Earnings Call Transcript - TENB Q1 2020

Operator, Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Tenable First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ms. Andrea DiMarco, Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategy. Thank you, you may now begin.

Andrea DiMarco, Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategy

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Tenable's first quarter 2020 financial results. With me on the call today are Amit Yoran, Tenable's Chief Executive Officer; and Steve Vintz, Chief Financial Officer. Prior to this call, we issued a press release announcing our first quarter financial results. You could find the press release on the IR website at Tenable.com. Before we begin, let me remind you that we will make forward-looking statements during the course of this call, including statements relating to Tenable's guidance and expectations for the second quarter, growth and drivers in Tenable's business, changes in the threat landscape and security industry, and our competitive position in the market, growth in our customer demand for and adoption of our solutions, Tenable’s expectations regarding long-term profitability, the impact of COVID-19 on our business and on the global economy, and planned innovation and new products and services. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as a prediction of future events. Forward-looking statements represent management's beliefs and assumptions only as of today and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or outlook. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to those contained in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC, February 28th, 2020 and subsequent reports that we file with the SEC, which are available on the SEC's website at sec.gov. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are a number of limitations related to the use of these non-GAAP financial measures versus their closest GAAP equivalent. Our earnings release that we issued today includes GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations for these measures and is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Amit.

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Andrea, and thank you all for joining us today. Our thoughts are with those who have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we hope everyone is staying safe. Our top priority is ensuring the health and safety of our employees, partners, and customers around the world. We have a lot of ground to cover today. But I'd like to take a moment to share what I've seen at Tenable over the past five to six weeks. In this unprecedented time, Tenable has had an incredibly resilient team. Many employees were already working remotely. So, as a team, we're able to adapt quickly and continue to deliver on our mission. We have an amazing company, and I'd like to personally thank all the employees of Tenable for their unwavering dedication to helping our customers manage and measure their cyber risk through this environment. We're proud of what we have accomplished. Our multifaceted go-to-market approach helps us maintain dialogue with customers. With the quick shift to work from home, enterprises must now manage a more distributed network and a broader attack surface. Our customer engagement has remained very high as they attempt to understand risk in this new operating paradigm. Our customers have to automate and prioritize how they assess and secure remote laptops, while the entire workforce is distributed. And when employees return to the office, reassessing risk will be an ongoing activity. We continue to see customers focus on robust vulnerability management programs, with increased attention on web applications, storefront websites, and cloud environments. To further assist our customers with the remote workforce transition, we immediately extended Tenable I/O licenses for additional coverage of assets through June 15th. For Tenable SC and Nessus professional customers, we offered a Tenable I/O license with our agent-based capabilities. We're also excited to announce a new major release of our web application assessment platform. We've already seen some of the benefits from our team's agility and commitment to customers during the quarter. In one instance, a large food processing company augmented their on-premise Tenable deployment by using agents deployed on work from home computers reporting directly to Tenable I/O. And another example, a domestic children's hospital worked with surge licenses to secure their mobile workforce. As cybersecurity remains a foundational part of our customer's business continuity planning, we continue to deploy our solutions and serve our customers. For the first quarter, calculated current billings grew 22% year-over-year, and revenue grew 28%. It was a solid quarter given the environment. I also want to note that we significantly improved our operating margin and became free cash flow positive in Q1. We'll continue a balanced approach, thoughtfully navigating between improved profitability and investing in growth initiatives. Overall, we remain confident in our ability to achieve positive free cash flow for the year 2020 and believe that the free cash flow characteristics for the business long-term are very attractive. Steve will cover the results in greater detail, but I'd like to talk about how we're managing the business through these challenging times. We continue to see positive improvements in pipeline size and maturity. However, the timing of when new business and, to some extent, renewal transactions will close is very difficult to gauge right now due to the uncertainty created by COVID-19. We expect that the current dynamics will impact our growth rate for the year. As a result, we're proactively taking measures to ensure we realize our intended operating leverage. Specifically, we are reducing discretionary spend until we have better clarity on the macro environment. In doing so, we will be careful not to impact key areas of our business, such as sales capacity and the levels of resourcing around innovation and other strategic areas that contribute to our long-term growth. The steps we take today will enable Tenable to become a significantly larger and more profitable company over time. We continue to believe that the best-of-breed focus will continue to fuel attractive growth and profitability. The dynamics that are propelling our business still remain, and we believe will continue to strengthen over time. No doubt the next few quarters will be a challenging period for many organizations. We believe our unique business model can help moderate the impact on us. There are four key attributes to our model. One, our recurring revenue model provides a level of topline visibility. Two, we have a diversified land-and-expand model with a focus on large enterprise customers with high retention rates. Three, we have a scalable and efficient business model with high gross margins capable of significant operating leverage. Lastly, four, with our disciplined cash management approach, we remain on track to achieve positive free cash flow for fiscal year 2020. We also have over $225 million in cash and investments and no debt. These characteristics provide us significant financial and operational strength. We see a path to manage through the near-term challenges presented by COVID-19 and maintain focus on our long-term opportunity, which we believe remains compelling. We've heard from many customers that measuring and managing cyber risk remains a key priority. Vulnerability management, assessments, automation, prioritization, data integration through Lumin, web application scanning, and operational technology all remain critical to their efforts. Let me share a few six-figure customer examples that demonstrate our strategic value and our commitment to our customers as they navigate these unprecedented times. The first customer is a Nessus upsell, also a competitive enterprise platform displacement with a large international automotive manufacturer. This customer was looking for a scalable vulnerability management solution to deploy across almost 1 million assets globally. The customer indicated they chose Tenable because of the accuracy of our products and our trusted brand. While the Q1 purchase is intended to cover their IT systems, our IT/OT integration provides a longer-term OT opportunity for us and to expand into their manufacturing facilities. The next example is an IT/OT convergence case— a large financial institution, an existing Tenable SC and IoT diode customer. This customer was seeking to reduce cyber risk across their data centers, including not just servers but also monitoring of HVAC systems and other parts of the infrastructure. The customer told us they chose Tenable OT to ensure proper security of operations and the integration of OT and IT risks with an opportunity to expand to more sites over time. Lastly, I'd like to share an exciting cross-sell expansion customer, a domestic software company. This customer was a heavy cloud user and migrated from SC to IoT and also had a web application assessment and Lumin. This customer win is a great example of how we can help our customers as they transition to the cloud. It also highlights what we can accomplish with customers remotely as we conducted the evaluation and pitch for Lumin all remotely. We believe there's a lot of evidence that our best-of-breed strategy in enterprise vulnerability management continues to generate momentum in the market. Strategic opportunities around VM continue to present themselves as the attack surface continues to widen and customers demand more automation and prioritization. Understanding cyber risk is becoming increasingly important to C-level executives, boards, and audit committees. This gives me exceptional confidence in our future. And now I'll turn it over to Steve.

