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spk07: Greetings. Welcome to Tufin's fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Jackie Marcus with Investor Relations. Jackie, you may now begin.
spk03: Thank you, Operator, and good day, everyone. Tufin released results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, ended December 31st, 2021, earlier this morning. If you did not receive a copy of our earnings press release, you may obtain it from the investor relations section of our website at investors.tufin.com. With me on today's call are Ruvik Attaf, Tufin's co-founder and chief executive officer, and Jack Lekiele, Tufin's chief financial officer. This call is being webcasted and will be archived on the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that any statements made in today's webcast that relate to a future event or express a belief, expectation, projection, forecast, anticipation, or intent regarding future events or the company's future performance may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other applicable securities laws. These forward-looking statements are based on information available to Tufin's management team as of today and involve risks and uncertainties, including those noted in this morning's press release and Tufin's filings with the SEC. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Tufin specifically disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law Please note that a reconciliation of any non-GAAP number to the mostly directly comparable GAAP number can be found in the tables of our earnings press release located in the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Tufan's CEO and co-founder, Ruvik Kittos. Ruvik?
spk06: Thank you, Jackie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm excited to be here with you to review our fourth quarter results, reflect on the last year, and share our outlook for 2022. The end of 2021 marks the completion of year one in our transition to a subscription model, and I'm excited to say that we exceeded our transition targets for the year. Additionally, we surpassed our guidance in both the top and bottom line, and we entered a new year with solid momentum across the business. As I reflect on our fourth quarter in the full year of 2021, we made significant progress, strengthening our sales team, improving our lead generation efforts, signing new logos, and adding subscription-based services. we saw increased awareness of security breaches as corporations are allocating more resources to implement policy-driven automation in order to navigate the security threats of tomorrow. Turning to our fourth quarter performance, I'm pleased to report another strong quarter bolstered by healthy growth in new logos, as well as continued momentum in our land and expand with existing customers. We signed a record number of larger deals, including our most significant deal in the last three years. Our fourth quarter revenues grew 16% year over year, with 27% growth in product revenues. Full year revenues were a record $110.9 million, with subscriptions representing approximately 56% of the new license bookings for the year. In addition, 84% of the bookings from new logos in 2021, excluding hardware and professional services, were subscription. While Jack will discuss this in greater detail in a moment, I'm pleased to share our ARR, as we believe it provides the best reflection for the health of the transition. At the end of 2021, we reached $72 million in ARR, representing growth of 19% year over year. Going forward, we will provide ARR on a quarterly basis. As I mentioned earlier, we're ahead of our stated objectives, and we feel confident going forward about our continued move from perpetual licensing to subscription. Moving to the cloud, we're pleased to report that Tufin Cloud Bookings totaled $3.9 million in 2021, representing 40% year-over-year growth. Tufin Cloud Bookings refers to the combined sales of secure cloud with secure track and secure change cloud licenses. Moving forward, we plan to report Tufin Cloud Bookings on an annual basis. This has been an important year for Tufan as we completed our first chapter as a subscription-based business while also seeing growth in both new logos and expansion of existing accounts. Before I discuss our business in greater detail, I'd like to now turn the call over to Jack for a deeper discussion of our financials. Jack?
