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spk05: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the JFrog's fourth quarter fiscal 2021 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to Joanne Horne with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Norma. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as we review JFrog's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results, which were announced following market close today via a press release. Leading the call today will be JFrog's CEO and co-founder, Shalemi Ben-Haim, and Jacob Shulman, JFrog's CFO. Before management shares their remarks, let me review the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under federal securities laws and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements related to our future financial performance, including our outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2022. The words anticipate, believe, continue, estimate, expect, intend, will, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements or similar indications of future expectations. Your caution not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our views only as of today and not as of any subsequent date. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, Please refer to our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020, filed with the SEC on February 12th, 2021, and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30th, 2021, filed with the SEC on November 5th, 2021, all of which are available on the investor relations section of our website, along with the earnings per list release issued earlier today. Additional information will be made available in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2021, and other filings and reports that we may file from time to time with the SEC. Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. These non-GAAP financial measures, which are used as measures of Jay's performance, should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, GAAP measures. Please refer to the tables in our earnings release for reconciliation of those measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. A replay of this call will be available on the JFrog Investor Relations website for a limited time. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to JFrog CEO, Shlomi Benhaim. Shlomi?
spk11: Thank you, Joanne, and greetings to all of you from the Swamp. I'm excited to welcome you to our fourth quarter and fiscal 2021 earnings call. Every end of the year urges us to pause, look back, and observe the leaps the company has taken from all perspectives. I'm grateful for our customers and community. Their faith in JFrog and their determination to innovate and digitalize the world inspires us to bring our best to work every day. 2021 ended on a strong note. Our multiple strategies across technology, business, and culture continue to bear fruit that I'm happy to share with you today. I'm pleased to report that we delivered another strong quarter and that in Q4, all of JFrog's key metrics continued to trend upwards, reflecting the continuous demand for our platform in an expanding market. Q4 revenue was $59.2 million, a growth of 39% over the same period last year, and compared to 38% the overall growth reported in the previous quarter. Our cloud revenue in Q4 grew by 52% year-over-year, an increase from 50% reported in the previous quarter. This reflects our ongoing strategy of accelerating our multi-cloud and hybrid growth. Growth in customers with over $100,000 in ARR accelerated to 53% year-over-year, reflecting a compelling market need for complete JFOG platform solution with our Enterprise Plus subscription. I'm also happy to report that our four trailing quarters net dollar retention climbed to 130% as predicted, compared to 129% reported in the previous quarter. This was driven by customers' increased usage of our product as a unified platform with binary management, security, and software distribution as key drivers. This year, hundreds of new customers adopted our solutions, and I'm pleased to report that we closed the year with approximately 6,650 customers across industries, which represents 10% year-over-year net growth. Team JFrog, these 2021 results are a testament to your hard work and dedication, allowing us to better serve developers, DevOps, and security communities, exceeding our revenue commitments in every single quarter of the year. This success belongs to you and reflects the unique spirit of the Frogs. Now, I would like to share with you some additional market and business highlights. In a world that demands faster, secure, more innovative software to the edge, the DevOps-driven software supply chain is more top of mind and mission critical than ever before. Getting software updates to your vehicle, mobile application, medical devices, and more requires the ability to build, release, secure, distribute, and deploy binaries, often also called software packages. Complementary solutions for CICD and source code management make development more efficient, but this isn't enough to bring software quickly to the market. The moment first or third party code is compiled, it changes to a binary form and requires full binary lifecycle management from the developer's machine to the deployment environment to meet the demands of the business. This transformation into a digital and secure reality can be only achieved by managing the binary. To illustrate this, we only need to look at the major news item that shook the software industry late in 2021, the log4j vulnerability, or as coined by the community, the software pandemic. This affected almost every organization in the world within days of its discovery, frustrating millions of developers who had to drop everything and rush to identify patient zero across all software environments. This forced many companies to bring their entire software delivery organization to a halt until the vulnerability was found, fixed, and replaced. J4 customers were able to quickly identify where they were impacted and address the risk. For example, one of the Fortune 100 banks with over 20,000 developers globally was able to identify where the infected lock4j binary was hosted in their business and what dependencies it carried across the global pipeline. This identification happened in a matter of minutes with JFrog Artifactory serving as the bank's single source of proof and the database of DevOps, allowing them to replace the vulnerable log4j binary with a patched version and applying it across the organization automatically instead of manually finding every place it was being used in every application. Using JFrog X-Ray alongside Artifactory, they were able to easily protect themselves from additional exposure, setting security policies that automatically ensured vulnerable log4j binaries could not be used again by developers, and keeping the repository from further