Steve Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Amit. As Amit mentioned, we're pleased with our results for the first quarter and remain excited about our long-term opportunity for cyber exposure. However, we're currently cautious around the near-term environment and macro uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Let's talk about our results for the quarter, then turn our attention to guidance. First, please note that with the exception of revenue, all financial results we will discuss today are non-GAAP financial measures unless otherwise stated. As Andrea mentioned at the start of this call, GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations may be found in our earnings release issued earlier today and posted on our website. Now, onto our results for the quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $102.6 million, which represents 20% growth over the same period last year. Revenue in the quarter exceeded the midpoint of our guidance range by approximately $2 million. Revenue was aided by strong execution across the globe, notably in EMEA and some large deals in APAC. As a reminder, Tenable has a very sizable international footprint with operations in over 30 countries and customers in over 160. This gives us a very broad go-to-market capability that is not dependent upon closing a few large individual transactions in the quarter to achieve growth. Over time, we've been able to achieve growth on our customer base to over 30,000 by selling annual prepaid subscriptions, resulting in 93% recurring revenue. Calculated current billings, defined as the change in current deferred revenue plus total revenue recognized in the quarter, grew 22% year-over-year to $99.2 million. We added 319 new enterprise platform customers this quarter and 24 net new six-figure customers, bringing the total number of customers spending in excess of $100,000 annually to 665. The takeaway here is we achieved solid growth in new enterprise platform customers, though fewer new logo deals were large six-figure deals. Activity levels remained healthy in the quarter, and there was good customer engagement. But the uncertain economic environment did impact our ability to close some deals in the quarter. However, we were pleased to see conversion on many new opportunities that were advanced in our pipeline and across various industries and geographies. I'll now turn to expenses and profitability, where we have seen a significant reduction in non-GAAP operating loss. Gross margin was 83% this quarter, down from 85% in Q1 last year and up from 82% last quarter. Our gross margin reflects increased demand for our cloud-based Tenable I/O platform, which we are delivering more efficiently as we scale. Let's turn to operating expenses. Sales and marketing was $55.4 million this quarter compared to $49.3 million in the first quarter last year and $57.7 million last quarter. This represents 54% of revenue for the quarter, down from 61% in Q1 2019 and 59% in Q4 2019. It's worth noting that the first quarter reflects continued investment in sales, primarily related to hiring more quota-carrying sales reps, as well as costs for a worldwide sales kickoff and industry events such as RSA. This was offset by lower non-capitalizable sales commissions relative to seasonally strong fourth quarter sales and to a lesser degree, lower spend on travel. Further, and perhaps more importantly, we realized leverage in the quarter from the optimization of sales overhead in our target markets, which we expect to be a source of leverage in the future. R&D was $23.9 million compared to $19.9 million in the first quarter last year and $20.4 million last quarter. As a percent of revenue, R&D was 23% compared to 25% in the same period last year and 21% last quarter. Sequentially higher spend reflects the full quarter impact of our investment in our operational technology offering via the acquisition of Indegy, as well as further development activities to enhance Lumin and other cloud data products. G&A was $13.8 million compared to $11.9 million in the first quarter last year and $12.6 million in Q4 2019. As a percent of revenue, G&A was 13% this quarter, flat with last quarter and down from 15% last year. Non-GAAP loss from operations was $7.7 million compared to a loss of $13.2 million in Q1 last year and $11.1 million last quarter. Non-GAAP operating margin was negative 8% compared to negative 16% for the first quarter last year and negative 11% last quarter. Overall, we are very pleased with