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spk03: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to JFrog's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I'll hand the conference over today to Joanne Horn of JFrog Investor Relations Team. Joanne, please go ahead.
spk04: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as we review JFrog's first quarter financial results, which will be announced following market close today via press release. Leading the call today will be JFrog's CEO and co-founder, Shalmi Benhaim, and Jacob Shulman, JFrog's CFO. Before we get started, 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 second 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. You are cautioned 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 obligated 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, 2021, followed with the SEC on February 11th, 2022, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website, and the earnings press release issued earlier today. Additional information will be made available in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, 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 JFROG'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. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to JFROG's CEO, Shalmi Benhaim. Shalmi?
spk07: Thank you, Joanne, and greetings from the Swamp. Before we begin today's conference call, I want to say that our thoughts and well wishes continue to be with the millions of victims due to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. We hope and pray for more peaceful days ahead. Welcome again everyone to JFrog's first quarter earnings goal. 2022 got off a strong start for JFrog with the highest revenue growth in the past six quarters. These results are a clear reflection of several key strategies we implemented, joined with our cloud-first security focus, end-to-end platform approach, and impressive self-execution. As we will share today, Q1's numbers across all key metrics show how product-led mindset, market demand, and strategic investments are all aligned with our goals, leading to a sustainable, fast-growing company consistently generating positive free cash flow. Our first quarter revenue was $63.7 million, reflecting 41% growth year over year, compared to 39% reported in the previous quarter. This growth exceeded the midpoint of our guidance by 4%. Our cloud revenue in the first quarter grew by 63% year over year, compared to 52% reported in the previous quarter, driven primarily by increased usage of our security capabilities and growing adoption of our platform subscription through our cloud marketplace channels. As a result of this demand, the number of customers with ARR over $100,000 also grew significantly to 599 compared to 537 in the previous quarter. And our trailing four-quarter net dollar retention expanded to 131% compared to 130% in the previous quarter. During the first quarter, we saw a trend of more companies moving forward, adopting one-stop solution, going from binary storage then to security, distribution capabilities, all provided in our integrated platform. This end-to-end adoption is driving higher consumption by our customers. Now allow me to elaborate more about the following strategies and changes we applied that drove the company's growth in this quarter. First, investment in our cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud offerings. JFrog's strategy of enabling a hybrid environment is being validated daily by our customers who are considering or already moving between cloud and on-prem with their DevOps and security tools. Second to security, our security solution is setting a new standard in the market. Modern organizations already understand that security scanning isn't enough and need a holistic solution to secure their software supply chain. Third, Our end-to-end platform approach delivers full binary lifecycle control, allowing companies to build faster, secure easily, and distribute in a fully automated flow. Our investment in a unified enterprise-grade platform is key to the growth we see. Fourth, our 360 funnel management and investment. Not only is JFrog bottom-up, but also selling top-down. Sales are not only direct and through our inside and strategic sales teams, but now we will also be expanded through partners and channels. Today, I will share with you how these focus areas are fulfilling our goal strategy. In Q1... we continue to see that binaries, or software packages, are at the crossroads of the modern software supply chain. As our customers well know, binaries are brought into the organization from third-party hubs, and binaries are what you build, secure, automate, and deploy. There is no way to manage and automate your software all the way to runtime without managing your binaries. Increasingly, As our customers demonstrated, the runtime of choice is trending towards cloud. I'm pleased to announce that during the first quarter, we recorded the largest ever single company cloud contract in JFrog's history. A manufacturer of semiconductor and industrial software is undergoing a massive digital transformation and promoting a strategic transition to the cloud. They started with JFrog Artifactory, grew into adoption of the entire JFrog platform, and are now completing their end-to-end cloud standardization across all business units. While this deal is an amazing achievement, it also validates our long-held strategy to provide customers with hybrid and multi-cloud solutions that will serve them across deployment environments as they migrate to the cloud. As another example, within this quarter of a full platform subscription in the cloud, one of the largest American-based manufacturers of automotive software saw a need to standardize its DevOps processes and incorporate security. After already utilizing J4G Artifactory as a single source of proof for DevOps, the customers reached out to us to normalize software distribution across its global team. In partnership with our strategic sales team, the manufacturing customer moved to JFork Platform Enterprise Plus subscription in the cloud, which led to a net new ARR of $500,000. Moving to security, we were all reminded in Q1 that the global software supply chain is under constant attack. As we mentioned in our Investor Day in February, there was undoubtedly a new Lock4J incident coming around the corner. Regrettably, a new critical vulnerability, Spring Shell, came just weeks after Lock4J affected the entire industry. This only made it more apparent that we need a new approach to SecOps that couples automatic identification and rapid remediation across an entire company. The combined power of J-Fog Artifactory and X-Ray continues to protect customers from these types of incidents, turning what could be days and weeks of finding, fixing, replacing, and testing down to just a few hours. We see net new and existing customers upsell pipeline being generated for JFOG solutions based on both industry leading tools and our outstanding and trained security research team. This