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spk02: Good morning. My name is Audra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the SolarWinds Q3 2022 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. I would like to turn the conference over to Tim Karraja. Please go ahead.
spk03: Tim Karraja Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the SolarWinds Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. With me today is Sudhakar Ramakrishna, our President and CEO, and Bart Kallsu, our CFO. Following prepared remarks, we'll have a question and answer session. This call is being simultaneously webcast on our investor relations website at investors.solarwings.com. On our investor relations website, you can also find our earnings press release and a summary slide deck, which is intended to supplement our prepared remarks during today's call. Please remember that certain statements made during this call are forward-looking statements, including those concerning our financial outlook, our market opportunities, our expectations regarding customer retention, and our evolution to a subscription-first mentality, the impact of the global economic and geopolitical environment on our business, the timing of the phases of our subscription evolution, our gross level of debt, and the impact of cyber incident and cybersecurity generally on our business. These statements are based on currently available information and assumptions. and we undertake no duty to update this information except as required by law. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including the numerous risks and uncertainties highlighted in today's earnings release and our filings with the SEC. Copies are available from the SEC on our investor relations website. We completed the subpoena of Enable on July 19, 2021, and accordingly have included the results of the Enable business as discontinued operations for historical periods. Therefore, the financial results presented on this call reflect SolarWinds as a standalone business and do not include any contribution from the Enable business. Furthermore, we will discuss various non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. Almost otherwise specified, when we refer to financial measures, we will be referring to the non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today's calls are available in our earnings press release and summary slide deck on the investor relations page of our website. As a reminder, beginning with the first quarter of 2022, we no longer adjust our revenue for the impact of purchase accounting. For the third quarter of 2022, non-GAAP total revenue is equivalent to our GAAP total revenue. Finally, we note that the financial results discussed on today's call and in our earnings release are preliminary and pending final review by us and our external auditors, and we will not be final until we file the quarterly report on phone. Thank you. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Sudhakar.
spk04: Thank you, Tim. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As always, I'd like to start by thanking our employees, customers, partners, and shareholders for their ongoing commitment to SolarWinds. I'm extremely proud of all our team accomplished during the quarter, considering a challenging macro environment. Let me start with a few comments on our third quarter 2022 results. We had several highlights, including continued subscription revenue growth in line with our subscription first strategy, continued execution on customer retention, healthy EBITDA margins reflecting our commitment to expense and operating discipline, expansion of our routes to market with our announcement of our Transformer Partner Program, strong adoption of hybrid cloud observability representing the superior value that we believe we deliver to customers, continued federal business execution demonstrating our strength in and commitment to the public sector, and major product announcements including key milestones in our observability evolution. I'll touch on some of these before turning it over to Bart. for more color on the quarter, as well as our financial outlook for the balance of the year. In Q3 2022, we delivered revenues of $179 million, down 1% year over year. Excluding an approximately $1 million currency headwind since we provided guidance, revenue, assuming foreign currency exchange rates used in our previously issued outlook, would have been within our guidance range, and on a constant currency basis, we delivered a 1% year-over-year growth. I'm excited to report that in Q3, our in-quarter maintenance renewal rate was 91%, and our trailing 12-month renewal rates are now at 91%. Both these metrics were impacted negatively by currency headwinds, but even with that, I'm happy to report the strong execution. I attribute these results to the commitment of our team, the relevancy of our solution, the resiliency of our business model, and the trust our customers place in us. We continue to make demonstrable progress with our subscription first strategy and deliver third quarter subscription revenue growth of 31% year over year. While shifting to a subscription-first strategy has resulted in some total revenue headwinds, we continue to believe it is the right strategy for our business as we focus on growing annual recurring revenues to over a billion dollars in the coming years. The improving bookings mix and conversions from maintenance to subscriptions lay the foundation for even more predictable revenue and the opportunity to expand our lifetime value with customers. We ended the third quarter of 2022 with 882 customers who have spent more than $100,000 with us in the last 12 months, an increase of 12% over the comparable period