Rapid7 Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
February 7, 2024

There are 15 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Christa, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Rapid7 4th Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.

Operator

Followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Elizabeth Chiuok, Director of Investor Relations. Elizabeth, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today to discuss Rapid7's 4th quarter and full year 2023 financial and operating to our financial outlook for the Q1 and full fiscal year 2024. With me on the call today are Corey Thomas, to our CEO and Tim Adams, our CFO. We have distributed our earnings press release over the wire and it is now posted on our website at investors. Rapid7dot to the company's presentation and financial metrics file.

Speaker 1

This call is being broadcast live via webcast and following the call, an audio to the operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Investors. Rapid7.com. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are considered forward looking under federal to the Securities Laws. These statements are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and include statements related to the company's positioning, strategy, business plans, restructuring plans and financial guidance for the Q1 and full year 2024 and and the assumptions underlying such goals and guidance.

Speaker 1

These forward looking statements are based on our current expectations and beliefs and on information currently available to us. To Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks to the SEC. And uncertainties, including those contained in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10 Q filed on November 6, 2023, and in the subsequent reports that we file with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks. To the operator.

Speaker 1

Actual results and the timing of certain events may differ materially from the results or timing predicted or implied by such forward looking statements, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Rapid7 does not assume any obligation to update the information presented on this to the call except to the extent required by applicable law. Our commentary today will primarily be in non GAAP terms and reconciliations between our historical GAAP and non GAAP results can be found in today's earnings press release and on our website at investors. Rapid7.com. At times, in our prepared remarks or in responses to your questions, we may offer to the operator to provide greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly results.

Speaker 1

Please be advised that this additional detail may be one time in nature and we may who may not update these metrics in the future. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Corey Thomas. Corey?

Speaker 2

Good afternoon, and thank you to everyone joining us on today's call. Rapid7 had a strong close to 2023, to the end of the year with $806,000,000 in ARR, growing 13% over the prior year, while delivering revenue, operating income to our free cash flow above our guided ranges. Sustained customer demand for our platform offerings, anchored by our detection and response to the cloud security solutions and improvements and execution supported a strong top line finish to the year. At the same time, our focus on operating efficiency and streamlining our cost structure drove $84,000,000 of free cash flow in the year, exceeding our target and reflecting nearly 500 basis points of free cash flow margin expansion over the prior year. As we look back at the last year, there are a few highlights that stand out.

Speaker 2

First, we continue to drive product innovation across our Insight platform. We further elevated our market leading capabilities and our compelling customer value proposition with advancements in areas like AI driven cloud anomaly detection. We exited the year with a scaled security operations platform that extends over the fragmented attack surface covering strategic workloads across Detection and Response, Cloud Native Security or CNAP to Vulnerability Management. Secondly, our sales force successfully reoriented towards our platform consolidation solutions to meet customers' most pressing needs, while navigating larger and longer deal cycles with conversion rates that improved as the year went on. Our package offerings gained steady traction throughout 2023 and now constitute roughly $100,000,000 in ARR, Driven by a healthy contribution from both landing new customers and upgrading existing customers.

Speaker 2

We have reflected The deal size and conversion dynamics of our growing package mix into our forward expectations for seasonality, given the ongoing success of our consolidation value proposition. And lastly, we rightsized our cost structure to build a foundation for efficient growth. This was a critical initial step that positions us to be able to drive efficient growth in our business over time. A great example of our progress in 2023 is illustrated by a new customer win in the 4th quarter. To a publicly traded media company with a mature and security program was extensively evaluating new solutions and looking to consolidate multiple vendors across their Security Operations Center or SOC.

Speaker 2

The large and complex nature of the company's digital footprint and their lean team, combined with Rapid7's ability to work better together with their endpoint provider made us stand out against legacy SIEM competitors. This customer chose Rapid7 for 3 main reasons: the breadth of our cloud native platform our ability to consolidate critical capabilities across multiple SecOps categories, including SIEM or XDR and VM. And lastly, our ease of adoption and integrations with other security vendors. We displaced a competitor with our Managed Direct Complete consolidated offering, securing a multiyear deal worth over $500,000 in ARR. We believe the progress we made in 2023 sets us up well to win market share, accelerate growth to be a leading security platform consolidator in the next few years.

Speaker 2

Looking forward, we see 2024 as a critical year to accelerate our platform differentiation by driving focused investments to lead and mainstream cloud security adoption, drive security productivity with AI, to extend our service and partner ecosystem to deliver sustainable and efficient growth going forward. We are delivering this strategic execution against a backdrop of stable yet noisy demand environment. Amidst this backdrop, we are leaning into to our areas of strategic focus in building our security operations platform for acceleration. We're investing and innovating in areas where we see to substantial demand over a multiyear horizon and where there is a clear opportunity to elevate our customer value proposition and the services ecosystem that supports it. We're making deliberate investments to build the strongest managed SOC ecosystem and deliver a leading data platform that contextualizes risk across a fragmented complex environment.

Speaker 2

Here are the 4 key areas where we are focused on and investing in as we build our leadership position in the extended SOC. To the first is on integrating and contextualizing more data across the digital attack surface, particularly as security teams are managing data across traditional and cloud environments. Easy consolidation of data on our Insight platform allows customers to apply the best operational context to their security programs. To the operator. The breadth and quality of our platform features are strong and our internal SOC has years of expertise and data to better understand the attacker.