risk. And finally, JFrog Distribution, rapidly delivered and validated release to fix the software in all environments, including production. Altogether, this bank automatically found, rebuilt, replaced, and protected themselves against the all-vulnerable log4j binaries in under 12 hours. This speed is only achievable with a unified, integrated JVOC platform that automates these activities across a company. Development organizations without this approach have taken weeks hunting these binaries down, and many are still in the trenches trying to recover today. During the Lock4J episode, the power of a binary-centric approach to DevOps saved J4 customers potential millions of dollars in lost business due to downtime or security breaches, and countless hours spent by millions of global developers fortifying their software supply chains. The Lock4J vulnerability will not be the last impactful binary discovered by our industry. This happened in 2021 with NPM, Python, and it will happen again. This reality reinforces JFrog's strategy to manage the entire DevOps flow from the binary repository to security and through distribution to deliver complete automated pipeline control for every development organization. As a result, we are seeing a growing demand for our end-to-end platform. Now, on to some product and business highlights from Q4 and the fiscal year. In support of our Liquid Software vision, our roadmap in 2021 brought many innovations and enhancements to our holistic platform, deepening our commitment to deliver integrated automated solutions to the DevOps and DevSecOps communities. This included delivery for many of our core product categories, such as artifact management, CICD, security, and software distribution. Importantly, all of the solutions delivered in 2021 continue to fulfill our promises to always deliver universal, scalable products across self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud environments. As a result, we continue to see strong demand for our hybrid and multi-cloud subscriptions. In Q4 specifically, we were proud to partner with AWS for the announcement of EKS Anywhere on the AWS marketplace, which makes Amazon cloud services available for self-hosted customers as well. This move by AWS is a recognition that many companies see a hybrid model as a strategic move for the business, and we are excited to be at the forefront of hybrid DevOps with our customers and cloud partners. Our strategic investment in our cloud offering both root again in Q4. And as an illustration of our cloud subscription growth, one of the largest providers of GPS and geolocation services in the world recently became a new customer of JFrog, standardizing their development team on JFrog's SaaS solution. They were looking for a DevOps partner to scale alongside their company growth and had found their existing competitive offering would no longer scale to meet their needs, nor able to support their cloud-first initiatives. With the J4 platform provided as a service in the cloud of their choice, they have managed to successfully migrate all of their binaries and scale across multi-site setup. We look forward to partnering with more J4 customers like TomTom, headquartered in EMEA, or FastAF, a luxury retail delivery company headquartered in North America, to ensure our DevOps solution meets enterprise demands across all vertical and hybrid deployments. Across geographies, JFrog distribution, which delivers binaries to production environments, such as data centers or Kubernetes, remained a key driver for upgrades to our full platform subscriptions. One of the world's largest financial institutions recently upgraded to JFrog's Enterprise Plus subscription in order to distribute binaries for thousands of applications written by thousands of developers delivering to dozens of global locations, each with their own regulations and compliance needs. Examples such as this illustrate a continuing trend we are seeing in organizations. The need to secure, automate, and manage software distribution at scale across all applications and multiple releases per day can no longer rely on manual processes built in-house and implemented a decade ago. These complex environments and the pace of releases requires a binary-centric and distribution-capable DevOps platform in order to be successful. To avoid friction, with the platform capabilities and to focus on one consolidated platform, we decided to sunset Bintre, our legacy distribution as a service offering that provided a standalone binary store and distribution service. We managed an extensive and transparent process with our community and customers of shutting down this service in 2021. As a natural extension of the increasing value of JFrog distribution, we also recently made JFrog Connect available following our acquisition of AppSwift. This early offering for connected device management aims to greatly increase our addressable market by bringing binaries all the way to devices. JFrog Connect will bridge the world of DevOps with the exploding market of IoT and connected devices. We look forward to driving this growth at the edge in the future. We are innovating, extending, and maturing our platform, which we believe will serve not just millions of developers, but billions of devices with the ability to build, manage, protect, update, and automate next-gen software supply chain from any source to any device. On the go-to-market front, during the year, we also focus on building our strategic sales team backed up with high-touch support, field marketing, and solution architects in order to expand business with our key accounts. During Q4, we continue to see the fruits of this investment as we welcome more and more large enterprises who are expanding their J-PROC product adoption. In fact, one of the world's largest telecommunication providers, managed by our strategic team, is continuing to standardize on JFrog in order to reduce the usage of ad hoc tool sets and to develop DevOps best practices across the organization. This over $1 million customer grew over 80% year over year and continues to expand. We believe that the expanded strategic sales team will continue to drive this consolidation pattern as we bring more solutions into the market. We look forward to extending our deep customers' relationships and innovative technologies to meet these enterprise needs. As a final note, before we dive into the financials, I wanted to extend a warm welcome to the newest member of JFOG's board, Mira Rajabel. Mira currently serves as the CIO of Citrix and brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software and cybersecurity. We are proud to have her joining our board and look forward to her guidance as J4 continues to grow. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Jacob Schulman, to look more deeply at the 2021 Q4 and fiscal year financial numbers and share our outlook for 2022. Jacob, stage is yours.