the significant progress we've made in our operating margin, which reflects our ability to efficiently scale our business, and we believe positions us well for continued improvement for the remainder of the year. All of this translated to significant EPS upside as our non-GAAP net loss per share from the first quarter was $0.09, which was $0.09 to $0.10 better than expected. To summarize, $0.02 to $0.03 of the beat was attributed to better-than-expected revenue, while approximately $0.07 resulted from better operational efficiency and lower costs. Now, let's turn to the balance sheet. We finished the quarter with $226.7 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Turning to cash flow, we achieved $3.9 million of positive free cash flow, which is our first quarter of positive cash flow as a public company. This compares favorably to a free cash flow burn of $3.2 million in Q1 of last year. As a side note, the construction of our new headquarters is progressing and nearing completion with an estimated $5 million of net cash backs remaining across Q2 and Q3. With the results of the quarter behind us, I'd like to discuss our outlook for Q2 and the rest of the year. I'll start by echoing Amit's comments. With over 90% recurring revenue, 80% gross margin, high renewal rates, and strong unit economics, we're confident in our progress towards becoming a Rule of 40 company. A leading indicator of the strategy is that we turned free cash flow positive this quarter and expect to generate positive cash flow for the whole year and beyond. Given the fluidity of the current environment, we will continue to manage the business in a disciplined way and will make changes as necessary. With that as a backdrop, let's turn to guidance. For the second quarter, we currently expect revenue to be in the range of $101 million to $103 million and non-GAAP loss from operations to be in the range of $5.5 million to $3.5 million, non-GAAP net loss to be in the range of $6 million to $4 million, and non-GAAP net loss per share to be in the range of $0.06 to $0.04, assuming 99.8 million weighted average common shares outstanding. While we're able to provide this outlook for Q2, we have noticeably less visibility for the full year, especially for calculated current billings. CCB is not only a reflection of new ACV bookings in the quarter, but also early renewals and multi-year prepaid deals. Since the crisis began, we have been stress testing our model and running a number of scenarios based on various assumptions. Given the level of uncertainty around the duration of the health crisis, the rate and pace of economic recovery, and the extent to which all of these factors will affect our customers and the industries in which they operate, there's a wide range of outcomes for the full year, which we are confident we are prepared for. However, assigning a range for the full year just does not feel appropriate. Our expectation for our business in the current environment is as follows; growth in new logos will likely be lower. Upsells into our installed base are also expected to be slower, but feel less of an impact. Renewal rates are expected to remain healthy, but will likely experience a modest decrease from our high historical levels. While there's uncertainty created by the current environment, what we do know is that we will remain nimble and deploy our go-to-market resources where we see opportunity as the global recovery unfolds. We will also continue to revisit the efficacy of our cost base to ensure we strike the right balance between investment and our desired operating leverage. Before turning back to Amit, I want to provide some perspective on what we're seeing so far in the second quarter. Overall, we are pleased with the size and maturity of our pipeline and activity levels. But keep in mind, like many software companies, we're backend-loaded, and our performance will depend on how we yield against those opportunities. In summary, Tenable remains well-positioned to deliver strong growth and profitability over the long term. We've developed a comprehensive foundational cyber exposure platform that provides significant value to our customers. We are prudently managing the business through the current challenging macro-economic environment while continuing to execute on our long-term strategy. We believe our ability to remain on track to generate positive cash flow for the full year is a sign of the strength in our business. And now I'll turn the call back to Amit for some closing comments.