in the previous year. More and more, we are helping customers reduce tool sprawl achieve comprehensive visibility across multi-cloud environments, eliminate alert fatigue, and accelerate their digital transformation, leading to larger deal sizes. Adjusted EBITDA was $70.3 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39% in line with the outlook we provided. Now, I'd like to take a step back and reflect on the strategy we laid out at our Analyst and Investors Day one year ago and what we have accomplished since then. Last year, we talked about our retain, evolve, and grow strategy. We committed to our customers and to the industry that we will retain the best of what made SolarWinds what it is today, evolve with our customers' needs, and grow together in our mission to help customers accelerate their business transformation through simple, powerful, and secure solutions designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. I believe our portfolio and execution enable us to deliver the best time to value, best time to detect issues, and the best time to remediate issues in our customers' multi-cloud environments. We aim to be the best at improving our customers' security, productivity, and total cost. Our portfolio is broad, and we believe our addressable market is large. We're making strong progress in our database performance monitoring and service management parts of the business. But today, I'll focus on our evolution to observability and its significance to our future growth. A key element of our strategy is transitioning from monitoring to observability solutions to address the productivity, cost, and complexity challenges our customers increasingly face. We made tremendous progress during Q3, and many of you joined us for our first-ever SolarWinds Day event two weeks ago, where we made exciting announcements. First, we unveiled SolarWinds Observability based on our SolarWinds platform which will be the basis for all future solutions. This full-stack software-as-a-service solution is built to unlock the productivity of DevOps, DevOps, CloudOps, and ITOps professions. We also announced an updated version of our SolarWinds hybrid cloud observability solution less than six months after its initial introduction. Hybrid cloud observability now features enhanced anomaly detection capabilities powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning while continuing to enable SolarWinds customers to migrate from on-premises to SaaS at their own pace and while making the most of their IT investments. Traditionally, our business focused on tools which monitored network system applications and databases. However, hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments are becoming increasingly complex and more challenging for customers to manage. Our observability solutions are designed to solve this problem by providing comprehensive visibility into the complete environment in both public and private clouds to expedite anomaly detection and resolution. SolarWinds was built on a foundation and commitment to providing customers with simple, secure, and value-based solutions to help them digitally transform their companies. These latest announcements reinforce our foundational principles. Another element of our retain, evolve, and grow strategy we talked about at last year's Analyst and Investors Day was expanding our customer reach and, importantly, growing our partner ecosystem. To that end, we announced the launch of our SolarWinds Transform partner program last month. Transform represents our enhanced focus on channel growth and development, and we believe it will improve the way we partner with technology distributors, value-added resellers, global system integrators, managed service providers, and cloud partners across the globe. We are excited to strengthen our relationship with our partners in our shared vision to help customers accelerate their business transformation. We also make key leadership hires to support our channel growth, including Chad Reeves, who joined SolarWinds during the quarter as our President of America's Sales and Global Challenge. Chad brings 25 years of technology industry experience serving in leadership positions at IBM and most recently at VMware. Now I want to take a moment to address the macro environment. Amongst others, one thing that has stood out to me during my tenure at SolarWinds is the resiliency of our business model and the stickiness of our solutions, particularly during challenging periods. We believe our highly cost-effective solutions Diversified customer base, compelling value proposition, and high-velocity transaction models enable us to operate successfully through challenging macro environments. This is reflected in our consistently strong customer retention as reflected by our strong renewal rates. In addition, although we continue to see healthy demand and commitment from our customers, like many of our software peers, we did experience some delays in deal closures during the quarter, particularly in Europe. We'll continue to monitor the environment closely, but we remain confident in our long-term opportunity and are sharply focused on executing on our strategic priorities. We are and always have been focused on our capital allocation and expense management. We continue to seek to balance growth and margin expansion. Our management team has led companies through previous downturns, and we intend to diligently manage costs across our businesses. These attributes remain a foundation of who we are, and over the years, we have worked hard to build an even sturdier business model on this foundation. With that, I will turn it over to Bart to expand on our financial performance and to provide an updated, fuller outlook. Bart?