Speaker 2

In 2024, we're focused on elevating the customer experience with a better, more integrated Rapid7 technology platform to support fragmented IT environments. The second area of investment will be around driving cloud security adoption and mainstream enterprises. As security programs mature, to lean teams with significant resource constraints increasingly need to secure their cloud environments. We believe the majority of cloud security buyers In the coming years, we'll look different from the typical buyer we've historically seen. We are focused on delivering CNAP solutions that are simple to use, affordable and integrated into our broader security operations platform.

Speaker 2

And our packaging and distribution is being fine tuned for our mainstream enterprise customers. We're also extending our capabilities, building on the solid traction in cloud security posture management to be a leader in cloud detection and response. The 3rd area of focus is the use of AI for improving security operations. Our AI powered SOC continues to drive to our leadership in managed detection response, one of the areas of highest growth in customer demand within security operations. We are focused on using machine learning and large language models or LLMs to improve our SecOps coverage and detections in multiple areas, including anomalous activity monitoring, analyst workflows and quality assurance.

Speaker 2

In addition, we're working on leveraging LLMs to drive efficiency and accelerate response times. We are building and refining these capabilities inside our SOC and managed delivery ecosystem to help get product innovations to market faster. And we'll continue to expand on these AI capabilities with a focus on productivity and efficiency, all while safeguarding our customers' data. Lastly, we will be investing in our services and partner ecosystem with an emphasis on growing key channel relationships, accelerating our MSSP partnerships and increasingly engaging with customers in marketplaces like AWS. As we look out at the rest of the year, Rapid7 has a compelling opportunity to build better, more connected customer experience across our platform.

Speaker 2

We believe that the foundational work we're doing will position us to drive market share gains and higher durable growth over the medium to long term. At the same time, we're focused on optimizing for efficient growth and remain laser focused on scaling free cash flow. To Consistent with our previous commentary, we expect to generate at least $160,000,000 in free cash flow in 2024. Looking towards our overall financial outlook for the year, as we process a healthy finish to 2023, balanced with our expectation for a continuation to the recent stable demand backdrop. We remain focused on providing a high confidence range for our 2024 financial outlook, Which Tim will detail in his remarks.

Speaker 2

We are focused on making deliberate platform and services investments to reaccelerate and drive durable long term growth. We're optimizing around our technology and distribution channels, which we believe will position us for the best multiyear growth outlook. With that, thank you for joining us on the call today. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Tim Adams, to share additional detail on our financial results and outlook.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Corey. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today. To. Before I turn to the results, a quick reminder that except for revenue, all financial results we will discuss today are non GAAP financial measures unless otherwise stated. Additionally, reconciliations between our GAAP and non GAAP results can be found in our earnings press release.

Speaker 3

Rapid7 ended the year with $806,000,000 in ARR, growing 13% over the prior year. To the operator. Growth was led by healthy customer demand for our integrated security operations platform and supported by expansion and innovation in our detection and response and cloud security capabilities. We saw strong traction as our consolidated offerings ramped throughout the year with improving sales conversion rates as the combined value and efficacy of our solutions increasingly resonate with mainstream enterprise customers. ASPs increased as we benefited from larger deals tied to our package offerings and we saw roughly balanced contributions from new and existing customers throughout the year, with particular strength in cross selling to our existing base.

Speaker 3

These dynamics speak to the effectiveness of our technology in our strong value proposition as customers consolidate across our Insight platform. Our customer base grew 5% year over year to end 2023 with over 11,500 customers globally. To ARR per customer grew 7% over the prior year to approximately $70,000 at year end. To full year revenue of $778,000,000 grew 14% over the prior year and exceeded the high end of our guidance range. To the operator.

Speaker 3

Product revenue also grew 14% over the prior year to a full year total of $740,000,000 Our commitment to profitable growth, including the changes we made to our cost structure in August, drove meaningful to expansion in operating income and free cash flow, and we exceeded our guided ranges on both metrics for the year. We delivered $102,000,000 of operating income, which represents full year margin expansion of over 800 basis points, And we generated $84,000,000 of free cash flow, which reflects an 11% free cash flow margin for the year. To the operator. Now turning to our Q4 results. Total Q4 revenue of $205,000,000 was up 11% over the prior year and above the high end of our guidance.

Speaker 3

Product revenue grew 13% year over year to $195,000,000 to our Investor Relations Officer. While professional services declined 10% to $10,000,000 as we actively deemphasize certain lower value services. To our international revenue grew 21% over the prior year and represented 23% of total revenue for the 4th quarter, to our Q4 results. While North America revenue grew 9% and represented 77% of total revenue. Product gross margin was 76% in the quarter and total gross margin for the quarter was 74%, both in line with the prior year.

Speaker 3

Operating expenses in the 4th quarter reflect changes to the cost structure starting in the Q3 of 2023. To the operator. Sales and marketing expense declined 5% year over year and represented 32% of revenue, down from 38% in the prior year. To R and D expense was slightly lower than the prior year and represented 16% of revenue, down from 18%, while G and A represented 6% of revenue down from 8% in the prior year. All in all, to 4th quarter operating income of $41,000,000 was better than our guidance and represented a 20% operating margin exiting the year.