dedicated team is already demonstrating industry leading zero day vulnerability detection capabilities with more discoveries than other security companies in the domain. The security research team is also working closely with our product groups to integrate an in-depth analysis of vulnerability directly into the J-PROG X-ray database to protect customers more quickly. We were also excited to continue to extend the security capabilities in Q1, announcing contextual analysis features. JFrog X-Ray now allows customers to more precisely determine the relevance of security vulnerabilities by looking at not just the binary itself, but also the environment it lives in or how it's configured. The unique functionality powered by JFrog Artifactory and X-Ray assists already overstretched DevSec ops teams and allowing them to quickly address the most critical security gaps And disregard irrelevant ones. To illustrate the value of our security offering, one of Europe's leading automobile manufacturers has turned to the JFrog platform to secure its software supply chain as the manufacturers develop self-driving car technologies. They have heavy dependencies on third-party software, and the holistic security coverage JFrog delivers, combining out the factory X-ray and distribution, led to an approximately $400,000 deal in Q1. The integrated team and technologies of JFrog and Vidoo are already making an impact on the market, and we look forward to further expanding our security solution in 2022. Let's move next to our end-to-end platform approach. One of JFrog's key differentiators is a focus not just on building better software, but getting it intelligently to where it is running and consumed across customers' distributed environments. Allow me to elaborate on the pain that organizations have with distributing software. Take a small globally distributed company which is developing one application. This single application must run in 20 different locations in the world. Each of those locations require different versions of the software to address the various export controls and compliance regulations with each country. The organization has to manage this process across all 20 locations each time releasing a new software version. Now take a large enterprise and multiply that effort exponentially as it manages hundreds and thousands of applications. JFrog continues to onboard customers and grow with more and more organizations choosing to meet these challenges with JFrog distribution as part of the unified JFrog platform. For example, One of the world's most used collaboration and meeting tools with nearly 300 million daily users is driven by a large development team in China with exactly these challenges. This company faces complications around the Chinese firewall, widely varied deployment environment, and consumers around the globe, quickly recognizing that only JPEG distribution could meet its needs. This contract was a net new win for the entire J4 platform. Going even further, software delivery doesn't end at the data center or the cloud anymore. Increasingly, companies are becoming connected device companies. This is why our strategic acquisition of AppSwift, now J4 Connect, is a key part of our liquid software vision. J4 Connect aims to bring together the world of IoT devices and the world of DevOps to create a unified flow across entire organizations from developers to devices. In addition to having tens of customers already using J4 Connect, we are seeing additional demand for managing large plates of devices remotely, including over-the-air updates, monitoring, controlling, and more. At the heart of our platform is our core flagship product, JPEG Artifactory, where we continue to innovate and support the developer and DevOps community with our universal approach. We recently expanded our offering by releasing support in Artifactory for the Dart programming language, an emerging technology driven by Google. This is a top 20 most popular technology of 2021. And support for its public repository, Pub, was a key request from the community, which we were happy to deliver. We are committed to the developer community by continuing to support all software packages and welcome dark developers to JFrog Artifactory. Finally, regarding our 360 panel management and investments. Last year, we focused on building a top-down sales motion with our strategic sales team, who are already showing results on growing the business across our top-tier accounts. This year, we are doubling down on partners and indirect sales. During Q1, we partnered with AWS for the support of their game initiative, and we were chosen as a key DevOps partner. JFrog already supports some of the most respected and well-known gaming platforms across the globe, including companies like Ubisoft, who see the partnership between JFrog and AWS as strategic to their business. In their own words, and I quote, we rely on JFrog Artifactory to provide a quick and easy way for each team to access their build tools, while the AWS Cloud enables cross-team collaboration so we can create the best video games on the market, end quote. These types of partnerships are just the beginning of a broader set of possibilities that JFrog can tap into. With increasing emphasis on resellers, partners, and alliances relationship within the software development ecosystem, we see attractive growth opportunities for JFrog as the global DevOps and security market expands. Speaking of relationships, we were honored to hear about the impact of JFrog's platform from some of our most trusted customers during our recent events. Our customers, Fidelity, spoke about the transition to the cloud and how J-Frog supported their massive scale at approximately 16,000 developers migrating thousands of applications in a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, all having to keep their products and services running. Fidelity showcased how J-Frog continues to be mission critical, not just for their development teams, but for the entire business. We were also very excited to see the use case of Vodcom supporting 23-plus business units, such as CA Technologies and Symantec, covering not only thousands of developers, but also extensive M&A activities and standardization, supporting about 6,800 deployments per day. They said, if you have ever looked at DevOps tools, It's like a periodic table of hundreds and hundreds of applications and integrations. Artifactory, X-Ray, and VDU, and a number of other JPEG pieces are a part of our standard sets. We are proud to have customers who put trust in us as they build out their DevOps and security journey. As we now turning to financials, I want to reiterate our commitment to building solid growth alongside an efficient business with positive free cash flow in 2022, as we have in the past and continue to operate this year and beyond. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Jacob Schulman, who will provide an in-depth recap of our quarterly results and update you on our outlook for both the second quarter and full year 2022. Jacob?