spk12: Thank you, Shlomi, and good afternoon, everyone. We are very pleased to have ended the year with a strong quarter in line with the commitment we made back in Q1 of this year that the second half of the year would show acceleration across the business. I will start with a brief overview of our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 financial results and provide our outlook for Q1 and the full year of 2022. As a reminder, note that all numbers referenced in my remarks are on a non-GAAP basis, unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings release, which is available on our website, and as an exhibit to the Form 8-K furnished to the SEC. Now let's turn to our financial results. Total revenues for the three months ended December 31, 2021, were $59.2 million, up 39% year-over-year. This is our strongest growth rate in four quarters, and we continue to see a better business environment. Self-managed revenues, also often called on-prem, were $44.4 million, up 35%. Cloud revenues again grew faster, up 52%, to $14.8 million, or 25% of total revenues. For the full fiscal year, total revenues were $206.7 million, up 37% year over year. Self-managed revenues were $157 million, up 33%. Cloud revenues for the year were up 52% to $49.7 million, or 24% of total revenues, compared to 22% in 2020. Net dollar retention for the four trailing quarters was 130%. We expect net dollar retention for the trailing fork waters to remain around approximately 130% for the foreseeable future. We ended the year with approximately 6,650 customers, a 10% increase over 6,050 customers at the end of 2020. As noted by Shlomi, we sunset the bean tray product. While the vast majority of Bintre customers adopted our other distribution solutions, we lost approximately 200 customers as a result of this change. These customers were light users of the Bintre solution and represented a negligible revenue impact. Our gross retention rate remained at historic levels in the high 90s for the year. As of the quarter end, we've had 537 customers with ARR of over $100,000, up from 466 customers as of September 30, 2021. On a year-over-year basis, we grew the number of over 100,000 ARR customers 53%. In addition, we grew the number of over $1 million ARR customers to 15, up from 14 in the previous quarter, and 50% increase year-over-year. This increase in the number of large customers is driven primarily by the greater adoption of our full platform, both in cloud and on-prem. In Q4, 35% of total revenue came from Enterprise Plus customers, up from 26% in Q4 of 2020. Now let's review the income statement in more detail. Gross profit in the quarter was $50.2 million, representing a gross margin of 84.8%. compared to 82.6 percent in the year-ago period. For fiscal 2021, gross profit was $173.9 million, representing a gross margin of 84.1 percent compared to 82.4 percent in the fiscal 2020. We continue to see our sales gross margin expand as a result of the steps we took early in the year to improve our cost structure. R&D expense for the quarter was $17.9 million, or 30% of revenue, compared to 24% of revenue in the year-ago period. We continue to invest significantly in enhancing our product solutions, along with integrating video and apps with technologies into the platform. Sales and marketing expenses for the quarter were $23.2 million, or 39% of revenue, compared to 38% of revenue in the year-ago period. G&A expense for the quarter was $9.1 million, or 15% of revenue, compared to 16% of revenue in the year-ago period. Non-GAAP operating income for Q4 was $49,000, or 10 basis point operating margin, compared to an operating income of $2.2 million, or 5.1% operating margin in the year-ago period. As we discussed, integrating bid and ups with Q4 would impact our profitability. For the full year, non-GAAP operating income was $4.2 million, or 2% operating margin, compared to $13 million, or 8.6% operating margin, in 2020. Non-GAAP net loss in the quarter was $965,000, or negative one cent per diluted share, based on approximately 97 million weighted average shares outstanding. Non-GAAP net income for the full year was $2.7 million, or $0.03 per diluted share, based on approximately 103.6 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the year with $421 million in cash and short-term investments, up from $402 million last quarter. Cash flow from operations was $17.7 million in the quarter, After taking into account CAPEX, free cash flow was $16.6 