spk07: Thanks, Sudhakar, and thanks again to everyone joining us on today's call. I'd like to start by reminding everyone of our 2022 strategic focus around growing with a subscription-first mentality. With this, it is important to emphasize that our subscription transition will be multifaceted. The first phase of the transition entails selling subscriptions of both our existing on-premises products and our hybrid cloud observability products. The second phase of the transition begins with the recent launch of our SAS observability solution. It is our belief that these two models of subscription growth will persist in our business, and our overall focus is to grow subscription ARR while exercising operating discipline. Our third quarter results reflect our ongoing progress with this transition and represents another quarter of execution of our strategy. Turning to the numbers, we finished the third quarter with total revenue of $179.4 million, which is a slight decline compared to the prior year. And below the total revenue range of Outlook, we provided 180 to 185 million. Total revenue assuming the foreign currency exchange rates used in our previously issued Outlook would have been $180.3 million and within our guided range. Like other companies with foreign currency exposure, We felt the impact of the decrease in the value of the Euro compared to the U.S. dollar. On a constant currency basis, our total revenue would have been approximately $184 million, which is a slight increase over the prior year. We ended the third quarter with total ARR of $623 million, roughly flat compared to the prior year. And on a constant currency basis, our total ARR would have represented an increase of approximately 2% over the prior year. Our subscription ARR as of September 30th was $159 million, which is an increase of 23% year over year. This growth is mainly due to the execution of our subscription first strategy, as well as the conversion of a portion of our maintenance space to the hybrid cloud observability solution. Digging into the revenue details, our third quarter subscription revenue was $42 million, up 31% year over year. Our subscription revenue growth reflects the ongoing success of our subscription first efforts, The transition to a subscription-first strategy creates headwinds in the current quarter total revenue. However, we believe that an increasing percentage of new deals made on a subscription basis will result in a higher recurring revenue in the long term. Maintenance revenue was $114 million in the third quarter, which is a decrease of 4% from the prior year. As we have discussed recently, our maintenance revenue has been impacted by the conversion of a portion of our maintenance customers to subscriptions as well as the lower Euro to U.S. dollar conversion rate in 2022 compared to the prior year. Our maintenance renewal rate is at 91% on a trailing 12-month basis, as well as our end quarter rate for the third quarter. These rates are consistent with our historical performance, and both are impacted by currency headwinds. We believe this is a testament to the loyalty of our customer base and our focused customer retention and expansion efforts over the past 12 to 18 months. Note that as we convert maintenance customers to subscription arrangements, we will exclude those customers from the renewal rate calculation. For the third quarter, license revenue was $23 million, which represents a decline of approximately 22% as compared to the third quarter of 2021. Keep in mind that our new perpetual license sales performance will continue to be impacted by our subscription first focus. As noted previously, our increased sales of subscriptions offset the decline in license revenue in the quarter. Early in the year, we talked about how our federal customers were slowing to reach spending decisions, and we are pleased that we saw improved sales performance from our federal and public sector customers in the third quarter compared to a year ago. We finished the third quarter of 2022 with 882 customers who have spent more than $100,000 with us in the last 12 months, which is a 12% improvement over the previous year. This marks the third consecutive quarter with double-digit growth in this metric. We continue to supplement our traditional high-velocity, low-touch sales approach with the targeted efforts to build more strategic relationships with our enterprise customers, which we detailed at our Analyst and Investor Day one year ago. I'm also pleased to report that we delivered another quarter of strong non-GAAP profitability. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $70.3 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39%, which is in line with our outlook for the quarter, even as we continue to invest collectively in our business. Excluded from adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter are one-time costs of approximately $10.8 million of litigation and governmental investigation costs and other professional fees related to December cyber incident. We expect one-time cyber incident related costs to fluctuate in future quarters, and these one-time cyber costs are difficult to predict. Turning to our balance sheet, net leverage at September 30th was approximately 3.9 times our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA. Our cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investment