spk08: Thank you, Shlomi, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me echo Shlomi's comments that we are very pleased to have started the year with such a strong quarter, continuing the momentum we saw in the second half of 2021. As a reminder, 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 8K furnished to the SEC. Now let's turn to our financial results. Total revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2022, were $63.7 million, up 41% year over year. This is our strongest growth rate in six quarters and our third consecutive quarterly increase. Self-managed revenues, also often called on-prem, were $46.9 million, up 35%. We had a particularly strong quarter in cloud revenue growth up 63% to $16.8 million. As a reminder, we indicated in the second quarter of 2021, we believed cloud growth had bottomed and we would see a re-acceleration of growth. While we are pleased to see the continued momentum in our cloud business, driven by increased adoption of security solutions and the full platform, we would like to remind you that our cloud business is subject to variability due to usage-based revenue recognition. We believe the baseline growth rate for our cloud business is in the mid-50s percent range, with potential upside from increased customer usage. Net dollar retention for the four trailing quarters was 131%, in line with our prior commentary. As of the quarter end, we had 599 customers with ARR of over $100,000, up from 537 customers as of December 31st, 2021, and up 52% from 395 customers at the end of Q1 of 2021. In addition, we grew the number of over 1 million ARR customers to 16, adding one from Q4 and increasing by 60% year-over-year. As we discussed in the past, adoption of the full platform is a key factor in the increasing size of our customers. In Q1 2022, 35% of total revenue came from Enterprise Plus customers, up from 29% in Q1 of 2021. Before moving to the income statement, I wanted to provide an update regarding the pricing changes we made to some of our on-prem offerings one year ago, which, as a reminder, excluded all cloud subscriptions and the on-prem Enterprise Plus subscription. First, I'm happy to report that customer churn has remained minimal, consistent with historical trends. In the first quarter, we saw customers who previously took advantage of early renewals a year ago now renewing at the current pricing structure. When we announced the pricing increase last year, we noted it would equal roughly 10% of FY20 revenues or approximately $15 million. Since instituting the price change on April 1st of last year, We have recognized almost half of this contribution in reported revenues and would expect to see the remaining balance roll off over the next four quarters. We believe adoption of the price changes by our customers reflects the increasing importance that JFrog's platform solution delivers. We continue to explore additional opportunities to further monetize the value we provide our customers. our commitment to 30% plus revenue growth for the foreseeable future remains intact, even excluding the benefit we have seen from our on-prem pricing increase. Now let's review the income statement in more detail. Gross profit in the quarter was $53.8 million, representing a gross margin of 84.4% compared to 83.4% in the year-ago period. We continue to see our SaaS gross margins expand as a result of the steps we took in 2021 to improve our cost structure. We expect gross margins to remain between 83% to 84% for the balance of the year and moderated toward the low 80s over the long term as cloud revenues become a greater portion of total revenue. Operating expenses for the first quarter were $53.2 million or 83% of revenues, up from $35.8 million or 79% of revenues in the year-ago period. We continue to invest in our product offerings and building out our strategic sales and partner channels. Non-GAAP operating income for Q1 was $543,000 or 0.9% operating margin, compared to an operating income of $1.9 million of 4.1% operating margin in the year-ago period. Non-GAAP net income in the quarter was $158,000, or zero cents per diluted share, based approximately on 103.9 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter with $428 million in cash and short-term investments. up from $421 million as of December 31st, 2021. Cash flow from operations was $5 million in the quarter. After taking into consideration CAPEX, free cash flow was $3.9 million. Before we turn to the guidance, I want to remind you of the detail we provided last quarter around the cadence of the financial model for the year. There is no change to our expectation that the second quarter will be the low point for profitability, as beginning in the second quarter, we implemented merit increases to align with labor market benchmarks. Our profitability is expected to improve in the second half of the year. For Q2, we expect revenue to be between $65 million to $66 million. with non-GAAP operating loss between $2.5 million to $3.5 million, and non-GAAP loss per share of 3 cents to 4 cents, assuming a share count of approximately 99 million shares. For the full year of 2022, we are increasing our revenue guidance to the range between $276.5 million and $278.5 million. Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be break-even between negative $1 million to positive $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?