million. For the full year, free cash flow was $23.7 million. As discussed last quarter, Q3 cash flow was impacted by one-time payment of $19 million related to holdback agreement associated with VIDU and Upswift acquisition. Normalized for this, free cash flow for the year would be $42.7 million. Let's briefly discuss the cadence of the financial model in 2022. We expect to see linear top-line revenue growth on a year-over-year basis throughout 2022. Additionally, beginning in Q2, we will see higher expenses due to merit increases in employee compensation and alignment with labor market benchmarks. As a result, the second quarter will be the low point from a profitability standpoint and will recover in the back half of the year. Turning to guidance, for Q1, we expect revenue of $60.8 to $61.8 million, with non-GAAP operating results between a loss of a half a million dollar to income of half a million dollar, and non-GAAP operating earnings per share of negative one cent to positive one cent, assuming a share count of approximately 104 million shares. For the full year of 2022, we're establishing revenue guidance of $273 million to $275 million, non-GAAP operating results between a loss of $1 million to income of $1 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share of negative 1 cent to positive 1 cent, assuming a share count of approximately 107 million shares. Now let me turn the call back to Shlomi for some closing remarks before we take your questions. Shlomi? Thank you, Jacob.
spk11: JFrog successfully marked its first complete fiscal year as a public company, exceeding revenue commitments in every single quarter of 2021. We met our product delivery goals while continuing to build an efficient and healthy business. JFrog's fourth quarter performance is a great foundation to build upon as we leap into 2022, providing further evidence that we have the right strategy and portfolio for growth, in 2022 and beyond. During 2021, under the pandemic reality, we also nearly doubled the size of the company in terms of employee headcount and recently crossed the 1,000 employee bar. This growth is reflective of the strong uncompromising culture we have built that cuts through a challenging labor market. In the last year, greater than ever before, we saw more and more companies identifying software binaries as the primary asset to allow fast and secure digital transformation. We believe JFrog is well positioned to drive strong results in 2022. We look forward to delivering for developers, companies, customers, and shareholders throughout the year. Next week, on February 15th, will hold our first Investors Day. We look forward to virtually hosting you as we share more in-depth details about JFOX technology and business. I'd like to thank you all for your attendance. May the frog be with you. And now, we are happy to take your questions.
spk06: Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. You may then return to the queue. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from Mike Sikos with Needham & Co. Please go ahead.
spk09: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the questions here. I appreciate it. The first question that I wanted to ask about, I know that you guys had mentioned an impact of 4Q profitability as it relates to the Upswift acquisitions. Could you help us fine-tune what that impact was and then maybe parse out what kind of impact we should be thinking about from the upswift acquisition as we look at the guidance that you guys provided us for fiscal year 22?
spk12: Yes. Hi, Mike. This is Jacob. As you know, we acquired two companies in Q3. It's Vidu and Upswift. Actually, Vidu was the larger company that we acquired and had more material impact than Upswift Acquisition. Both of them are currently being integrated technologies and we're making very nice progress with that. So specifically with the equation, Upswift did not have any material impact on our profitability. It just was a very small team. The Vidu acquisition had a bigger impact because it's a much bigger team. Overall, our security division today is around 100 people. A significant portion of that is coming from Vidu.
spk09: Understood. Thank you for that. And then the other question I wanted to ask is, if I'm thinking about Q4 and the revenue upside that you guys delivered, Can you help us think about the outperformance? What went better for you guys this quarter that helped deliver that upside versus your patients coming into the quarter?