balance was at $493 million at the end of the third quarter, bringing our net debt to approximately $1.1 billion. In September, we made a voluntary debt prepayment in the amount of $300 million. Our debt matures in February of 2024, and we expect to make an additional payment to further reduce our level of gross debt in parallel as we work on a potential refinancing. I will now walk you through our outlook before turning it over to Sudhakar for some final thoughts. I will start with our fourth quarter guidance and then discuss what that means for the full year. We arrived at our guidance taking into account the macro environment, FX headwinds, and the impact of our subscription first business model transition. For the fourth quarter, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $178 to $183 million, representing a slight 3% year-over-year decline at the midpoint. On a constant currency basis, revenue at the low and high end of the range would be approximately $5 million higher, and it would represent a range of 2% decline to 1% growth year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the fourth quarter is expected to be approximately 38% to 39%. Non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per share is projected to be 23 to 25 cents per share, assuming an estimated 162.2 million fully diluted shares outstanding. And finally, our outlook for the fourth quarter assumes a non-GAAP tax rate of 25%, and we expect to pay approximately 9.8 million in cash taxes during the fourth quarter. While our business model has proven to be resilient during challenging economic conditions and we remain confident in our business transition, we are lowering our full-year guidance. primarily driven by our cautious approach that macro and economic conditions could deteriorate further and FX headwinds may continue. We are appropriately accounting for the fact that we remain early in our subscription transition. For the full year, we now expect total revenue to be in the range of $710 to $715 million, which is a slight 1% year-over-year decline and compares to prior guidance of $715 to $725 million. On a constant currency basis, our total revenue guidance would be $725 to $730 million, or growth of 1% to 2% over the year. Adjusted EBITDA margins for the year are expected to be approximately 39%, which is consistent with the guidance we provided last quarter. While we continue to manage our expenses, we remain focused on our product roadmap, robust core execution, and subscription-first strategy. Non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per share is projected to be $0.87 to $0.89 per share, assuming an estimated 161.7 million fully diluted shares outstanding. Our full year and fourth quarter guidance assumes a euro to dollar exchange rate of 0.97. Finally, when you review our GAAP financials, you will notice an additional impairment of our goodwill, which resulted in a $279 million non-cash charge in the third quarter. We determined this impairment was appropriate in light of the current macroeconomic environment and the continued deterioration in the equity markets. We are happy to announce that last week we agreed to settle our securities class action lawsuit pending in the Western District of Texas for an amount that will be covered by insurance. While we still have ongoing government investigations related to cyber matters and will continue our approach of transparency and collaboration, having resolved this litigation will enable the company to focus on our strategy. You can find a more detailed update on our litigation and government investigations in our 8 file today. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Sudhakar for his closing remarks.
spk04: Thank you, Bart. The midpoint of the outlook Bart provided still represents year-over-year growth on a constant currency basis, which reflects our continued belief in the relevance of our solution, the execution ability of our teams, and most critically, the trust our customers and partners place in us. I'm very pleased with the momentum building for our new innovation, and I'm confident as ever in the long-term trajectory of our business. As we look to Q4 and to next year, I'd like to share three near-term priorities for us. First, we have a robust renewal business with over 90% renewal rate. We remain very focused on customer retention and expansion efforts as we have been for the past 18 months. Second, we continue to aggressively seek to drive subscription adoption across our business. While this has resulted and will likely continue to result in some variability in our reported revenue, the accelerated shift to subscription is consistent with how our customers want to consume our products and a key to our long-term strategy to achieve a billion dollars in ARR at mid-40s adjusted EBITDA margins in the coming years. And third, we will continue to exercise expense discipline in an increasingly challenging macro environment. As we look to 2023, we expect to continue to look for opportunities to invest selectively, to manage expenses tightly, and to improve our operating margins. We have an experienced management team, and we have led companies through many economic cycles. I'll conclude again by thanking our employees, partners, customers, and shareholders for their commitment to SolarWinds. Bart and I will now be happy to address your questions.