spk09: Thank you, Ruby. As Ruby mentioned, we are pleased with our performance in the fourth quarter and the full year as we made continued progress towards our initiatives and subscription-based goals. Q4 was another quarter of consecutive and year-over-year revenue improvement, and we are happy with our pace of conversion of customers from perpetual to subscription and expect this trend to continue into next year. In 2022, we will be tracking subscription out of new license bookings, as we believe this metric best represents our progress in the transition to our recurring revenue model. In 2021, we reached 56% subscription out of the new license bookings, and our target for 2022 is 68%. Before I get to our fourth quarter and full year results, I want to review how we measure ARR, which Ruby noted in his remarks was $72 million for the end of the quarter. ARR is comprised of the annualized value of one, our subscription contracts for the license and the maintenance together, two, our SaaS business, and three, our maintenance and support contracts for our perpetual licensing business. Historically, we have been primarily been a perpetual license company. The majority of our ARR is still comprised of maintenance and support contracts, while subscription is growing fast and expected to surpass ARR from perpetual support within the next four to six quarters. As Ruby mentioned, going forward, we will be sharing ARR on a quarterly basis. Let me now turn to our results. In the fourth quarter, total revenue was $35.8 million, which is 16% above Q4 of 2020. Q4 product revenue increased 27% year-over-year to $19.1 million, while maintenance and professional services revenue was up 5% to $16.8 million year-over-year. Looking at the geographic mix of Q4, the Americas represented 53% of our revenue, Europe represented 42%, and 5% came from Asia Pacific. Moving to margins and expenses, I will discuss our results based on non-GAAP financial measures. Gross profit for the fourth quarter was $30.1 million, or 84% of revenue, compared to $26.1 million, or 84% of revenue, in Q4 of last year. Our operating expenses for the quarter totaled $30 million, up 17% compared to $25.7 million in the Q4 of last year. R&D expense for the fourth quarter was $9.2 million or 26% of revenue compared to $7.7 million and 25% of revenue in Q4 of last year. Sales and marketing expense for Q4 was $15.7 million or 44% of revenue compared to $13.7 million or 44% of revenue in Q4 of last year. G&A expense for Q4 was $5.2 million or 14% of revenue compared to $4.3 million or 14% of revenue in Q4 of last year. The increase in our operating expenses is primarily attributable to increased R&D costs and rising labor costs to remain competitive. Operating profit for Q4 was $0.1 million compared to $0.4 million in Q4 of 2020. Net loss for this quarter was $1.6 million compared to a net loss of $1 million in Q4 of last year and net loss per share, basic and diluted, was $0.04 for this quarter compared to $0.03 in Q4 of last year. During the quarter, cash flow used for operating activities was $3.6 million versus $1.7 million in the year-ago quarter. Moving to full-year results. Total revenue for 2021 was $110.9 million, up 10% year-over-year. Full-year product revenue increased 20% year-over-year to $46.6 million, while full-year maintenance and professional services revenue was up 4% to $64.4 million. Looking at the geographic mix for the full-year 2021, the Americas represented 51% of our revenue, Europe represented 42%, and 7% came from Asia-Pacific. Moving on to non-gap margins and expenses. Gross profit for the full year 2021 was $89.6 million or 81% of revenue compared to $82.6 million or 82% of revenue in 2020. Our operating expenses for the year totaled $112.1 million, up 11% compared to $101.1 million a year ago. R&D expense for the full year was $35.7 million or 32% of revenue compared to $30.2 million and 30% of revenue in 2020. Sales and marketing expense for the year was $56.6 million or 51% of revenue compared to $54.8 million or 54% of revenue last year. G&A expense for the full year was $19.8 million or 18% of revenue compared to $16 million or 16% of revenue in 2020. Operating loss for 2021 was $22.4 million compared to an operating loss of $18.5 million in 2020. Net loss for the full year was $25.8 million compared to a net loss of $20.6 million last year And net loss per share, basic and diluted, was 69 cents for the full year compared to 58 cents last year. For the full year, cash flow used for operating activities was 14.2 million dollars versus 17.4 million dollars for last year. Turning to the balance sheet. As of December 31st, 2021, we had total cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and marketable securities of 89.4 million dollars, down $14.6 million from the beginning of the year. I will finish up with a discussion of guidance for the first quarter and full year 2022. For the first fiscal quarter of 2022, we expect total revenue to be between $23 and $27 million, and non-GAAP operating loss to be between $11.5 and $8.1 million. For the full fiscal year of 2022, we expect total revenue between $123 and $129 million, and we expect non-GAAP operating loss to be between $28.9 million and $23.8 million. I am pleased with our progress over the past year and the opportunities that lie ahead for Tufin. We are working to prudently manage our costs while also investing in the expansion of our business. With that, I will turn the call back over to Ruvie. Ruvie?
