you mentioned one of them. That's just the expansion of Apple in the enterprise. And we see a lot of that. Many companies now are providing choice programs. When you start with a company and they say, do you want a MacBook or do you want a PC? And 2/3 of the time, and we've corroborated this through a couple of different studies, that they will choose the Apple device over a PC device, even if they're going through a refresh cycle. So we see the expansion of Apple in that space. The other thing that we see is that the growth in deskless workflows. So things like security -- or sorry, things like retail when -- the point of sale, inventory management, returns, payments. If you're inside of a retail outlet, you can book phones with somebody, walk out the door, you don't have to go stand in line. All of those things are fantastic ways that companies are realizing how to extend the deskless workflow, and the Apple ecosystem really stands above there.

Yes. And we look at our growth vectors, there's 4 of them. Mobile, which we had really good performance in Q4 on mobile and security side; international, this is about 1/3 of the business is international, and it grows at a higher rate; security; and the channel. So 80% of our revenue is ARR comes from the channel internationally and 50% in the U.S. And we hired a new individual to run the channel program. And he came from Symantec and Adobe, big channel companies. And so he's making -- we're making additional investments there to really leverage that business and add partners. With the system upgrade, we also have a partner portal now where they can register their deals and get quotes without having to talk to a Jamf salesperson. So we're going to see more sourcing of deals from the channel. And so that -- those 4 give us the ability to grow. Obviously, 8%, we don't like 8% growth at the midpoint of our guidance, and we will strive to do better as we move through the year.

And actually, that's a good segue into my next question. I did have a chance to talk to some of your go-to-market folks in Nashville at your user conference. And it did seem like the channel was a really big focus, particularly as it relates to security. We know a lot of security is sold through channel partners, MSPs. Maybe talk to us about the different levels of investment when it comes to the security sale, what you're kind of doing there from a channel perspective relative to the core device management offering.

Yes. Well, we sell them together as a solution. So there's not a wild difference between how we'll approach the channel for either one of the parts of that product. The fact that we've done some things -- as David mentioned our comprehensive technical update, our ERP system. What that did is it gave us the opportunity or the possibility to have a partner portal that we didn't have before. So now channel partners can come and actually register a deal themselves, which they couldn't do before. They had to talk to a Jamf salesperson. And so that helps the efficiency on the channel partner side as well as our own. We deployed a new partner program where it gives different levels of margin or commission based on if they brought the deal to us versus us bringing the deal to them. So that's another area that we focused on. Internationally, we have a bigger percentage of our business that goes through the channel because we started channel first. We didn't have the people on the ground to do that. In the U.S., we're transitioning from a direct sales model into the channel. And so a lot of the investment there has been building up channel, channel reps, channel account managers that can really enable the channel and then make sure they follow through with them. It's almost like running a sales team, if you will. Like how -- what is your pipeline look like? What's your close ratio? How can I help enable you? What else can I do to support you in that? And that mindset is something that's gotten some traction in the U.S., and I see that only continuing.

And I think the other thing is that we are selling more platform deals, too. So I think buying of these products is going to consolidate into management and security. And so what we said during Q4 is that we have 50% growth in ARR business plan, which is our platform of management, security and mobile. And so we see nice traction there. What we see, obviously, is if they deploy more of our products and use our products, it's a lot stickier. And so we're going to market with this bundled approach, and we're seeing nice traction there. And I think that's how buyers are going to look at this, I think, as you look in the future.

I think one of the things that maybe the exogenous factors that maybe perhaps a little bit out of control is we are seeing longer replacement cycles for devices, particularly Apple devices. I did update my iPhone actually recently though. So -- but I think, in general, to your point, more and more people are going to use Apple in the enterprise as consumers start to move their devices into the workplace. But just curious, are you seeing anything change around that? How are you thinking about just the refresh cycle, if you will, as it relates to your guide? It's really a question for David.

Yes. I think on the refresh cycle, I mean, if they have an old device, they get a new device and they have subscription, that's the same. I think where a refresh will help us is if they have a choice program. So how are we going to refresh everybody's devices? You can choose what you want, and I think it's what, 2/3 of people would choose a Mac, right, especially as the younger generations come into the workforce, I think you'll see more of that. So it does give us the opportunity. We constantly try to cross-sell security and everything else into the base, too. So I think what we're seeing now is that the hiring has been slower that -- if hiring picks up again, and tech is our biggest exposure, that will be tailwinds for the business as you look out towards the future. I think what we thought about as we built the plan, we talked to the sales team, we tried to get a read on budgets for our customers. It sounded very similar for '24 to '25. And then as we entered into the new year, you look at some of the layoffs that were happening, and it kind of leads you to be, I'm a little uncertain here, which was the cause for kind of the 8% midpoint growth that we provided. So I think we're taking a conservative view on the year. We built an achievable model. And then as we move through the year, we would expect -- we're going to aim to outperform that number and do the old beat-and-raise model.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean even if units are maybe not growing as fast, you like -- there's a lot of room to drive ASPs higher as well. I think one of the things -- just drilling into the security side of the house. So there's the endpoint security as well as the identity security. Just -- sometimes when people think of endpoint protection, they think of obviously CrowdStrike and SentinelOne and others as well. Just curious, are those some of the competitors you go after and how you think about differentiating versus them?