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Steve. It was a tough decision to withdraw guidance, but we believe it's appropriate given the circumstances. There's a difference between the ability to accurately predict CCB, annual revenue, or earnings per share, and the confidence that we have in our business over the longer term. I continue to have great confidence in our business. We believe our cyber exposure platform will become even more critical as enterprises consider cyber risk in combination with business context as a critical piece of their business risk management. Regardless of the macro environment, we believe the combination of our differentiated technology, strengthening product portfolio, data integration capabilities, and best-of-breed strategy position us for long-term success. We hope to see many of you virtually at the JPMorgan Conference on May 14th and the William Blair Growth Stock Conference on June 10th. We would now like to open the call up for questions.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Sterling Auty with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Sahil Dhingra, Analyst

Hey guys, this is Sahil on for Sterling. Thank you for taking my question. So, given that the margins were so much better in the current quarter and even in the outlook, what has changed in the capital structure? Are we seeing the change in pace of filing or are there any other factors behind that?

Steve Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

Hi, this is Steve. Thanks for your question. We've mentioned on the call that we are focusing on areas like sales and marketing. We had quarter-carrying representatives this quarter, and we plan to continue this practice throughout the year. However, I believe it's important to note that the rate at which we hire these representatives may be more measured than we initially anticipated. We will observe how the global crisis develops. We will remain flexible and reassess, but continuing to recruit is crucial for us. Additionally, while we intend to invest, we want to do it efficiently, so we will keep assessing investments and costs that are not directly related to quotas, ensuring our ratios emphasize utility, specifically focusing on quarter-carrying sales representatives and enhancing efficiency within the sales and marketing organization.

Sahil Dhingra, Analyst

Thank you. That's helpful. And one follow-up. So, what are hearing from customers in terms of the prioritization of VM in this environment? Are you seeing any pull forward of demand in the scenario?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

I think it's premature to say there's a pull-forward demand. We're actually very pleased with the quarter overall. Hopefully that is apparent, as we added a good number of new enterprise customers, as well as a number of new six-figure customers. So, overall, we're pleased with what we saw in Q1. But the global crisis really started in the last three weeks of the quarter; they happen to be the busiest times for our software company, as the last few weeks of the quarter are always very busy. We're dealing with us for a full quarter in Q2. So, for us, I wouldn't characterize it as saying that we saw a pull-forward of demand. We were busy at the end of the quarter, busy closing deals, and we're pleased with the rate in which we did sell. However, we obviously have a cautious outlook for the rest of the year just given some of the uncertainty surrounding it.