spk06: Thank you, Jack. While companies around the world have mostly adjusted to working through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, one unforeseen challenge is the scarcity of qualified IT personnel. Companies of all sizes are continuing to expand their staffing and hiring efforts for security professionals as they recognize the critical need for protection against the ever-changing threat landscape they face today. As a result, it is more difficult than ever before to hire and maintain teams of security professionals that can manage a growing number of change requests in large enterprises. The difficulty of this challenge is magnified by the record rates of workforce turnover seen in the broader labor market. Tufin's automation-based offering not only improves security and increases agility, but it also helps solve the critical shortage of security specialists that are needed to process network changes and handle other security challenges. In conjunction with labor shortages, security teams are hard-pressed to define and enforce their security policy, which puts organizations at risk for noncompliance and security incidents. In the fourth quarter, we released another app on the Tufin Marketplace, the Security Policy Builder app. This app automates the design of corporate security access policies across the hybrid environment, reducing the complexity and the time that it takes to create security policies from months down to days. Integrating with SecureTrack, the Security Policy Builder app automates the design of the unified security policy based on the existing access to align the compliance models. This enables organizations to reduce the likelihood of a breach, avoid fines and penalties due to noncompliance, and maintain a strong security posture. I'd now like to highlight some of the interesting deals that we saw in the quarter. The first deal I'll discuss was with a large airline that needed to automate security changes and struggled to maintain efficiency. Their environment included over 300 power output and checkpoint firewalls, thousands of routers and switches, hundreds of load balancers, and a growing cloud presence. with over 100 public cloud accounts. They were making over 150 rules and policy changes every week, with every change taking several days to implement, slowing down application change deployment for the business. With a near shutdown of the travel industry for much of 2020, they lost about one third of their staff. And as they returned to business as usual, they wanted to automate their IT processes as much as possible. The Colonial Pipeline hack caused them to look even closer at security automation. as they could not afford to shut down the business for five days like Colonial did due to the security incident. They bought SecureTrack for compliance and SecureChange for automation of their on-premises and cloud networks. Another significant deal this quarter was with a federal government in Europe. They had a very complex infrastructure with over 1,000 firewalls that contained over 4 million rules spread over multiple data centers and multiple teams, some of them with different levels of access. They were using a homegrown tool for network visibility, which was insufficient for their audit and compliance needs, and they were looking to automate changes and scale their IT operation. There were multiple security breaches in European federal agencies in the recent years, leading to heightened awareness and a sense of urgency around security posture. They needed to move away from annual processes, reduce their attack surface, and build a well-documented process around making policy changes for compliance audits. They purchased both SecureTrack and SecureChange in a multi-million dollar new local subscription deal. This was our largest deal in the past three years. The last deal I mentioned today was with an online consumer shopping company with several billion dollars in revenue and over 15,000 employees worldwide. They have about 200 firewalls in their on-premise data center, and they've been Tufan customers since 2016. They were using SecureTrack for visibility and compliance with regulations such as PCI since all of their business is with online consumers. They expanded aggressively into the cloud, with the cloud infrastructure team adding about 1300 virtual firewalls in AWS over the course of several months. At the same time, the network security team had no visibility or compliance over the security posture within these firewalls due to the fact that a different organization was managing the cloud firewalls, as well as the speed with which these changes were made. They bought an expansion of SecureTrack to monitor their cloud environment and signed a seven-figure, one-year subscription deal in the fourth quarter. The future expansion potential with this customer is very significant, with an upsell of SecureChange to automate network changes for their entire state. We're very proud of the progress that we've made as we've reached the one-year mark of announcing our transition to subscription. Our sales team is executing well, and we continue to see demand for our policy-driven automation solutions. I wish to thank everyone at Tufin for all their hard work in achieving our goals for the year. I would now like to turn the call over to the operator to open the line for questions. Operator?
spk07: Thank you. At this time, we'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 from your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants that are using speaker equipment, It may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Once again, that's star one. Thank you. To ask a question today, you may press star one. Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Sterling Audie with JP Morgan. Please receive your questions.
spk02: Hi, this is Drew. I'm for Sterling. I was wondering if you could provide some more color on what portion of the 2022 guidance is subscription.
spk09: Hi, this is Jack. So for 2022, we said we're going to follow the subscription metric that is measured as subscription license out of total new business bookings. Sorry, out of total new license bookings. And we said that for last year, for 2021, this metric was 56%. And we said that we are looking to achieve 68% for that metric for 2022. Okay, got it. Thank you. Thank you.
spk07: Our next question is from the line of – I'm sorry, please switch to our one-second question. The next question comes from the line of Sakai Kalia with Barclays. Please receive your question.