spk02: Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press start and the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll take our first question from Terry Tillman at Truist Securities.
spk01: Oh, great. Good morning, team. This is Connor Passarella on for Terry. Thanks for taking my questions. First one, I'd love to just dig a little bit deeper into federal this quarter. Seems like it was a pretty nice quarter in Q3, the busy season. Just curious on any important trends you saw amongst offerings or product adoptions during the quarter for these customers and maybe how the shift to SaaS for federal has stacked up against enterprise.
spk10: Just any call in there would be helpful. So thanks for your question.
spk04: On the federal side, as Bart mentioned and I highlighted, we had good growth in Q3. This is a result of not just like one quarter of activity. As you know, we have continued our engagement with our federal customers for a long time, and in particular for the last two years. And look at the quarter results as a further reflection of the confidence that the federal customers have in us, and broadly speaking, public sector, because we did well across the entire public sector, Fed and SLED, last quarter. A combination of factors, I would say. One is I keep highlighting the stickiness of our solutions and the relevance and the value that we deliver to customers. Two is the execution of our overall public sector teams in terms of engaging with customers, reaching out, supporting them through, call it challenging times, and building pipeline. So this is a trend that I expect to continue to improve as we move forward as well.
spk01: Perfect. That's helpful. Thanks for the color. Maybe just as a follow-up, as you think about international markets like Europe, it seems that there's still a continuation of longer sales cycles over there. How should we think about the pipeline in Europe and maybe the return of those deals as we move into next year? Thank you, guys. Absolutely.
spk04: Yeah, Europe, with regards to the foreign exchange issues, you obviously know them all, so I'm not going to belabor that, except to highlight that it did have an impact on our reported revenues. With regard to demand as it relates to pipeline generation, the demand has been strong across all regions, Europe included. That being said, due to, let's call it local conditions, be it in Southern Europe or in Central Europe, some deals get pushed, which is going to happen in every business almost in every quarter and particularly accentuated, let's say, in these environments. But at the same time, the trajectory of demand is on the up and we are managing our risk across the business in terms of deal closure rates. The beauty of our company, I would say, is We have a very large part of our business that's a transaction high-velocity business, and we are increasingly supplementing it with partner activity and call it the high-touch part of the business.
spk10: Great. Appreciate it. Thank you.
spk12: We'll move next to Matthew Hedberg at RBC Capital Markets.
spk11: Hey, everyone. This is Simran on for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking our question. My first question is that with the continued pressure, can you give us any update on SME spending and if there continues to be heightened scrutiny on deals over there?
spk04: I'd say a lot more of the scrutiny happens to be in call it the upper mid-market and enterprise. The SME segment, typically in these environments and especially with the cost effectiveness of our solutions, continues to be more robust, quite simply because of the base of customers that we have. And so customer concentration is really, really low. And unlike, let's say a pure play enterprise vendor, we are very broadly diversified across a large base of customers. So I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly soft about the SME itself.
spk11: Okay, got it. And then also, you recently announced the launch of SolarWinds Observability. How has that initial response been, and what would you say are the key benefits to that platform?
spk04: Absolutely. It's been a little over two weeks, I would say, since we launched this. The initial response from, call it a pre-trial standpoint, with customers has been very positive, and likewise with analysts as well. We recognize that this is going to be a journey of evolution from monitoring to observability. So don't look at it as we stop what we are doing and then shift everything over to this. As much as it's a continuum for customers as they deploy multi-cloud environments, as they think about evolving from premises to the cloud. And so the advantages that we provide, I'll state them quite simply, are one is that we are the only vendor that provides them a full continuum from premises to multi-cloud environments, number one. Number two is that we provide the same levels of simplicity and cost-effectiveness, ease of use that we have always been known for. And we are able to deliver the best full-stack capabilities. By that, what I mean is a combination of network system application and databases observability, including security observability, on the same platform. So continued focus on cost effectiveness, continued focus on ease of use, ease of deployment, and continued ability to give them full visibility to their entire environment.