Sahil Dhingra, Analyst

That's very helpful. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Melissa Franchi with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Melissa Franchi, Analyst

Thank you, and hope you all are doing well. I understand why you would pull the guidance for the full year just given the uncertainty, which is not unique to Tenable. But — I mean, you have a lot of conversations; I'm sure, with customers. And so I'm wondering if you could maybe just provide a little bit more color around what you're hearing from those customer conversations, particularly how CSOs are viewing vulnerability management and their spending incrementally on VM for the rest of the year, just recognizing there still is a lot of uncertainty, but what are the conversations today suggesting?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, great question, Melissa. Thank you. I think we have not seen a significant shift from a security prioritization standpoint. So, security remains — I would say sacrosanct, but it remains a high priority for enterprises. We see that within security spend that VM understanding risk and how to more efficiently manage risk remains a key high priority for the CSOs that we talked to. I think what is reflected in our decision to pull guidance is an increased sort of uncertainty, if you will, in the process for closing. We know that budgets are going to be shifting, budgets are going to be changing, they are being more closely scrutinized in the process to close transactions, and that may cause for some delays, and in certain segments and market uncertainty around what those budgets will look like and how they'll shift. So, I think with that we're trying to just say, look, the pipeline is healthy. It continues to grow at a healthy click, but we just want to — we just don't have that type of precise visibility into the close process that we've had historically.

Melissa Franchi, Analyst

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And Steve, you talked about upsell activity; you're anticipating upsell activity to be healthy but maybe not as robust. When we spoke to you all a quarter ago, you were very enthusiastic and bullish, I guess, on the Lumin early adoption. Just wondering what you saw in Q1 and whether this current environment maybe puts a little bit of a pause on the momentum that you were seeing in the early days?

Stephen Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

I think with regard to momentum overall, I think we're happy with how the quarter played out. We acknowledge we would like to close a few more deals. Specifically, a few more larger deals than we have seen in quarters past. But adding over 300 new enterprise platform customers, 24 net new six-figure customers, and to be able to continue to do that, especially in a market like this, I think it's certainly notable. We launched Lumin in Q4 of last year and International is a product — and we sell primarily to enterprise customers. So, given enterprise sales cycles, our expectation is that Lumin will be more of a contributor to the second half of the year than the first half. But we're very pleased with the pipeline for Lumin and very pleased with the pipeline just more broadly. I think it's fair to say that the size and the maturity of the pipeline are very strong, and there's really good customer engagement, and we're continuing to move deals throughout the pipeline. The big question mark is the yield against those opportunities in a market like this, but overall, we're pleased with what we see, but we're obviously taking a more cautious outlook. We think the value prop of VM and cyber exposure more broadly, and Lumin in particular, remains strong even in a market like this.

Melissa Franchi, Analyst

That's good. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gur Talpaz with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.

Gur Talpaz, Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks for taking my question. Amit, outside of core VM, you mentioned a handful of pretty interesting OT and Lumin wins. Can you talk about the view on appetite for these solutions, recognizing the term uncertainty? And looking well beyond that, just the nature of the conversations you're having and how you think about just the build, maybe looking into 2021?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Gur. Great to hear from you. We continue to see a very healthy pipeline build in OT and Lumin. And I think in addition to the comments that Steve was making about Lumin’s relevance, the more complex the environment, the more distributed and complex the attack surface, the more of an opportunity exists for Lumin to come in and help CISOs and enterprises really understand risk and understand the prioritization of how they can most efficiently reduce risk. As we've seen the changes and attack surface, CISOs are trying to figure out okay, what does this mean to me now, I've got a bunch of remote workstations and I have some changes in compute behaviors. What does that mean from a risk perspective? I think Lumin can help them get their arms around that, and really the fundamental requirement to understand cyber risk in core business processes, whether it's manufacturing, critical infrastructure, or retail inventory management, all of these things remain absolutely critical. The timing of deals is certainly challenging to understand in this environment, but we have seen no notable change in our ability to add pipeline and opportunities to the pipeline, and I think the sales teams understand these types of transactions that we've been closing, just need to get our arms around the macro environment and what it means for transaction timing.

Gur Talpaz, Analyst

That's helpful. Maybe one for you, Steve. You made it a point that the stresses are going to be FCF positive for the year. Is there anything here that can happen over the next few quarters that could ultimately lead you to provide a more definitive range for cash flow positive despite the uncertainty?

Stephen Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

No, not that we anticipate, Gur. For a matter of fact, we made a point to call that out. We talked about becoming cash flow positive on our last call, even with some of the uncertainty surrounding it. We remain committed to becoming cash flow positive. There's a lot of natural leverage in the business, and I think you're starting to see that given the EPS and the fact that we are returning cash flow positive, almost three to four quarters earlier than expected when we talked about when we went public. We said our intention was to become cash flow positive by the time we exit 2020, and here we are doing it in the first quarter. We're pleased to see it. We think through a lot of leverage in the business. We're excited about the long-term opportunity, and we're going to continue to invest, but balance those investments in a way that also creates operational efficiency for us as a whole.