spk12: Yes, you're absolutely right that we're very pleased with the adoption of our platform. What we've seen is better than expected adoption of the platform, and Shlomi talked about different drivers behind that, distribution capabilities and enhanced security capabilities were the primary drivers for the adoption of the platform, and that is also indicated in the acceleration for the growth of large customers. Specifically, over 100K customers grew 53% year-over-year, and as Andrew pointed to, the platform is $115,000. That kind of gives you an approximate number of new customers that have adopted the platform.
spk09: Great. Thank you. I'll turn it over to my colleagues. Appreciate it.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Sterling Audie with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
spk13: Hey, this is Doug on for Sterling. Thank you for taking my question. Can you talk about what you're seeing in terms of the adoption of X-ray now that it's included in the enterprise price?
spk11: Yes, hi, and thanks for the question. This is Shlomi. X-ray or if I may say the security solution is landing on a very strong demand around software supply chain and binary security request and requirement from our customers. Basically, what we have seen lately, especially in 2021, is that most of the vulnerable pieces of your software supply chain are coming from binaries, third party or first party. X-Ray sits natively on top of Artifactory. It's part of three subscriptions in the self-hosted offering and offered to all of the cloud customers. So, obviously, we see a growing number of customers that are adopting X-Ray. Speaking of Lock4J specifically, that was at the end of the year, but it echoed everything that we are saying about what type of security the world of DevOps and DevSecOps demand and need. And obviously, this generated a much greater demand by the market. So you see more adoption of our platform. You see more adoption of... of X-ray and the integration of X-ray and video technology have also a very promising roadmap ahead. Great. Thank you so much.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Kingsley Crane with Barenburg. Please go ahead. Hi.
spk08: I'm wondering on Log4J, so how much did helping customers with this open up a broader conversation on other platform products?
spk11: On other platform products, Kingsley, regarding Log4J specifically?
spk08: Well, yeah, if you help them with Log4J, you can become a trusted partner, and maybe they'll expand into other products.
spk11: Yeah, so let's take a step back for a moment and see how the sole toolchain kind of supported this software pandemic as was going by the community. First of all, you have to identify the vulnerable binary, and this obviously happened in a matter of minutes by using Altifactory. the database of devops point a artifactory is the core product of our platform then you have to establish and to place all type of security policy on top of your repository to protect it so no developer will try to get a vulnerable piece again, and this is where you use X-Ray. And now you have to ask all of your deployment environment and development environment to build against the new patch of the Log4j, and this is where J4 distribution comes in place. So obviously, the different sides of the platform playing together emphasize, amplified by the Log4j episode, was a great driver to tell the story, not only of the J-Book platform, but overall DevOps with a binary-centric approach.
spk08: Okay, that's really helpful. That's it for me now. Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
spk03: Thank you so much for taking the question to congrats on a strong key for, and the guidance was very healthy too. So glad to see on both accounts. One of the things in the metrics we sort of disclosed was the customer-based growth. And I'm really happy to see that growth get back into the double digits. So I was wondering if you could talk about how that sort of progressed through the year. I know we took a deliberate focus on focusing on existing customers in 2020, and now it seems like we're starting to see growth again How durable is that going into 2022? And are there any sort of incentives that you guys are using to drive that free-to-pay conversion? Any sort of commentary on the customer base would be helpful.
spk11: Yeah. Hey, Sanjit, and thanks for the question. Obviously, we were very excited about all the – all the metrics of 2021 and also the growth in new logos, new customers, new onboarding users that are using the J4 platform. We committed in 2021 to perform in a higher pace and had more new logos than 2020, and we delivered. And that, although we had to remove friction and remove vintry from our portfolio, and by that even, as Jacob mentioned in the script, we lost 200 customers. And still, we go as expected. So we were very pleased to see this role happening again, this trend of adopting the J4 products again. And what I see moving forward is that our investments will bear fruit. It happened in 2021. It will happen even further in 2022. The security investment is very much appealing to the market. This is a booming market. Everyone that we speak with speaks about the pain of securing the full software supply chain. X-Ray is the perfect fit for it. The enforcement of V2 technology and the team is very, very well aligned with the market needs. The enhancements added to Artifactory to manage binary from all types would be also very appealing to it. And also our strategic move to the cloud with the free tier, if you remember, also start to show higher adoption in terms of active users that are landing on JPEG solution rather than taking any other solution in the market. So I'm very optimistic regarding the goal of additional customers in the next year. And if I may also say, although it's the very early beginning of JFO Connect, This is also a very unique solution to the market. There is no other distribution solution from the DevOps environment that is secured going all the way to devices. This will open a new field for J-Frost and introduce us to new users that currently are not necessarily using any kind of DevOps practices. So bottom line, I'm very pleased and I'm very positive regarding the future.