spk12: Got it. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Patrick Schultz at Baird.
spk00: Hey guys, congrats on a great quarter and thanks for taking my question. I guess first, it sounds like your partner strategy is just continuing to evolve. So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see the partner ecosystem progressing in light of the current macro conditions and what the recent product announcements you had at Solar Wednesday. How important is that partner ecosystem as you look to bring your solutions to market? Absolutely.
spk04: Again, thanks for your comments and questions. First, let me start with the high end or a higher end of the customer segment that we've been reaching out. The velocity of the transaction side of the business has always relied on partners. And so think of this as amplification of it with both traditional value added resellers as well as MSPs. And now coming to the new products that you mentioned, the focus has been to work with large global system integrators. The relevance of us to them is only increasing. We have had very strong and close relationships now building with the global system integrators where they're able to put their entire sales teams to work and integrate our solutions into their offerings and help us participate in larger digital transformation initiatives. The reason for highlighting that from our perspective is we are the technology supplier in this overall equation. That's a market that we traditionally have not accessed, quite simply because it also tends to be longer sales cycles and more expensive. But having GSIs on our side is going to help us reach better through the Transform program and also do it in a cost-effective manner. So I'm very excited about our opportunities in the broader enterprise space as we digitally transform customers with these solutions. To date, we did not have those solutions, but now we do, and we also now have the relationship.
spk00: Great. That's very helpful, Kala. And then just a quick one on renewal, just given the ongoing macro uncertainty. how should we be thinking about the renewal level? Is the low 90% range sustainable even if we do enter into a more challenged macro period? And then are you seeing renewal rates diverge based on either the customer cohort sizes or geographies? No.
spk04: As Bart mentioned, despite currency headwinds, we've been able to maintain or get to our 91% trailing 12-month renewal rates. My belief... in talking to customers and looking at various partners is that that will continue to sustain.
spk10: Great. Thank you guys so much for my questions.
spk12: We'll go next to Eric Septercher at JMP Securities.
spk06: Yes. Thanks for taking the questions. First off, Bart, you noted margin expansion in fiscal 23. Curious if you can give us any context in terms of what you would aspire for there. Then secondly, can you talk a little bit about what is going on from an interest expense perspective as rates move up? How should we be modeling interest expense? And then lastly, Sudhakar, when you're talking about your partners, your global system integrators working with SolarWinds, when are they using SolarWinds as part of their portfolio versus other observability technologies?
spk04: Maybe I can address that first, Eric, and then Bart can chime in on the margin expansion. But I'll also highlight that we give a full view of 2023 when we report our Q4 results as well, including margin goals that we have established. And as I wrote, as I mentioned in my prepared comments, Expense discipline and margin expansion is a key near-term priority for us as we enter 2023. Now, coming to your question, Eric, I would say it varies. We are engaged with a few very large and significant global system integrators at this point. At least in one or a couple of cases, their strategy and approach, given the comprehensiveness of our overall portfolio, especially now with both hybrid cloud observability and SaaS, is that we will increasingly become their sole observability vendor. That is at least the stated strategy. I can't go into a lot of details yet just because those have not yet been fully announced, but that is the path we are taking. So just like we are consolidating tools and reducing tool sprawl with our customers, we're also helping GSIs essentially consolidate different vendors monitoring solutions onto a common platform that has the broadest applicability to customers as they digitally transform. So that's kind of one approach. The other approach in some of the system integrators is much more pointed. meaning that they will either take our database monitoring solution as the first solution into the customer, or for that matter, our service management solution. So providing both an integrated platform as well as some of the more discrete solutions helps them pick and choose in that context. But increasingly, we are seeing their interest in the whole portfolio, given the advancements we've made in the last 18 months or so.
spk06: Great. Thank you. And Bart?