Yes. I mean it's not a rip-and-replace model. We tend to see customers that have 80% of their fleet is maybe Windows devices and 20% is Apple devices. And that 20% may be growing or sometimes less than 20%. And we'll go in -- and they may have a Windows-specific or a Windows security product on all of them. But then they'll -- because they're using our management product to deploy on the Mac, even the security products, they will add ours as well because of the fact that we've really gone after some Apple-specific things that will happen. Apple is the most secure operating system available. But now that it's in more and more enterprise hands, it's becoming a bigger and more valuable target. And so that's something that our customers have just said, hey, we want the belt and suspenders to really make sure that our Apple footprint is safe.

Also the most resilient operating system out there as we've seen in the last year.

It is.

Another lever of growth has been expansion in other verticals. I think -- we're not the majority, but a decent portion of the business is within tech, education and some SLED verticals. Just curious regarding the diversification of verticals, where else do you see opportunity to diversify the business and see growth beyond the main verticals that you go after today?

Yes. Our growth verticals outside of education and tech, we've seen financial services pick up quite a bit. We've seen wholesale and retail pick up quite a bit and in transportation, transportation and field services -- but airlines, for example, they used to have those big flight plans that the pilots would carry into the cockpit. Now it's an iPad. And the flight attendants walking up and down the aisle with their iPhones, all those are managed with Jamf. Not every one of them, not yet, but we're trying to get there. Many of them are and below the wing, the maintenance crews, will have iPads as opposed to manuals. They can figure out where their parts are, they can figure out how to fix something all on the iPad. So we're really seeing things and -- like I mentioned before, just in areas that we hadn't anticipated in transportation field services, financial services, wholesale retail, those are all areas that are really promising.

Another driver, going back to channel, has also been -- I think you recently expanded your partnership with Microsoft Azure as well. You're selling through the marketplace there. So maybe talk a little bit about that. And are there other ways that you can drive leverage through marketplace partnerships like that?

Yes. Absolutely. This is super exciting. And it was -- I was pleasantly surprised when we first started it with AWS, AWS marketplace. And because we have -- we use AWS cloud, we then partnered with Amazon to be on their marketplace as well. And so the Amazon sales reps can actually sell Jamf, and it retires part of their AWS quota because it uses AWS cycles. So that -- and the other thing about that is that it can actually use -- if you've signed a commitment with AWS for a number of years, a certain number of amount of spend, you can use part of that spend to buy Jamf products because it backs into AWS. And that has been tremendous because customers then have earmarked funds that they've already committed, and now they can use them to buy our product. So the approval levels went from 8 down to 1 because it's already earmarked for that. So we saw -- and the AWS reps are talking to all these different enterprises, are incentivized to sell our product as well as they get credit for it on their AWS spend. Works so well that we really started to talk to Microsoft and Microsoft Azure about the same thing, about the Azure marketplace. And so we launched that, I think it was last quarter, 2 quarters ago. Again, great traction, same concept. The Azure Microsoft salespeople will get credit for selling Jamf product because it backs into Azure. And there are some customers that really are already using Azure, and so this is in addition to that. And they can use that committed funds to buy our products. So we're really happy and excited about both of those hyperscalers.

David, maybe going back to the multiproduct story. So are there any stats or any color you can give us around when a customer does buy the Business Plan, when they do buy multiple products with Jamf, what does the gross or net retention uplift generally look like?

I look at Jen there.

Well, you can give high-level comment.

Yes. I think Business Plan is too new to really get a gauge on what the net revenue retention is because we're not at a renewal point for a lot of those deals.

But it is higher.

It is higher. We have found that when they purchase more than one -- we have both a Business Plan and enterprise plan as well. Business Plan will focus more on the mid-tier, small to mid-tier customers. And then the enterprise plan is the similar, but it's for the enterprise. And we've seen not only higher retention but higher cross-sell and upsell with those products when they buy the solution together.

That's helpful. Sorry for the curveball there.

No worries. I always look at Jen for help.

Yes. She said, no, it was good. I'd love to open it up to the audience for any Q&A or you can take a minute as you collect your thoughts. I can ask more questions as well.