spk12: If I may just add to that, Sanjit, majority of our customers now joining on cloud. And that's a big attribution of that is free tier that we launched late last year. Actually, of the new customers, about 60% now joining on cloud. And that portion of new customers on cloud continues to grow.
spk03: That's very encouraging to hear. And then to sort of dovetail off the previous question, if we look back to last year, the other part of last year, there was a new pricing sort of rolled out for server customers. And I think in Q1, you saw a sizable cohort sort of take advantage of the opportunity to upgrade their subscription tiers to sort of bypass that price increase. What is sort of the team's sort of base case view on what those customer cohorts will do when they sort of come up for renewal this spring? Do you expect them to sort of – should we expect those price increases to sort of flow through starting in the spring, or do we expect some customer behavior to minimize the impact there? Any sort of base case view would be helpful.
spk12: Yes, I'll take that question. So, as you know, the price increased on April 1st. And since then, actually, the majority of our customers have already renewed at new prices. So, we continue to see same retention levels, growth retention levels as previously. So, our customers understand why we did that, and they accept new pricing and move forward. Actually, specifically to your question on Q1, our renewal base of customers in Q4 was bigger than in Q1. So really, I think that the market and the customers understand the value that we provide. They accept it and move forward. So we don't expect any changes in this pattern in Q1.
spk11: And just to remind everyone, this is only relevant to the self-hosted solution. So the growth in the cloud was not impacted by the price changes. And it was not just price changes, but also a huge amount of technology added to our platform during this year. So as Jacob mentioned, the churn is very low, retention very high, and also the net dollar retention has committed, climbed up. So we are very pleased with the results.
spk03: Appreciate all the color. Thank you, guys.
spk11: Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Jason Ader with William Blair. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hey, this is Sebastian on for Jason. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to double-click a little bit on this DevOps for connected devices market where connect and distribution products play. Can you maybe help us define what this market is and how it might be a little different from sort of the traditional DevOps market and any type of, you know, TAM metrics or market opportunity metrics you could provide.
spk11: Yes, thank you, Sebastian. We are very excited about this opportunity. And, you know, JFrog was established 12 years ago. We pioneered the DevOps market by introducing the binary solution, but we had the end in mind already from the start. Like, what is it that we really ask for? We asked for software update to happen at the edge. We want our devices to be connected. And therefore, any kind of efforts that you invest only on the developer's side or secure only part of your organization is lame. It's half-baked. And when we looked at the liquid software vision, our end in mind was getting the binaries all the way to the devices. When we started to be distribution a bit more than three years ago, we listed two years ago, we knew that there is a missing part. What happened after the data center? What happened after the cloud? What happened after your Kubernetes environment? And this missing part was connecting the devices to the CITD wall. So from the developer's machine, from the developer's keyboard, you will be able to push it all the way to the devices. Now what we see in the future, Sebastian, is not just millions and tens of millions of developers building 10 times, 20 times a day. We see billions of devices that need to be updated. And since binary is the only digital asset that moves from the developer hand to the device, to your iPhone, to your coffee maker, to any device that we use, we see a huge avenue of growth. We started with distribution. We then extended with PDN. We now acquired AppSuite and built J4 Connect. And I'm sure that the market will follow, but this is the real demand, the real change of digital transformation.
spk04: Got it. That's very helpful. And then if I could just follow up. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the go-to-market investments that you've made that could help accelerate the new customer acquisitions, the new logo lands? And then are you landing at higher ARRs as customers demand sort of a broader platform, or because a lot of these new customers are adding the cloud version, are they actually lower ARR lands?