Speaker 3

Our adjusted EBITDA was $48,000,000 in the quarter and net income per share was $0.72 to our balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the year with cash, cash equivalents and investments of $439,000,000 compared to $373,000,000 at the end of Q3 2023. We delivered better than expected 4th quarter cash to the flow from operations on higher operating profitability, which helped drive over $60,000,000 of free cash flow in the quarter. This brings us to our guidance for this year. As we enter 2024, we assume a relatively to a stable macroeconomic backdrop and customer spending environment, consistent with the back half of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 3

To this assumption informs our high confidence growth outlook for ARR this year. For the full year 2024, We expect ending total ARR of $885,000,000 to $895,000,000 Which represents growth of 10% to 11%. As Corey shared earlier, This range reflects our strategy to focus this year on deliberate investments for more efficient, durable medium to long term growth. In terms of seasonality, as deal sizes get larger and reflect a scaling contribution from the success of our platform and package deals, to our new ARR linearity assumptions for the full year reflect slightly stronger seasonality with a naturally lower contribution in the Q1. Turning to the income statement.

Speaker 3

We expect total revenue for the full year to be in the range of 848,000,000 to $856,000,000 representing growth of 9% to 10%. As we continue to focus on the strategic areas of our business, We expect product revenues to grow slightly faster than this range, offset in part by professional services revenue, Which we expect to decline to approximately $30,000,000 for the full year. On profitability measures, to the operator. We anticipate strong growth in operating income, which we expect to be in the range of $150,000,000 to $158,000,000 for the full year, to implying operating margin expansion of roughly 500 basis points. We expect net income per share to be in the range of $2.10 to $2.21 based on an estimated 75,100,000 diluted to weighted average shares outstanding.

Speaker 3

For full year 2024, we expect to generate at least $160,000,000 in free cash flow. To this implies roughly 800 basis points of free cash flow margin expansion. In terms of free cash flow seasonality, to the operator. We expect a modest contribution in the Q1 driven by a number of cash expenses that are concentrated early in the year, including the FY2023 bonus payments and timing of tax payments. We would then anticipate a notable ramp to the free cash flow in the 2nd quarter.

Speaker 3

Moving to quarterly guidance. For the Q1 of 2024, we expect to our operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to our operator. Total revenue

Speaker 4

in the range of $203,000,000

Speaker 3

to $205,000,000 representing year over year growth of 11% to 12%. We expect non GAAP operating income for the Q1 in the range of $37,000,000 to $39,000,000 to a non GAAP net income per share of $0.52 to $0.55 which is based on 74 to 4,400,000 diluted weighted average shares outstanding. We made important progress in 2023 across product innovation, to go to market improvements and rightsizing our cost structure. This year, we have a compelling opportunity to build on that foundation to position ourselves for reacceleration and share gains in the next few years. Thank you for taking the time to join us on the call today.

Speaker 3

And now we will open the call for questions. Operator?

Operator

Your first question comes from the line of to Hamzah Mathurala from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Thanks, Corey. It seems like

Speaker 5

a lot of opportunity for consolidation within security operations among your customer base. I'm curious, can you talk a little bit more about how you're working with some of your strategic services partners To help drive some of that consolidation and how you're offering perhaps some of your own services as well to augment and complement what your partners are

Speaker 6

to. It's a great point, Hamzah. Most customers right now are trying to figure out how to deal with the twin factors of Enhancing security programs that have to be improved. You know, we talked about the security backlog, demand, need for talent, need for projects, and the fact that they have to do it on a budget. And so one of the things that they're looking to do is to both consolidate their security programs, but to do it in a way that drives more efficiency.

Speaker 6

And that requires, partners and talent sometimes. We are actively, building out our managed services partner ecosystem. Our partner ecosystem in general, which is sort of like a big area of focus, but also partners that can actually provide cost effective services to our customers that allow them to upgrade their security programs along the way. We're incredibly attractive to partners because we allow them to actually look at the landscape across the, you know, SIEM and XDR as well as the cloud security and the traditional vulnerability management. So they can look at both the overall attack surface and risk side of the equation as well as the detection response side of the equation.

Speaker 6

And so that's attracted to partners. We're also working on something that's near and dear to our partners hard is the ability to process more and more of the alerts that come in from other security products. And so I would just say it's a very big focus that we have both with our partners and with ourselves. We do have, you know, services offering and NDR services internally inside of Rapid7. But our focus is an ecosystem approach to actually tackling this problem that customers are demanding.

Speaker 6

And thank you so much, Hans.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mac Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets. Please go

Speaker 7

ahead. Hi. This is Anishta on for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just talk about a little can you talk a little bit more about the assumptions embedded in the 2024 guidance as it relates to the conversion rates, to the new pipeline as well as the macro environment.

Speaker 6

Yes. So at a high level, I'd just say we think the macro environment is fairly stable and we're optimistic. To What I'll remind you of is that as we did our restructuring last year, we really oriented around how we actually deliver the best, you know, long term free cash flow growth, which is the intersection of ARR growth, which again, we want to actually, drive share and win share over the medium term and be a share leader in ARR growth, And as well as margin expansion. Those are the two factors that we see as sort of driving the overall free cash flow growth strategy. As we actually think about that to your question about how do we actually think about guidance We're really on that strategy that we outlined in the second half of the year of saying setting ourselves up to make sure that we have Very, very high confidence and conviction that we can hit targets that are outlined, but also have a setup so that we can actually exceed 1 or more of the targets.