Gur Talpaz, Analyst

That's great. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst

Good afternoon. Can you maybe quantify for us, you know, some of the benefits that you saw, I guess, from organizations that may have accelerated some of their buying activity, and were maybe addressing things like work from home technologies, buying new laptops and outfitting them and how you think about that opportunity, particularly with regard to how recurring it is? Are you seeing that persistent to April and it could just be a new normal that adds to your opportunities?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

You know, I wouldn't characterize it as sort of an acceleration of business. I think that there's, you know, the change in compute environments and the way enterprises are supporting their employees has evolved. To some extent, that plays to our strengths, or we've always touted that we bring the greatest flexibility to assess risk. In this environment where there's more work from home, I think there are various methods and techniques, including reaching out to cloud-based deployments that our customers are adopting, and we've made some more flexible licensing schemes available to them. It's really, we've seen a little bit of a morphing of the business more so than an acceleration. In terms of whether or not we anticipate this to sustain itself going forward, I think the macro environment will largely dictate that. We've seen all sorts of different approaches from different states, in fact, around the globe, to the return to work from home, and we think that'll create another wave of security requirements for enterprises as these remote systems now come back into enterprise environments with all the applications and potential malware. So, we think it is going to mean that assessing vulnerability, assessing risk, assessing exposure to the enterprise is just going to have to be done in a more mature fashion than it has historically and we think that could bode well for business although the macro environment can also dictate the pace.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst

Got it. And can you talk a little bit about your exposure based on industry verticals? I mean, clearly, you guys have a large U.S. government business, and we would assume that's less impacted. But there are other industries that potentially are more; can you maybe give us a little bit of color around what you're seeing and assuming around the industry piece?

Stephen Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

Hi, Jonathan, this is Steve. Yes, the good news is that we're fairly diversified. We have over 30,000 customers, I think one of the largest customer bases of any public security company. We transact sales in 160 different countries with offices in over 30. So we have a sizable and very diverse customer base. If you've looked at areas such as retail, hospitality, transportation/travel, in aggregate, it's less than 10% of our total sales. So the good news is we don't have significant vertical concentrations. With the exception of the U.S. government, we talked about how it’s on average about 15% of our total sales, and we think that's actually a good place to be in a market like this. Overall, we feel like we're pretty broad and pretty diversified with no significant concentrations, and we think that's good in a market like this.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Ives with Wedbush. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

This is Victor on for Dan. Can you just talk about what you're seeing on the federal spending front? And what are your views on the deal environment during this pandemic? And then, what are the opportunities as well as challenges that this may present for Tenable?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

We haven't seen any notable change in the federal environment; the updates have been really consistent with what we've seen in terms of buying behaviors from years past. As you know, we have a very strong position in the federal government and believe that will continue to be the case as we service those customers and help them make the adjustment to work from home capability. In terms of how this is impacting or changing, the broader market or deal flow, we continue to see a high level of engagement with our customers, both federal and in the private sector, and there’s good customer engagement and continued pipeline creation. There seems to be a lot of demand out there, just trying to understand what causes will look like relative to the macro environment and how company purchasing practices will evolve.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nick Yako with Cowen and Company. Please proceed with your question.

Nick Yako, Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask about the decision to extend the licenses to cover additional assets coming online into June. Is the plan to go back to those customers in June and convert those into upsells? And then just how confident are you feeling in the ability to do that?

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

I think the initial outreach here was to make sure that we're engaging with our customers and assisting them in whatever fashion we can during something that's ultimately, a crisis for them to manage through. They're dealing with massive shifts in how they operate and work from home environments. This was one of those things where we could draw a line and restrict our customers use of our technology, but we wanted to ensure they feel like we've got a great partnership with them, and we're helping them with technology when they’re in a jam, and helping them strategically assess and understand the data that's coming out of those technologies and what it means for their business from a risk perspective. Ultimately, will we extend that beyond June? I think it depends on a number of factors. Will we be able to convert some of those extended licenses into sales? I think will depend on a number of factors. This is one of those times where you want to ask what you're made of as a company and as a partner, and our intent is not to jam people up, but to provide them capability and believe also that they'll be with us for the long term and expand their deployment as they see us as a strategic company to do business with.