spk08: Okay, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question here. Maybe just one for you, Jack. Can you just speak to sort of the average duration that you're seeing on deals and kind of what that assumption on duration is in 2022? Okay.
spk09: Yeah, sure. I think you referred to subscription deals, right?
spk08: Yes, absolutely. Sorry, subscription deals.
spk09: Yeah, so we said in the past, and this is still the case, the vast majority of the deals are multi-year deals. And when you say multi-year deals, within that, it's typically a three-year deal. Sometimes we see less than three years, but more than two years. So we have a group of 30 months, two to three years. So that would be the average between those two buckets.
spk08: Got it. And actually, I lied. Sorry. Maybe one follow-up for you, Ruby, here. Ruby, obviously a very healthy firewall spending backdrop. Just given all the years that you've been in the industry, I'm wondering kind of what you've seen historically. Does demand for network security policy management typically lag sort of firewall refresh or upticks in spending? And And if so, you know, what's that sort of lag been like in the past, roughly?
spk06: Hi, Saket. So what we said in the past, and I think that's still true, is that it's not directly correlated, right? We're selling into the install base of over five years' worth of, you know, network gear, if you will, not just firewalls, but, you know, load-downs of rudder switches, also cloud security elements. So it's not that... Fortinet or Palo Alto have a great quarter and suddenly in two quarters you can track some growth for Tucson. It's just, you know, there's, I think, healthy network security spending overall and security spending. You know, so demand is back for us. We mentioned that in the last quarterly call that it's back to pre-COVID levels and it's surpassing that as well. And it's not directly correlated to the firewall vendors having a strong quarter or not.
spk08: Got it. Very helpful. Thanks, guys.
spk06: Thanks.
spk07: Thank you. As a reminder, you may press star 1 to ask a question at this time. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew King with Colliers. Please proceed with your questions.
spk05: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the good quarter. First off, just wanted to dive into the product revenue. This is the first time since Q4 2018, it looks like that product revenue has been over 50% of total revenue. Can you just break out why that was and where you expect that in FY22?
spk09: Yeah, sure. This is Jack. Yeah, we reported the 53% product for Q4 for the full year. We're still not at 50% where we want to be, but definitely it's product that's driving the growth So if you're looking at bookings, for example, you can see the bookings is growing even higher than our revenue, right? So bookings reflect the fact that product is driving the growth. And as we think of it going forward, continuing this growth, and we did guide for accelerated growth for 2022 in revenue, as we move forward, we expect to go back to 50%, 50% split as we were before the IPO.
spk05: Got it. And then just on the hardware business itself, you've seen a lot of other people in the security space dealing with some supply chain issues. Can you just detail out any of those that you've seen? Or if you haven't, why not?
spk06: Sure. So I'll take that. You know, nothing notable really to call out that impacted financial results in terms of supply chain. We do have supply chain-run appliances. About a third of our customers choose to buy into Polytufin appliances. But so far, we've been managing the supply chain challenges and ordering ahead of it.
spk04: Got it. And then I might have just missed this, but could you just break out international contribution for us? Thank you.
spk06: I think, Jack, the question was about international contribution geography-wise.
spk09: Yeah, we reported this on the prepared script. We had a balanced geographical split. It's not changing from year to year. We said it's about 50% for the US. It's about 40% for Europe. And that's been stable over the years. Between the quarters, we may see fluctuations because we're working with high ASPs. But for the full year, that has been stable.
spk05: Got it. Thanks. Congrats on a great quarter, guys.
spk07: Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Hugh Cunningham with Cowan. Please proceed with your questions.
spk00: Hey, guys. Congratulations on this strong quarter. Two questions. First, in terms of the labor tightness that you mentioned for your customers, is that also impacting you? And then secondly, in terms of the sort of wind down of COVID-19. What do you expect to happen with you? And let me just squeeze in a third one on the insurance deal. In general terms, who did you see competing against you for that deal? Thanks.
spk06: Okay. So hopefully I'll remember those three questions. The first one I think was on labor. Yeah. So obviously it's a very competitive environment that we're operating in. Tucson is a great place to work. We continue to find ways always to attract and retain the best talent. We did adjust compensation in order to stay competitive with the market, and that's reflected in the expenses and guidance for the year. Can you remind me of the second question?