Speaker 6

And you know, in this market where the market is a little bit noisy, of course, you know, we would love to actually hit and focus on ARR as a dominant, approach to growth. But We also don't want to be hamstrung by that. Our take is that if the market gets a little bit incrementally noisy, then we can actually focus on margin expansion and that's A fine way to actually grow and drive free cash flow expansion. So we really think about the guidance being a setup to make sure that we can both hit And we actually have the setup to actually, deliver better under different circumstances with the trade off between margin expansion and free cash flow. We're always going to want to go and take share, but we don't control the market.

Operator

Your next Question comes from the line of Ghislav Tala from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, great. Hey, guys.

Speaker 3

Thanks for taking my questions here. Tim, maybe my first one for you. Great expense control for next year to drive That free cash flow guide. Maybe the question is, how are you thinking about billings growth as part of that free cash flow equation? I know ARR is the focus, but and there seems to be a lot of confidence there.

Speaker 3

But any thoughts on how to model billings visavis that ARR guide as we think about those to the free cash flow.

Speaker 8

Yes. Hey Saket, thanks for the question. Generally, you would think of billings and ARR growth rates being very, very similar, A minor exception for 2024, which I mentioned in my prepared comments, our professional services revenue, we Expect that to be down modestly in 2024 compared to 2023. So that gives you a minor headwind to billings relative to ARR growth, But they're pretty tightly aligned with that one exception.

Speaker 3

Got it. Got it. Corey, if I could squeeze in a follow-up for Really balanced growth in ARR here in 2023 between customer growth and ARR per customer. But it's that latter one I want to focus on just the ARR per customer and just the success And scale that you're seeing with packages. Maybe the question is, what are some of the non VM products that you're finding customers are using the most?

Speaker 3

Obviously, they get offered a lot of the products as part of those packages. Which of the products do you find that they're using the most as they adopt those packages?

Speaker 6

Yes. Look, the big driver and one of the biggest drivers, I would just say, is the detection response, which is we shared last year, It is a scaled business. It has very healthy growth rates, but it also has a lot of late customer demands. It is a must have. We've always said that's what we actually liked about that business.

Speaker 6

It's a must You must have business. People have to be able to monitor attacks in their environments. This is not saying that the exposure of tax service management is not valuable. We think it's incredibly valuable. In fact, we'll continue to focus on life growth.

Speaker 6

In some ways though, our strategy is frankly to be a market adoption and unit share leader in the vulnerability exposure tax service management areas, because that really sets us up well to make sure that we're providing value on detection response to our customers overall. But if you look at from a raw dollars perspective, it's clear detection response is generating the dollars, even though we're focused on really having the broad distribution overall risk management and exposure management solutions.

Speaker 3

Got it. Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 6

Thank you. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Hi. I just wanted to follow-up on Saket's question and maybe delve a little bit deeper into your guidance for 2024. Is there a way for you to maybe break out for us what you expect at a high level or just directionally in terms of the growth rates for traditional VM detection and response, as well as, in the cloud side of things as well. Thank you.

Speaker 6

So thanks for the questions. It's not really a way to break that out because again, as we do the platform consolidation offers, it's offered most of them. Like VM is a feature of every platform overall. What I would just say is, one way maybe the easiest way to actually think about it is that, we have, I would just say, very reasonable, very, very high to our guidance that's just anchored on, I would say, the trends that we're seeing, continuing at very reasonable levels. I actually think we actually have upside as we actually take our cloud security solutions more mainstream.

Speaker 6

That's not something that we're factoring on for this year. Something we're looking at as a big growth driver over multiple years. We expect to see the same type of progress that we actually saw, which was solid over the course of the last year. We think our market in cloud security is a big one, but it's really sort of like it goes from niche specialists to mainstream cloud security providers, and I talked a little bit about that earlier. So we see that as a big growth chart over multiple years.

Speaker 6

It can be upside to this year, without a doubt. I would just say the core of Lynchpin is the continued progress that we see in detection and response, And we expect that to be fairly sort of like consistent. And we see upside from some of the other emerging areas, but they're not factored into our baseline assumptions. When we think about, to your question, the idea of giving guidance, we actually just really center the guidance on what we actually have see, have visibility, have high confidence in. And then there's something we're working on delivering that just flows into some how we actually think about upside.

Speaker 8

Corey, the only thing I would add, which you mentioned in your to prepared comments as we're really seeing the market adopt these packages and it's really resonating with customers. It's over $100,000,000 of ARR and they were introduced roughly about a year ago. So we're really starting to see that traction. And that gives you larger ARR ASP per customer.

Speaker 6

Thanks for the question, John.

Speaker 3

Excellent. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of to Rob Owens from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Good evening and thanks for taking my question. Corey, I was hoping you could maybe drill down into that commentary about driving more cloud security in a mainstream environment and What you're implying there. And number 2 for me is just around customer count and kind of looking at the 11,500, but obviously have Seeing declining customer counts over the last couple of years in terms of either net new or year over year growth, however you want to look at it. What's It's really the catalyst to get that moving again. What's it going to take?

Speaker 9

Is it the partner network? Is it maturation of the sales force in terms of selling the platform? What's going to get that moving, because it's not that big of number, I guess,

Speaker 3

in the relative scheme of things?