spk07: Thank you, Jacob. 2022 has seen a strong start for JFrog, and we are committed to building on this success across products, processes, and execution as we leap forward throughout the year. My team, JFrog employees, your dedication to always listening to the community and addressing the real pains in the market continues to bear fruit. These strong quarterly results are a testament and thanks to you. Looking forward to Q2, we are happy to finally meet our customers, partners, and the community in person again for the kickoff of our annual SwampUP user conference. This year, we're taking SwampUP on the road, visiting multiple cities, interacting with the global developer and security communities and customers. We invite you all to attend. Finally, We believe J-Frog is well positioned to drive further revenue growth in 2022 as we aim to deliver for J-Frog users, customers, and shareholders. I'd like to thank you all for your attendance today. May the frog be with you. And now we'll take your questions. Operator?
spk03: If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press the star, then the number one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, Press the pound key. Our first question comes from Mike Sikos with Needham & Company.
spk06: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question here. And good to see the revenue outperformance as well as far as the acceleration in revenue that you guys were able to report. I did have a question. And I guess first, if we could come back to that revenue acceleration we were talking to, could you help us think about what went wrong? right for you guys? What came in the quarter that maybe you hadn't anticipated which drove these stronger results that we're seeing today?
spk07: Mike, thank you for joining the call and thanks for the question. We actually looked very well into the growth that we observed this quarter. And as we detailed, there were three main reasons for this growth. Eight, is the growing adoption of our SaaS services in the cloud, mainly because of security, and probably after the Lock4J episode, when people understand that they need a holistic solution for their security. The second thing is the adoption of our end-to-end platform. It's not anymore just covering your repository or your security domain. You need an end-to-end DevOps platform to manage the full binary lifecycle all the way to deployment. And third is our consistent investment in our strategic testing that drove not only to more and more customers that are adopting the full platform, but also higher entry point and lending POs. within our customer portfolio, plus the improvements of the strategic team working with the partners, mainly the cloud partners. Those are the main three reasons for the growth you saw in Q1.
spk06: Thank you for outlining that. And if I could squeeze one more in, this would be more for Jacob, I think. Good to see the revenue raise for the full year in excess of the Q1 beat. I know that we're maintaining the full-year operating profit outlook, and I know that we're talking about this cadence being the same as what you guys had spoken about last quarter, where Q2 is going to be the low point before profitability improves. Just curious, can you provide an update? Why not take up the full-year profitability? I just wanted to get a better sense of, I guess, some of the assumptions that you guys have in that profit guide, and then if you could also talk in any way to the potential FX movements that you guys are seeing in conjunction with that, that would be terrific.
spk08: Yes. So let me first address the potential FX. As we noted in the previous quarter, the negative trend in FX impacts us at about two points. Please know that for 2022, we've cashed at a very sufficient level, so this volatility that we're seeing right now does not actually impact us, and the improvements in the dollar rates versus Israel Shekel actually will be resulting in a better environment toward the end of the year, more 2023, just because we very well cashed for this year. With regards to overall profitability, as noted previously, we continue to grow as a very efficient business and continue to generate free cash flow. There are a lot of opportunities in front of us, specifically in additional offerings and security and ConnectX, Connect products. We're also building our market channels and partnership alliances, so we have a lot of areas of investments with very attractive ROI, and that's why we continue to be understand that for the year we're going to be at the break-even levels.
