Earnings Call Transcript - CVLT Q3 2021

Michael Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Commvault's fiscal third quarter earnings review and futureready investor event. My name is Michael Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations, and we are pleased to spend the next couple of hours with you. Our leadership team is eager to share our perspective on the evolving data protection and management market. We will showcase how our vision and strategy have been realized through our revamped software and SaaS portfolio, our refined go-to-market approach, and our commitment to execution excellence, all of which are driving our goal of achieving sustainable and profitable growth. With increased visibility from our expanding recurring revenue, we will provide both near and long-term targets, along with a more detailed capital allocation framework. After our prepared comments, there will be a moderated Q&A session. Before I hand it over to our President and CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, I will briefly summarize our safe harbor statement. Today, we will make forward-looking statements based on our current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ significantly. Details regarding these factors can be found in our SEC filings. We will also reference non-GAAP financial measures and targets, and the reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures is available on our Investor Relations website. We hope you enjoy today's program, and Sanjay will join us after a short video introduction.

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO

Wow, it's a great time to be in this industry. I'm thrilled to be with you today to share our vision and what we see as the opportunity ahead. Thank you for being with us. When I joined Commvault, we focused on three priorities: one, simplifying our business to make it easier for partners and customers to work with us; two, radically innovating to meet the market in massive transition; and three, executing by focusing on what matters to deliver results, which is why we've exceeded expectations in five of the last six quarters, with the only exception at the start of the pandemic. I'm proud to say we've made tremendous progress, ushering in a new era for Commvault. Our high-performing engineering team is innovating faster than ever. Our field is delivering results. And we have a winning team and culture already helping customers with their digital transformations. Before I get into our view of future, let me take a minute to talk about our Q3 results. Simply put, Q3 was our best quarter ever. We delivered all-time highs for total revenue as well as software and product revenue. All of our geographies had a solid quarter. Annual recurring revenues, the primary metric we use to indicate the health of our business also crossed a critical milestone, over $0.5 billion. Finally, we delivered record earnings per share, which demonstrates our balanced approach to revenue growth and profitability. These results reflect and are the result of our transformation over the past two years. With that, let me share a little bit about our vision and expectations moving forward. We're here today because three things are coming together right now. First, as organizations digitally transform and embrace the cloud, multigenerational data sprawl threatens the fundamental integrity of their business, more on that in a moment. Second, we believe our portfolio delivered through intelligent data services as software and SaaS is best aligned to help customers with their hard problems. And third, we've been working really hard over the past two years to get ready for this opportunity, and we think we are. That translates to our near-term outlook. We are positioned to deliver between 6% and 7% total annual revenue growth, 9% to 10% software and products growth, and 10% ARR growth. We're on a path to deliver over 25% EBITDA through FY '23, and we will be close to the Rule of 40 by fiscal year '25. Now let's go into a little more detail about what's at stake. As you know, Commvault has a rich heritage of delivering world-class solutions. More than 100,000 organizations around the world are leveraging Commvault's technology. Over 25 years, we have evolved as conditions have changed. And we developed a powerful ability to help customers reinvent themselves for the future and thrive. We believe this is what gives us a unique vantage point to help customers accelerate their digital transformations. It's not just about modernizing backup environments or moving to the cloud or even transitioning to SaaS. These miss the heart of today's mission-critical data challenge. You see, digital transformation changes everything when it comes to data, and when your very existence depends on data, how do you ensure the fundamental integrity of your business without increasing your exposure, slowing down your transformation or leaving yourself unequipped to handle what's next? This is the question being asked more and more by board members, CIOs, CSOs, governments and customers. It's not surprising that organizations are in a state of change. Infrastructure is moving to the cloud and sometimes back again. Businesses need that flexibility. Tightly integrated and monolithic software is being replaced by SaaS applications. Once modern, agile software delivery processes are now being replaced by DevOps and sometimes NoOps methodologies to immediately bring capabilities to market. Containers are being used increasingly in production environments. The use of mobile is an imperative. And the lines of ownership between IT and the business are fast blurring. So what does all this mean? Data is in constant motion, almost kinetic, if you will, from here to there, from this application to that application, never has data been further away from the tools that created it than it is now. And this causes multigenerational data sprawl throughout an organization. And it's only getting worse as data grows exponentially. Frankly, it's out of control. This introduces massive data fragmentation, inefficiencies and potential points of failure. For starters, you can't control what you don't know exists, like dark data or some SaaS app spun up somewhere unknown to IT. This is compounded by the rise of ransomware attacks and increased data governance scrutiny. Can the organization recover quickly and evolve to beat these governance demands, all of which depends on integrated data protection and management policies driven by deep degrees of automation? Otherwise, you just cannot reach the promise of the cloud. This is what I mean by an existential risk. The heart of the challenge is what we at Commvault call the business integrity gap. Simply put, it is the growing exposure between the current budgets and capabilities and the organizations' need to digitally transform. The gap won't go away on its own. Just think about these trends. Implementing new SaaS applications to compete more effectively actually increases the data footprint that you manage. Nine out of ten organizations have a multi-cloud strategy. Containerized applications are increasing. Ransomware events are rising fast, up 40% this past fall and continue to get more sophisticated. And it's frankly hard to find people with the necessary skills to span this gap. If this wasn't challenging enough, we're also in the midst of a pandemic, which has catapulted us into unnatural timelines, furthering the gap. In fact, IDC predicts that by the end of 2021, 80% of organizations will accelerate their move to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications, that is twice as fast. The new imperatives are to modernize and use technology to drive competitive advantage, but organizations need to take control of their data now. So how do organizations close the business integrity gap? Unfortunately, some organizations have employed inferior strategies, hoping and praying, or adding a new set of tools, which will only come up short while adding complexity. There is a better way, which brings us to the second reason why we will seize our opportunity. We believe that we are the best positioned to solve this existential problem with multigenerational intelligent data services delivered through software and SaaS. Folks, our entire existence is around data and innovation. We've been doing this for 25 years and have the patents and the accolades to prove it. Customers rely on us and are looking to us to help them close the gap, which is why we've invested over $1 billion in R&D to continually enhance our no-bounds architecture. The digital transformation journey, our customers are on requires that they manage the data life cycle with an integrated set of services versus discrete disparate products and can be consumed on-premise through the cloud and through SaaS. Our portfolio enables this today.

Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft General Manager

Yes, thanks for having me. 2020 was a lot of things for the world. But one of the things we saw in the business was a lot of our customers accelerating the digital transformations. As we go into 2021, what are you thinking about this? What are you seeing with your customers? Customers are moving quickly to enhance virtualization and collaboration spaces for their teams, secure their environments, and speed up their transition to the cloud. This situation places significant pressure on the partner ecosystem to act swiftly. We have made substantial progress in meeting customer needs and assisting them in their recovery. As we look ahead into 2021, our focus will be on helping customers envision a post-COVID world and establishing their organizations for greater resilience in the future while keeping the lessons learned from 2020 in mind. Although the current state of the world has been challenging, it has also allowed everyone to discover new business approaches. I’d like to ask you, since you interact with many customers, are you experiencing similar discussions?

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO

We are focused on data as it's central to our lives. What we are observing is that data is becoming increasingly important. Every business is evolving into a data-driven organization. Customers want to manage their data effectively, prioritize it, derive value from it, and protect it due to ongoing threats. This situation is driving the adoption of cloud solutions and prompting customers to reconsider their strategies. Gavriella, I’d like to put you on the spot. Our partnership with Commvault and Metallic is critical for us; what unified all of this for Microsoft?

Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft General Manager

There are several factors to consider. Firstly, it showcases Commvault's dedication to its customers in terms of security, backup and recovery, and services. We're pleased to maintain the strong partnership we've had for many years while supporting this new offering. The shift to remote work has emphasized the importance of security and recovery for our customers, making it a timely market introduction. The service within Metallic is user-friendly, scalable, and reliable; it protects Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive as well as the back-end, VMs, and file servers, making it a comprehensive solution. Our long-standing partnership brings significant value from both the customer and Microsoft perspectives. I'm proud of how closely our engineering teams have collaborated to develop these solutions and assist customers in addressing their immediate challenges. We are excited about launching Metallic into the market. Can you share your thoughts on how Metallic is performing from your standpoint?