Speaker 6

Yes. I think both of those are very sort of like there. So On the first question, Rob, what was your first question before I tackle the second one?

Speaker 8

Mainstream cloud.

Speaker 6

Yes, mainstream cloud. Yes, mainstream cloud. Yes, mainstream cloud.

Speaker 9

Yes, what does mainstream cloud mean exactly?

Speaker 6

So so the way that the way that we've seen the market so far, keep in mind, when we work hard at DV Cloud, we got direct access. And so we have a very healthy cloud business and a growing cloud business. We have not, I'll just be explicit, is that we are accelerating our investment in the cloud because what we've actually found is that the early adopters of cloud to Security Technologies were cloud security specialist teams. They were special teams that were not the main security teams that get nothing but set cloud security, And they were very focused on that. And we've been participating in that market.

Speaker 6

And you see people like, you know, like the whizzes of the world doing quite well and some of that. What we actually see as we go out though, if you think about like the when we think about the mainstream enterprise, think about that Russell 3,000 and their private equivalent and all those other companies out there, Those are folks that are not going to have like 5 to 10 people just for cloud security. They actually have to actually have security as part of their core band aid. It has to be integrated in. It still has to be highly functional.

Speaker 6

It has to be accessible, easy to use. It has to deliver the key results. But it has to In the context of their overall security operations program. Lots of those customers have not adopted cloud security. So if we look at cloud security It's a massively untouched market.

Speaker 6

You know, a similar way, Ralph, the way to think about it is that, you know, when we pointed to the, SIM market, Originally people were just like, wow, that market's been around forever and it's a little bit tapped. And we said, look, no, most SIEMs are only designed for very complex, to large complex enterprises. Most mainstream enterprises don't have a functional SIEM because it has not been designed for that ease of use, that mass market efficacy and efficiency. We see the same dynamics in cloud. We view that as a largely untapped market.

Speaker 6

There's things that we actually are doing right now and investing in to actually Allow very complicated things about how you assess risk environments. How do you do detection and response in cloud environments to actually be part of a mainstream security operations and risk program. But that's the core of what we're actually looking at when we talk about sort of that mainstream enterprise. It's the Large majority of companies that have not purchased cloud security and are not going to do it at the traditional price tags of a $500,000 plus for those types of solutions. And so that's where we see the big opportunity playing out over the next few years.

Speaker 6

And we think we're all set up for that. Again, we're seeing early adoption of that. We're well set up for that. And again, I think we have the opportunity to make progress this year, Moundin. To your other question, which I think is a good one too, which is about the customer count.

Speaker 6

What I would just say is lots of the customer count. Look, I think we have plenty of space to grow customer count, but I actually want to grow it strategically. And I think what I've shared before Was that our customer count volume from years past had a lot of transactional sales in it. The thing I like about 11,000 customers is we made it a much more strategic base that allows us to truly achieve our TAM and allows us to truly to get material ARR per customer, and we expect that to continue to increase. We will grow the customer base.

Speaker 6

I'll just say, listen, sales is sales, in that fact that We're having a lot of success with the consolidation efforts. And so what that just means is that your average sales rep needs fewer customers in order to actually hit ARR targets, even though the sales productivity and the ARR for sales reps, we expect to continue to improve this year. Part of how we actually do that, Rob, to your point is we have a big focus on that partner ecosystem. I think you and I have talked about it in the past, critical. You've asked a lot of questions about that.

Speaker 6

We think that we're ready and equipped. We have a compelling portfolio. I would say that that is still the we're seeing lots of momentum. I would say still an upside driver for the year, as we're onboarding partners. We're focusing on a smaller set of partners that actually have massive distribution capabilities, And we're tuning that in.

Speaker 6

So I think I got both of your questions there.

Speaker 3

All right. Thanks for the color. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Moskowitz from Mizuho. Please go

Speaker 10

ahead. Yes. Hi. This is Mike on for Greg. Thanks for taking my question here and Perhaps a follow-up to Rob's.

Speaker 10

You mentioned last quarter that following the restructuring,

Speaker 5

You really zeroed in on

Speaker 10

your installed base, right? Did that focus continue with the same intensity this quarter? Or have you recalibrated back to your sort of traditional approach with respect to new logo and expansion business? Thanks.

Speaker 6

Well, I would just say, look, we are In noisy markets, it's actually just, I think, more straightforward to actually tighten and focus in on your install base. I would just say that's generally a true thing because you have Existing relationships, you have existing contracts, you have existing vehicles. I don't think that bias is actually changed. What I would say to The question and the previous question that Rob had is we are looking to expand the installed base. But because our ASPs are growing and the package consolidation is successful.

Speaker 6

Instead of trying to actually force it, we're actually really being very thoughtful about our distribution And how we drive distribution and partnerships. And so we have a strategy in the mid term to actually, again, I want to be very explicit, our goal is to actually take share and drive to growth and be a very strong grower in the medium term. Our investments this year, if you ask We're putting our investments this year. We're putting more investments into the partnership and distribution and growing that investment at a higher rate than the growth in our direct sales force. And that's a very intentional thing because we actually think that that gives us scale of net new customer adds.

Speaker 6

But it also allows us to actually surface more customers who actually need more care. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Adam Tindle from Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Speaker 11

Okay. Thank you. Tim, I just wanted to start out with the fiscal 2024 guidance, which is really impressive on profitability. If I look at it, revenue is going to be increasing about $75,000,000 year over year and EBIT up over $50,000,000 year over year. So Call it a 75% or so contribution margin on that.