spk11: So when you adopt the platform on-prem or cloud, you already pay more than $100,000. And this is the highest subscription of what we call the Enterprise Plus. In the cloud, obviously, you also go by consumption, but the base price is, in both cases, is over $100,000. In terms of the go-to-market, what we have built on the self-hosted and in the cloud is the combination of the freedom of choice to the user, to the developer, comes with more value and capabilities of the platform. So when you upgrade, you get security. When you upgrade again, you get highly available solution DR and so on. When you upgrade to the platform, you get distribution capabilities and so on and so forth. In terms of the cloud, obviously, when you use more, you pay more. That's the simple go-to-market philosophy that we have in J-PROG. On top of that, we provide you with a multi-cloud solution, so it's not just one cloud that you can run on, and this is also very appealing. And one thing that we hear from all enterprise, and remember, currently we have approximately 7,000 customers, this is... something that we hear from all Fortune 100 or Global 2000. Cloud is happening, but we need a hybrid environment. And JPEG is also very unique with providing that, giving you a hybrid environment for the same tool, whether it's in the cloud or hosted by you. So the overall go-to-market is evolving together with the evolution and the adoption of DevOps and DevSecOps in the market and very focused on this binary piece that the number of binaries in your organization is just growing. And if I may just add to that, you...
spk12: You're absolutely right that the majority of new customers land on cloud and typically the landing point on cloud is lower ASP. Having said that, given the fact that many of our customers have an opportunity to try the products on free tier and also the platform resonates with a lot of value to the customers, we started seeing some of the customers landing on the platform. It doesn't happen a lot, but every quarter we might have a few cases where new customers land on the platform. So on average, ASP did not change much. It increased slightly for new land, but on average it did not change much.
spk04: Got it. Thank you. Very helpful.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Koji Akira with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
spk14: Hey, Shlomi. Hey, Jacob. Apologies if these questions were asked. I've been bouncing around for a couple calls here. I wanted to ask you on billings. taking a look at the billings in the quarter, you know, it grows 34% according to our model. I guess the top comp, you know, do realize a lot of mechanics this year with billings, especially around the pricing change. But should we be heading into a period of normalization for billings over the next year? And I guess thinking about with cloud usage, should we be looking at billings at all, or is there something else that you suggest as a better forward-looking growth metric?
spk12: Koji, thank you for this question. Just to remind you that due to various dynamics, billing is not a very good predictor of future revenue growth because of core terms and a few other billing dynamics that we see from time to time. Now, you're also right that during this year, the B-Links picture was kind of skewed toward Q1, where we did have significant pull-ins, but Q4 came out very strong in B-Links. We don't see any one-time items there. We don't see any significant changes in duration, average duration of our contracts, so it's a kind of normalized course. Going forward, again, cloud is primarily annual term for on-prem, for self-coated solutions. We have some time multi-year deals. But we don't see any changes right now in average duration, in average contract duration. So Billings should be probably normalized. Again, to remind you, Billings is not a very good predictor of revenue growth because of this co-term dynamics that we experience from time to time.
spk14: Got it, got it. And then I think I overheard in the prepared remarks talking about net revenue retention. And, you know, Jacob, I think you made the comment that NRR should kind of hang around 130% level. But just thinking about cloud usage, you know, the cloud growth acceleration here in the fourth quarter, I mean, is there a potential for net revenue retention to actually end up over 130% in the future?
spk12: Yes, our cloud customers expand more than 30%. As the cloud continues to become a bigger portion of our revenues, that's definitely a potential right now. In our model and our guidance, we're assuming to be around 130%. Got it, got it.
spk14: All right, thanks, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Matai Kidron with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
spk10: Thanks. Hey, guys, and nice to see the acceleration and growth in the cloud. Jacob, I had a couple of questions for you. First, I just want to make sure I understand the Enterprise Plus. In the last couple of quarters, you've been growing that business 150% year over year. We're now down to under 90. Don't get me wrong, it's still a very impressive number. I'm just wondering if there's anything going on there in the adoption of Enterprise Plus.
spk12: No, we continue to see very strong adoption of Enterprise Plus subscription. The revenue continues to grow. Today it represents 35% of the revenue. The number of customers adopting Enterprise Plus actually grew nicely in Q4. We don't see any unique trends.
spk10: Okay, very good. And then as a follow-up on the OPEX policy, You know, a lot of companies that have bases in Israel have been calling out a lot of FX headwinds. Can you kind of elaborate a little bit? I know you've been hedging somewhat, but I don't know how far out you do. But as I think about your guidance for the year, what kind of a headwind are you seeing from FX, and how should I think about that going forward?