spk06: Understood. Thank you very much to both of you. I really appreciate it. I'll jump back in the queue now.
spk03: Our next question comes from Brad Rebeck with Stiefel.
spk11: Great. Thanks very much. Shlomi, you talked a bunch about various initiatives on the sales and marketing side, top-down sales, partners, AWS, especially on the cloud. Is there an opportunity for these efforts to lead to an acceleration of customer growth or customer count? You know, last year was up 10%. Can we see that accelerate here this year?
spk07: Yes, absolutely. And thank you for emphasizing this subject. As you know, and as we guided the market, we are building our sales force peer-to-peer From a completely bottom-up inside sales machine, we built in the past 18 months a very strong strategic team that also comes from the top-down. And it's now the time, as we shared in our investor day last February in New York, it's now the time to double down on partnership, on strategic alliances, working with the ecosystem, not just to accelerate the growth, but to also expose JFOG or other solutions to prospect a new customer? So my answer is yes. It will happen in three different directions. Obviously, the immediate suspects are the major cloud players, and these guys are already working very closely with us. The second thing that we are developing is all the system integrators' relationships. And last, all the professional service strong companies that are in the domain of DevOps and security. So, yes, we should see growth not just in AR, but also in new customers coming from partners in China.
spk11: Excellent. Thanks very much.
spk03: Our next question comes from Itai Kidron with Oppenheimer.
spk10: Thanks, guys. Solid numbers. Shlomi, I want to start with you first on the growth, the cloud growth, the acceleration. They're great to see that. Can you talk about the maturity of your cloud platform, and more specifically, when you look at customers and how they're using the cloud platform here and now, how is it different, do you think, than how they used it a year ago? Would it be types of applications and use cases, or... how broadly, pervasively they're using it in their own organizations.
spk07: Hi, Ty, and thank you for the question. The answer is actually split into two. Things that we did and invested in the cloud that drove to the goals that we see, the consistent goals that we see. This quarter was amazing, but we grew in the previous quarter and the quarter before as well. And the second thing is what happened in the market and we got our solution ready for it. So I'll start with the first one. In order to be a sustainable growing business in the cloud, you have to understand the dynamics in the market. There is no enterprise customer that we know in our portfolio that will move now just to a single cloud. The fact that we are providing not just a multi-cloud solution, but also a hybrid environment that allows you to migrate to the cloud according to your organizational needs. This is a platform J-Po. And it's not only cloud versus hosted, also the fact that you can actually run both of them in Palette. Alongside the holistic end-to-end solution, what we call the enterprise cloud subscription, it gives you capabilities not just as a repository in the cloud in a universal way, but also a security solution that runs on the repository, scan and make sure that you have no vulnerabilities in your single source of records, which is the repository. And then, obviously, the distribution, distribution to different clouds, distribution to different destinations, and everything that we now see that the market is asking. The second thing is how JPEG prepared itself. for more than 18 months to what is now exposed. We keep saying organizations are being vulnerable because of their binaries. There is no hacker in the world that will attack any other asset than your binaries. Log4j is one reminder. After Log4j, and a lot of others. And now, when you have a strong security solution that is well natively scanning your repository, of binary, I think that these draw more attention to the J4Cloud solution this quarter than ever before, when the headlines shouted Log4J and Spring Shell and other things that kind of caught the attention, not only of the developers, but also the CISO and the security stakeholders.
spk10: Got it, excellent. And then Jacob, for you, and maybe I'm kind of following up on Brad's question before, Clearly you're doing extremely well in upselling to customers. We can see that in your 100K customers and your million-dollar customers and your dollar expansion. So clearly the end-to-end motion is resonating with customers and they're upgrading. Is there a way, though, to think about the contribution to your growth and of volume versus price. I'm just trying to think about how much of your growth, again, is driven by this shift up tier, if you like to call it, plus the price adjustments you've made versus just a pure growth in the customer count. If there's a way for you to Try it for us. That would be great. I think investors, as I've been getting from investors, that there's just a concern that your base isn't growing enough and you're kind of squeezing the orange, meaning you're getting a lot of value from your existing customers. But the question is how much more new fields are you kind of sowing right here that you can leverage down the road?