Speaker 11

If you did that same analysis during fiscal 2023, I think you'd come up with a similar contribution margin or drop through of revenue to EBIT. So I guess the question would be, because fiscal 2023 had risks and cost control and stuff like that, How you thought about the buildup to drive similar leverage operating leverage in fiscal 2024 as fiscal 2023 and the logistics behind it? And I've got a follow-up to record.

Speaker 8

Yes. Adam, we try to be very thoughtful when we go into the planning session as we move into 2024. And a lot of that stems from the actions that we took 6 months ago with the restructuring. And we really tried to be very deliberate to At a department level where we're going to make our investments. Corey mentioned a little bit early in the prepared remarks about some of this investment in innovation.

Speaker 8

So I would expect to R and D as we go into next year to tick up a little bit as a percentage of revenue. But when we look across the base, I think we see nice leverage across the board in sales and marketing and G and A. And we want to make sure we're investing in the appropriate areas. And I think we can do all of that based on the way we built the plan for this year and still double that free cash flow to at least $160,000,000 as we go into 2024.

Speaker 11

Okay. And quickly, Corey, this obvious improved profitability is impressive, but I wonder how you would reflect on the impact on growth. You added $90,000,000 of net new ARR this year. Looks like guidance implies around $85,000,000 net new ARR next year, so flat to slightly down. What would it take to maybe push to a new level of net new ARR or a step function above this level on growth?

Speaker 11

And do you think you could do so while holding this level of profitability?

Speaker 6

So Juan, it's a very good question. What I would say is that we have plenty of growth levers in the business. Whether you look at our distribution partners or whether you look at the new Products and capabilities that we actually plan to actually bring online. Whether you look at the fact Well, we see the same market momentum and consistency that was on Q4, and that you see a healthier market, not just stable, but it gets even healthier. So we have, I would just say, growth drivers and catalysts in our own business.

Speaker 6

There's market ones. There's things that we're doing in our partner distribution ecosystem. So we have a number of catalysts and growth drivers. What I would just say is from a guidance perspective, we just don't think that's material to actually to put into our baseline guidance assumptions. So we're always going to pursue and look at pursuing higher growth.

Speaker 6

But in our model, what we're committed to It's actually delivering very strong free cash flow growth, of which I am thrilled and my focus is for that to come from higher ARR growth. But if the market is tighter or tougher, then that can just easily come from margin expansion, which Tim and our finance team has plenty of room to do.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani from Citi. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Corey, Eric Barton, I wanted to revisit the outlook and maybe ask you this question from a different angle.

Operator

So when I stack up all of the goodness that you're seeing with back to the package momentum, the larger deal sizes, the ASP increases commensurate with that. Why would we see a deceleration and frankly a flattening out of your net new ARR? If you can give us sort of the flip side of the coin on what are some of the conservative elements that you're baking into your outlook to hear perhaps there is some cannibalization and maybe some compression of existing spend. I'd just really like to better to understand the other side of the coin on that implied conservatism. Even though things are going well and you're frankly entering year 2 of a much stronger, better to equipped and enabled sales force in installing these packages.

Operator

Thank you.

Speaker 6

No, it's a very fair and good question, Puneet. So I think that, you know, the first thing I would just say is that we do expect the market to be noisy. And so overall, so the, you know, the first thing you just say is that, Look, if we actually while Q4 was consistent and stable, we saw upward momentum on deals getting funded, And that was very healthy. Look, if the market stays very healthy, then like we have room. That's a good thing.

Speaker 6

We actually have upside there. That's not a problem. It would be inappropriate from my perspective to actually assume that all market noisiness and challenges are behind us. That's just not something that I'm going to do what we're going to do from a fundamental planning perspective. But if it is, that's sort of like that's Very consistent.

Speaker 6

I would just say that's probably one of the biggest factors, that I would consider. And then, you know, to your other points, if things Stay. I would just say, like, if I look at the positive signals, and they'll stay consistent. If you know, like, our conversion rates Great. We're seeing some of the best conversion rates we've actually seen.

Speaker 6

You know, I don't assume that record high conversion rates stay record high. I'll just be explicit about that, even though they've been record highs for a couple of quarters. That's great. If you look at what we're doing from a distribution and building pipeline perspective, as we've actually sort of like come back from the rift. We're really investing heavily in our partner ecosystem.

Speaker 6

I would just say that our assumption is that that turns on later this year into early next year, but that actually may turn on sooner and that's actually a great sort of like thing if that actually happens there. And so if the Positive things that we actually see in the business and outlook continue, then we'll definitely to your point sort of be able to perform above. We do not factor that into sort of like the baseline assumptions to just say in a noisy market that things are going to actually be all good. I think that that's more of just the approach that we take. What we are committed to on the flip side, and this is something that we actually instituted at the end of last year from now on restructuring, We're committed to actually delivering strong free cash flow growth and setting ourselves up to actually exceed expectations somewhere along the line in the medium term setup.

Speaker 6

And that is sort of like a commitment that we make is like, hey, if the market is noisy, then we actually have margin expansion. But if we've seen the health and consistency that we actually saw coming out of last year and that continues stably throughout this year and it goes up, And we'll feel very good about things, and we'll be going stronger.