spk00: It was about who did you see going up against you on the insurance deal, but actually even the other two large deals you mentioned, what sort of competition are you seeing? Is there anyone you can mention that you're seeing more often?
spk06: Right. So in terms of competitive landscape, it hasn't changed that much. The two direct competitors that we see most often are AlgoSec and Firemon. To a lesser extent, we sometimes see Skybox as well. A lot of the large deals are competitive. Obviously, if it's a Tufin expansion, then normally they would not be baking off against the competitor. They would just be reviewing Tufin and making a decision on whether there's enough value there. But I would say AlgoSec and Firemon are probably the two competitors. Close is direct competitors, and Skybox is a secondary competitor.
spk00: And quick follow-on to that. Is there a reason why you – is it superiority of your products? How did you sort of ease them out? And my last question, by the way, was on COVID-19 and the wind-down and the impact on you.
spk06: All right. So let's take the competitive piece first. Sure. I mean, we've got strong competitive advantages. We're the clear leader in automation. We've got the most accurate topology. of any vendor out there. We have the best scalability. At the high end, you really need a solution that automates accurately. You can't trust automation unless the automation software is more accurate than the human, and that's what we've been able to achieve. So that's a major differentiator that we have against all of our competitors. In terms of COVID-19 pandemic, I think there's still impact in the sense that you know, in terms of physical offices, not everybody's back to the office yet. And it really depends on the geography. We're hoping to get more people back in the office, let's say in a two-day-per-week basis, so a hybrid model. But it depends on how the pandemic is going to move forward. And with customers, you know, we've shifted to selling virtually. There's a lot more virtual events. We hope to have more face-to-face meetings with customers. So We're now in this new environment, and we know how to work, operate, sell within this new environment. If things open up, I think that will just be upside for us where we'll get more face-to-face with customers, and we'll be able to see more of the employees in the office.
spk00: Awesome. Thanks, guys, and congratulations again.
spk07: Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, you may press star 1 to ask a question. The next question comes from the line of Adam Borg with Stifel. Please proceed with your questions.
spk01: Hi, this is Austin for Adam Borg, and thank you for taking the question. I guess just first, it's nice to see the ARR growth in the quarterly disclosures. How should we be thinking about ARR growth in 2022?
spk09: Hi, Adam. So we reported the ARR 72 million as of the close of last year. We're not guiding for ARR, right? It's too early. going to share ARR on a quarterly basis. Ruby mentioned that on the call, and I did as well. But we think it's too early at this point for us to report it, to guide it forward. But the way you should think it may be some color, you can expect, obviously, subscription ARR to be growing fast as the major component comprising the ARR, while support, maintenance support component actually growing slower, and over time it's going to decrease. So these are going to be the trends within the ARR, but as for guidance, we're still not there.
spk01: Great, very helpful. And then maybe just one follow-up. I'm just curious about early interest in support for Zscaler Cloud Firewalls, and if you could remind us the timeline of when you expect to support Zscaler for automation as well. Thank you.
spk06: Sure. So I think you're referring to the fact that in 21.3 last quarter, we announced integration with Zscaler Cloud Firewall. It's becoming a lot more popular with customers. And what we added is support for visibility now. We're going to add support for automation for Zscaler down the road. We still have not announced a release date for that. So when we're ready to announce a release date, we will. Just in general, we're looking at other SASE and SD-WAN players. And, you know, the market is quite fragmented. There are several vendors. There's no clear winner yet emerging, with the exception of Zscaler. Zscaler has a firewall that now competes directly with Palo Alto, Fortnite, and Checkpoint. So we're considering what are the next vendors as well to add in terms of SaaS and SD-WAN. And when we're ready, we're going to announce that.
spk01: Great. Thank you very much.
spk07: Thanks. Thank you. At this time, we've reached the end of the question and answer session. I'll hand the call back over to Ruvik Katel for closing remarks.
spk06: All right. Thank you very much. I want to thank everybody for joining us today. Like I mentioned in my remarks, we're achieving our targets. We continue to execute on our strategic objectives. I believe our products and services stand up against today and tomorrow's challenges and rise above the competition. Really look forward to updating you all on our progress on our next earnings call. Thank you very much for joining today.
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