spk08: I think there are a few aspects of that. If we're talking, again, folks, pricing increases and contribution of pricing increases. As I noted in my prepared remarks, about half of $15 million, which means $7.5 million in the past 12 months was revenue recognized from associated with pricing increases. Now, with regards to contribution of existing customers versus new ones, we continue to see that our average lands remain approximately $10,000. So our historically contribution to our revenue growth was from expansion of existing customers rather than land of new. We continue to land new customers, and we added about 10% of new customer count last year. And we expect, as you know, that we expect to grow that more in this year. So, you know, going forward, Our growth will primarily come from expansion of existing customers because this is what the land and expand model is about.
spk07: If I may add to it, to remind the public that the price changes we have done were only on the self-hosted solution and mainly at the enterprise and OX. So the platform subscription to see growing and the super fast-growing cloud was not subject to the price changes. So this is pure growth within our customers and new customers.
spk10: Yeah, maybe just to wrap that up, guys, when you think about the lands, Jack, we talked about your landing hasn't changed from a dollar standpoint, but do they start at different plans? Is the landing from a product standpoint any different today than it was a year ago?
spk08: We see, first of all, some of the customers are landing at higher lengths, and sometimes even on enterprise or even enterprise-plus. On the other hand, many more customers land on cloud, which is a smaller length. So, therefore, on average, ASPs are new customers of us. We may still extend change from prior periods.
spk10: Got it. Excellent. Good stuff. Thank you.
spk03: Our next question comes from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley.
spk02: Thank you for taking the question. Somebody wanted to get an update on the security progress on the integration with Upswift. I know G5 Connect has been out there with your customers. In terms of driving new deals or new expansion deals with your customers, where are we in that space? I'm sure we're early, but just in terms of if you could highlight some of the progress that you've seen with the Upswift integration and that broader end-to-end security positioning, what's been the early feedback like from customers?
spk07: Yes, hi, Sanjit. Obviously, the foods that we start to harvest are part of the investment of the inorganic additions to JFOC. Specifically regarding security, there are two elements here that are important to mention. A is that we have a very strong security, well-trained team that is building a better X-ray as stage one to serve our customers. And especially with what we see now happening in the world of SecOps, that's a great addition to existing customers. And also, we start to see more and more demand coming to us, not from our factory side, but from the X-ray side. The second side of the security investment is the security research team. Now, this is a team that is well-trained to find vulnerabilities before anyone else in the world knows about it. And to find a zero-day vulnerability and inject it into X-ray database, as mentioned in the script, is a plus for J4 customers because they are are better protected and faster in remediation processes. The security that JFrog X-Ray now gives them covers not only the features and the scanning and everything the technology covers, but also a very strong research team that reveals more and more zero-days, actually more than any other company in the domain. Regarding AppSwift, very good question. Long ago, we said binary and binary repository will be at the heart of your software supply chain. And now, de facto, it became the standard. A few years after, we said composition analysis security and security that relies on DevOps will be at the mainstream. This is happening now. What I'm saying now, and mark my words, developers will have to take responsibility all the way to the binary deployment of the device. And this is why the demand that we start to see Just by announcing J4 Connect, not even having it in production in our biggest customers, just the demand and the interest that we get from the market now represent the future pain and the future need of taking the binaries all the way secured and fast to the devices. J4 Connect, as a result of the AppSweep acquisition, already made the impact on the market, and we start to also see some partners that are also reaching out to us in order to integrate their solution with J4 Connect. So I guess that security is a low-hanging fruit, and J4 Connect would be the next reason for our goal.
spk02: Understood. Thank you so much for the color there, Shalemi. And then, Jacob, I wanted to sort of revisit the very popular macro thing guidance question that we've been asking all earnings season. From the lens of what you see out there in the market with your customers, your international customers in Europe, and any sort of vertical concentration that you may or may not have, could you describe the environment that you've seen thus far, not only for the quarter, but sort of coming out of the quarter? And then in terms of the assumptions on your guidance, How has your assumptions changed or not changed relative to last quarter with respect to deal closure rates, deal sizes, sale cycles, etc.?
spk08: First of all, to the first part of your question, Sajid, you're very well represented in various industries. A very diversified portfolio will not depend on any industry or any particular customer, so the diversification is the key. On the second side, yes, obviously there are macro changes in the market, but what we presented today in the guidance today, obviously we did not change their methodology. We continue to be prudent and cautious today with potential upsides in the future. So we're consistent in our methodology and we have not changed anything.
spk02: Got it. Understood. Thank you, Jacob.
spk03: Our next question comes from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.