Speaker 8

Grant, I would just add, we're seeing strong demand from CISOs because they have a backlog of to projects and the CFOs have gotten in the way a little bit to slow things down to release funding.

Speaker 6

The funding of the projects that are in the backlog CECLs have a lot of stuff that they want to do. We actually saw that those get funded nicely, sort of like coming out of last year. And I would love to see our aspirations to see those keep getting funded. We don't have a demand problem. We do have like our customers have to continue to fund security And the pace of that funding is something that we keep an eye on.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Gray Powell from BTIG. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. Yes, so that last answer was really thorough. But I did just have like one follow-up to to Fatima and Adam's question. So if I just look at like net new ARR trends, you bounced back to positive territory in Q3.

Speaker 4

Obviously, we had the Q4 results. The 2024 guidance implies that net new ARR additions is down. I'm just curious, like in terms of linearity, at some point, do you think we get back into positive net add growth in 2024? Like is that something that could happen in the second half of the Or is that really more of a 2025 event?

Speaker 6

Well, I think you're similar to the last question, I think you're asking, As you know more and if the market is stable and good, do you have the chance to grow higher? I said, yes, look, we have the capacity to actually grow faster. That is not a framework that we're going to start out with. The framework that we're starting out with is basically the free cash flow framework. 1st is actually taking a definitive view That the market is completely stable.

Speaker 6

If that actually happens, then without a doubt, we'll actually grow, we'll grow faster.

Speaker 4

Okay. Really helpful. A lot of color there. Appreciate that. And then last one on my side.

Speaker 4

Just did the risk from August to have any outsized impact on productivity or conversion rates or anything in Q4? Or was Q4 pretty much Exactly like you expected it to be.

Speaker 6

Q4 was pretty much exactly I would say Q4 was slightly better than we expected. I mean, like we saw again, We saw incredibly strong conversion rates. We saw customers funding projects. It was not budget flush to be clear. There was not like a lot of net new things, but projects that Customers have been waiting on spending on they actually funded those projects.

Speaker 6

Our sales team executed extraordinarily well. We liked a lot of what we saw in And we like a lot of the momentum that we actually have entering this year.

Speaker 3

Understood. Okay. Thank you very much.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of a shankarathari from Robert Baird. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Yes. Thanks for taking my question. So Corey, you mentioned about, to the Investor Relations and the Partner Ecosystem. And you also highlighted to leverage marketplaces like AWS. So just as a follow-up to an earlier question about the new customer growth, looks like CSPM is of course central to your strategy.

Speaker 12

Can you talk about the traction with AWS Marketplace and How much potential do you see that as we already offer products that are integrated into the AWS ecosystem aimed at reducing the to cloud back services and mitigating cloud risk. So, yeah, any color would be helpful here.

Speaker 6

Yeah, I don't have the numbers off. We probably wouldn't break them down. I would just say we saw good growth in AWS market based traction in sales last year. We're expecting, I would just say that growth to continue. This is part of our distribution strategy and engine.

Speaker 6

And I would just say it's continued momentum and we have upside there. But we've seen healthy growth in demand through that marketplace and through our AWS partnership. We're a strategic partner for AWS. They've been a good partner. It's been beneficial on the sales and go to customer side.

Speaker 6

It's something that we and they are investing more into.

Speaker 12

Got it. Thanks, Corey.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Henderson from Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thanks. Couple of comments made on the call just seemed

Speaker 13

a little

Speaker 5

Difficult to analyze. And you said you plan to gain share, but I don't really know what you think the market The growth rate is that you're gaining share again. So I was wondering if you could just give us some sort of a parse on what the rate of the market growth is Both in the near term and say intermediate timeframe. And in that context, You do talk a lot about the new customer adds. And it seems to me that you're still shedding some of the smaller customers and shifting mix to the larger customers.

Speaker 5

So it's somewhat of a bimodal number. If you could give us a little bit for quantification on what the larger customer growth rates look like versus the fallout at the bottom of the pie, that would be great. Thanks.

Speaker 6

Yes. So Good questions. I'm not going to try to do the IDC Gartner thing of giving the overall market growth rates, because I probably like misremember the specificity of them. But what I would just say is that think about my comment largely, Alex, is that our assumption or our plan is to see growth rate acceleration Over the midterm, you can give out that 2 to 3 year window. So we do actually plan to see like growth acceleration, and we plan for that to actually be ahead Where, the analysts in the market is.

Speaker 6

And I think we can look at what they have as their growth rates. It's probably the best arbitrator. It's certainly something that I actually said. But we see the capacity. And our strategy for that, just to be very specific, is that, this year, Our investment is rotated to products and product differentiation and distribution and market expansion.

Speaker 6

So like we're very focused about like what are the high growth areas, detection and response, taking cloud security mainstream, Getting more leverage for us and our partners through our AI and SOC investments and then extending our partnership ecosystem, especially in the managed service space. We think that those investments will allow us to both be differentiated to address more customer demand that we actually see in the overall market and actually have a more cost efficient Go to market motion and distribution motion. That's what we're actually putting our dollars and our investments. We think that over the next 3 years, We can be a very, very strong book free cash flow grower but also a total top line ARR grower with that actual setup and with that investment. Yeah.