spk07: And Eric, as far as our interest expense goes, you know, we're in the process of trying to work on refinancing our debt, so it's a little difficult for me to tell you exactly what to say from a modeling perspective. Obviously, the recent spike in interest rates has caused our cash tax, our cash interest to go up. I think it was around 14 million of interest that we paid in the first quarter. That number is up to about $24 million in the third quarter. And obviously that was impacted by, you know, us paying down some of our debt in the third quarter. So when you're modeling it out, you know, you should assume that somewhere in that it'll be a little bit, it'll be in that $24 million range, maybe slightly less because we made a payment in the middle of the quarter.
spk10: Very good. All right. Thank you.
spk12: Our next question comes from Bob Poing at Morgan Stanley.
spk08: Hi, this is Bob filling in for Sanjay. Just a question on your observability product that you wrote out on AWS and Azure. Maybe, can you talk about pricing in these products and in terms of how they stack up against competitors in terms of pricing? Absolutely.
spk04: So our goal is to continue to be a cost-effective solution, I would say, across the industry. So in that sense, compare very favorably with our competition. It'll be very difficult to provide like exact apples to apples because we tend to package and sell more full stack capabilities. And that has, again, has the same connotation that I was highlighting on the hybrid cloud observability of tool consolidation and simplification of deployment environments. But on the other hand, I will reinforce that our pricing strategy continues to be not so much a price leader. In other words, I've mentioned this at our analyst day, we are not a cheap and cheerful company, so to speak, as much as we deliver serious business value at a compelling cost point or price point.
spk10: Okay, thank you.
spk02: And as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star one. We'll go next to Kirk Maturne at Evercore ISI.
spk05: Yeah, thanks. So, Dr., on the observability side, can you just talk about sort of the thought process about where the customers come from, meaning are these customers that are early on in the journey to the cloud? Are these know potential customers that have started down the path with another vendor i'm just trying to get a sense on how much of this opportunity for you all is going to be greenfield versus maybe replace and how that might um you know might go over the over the long term thanks absolutely so i'll give you kind of the trends that we've seen to date since the introduction of our hybrid cloud observability solution in april and then i'll paint a picture on how to think about this as we get into 2023
spk04: As it relates to hybrid cloud observability, I would segment the adoption of the solution in two ways. One is our existing customers who are on a maintenance arrangement evolving and expanding with hybrid cloud observability for two reasons. One is the total and comprehensive functionality that we deliver to them, as well as the on-ramp that we provide them to the cloud. So in other words, they can move to the cloud at the pace at which they are ready to move to. So that's one set of customers. The second set of customers, which represent green field opportunities for us, are customers displacing, I would say, legacy monitoring solutions in favor of hybrid cloud observability, again, for the reasons I mentioned, consolidation of tool sprawl, elimination of alert fatigue, and so on. Now, coming to the SaaS observability, which will again be a continuum of the hybrid cloud observability, I expect more of the customers in the initial phases to be, call it, our traditional application monitoring customers, and largely speaking in the mid-market, but evolving to the enterprise segment. But that's early days still, given that we just announced it two weeks ago.
spk05: Okay, that's very helpful. And then, Bart, you mentioned that the federal business did better this quarter. I guess, is there anything specific going on there just in terms of normal buying patterns returning? And how should we think about that vertical as an opportunity?
spk07: Yeah, you know, just the federal space is always – the third quarter is always our most active quarter when it comes to our federal business just because that's the end of their fiscal year. That's always been the case. We also – earlier in the year, we talked about – We actually made a small acquisition of a company called Monolitic, which is a service provider to some federal customers of ours. So we've made a lot of investments in time with that customer base over the last year and a half or so for obvious reasons. And so we continue to see opportunities, and we see that market expanding for us now that we're past the cyber incident.
spk08: Great. Thank you all. Mm-hmm.
spk02: And that does conclude our question and answer session. At this time, I'll turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
spk08: I think that concludes our call. Thanks, everybody. Thank you all.
spk12: Thank you.
spk02: And that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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