spk05: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just one from me. So looking at the metrics of the business, it sure seems like everything's pretty good. Just a question here on the billing. I mean... based on our model, looks about 9%. You know, definitely off the tough cop. I understand there's pricing in there, but maybe affected a little bit by the cloud adoption too. So, you know, just, is there anything to call out in the billings other than the pricing or maybe the cloud adoption that we should be aware of? You know, how should we be thinking about billings going forward? Or I guess, is this even really a metric that we should be looking at anymore? Is there something else that we should be looking at from here? Thanks, guys.
spk08: Yes, I'll address that. Thanks for the question. We've been saying that for quite a long time, that the billing is not a very representative metric here. To provide you more context, last year we had a huge pull forward in the billings in advance of the price change that became deceptive on April 1st. So that's why we saw the significant increase pull-ins of renewals into Q1, and we quantified it to be about $24 million. So those customers who renewed back then will continue to renew unless they quote term during the year. So they will continue to renew in Q1. So that's why you saw probably the 9% growth in feelings just because of the significant pull-ins in the last year and some comparables. Adoption to the cloud also represents some kind of headwinds into the billings because typically on cloud we have two types of arrangements, annual contracts and pay-as-you-go monthly contracts. So if a multi-year on-prem customer transitions to cloud, that will be headwinds to the billing because of the annual nature of shorter-term duration contracts. Other than that, again, B-Links is really not a very representative metric in our business.
spk05: Thanks, Jacob. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Really, really appreciate it.
spk03: Our next question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair.
spk09: Thank you. Hey, guys. First question maybe for you, Shlomi. Can you give us an update on the competitive landscape? Any changes since the last... time we talked, in particular, I guess, how are customers thinking about end-to-end platforms and, you know, any kind of commentary on, in particular, GitLab, GitHub, trying to move into your territory of artifactory.
spk07: Hi, Jason. So regarding the landscape, as you remember, we put it in a kind of a four-tier model still. The majority of the big changes we are seeing is coming from replacing homegrown solutions. Some of it is migrated to the cloud. Some of it is being self-haussed. But still, companies are adopting what we call now mature DevOps and SecOps solutions. Regarding the source code, or specifically the two that you mentioned, GitHub and GitLab, Our solution coexists with source code management. There is no development organization that will not start or use source code management, and there is no organization that will scale without managing a full binary lifecycle. Regarding the roadmap, I keep hearing that they are planning to do what we are doing, but still in none of the pre-sales we are hearing that people are migrating to these solutions. Artifactory is solid rock, scalable. I think set the standard in the market of managing binaries. Our security is far more advanced and mature and protecting your binaries in a level that both cannot provide today. And, you know, at the bottom line, you look at the holistic solution, platform-based, the platform play, this is a game changer, especially when you think two years, three years, four years ahead, and you take everything together, including the hybrid solution, including the deployment, including distribution, including remediation. So it's not just putting a nice scanner over your Git repository. You have to think about the 360 of your DevOps platform. And the last is obviously the clouds. With the clouds, what we actually see is that our partnership is stronger than our competition. And we work together side by side. There are some overlaps. We are aware of that. And we trust our customers to choose what makes sense to them. At the enterprise, the multi-cloud is a killer. At the smaller business, the maturity of the product and the holistic solution, and the amount of features that we provide is a killer. So I think that what we will see more and more is that this competition in a very big market like DevOps and security is coexisting rather than competing.
spk09: Great. And then, Jacob, did you disclose RPO? I might have missed it.
spk08: No, RPO is disclosed on quarterly basis in our Q filings, but at the end of Q1, we've got approximately $172 million in RPOs.
spk09: Yeah, the reason I'm asking is because you're trying to steer us away from billings, but some software companies use RPO as kind of a proxy for bookings and kind of a leading indicator metric. Is that the case with JFrog? Should we be looking at RPO growth as kind of a leading indicator?
spk08: RPO is a better indicator than B-Links, but still, again, with the adoption of more cloud, we will see shorter duration of cloud agreements, so there's going to be headwinds to RPO as well.
spk09: Gotcha. And then any thought on buybacks, just given that you have a decent amount of cash and the The stock is somewhat depressed. Have you guys given any thoughts to that?
spk08: We see a lot of opportunity in front of us in the market, and we'll obviously invest in what is better for our shareholders.
spk09: All right. Good luck, guys. Thank you. Thank you.
spk03: Our next question comes from Michael Turitz with KeyBank.