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Oh, okay. All right. David, I'll go back to you. Obviously, as a CFO, you're always trying to balance growth versus profitability. So I hear John talk about obviously investing more in the security business, investing more in the channel, the go-to-market. But you also, obviously, aspire to grow more than 8%. The guidance for this year has you expanding operating margins. I think you're going to do a little over 20% this year, which is quite healthy. How do you show that leverage while also trying to best for that reacceleration?

Yes. I think we've done a nice job of optimizing the teams. Like the research development expenses is probably in line with where it should be in the long run. And we've done a nice job of putting additional help in offshore. So we have in Bernów, we have a group of developers in Bernów. And we do have -- on the G&A side, we have people in Poland, too, Poland and the Czech Republic. And this new system migration that will allow us to become more efficient, so we want to add as many people. And on the sales side, too, we continue to find ways to optimize performance of the team as well. So we did a restructuring last year. And with that then, we saw a very nice improvement in productivity on the sales side. And I think there's other areas to look even outside of the comp side where we can squeeze and really look at what we're spending with the new system. We have a lot more details now to go in and actually look and say, okay, do we need this vendor and that vendor? So we're going to go through and do that as well this year. So I think there's areas we can tweak without impacting the growth of the business.

Yes. I wouldn't be a software analyst if I didn't ask about AI. So curious if there's any ways that you're using AI internally, whether it's to automate customer support or drive more efficiencies?

The answer would be yes, in many of those ways. We've got a number of projects ongoing at the moment. We certainly have -- we have a product we call Ask Jamf, and we can query the data that we do have. And we can leverage this massive user group base that we have, which is JNUC actually, with -- comes together once a year as JNUC, but it's called Jamf Nation. It's over 150,000 active users that help each other out, help prospects out. We always send people there. If you Google what do I do with this Apple thing to manage or secure, 9 times out of 10, if not 10 times out of 10, you will be redirected to Jamf Nation, and then they will help answer the question for you. We had over 300,000 posts just on that site last year. So it's a very, very active group that comes together once a year for JNUC. You saw a portion of that. So we leverage this as Jamf, the data that we have in that, in order to help not only internally with our teams answer questions but then also externally as well. And we'll continue to leverage that more and more. We use it in the development department to supplement our development, especially some of the low-level, entry-level development pieces, to kind of go along with the development team. We use it in the go-to-market side, evaluating -- through the communications, we can evaluate the sentiment of the conversations. Are they -- is there a higher propensity to buy or propensity to churn so we use it on the go-to-market side, the development side. And I know your using it on some of the analytics side internally as well.

Yes. So as Oracle is deployed, there's some automation and AI built into it. But we also are deploying clarity, which has some AI in it as well. And then within Oracle, some of that automation, you'll be able to do reconciliations, cash matching and some of the billing work that we do. And anything analytics, we should be able to really dig in and get some more data detail out of that, too.

And as you think about future things, you can imagine that with 33-plus million endpoints that our customers know every application on the Apple side, every application that, that device has on it, when it's been updated, what the usage of that application is. So they get a lot of telemetry from their endpoints that then they can use even across their entire fleet to -- is there a security threat? Oh, there's a security threat. What should we do about it? Then AI can actually go and automatically remediate that because we have both sides of the coin. We have the management side and the security side. And you can't have a secure device without it also being managed because if you find out something is going on, how do you do something about it? Well, you need the management product. So there's -- that's why the 2 fit really, really well together, and AI plays really, really nicely into that because of the telemetry that we have. We can consolidate that. We also know how other customers with similar context or environments would deal with that so we can have blueprints providing suggestions for customers and how to deploy and implement things. And then using AI to actually go remediate issues that they find.

Yes. And certainly, the majority of threat telemetry is coming from the endpoint today. So that's an important point. I'll open up to the audience one more time. Any Q&A? I can certainly ask more questions but -- one of the things I also heard at the user conference during the analyst presentation, one of the things that you were trying to address was around building a strong integration ecosystem. I mean you've got almost 80,000 customers. And when it comes to Mac, you're really a system of record. But what were some of the things that you're trying to solve for when it comes to integrations? And what's been the progress in the last year since that user conference?

Yes. I mean we have 98% recurring revenue. So we don't have a lot of services business as it is today. But we do know that when customers do leverage our services capabilities or integration doesn't have to be us. It can be a partner. But when they do utilize that, they do also -- much like when they buy the whole solution, they have higher, better upsell, better retention, all of those things. So we are actively, as part of our channel program, building up those systems integrators and things that can -- and companies that actually work heavily in the Apple ecosystem, for example. They can come in and actually help with some of the integrations that they do for our customers. Many of them, especially internationally, are already contracted with our customers. So that really flows well into that.

Great. I'll open up to the audience one last time. Okay. Well, hey, why don't we end a few minutes early, but John, David, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you coming out here, and best of luck with reaccelerating the business and also showing the profitability.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you everyone for joining.