Nick Yako, Analyst

Right. Okay, helpful. And then maybe just a follow-up around Lumin. Any color around the contribution from Lumin in the quarter? And then just looking forward, does this environment change how you guys are thinking about the opportunity for Lumin going forward?

Stephen Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

Hey, Nick, this is Steve. No, we don't provide sales by product, but what we did say is that we're pleased with the strong start for Lumin in both Q4 and Q1. So, out of the gate, we think we're coming out really strong; pipeline activities are very healthy and continuing to build. In a market like this, the value proposition for VM and cyber exposure, and Lumin, in particular, we think is strong. We'll continue to keep you updated throughout the year. And keep in mind, we're an enterprise software company, so the expectation is that you’ll see more contribution from some of these newer products in the second half of the year versus the first half.

Nick Yako, Analyst

Thanks, guys.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Brian Essex, Analyst

Hi, good afternoon. And thank you for taking the question. I hope everyone is well. Amit, I just wanted to follow-up on some of the commentary that you had with regard to it sounds like things in the demand environment still are, I guess, relatively reasonably healthy. Is that a fair assessment to make? And it seems as though the conservatism is mostly around the demand environment? And then are there any business process perspectives that we need to consider? So internally inside your company, how you're managing the situation? Is anything materially changed over the course of the past few months with the remote workforce and how you need to remain engaged with your customers? Maybe a little bit of color there could be helpful.

Amit Yoran, Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Thanks, Brian. I think, I'd like the way you differentiate those. I think the demand environment remains healthy. We continue to see opportunities, new opportunities being identified, pipeline opened, and feel like there's absolutely no indication at this point that vulnerability management is lessening from a priority perspective, from a budget perspective, from any front. What we have seen, I think what we're trying to call out on the call is that there's just more uncertainty. We don't have the visibility or the certainty and visibility into the past and what's required to close transactions within our customer base that we've had historically and come to rely on for guidance. Many engagements are quite active with our customers, and even our customers don't know exactly what's required to move purchases forward with the degree of certainty that they had in previous quarters in a more normal operating environment. So I think it's important to differentiate those two, and it does — it caused me to remain extremely confident in the long-term business opportunity in front of us in the fundamentals of Tenable as a business, while there might be a little bit of turbulence until we understand what the buying behaviors look like during this COVID time. In terms of how we're engaging with our customers, we have a largely remote workforce already; about two-thirds of our staff were working from home prior to recent times. So, it's become embedded into the culture. Many of our sales reps report that they have just as high a level of engagement; less in-person engagement, but in many cases, it’s easier to get customers to agree to a 15 or 30 minutes Zoom than it is to take an hour or 90-minute meeting. So we do see continued healthy engagement from the sales force. We continue to see new opportunities being identified from marketing and turned into sales opportunities, as well as sales-qualified leads in the sales force entering the pipeline. We feel good about the overall business, again, recognizing that there's this uncertainty around the processes required to close transactions as customer budgets continue to evolve and procurement processes evolve.

Brian Essex, Analyst

Got it. That's really helpful. And maybe just a follow-up for Steve. Steve, on cash flow, do you have levers at your disposal where you could — you think you can remain sustainably cash flow positive? Or should we anticipate a little bit of movement around cash flow breakeven until you go through maybe the stronger back end of the year?

Stephen Vintz, Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. We're delighted that we’re cash flow positive this quarter. Of course, we expect to be so for the full year. The cash flow characteristics of the business are very strong, so we see real leverage there. Cash flow quarter-to-quarter is always a tricky thing, especially since if you look at our construction of our new headquarters, that will be completed in Q3. We are actively paying contractors and getting reimbursed. Notwithstanding that, we feel really good about cash flow on a yearly basis. How it moves throughout the year on a quarter-to-quarter basis may vary, but we'll keep you posted. But overall, we're very pleased with the cash flow characteristics of the business, and there’s significant leverage that we're demonstrating here not only in the first quarter but also in our Q2 guide.

Brian Essex, Analyst

All right, very helpful. Thank you very much.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session and the conclusion of today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.