spk12: Hi, Shlomi and Jacob and everyone. I'm glad to be on the call. Welcome back to Sanjay's macro question. And just ask what you're seeing in terms of the reaction of both, let's call it SMBs as well as enterprises, to the background situation in terms of their development projects. Are you seeing any slowing in those? Are you seeing it be more selective? And also, since they do have some in-house alternatives or self-built projects, Yeah, DIY. Is there any increased hesitancy in a tougher and inflationary environment to hold off on moving to a dedicated package?
spk07: Yeah, I hope I heard your question. SMB versus enterprise, very good way to distinguish the market. The enterprise all understand adopting DevOps It's not a question anymore. It's just a question of when it will happen, not if it will happen. And may I even add, having some assets in the cloud and to adopt Kubernetes. So cloud-native DevOps and security goes together in the enterprise. This is why we see that mature products like JFOG and the full end-to-end platform answer the enterprise demand. What we hear from the enterprise mainly is, is that they have to get the confidence that they can rely on JFrog to scale with them because the number of containers and Docker registries and images that they have to host, manage, scan, secure, and deploy is by millions a day. In our investor day, two of these enterprises, Fidelity and Botcom, mentioned the scale that I just mentioned. On the SMB, we start to see more and more small and medium business, not just looking for a single point solution DevOps, but to also combine with data security. And what happened there is that the developer of the world started to take responsibility over security engineering parts. And therefore, when they need to remediate from an episode like Lock4J, they need a tool that not only hosts the Lock4J, but also secures and helps them to remediate fast. So although the growth in the enterprise is more for the end-to-end solution as fast as they can, in the S&P we also see that there is more demand for more than just a single product. that is integrated together. So that's regarding the SMB versus enterprise. Is there another part of the question?
spk12: Just whether or not, in the current macro, are you seeing any slowdown in development projects?
spk07: No, no. Actually, the opposite. It's not just the number of developers. The number of developers is growing by... over 15% over here. This is nice. What we see is that there is more demand for developers to take more responsibilities throughout the full software supply chain. So what started as a movement is now the standard. And we see a growing demand in the market. And by the way, to be honest, not just for JFOG solution, but also observability solution, and also other solutions that complete the full software supply chain mechanism. So my answer is no. On the contrary, we see a growing demand, and I think that the next stop will be taking your software to the edge.
spk12: Thank you, sir.
spk03: Our next question comes from Rob Owens with Piper Sandler.
spk01: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. You touched on it earlier in the call, but I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit more on your channel strategy relative to how much of your revenue currently comes from the channel. And as you look at the appointment of Kelly Hartman to the new head of channel's role, what should we expect longer term? Is this to drive larger strategic types of opportunities, or is this to drive more of the velocity-related opportunities you're seeing now? Thanks.
spk08: So I'll address the first portion and then Shlomi will go over some more strategy. So today our channel is very, very minimal relatively to the entire overall business. Revenues that come in from marketplaces, they're approximately 10% to 15% of overall BAU's business. It's growing very fast, actually, a very fast-growing channel for us, but still a smaller portion of our entire revenue. We also have some resellers who act more as procurement agents rather than valued resellers or system integrators. So it's really a green field for us to expand this program and this go-to-market notion.
spk07: Yes, and regarding the strategy, As I mentioned before, the next logical step for us is to build a very strong mechanism that works with partners, work with the top five IS of the world in different regions, in places and organizations that we didn't get into. And this is not just government or highly regulated environment, but a very big project. We moved all partners and channels activity under our CRO organization and hired a very senior, savvy partner leader to manage it all. This will be split, as everything else, between the cloud and the on-prem. And while in the cloud it's more mature because we built a partnership with AWS, with GCP, and with Azure, We are now paving the way for more collaboration with the system integrator, with the professional service company, and not just PO handlers that we see now coming from the market. The big thing, the big change that we expect to see is that currently most of those partners are reaching out to us also online. on a full inbound way because the customer sent them to work with J4. And what we want to see is that these partners are also working with us in order to reach out to the market that we are still not exploring, in different geographies and in different domains.
spk01: All right. Thank you.
spk03: I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Shlomi Benhaim for closing remarks.
spk07: Guys, I would like to thank you all for joining us today. In today's market, it's very important that the company will be focused on the strategy and allocate not only the resources but also the capital in a wise way. J-Frog is paving its way to a very successful 2022. And may the frog be with all of you. Thank you very much.
spk03: this concludes today's conference call thank you for participating you may now disconnect
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