spk12: Yes, you're absolutely right that headwinds, We have significant portion of our operating expenses denominated in Israel and over the past year and a half, it's complete. We do hedge, but you cannot hedge forever. And eventually the less favorable rates catch up. So the impact on overall profitability as we see right now is about 2 percentage points in 2022. And if the situation changes and we see opposite trends, then it will help us. But this is what we're currently seeing.
spk10: Very good. Good luck, guys. Thanks. Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question will come from Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
spk07: Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking my question, guys. I'm curious on the customer count front. Realizing you just disclose it once a year, but there was a few acquisitions during the year itself, is that an organic 600 customers? Is that a net addition? Because you mentioned the 200 that had turned off as well.
spk11: Yes, so thank you for the question. As we reported in Q3 when we acquired VDU and AppSwift, there was no material revenue coming from this acquisition and also no significant amount of customers. So the answer is yes, this is the organic growth of the JPEG customers on the JPEG platform in most cases.
spk07: Given the opportunity post Log4j, how do you think about customer growth as you look at 2022? Should that, again, be an accelerating type of metric for you?
spk11: Yeah. Well, obviously, I'm not happy about what happened with Block4Chain in the world. It's not that we're underrating it. It emphasized the need for solutions like what J4 provides, because there is no other solution in the DevOps public market that gives you such a binary-centric approach, not only to security, but the whole remediation of episodes like Log4j. It happened before with NPM. It happened before with Python. And be sure, we will hear about another binary or software package that comes with a vulnerable impact in the near future. It will just happen. And what we see is more and more customers starting to understand that the holistic security solution must come with a single source of record solution like a repository that also control what you bring in and outside of your organization. And then a security solution that go across the old pipeline, give you control over your repository or distribution, build, test, deployment environment. and obviously to recover fast with the distribution. So log4j is one example. It got all the way to the White House, but j4 customers were not just well protected but also well recovered and saved Millions of developers around the world by using Airtel. So I believe that we will see a significant adoption of security solution under the different subscription coming from JFO.
spk07: Great. Thank you very much for the color. Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. And we do have time for one more question. That will come from Steve Enders with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk02: Great. Thanks for taking questions here. I just want to follow up on that last point there, Shalini, around securing the software supply chain in Log4J. I mean, is this seeing, I guess, increased pipeline activity at this point where, you know, now that people have maybe gotten on the other side of Log4J and spent all of the holidays and into January dealing with it, is this leading to increased opportunities for JFrog to go execute against it?
spk11: Yes, the answer is yes, clearly. And the amazing research and engineering security team in JFrog posted, I think, more than any other company in the market following the Log4J, what would be the best practices to manage it in the future and to protect your company from it. So the answer to the pipeline is yes. We hope that there will be no more low 4G, but yes, it helps the pipeline a lot.
spk02: Okay, that's helpful. And just want to touch on, it looks like there's good traction within the global 2000 that happened in 2021 from what you disclosed. How would you kind of attribute what led to the really good customer growth within the G2K in 2021? Is this a function of the increased focus on strategic sales teams that have been built up in the past couple of years, and I guess how penetrated do you see the opportunity within the GTK accounts today?
spk11: Yeah, so global 2,000 customers that are adopting digital transformation practices are not just looking at one solution. Usually, when they look at the old solution, they are looking at cloud strategy versus on-prem, They are looking at security versus DevOps practices and obviously replacing in-house solutions that would be 10, 15, 20 years ago. All of the above is addressed by our strategic sales team because they have the capabilities to land on the customer's side, work with different persona, answer different needs, bringing along architects that can help our customers and partner with them as they are adopting digital transformation. Global 2000 customers will go in different avenues and different deployment environments.
spk12: And if I may just add to that, when we went public, our penetration to Global 2000 was about low 20s. I think it was 22%. And today we're above 30% in penetration on Global 2000. So we continue our adoption of the Global 2000 customers continue adoption of our products at a nice pace. Yes.
spk02: Perfect. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk06: Thank you for participating in today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Shlomi Benheim for any closing remarks.
spk11: Well, everyone, thank you for joining us. That was a hell of a year, and we are very excited about our performance. We are happy to see the company growing and the community and our customers adopting more and more of our products and technology. I'd like to thank again for the amazing Frogs team that made this year happen, and I would like to thank you for joining us today, next week. We are welcoming you to join us on our first Investor Day podcasting from NASDAQ in New York. Thank you, everyone, and may the frog be with you.
spk06: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now.
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