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO

Well, thank you for sharing your perspective on Metallic. We're really excited about it. This is a product we built ground up for the enterprise. And partnered with Microsoft very closely as we did it. The product is now available across Europe. It's available in Asia, obviously, the United States and Canada. We've added a heap of services into the product over the past quarter or so, and we're getting great traction. As customers are seeing how easy is this to adopt, how easy it is to add additional services around it and how easy it is to grow as their businesses grow with Metallic. So we're really excited about it.

Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft General Manager

Awesome. I couldn't agree more. I mean I think that Commvault and Microsoft have a proven track record together of over 20 years. And especially now when our customers need us so much, the companies need new innovations from trusted leaders. And while there's still a lot more work that we can do together. I'm very excited about the work that we've done in bringing Metallic to the market and having it built on Azure. So I think that we're in for a great ride as we move into 2021.

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO

Absolutely. We've just begun. The products and the partnership and the ecosystem of our partners have incredible potential and most of all, great value for our customers. Gavriella, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft General Manager

You're welcome, and thank you for your leadership and continued partnership with Microsoft.

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO

I want to thank Gavriella for being part of our event. It's partnerships like this that make us excited about what's ahead. In addition, we need to run efficiently as an organization. To use a metaphor: "we have been changing the engines of an airplane while in flight". We have driven massive cost savings by streamlining our organization, driving process efficiencies, increasing our presence in low-cost locations and remaining focused on spending. Next, we have continued to invest. As the market evolves, we need to continue to innovate to stay ahead. I believe we are staying ahead, especially with Metallic and our Hyperscale X solution. And finally, we've made significant progress in attracting top talent, committing ourselves to transparency and creating a winning culture. I would like to call out another reason for my confidence. We have the right leadership in place. As you know, it's all about the people. During my tenure, we've built a tremendous leadership team, comprised of Commvault veterans and industry leaders who have brought fresh perspectives and energy to the company. I'm proud to work alongside them. You'll be hearing from some of them during this meeting. In a few moments, Don, Manoj, Ranga and Geeta will go a bit deeper into our technological vision and advantages. Then Chris, Riccardo, Sandy, and Gary will discuss our go-to-market strategy. After that, Brian will take you through the detailed financials. And then our independent directors, Martha Bejar Behar and YY Lee will shine a light on our important environmental, social and governance initiatives. And before we wrap, we will have 40 minutes to take your questions. With that, thank you for joining us today. And now I'd like to hand it over to Don Foster, an 18-year of Commvault veteran, who makes a huge difference with our customers, to discuss how we're driving innovation. Don?

Don Foster, Commvault Veteran

Thanks, Sanjay, and thank you all for your time. Over the last 24 months, new technology trends have driven new customer needs. And in solving for these new trends, we've uncovered a new strategic problem that organizations face. And as Sanjay described earlier, this is the business integrity gap. Over the last 24 months, we've also released a number of innovations in our product portfolio, focused on closing that gap and allowing customers to control their always-in-motion data environment. Over the next 20 minutes, we'll discuss three key trends that highlight and showcase how our product portfolio and strategy are supporting our ability for aggressive market growth. Those three trends are: number one, that IT is actively transforming into a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape; number two, that same hybrid multi-cloud landscape is catalyzing the next phase of application modernization with microservices and containers; and number three, there is an increased demand for SaaS driven outcomes for all workloads, both in the cloud and on-premises. We believe that we are uniquely positioned to handle these data-related challenges that have emerged from these new trends, and more importantly, help customers meet the demands that they have today and tomorrow. Now these five steps that Sanjay covered earlier really helped to highlight the acceleration that's occurring in the digital business transformation. In fact, it's this acceleration that is widening the business integrity gap for organizations everywhere. Business and IT leaders alike must start thinking differently about their data, ask different questions and find answers through and with technology to implement and enact a new strategy energy that can support the movement to the hybrid multi-cloud world.