Speaker 6

I won't comment more on the guide because I think I talked about like the different structure we have on the guide that we instituted at the end of last year. So I think I talked about that extensively. But that is just not sort of like the totality of how we actually see the midterm and the long term Or even fully this year. Your other question about customer accounts, you're absolutely 100% right. And what I would just say is that you can say it's smaller customer.

Speaker 6

What I would just say is That growth in customers, I think you nailed it, Alex, it actually maxed a shift from transactional sales and yes, some smaller customers To a higher mix of strategic sales, where Rapid7 is a dominant security provider, with all the opportunity for expansion and growth on that. So you're seeing a real shift in mix as reflected by our ARR per customer in there. So it is an intentional, as you say, shedding, I would say lower, you know, lower more transactional sort of like customers. It is transactional focus, not really the dollar size, to actually being more strategic. And I think we're executing great on that sort of like strategic pivot.

Speaker 6

So to that point, that's why I said we're not focused. Your question on like what's the growth rate, I think a while ago we provided like the platform growth rate. To I don't have that metric on hand and ready to go right now.

Speaker 8

That number is growing faster than the overall company base.

Speaker 6

It is. I just don't have it growing. We need to break to

Speaker 8

It's a few points higher than what we disclosed.

Speaker 6

Exactly. But thanks for the question, Alex.

Speaker 13

Great. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Turits from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Speaker 13

Hey guys, Eric, Heath here. Hey, Sam. Hey, Corey.

Speaker 4

Good to

Speaker 2

talk to you again.

Speaker 13

I mean, just along similar vein of the questions that have been asked, but I guess I'll just ask 2. Corey, I guess, What are the areas of the business where you can kind of best control your own destiny when it comes to that ARR acceleration of summer water? And then 2, just curious and to Performance in the quarter. Just curious if there's anything to call out, whether it's demand trends or just execution from the team, whether it's to Americas versus International, if there's anything to call out, I would suggest to you. Thanks.

Speaker 6

Well, that's a great question. I might tag team that with you. I actually thought to Q4 was fairly solid from my perspective. There's nothing that stands out. Tim, I don't know whether you think about anything that stands out.

Speaker 8

EMEA performed very strong in Q4 in terms of new bookings.

Speaker 6

Yes, which is an improvement over the prior year. So that was healthy. But I would just say that q4 was overall very, very healthy in general. I think on the stuff that we can control, I would just say we're taking, Eric, very disciplined mid term investments. So, look, we can control to our distribution ecosystem.

Speaker 6

As I've said before, we are invested in the partner. As we bring on new distribution things, we're being quite successful at it. I just don't factor in. And that's why I should say it, like, you know, you could you could figure out how you want to talk about those. We don't factor in things that are in motion or in play, even if they're sort of like optimistic into baseline assumptions.

Speaker 6

That's just not the way we're ever going to approach it. We talked to you about things that are actually already done and completed. But we have a lot of control of we're in the right markets. We're in sort of like the growth of your parts of security, detection responses to anchor tenant. We have incredible conversion rates.

Speaker 6

We're Set up well, we don't have to change our market position. So I'll say is we have capacity to actually do well in the market. But what we're communicating, I think overall, I'll reiterate, is that the market I will flip it around and just say, The setup that we've gave you is actually one of control. What we've actually said is that, like, we can actually grow, well and draw free cash flow independent of what happens in the market. And we think that's a great setup in a market that's a little bit noisy.

Speaker 6

And I would just say if the market stays safe, if the market is stable, then we actually have plenty of capacity for top line growth.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Please go

Speaker 14

ahead. Hey, this is Patrick on for Josh. Corey, you've mentioned that the environment was noisy a few times now. Just Just wondering if you could unpack that a little bit further. And then also one of your competitors mentioned that the mid market was strong in the Q4.

Speaker 14

Curious if You saw any of that outsized strength in the mid market space or maybe increased competition? Thanks.

Speaker 6

Yeah, I'll do the second one first. Mint market was, I would just say, stable and consistent for us and it was healthy. I think we made adjustments to earlier. So I think different people process their observations about the mid market. We processed ours at the start of last year.

Speaker 6

And I would say it was at or Seated our expectations and we think it's a healthy driver and contributor. And then remind me of your first question again. I'm not good at multiple questions. Oh, no. You've mentioned that

Speaker 14

the environment was noisy.

Speaker 6

Yeah. Yeah. So here's what I mean by noisy. When we talk to CECL, look, You said once again, when we talk to C cells and security teams, we see plenty of demand. Like there is plenty of demand.

Speaker 6

What's been noisy is if you look over the course of last year, there was different points in times where people were having trouble getting those projects funded Versus not. And so we don't see a problem in actually security demand. The question is, can those security teams get those projects funded? If they're getting those funds as funded, we feel great and things are great, but I'm not going to take a dependency that basically all the security projects that we actually see are actually going to get funded. That's what's been noisy.

Speaker 6

Over the course of last year, you had different periods of time where security teams were told they had to slow down some of their investments. I would say that my hope is that what we're seeing from the regulatory environment and what we're seeing more broadly, is going to encourage people to actually fund the projects Their security teams and their CSOs are asking for, but it's also not something that it would be wise to actually have a presumption that that's going to be the default case.

Speaker 14

Very helpful. Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of to Rob Galvin from Stifel. Please go ahead.

Speaker 10

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Corey, Last quarter, you spoke of a growing number of longer term contracts with weighted average deal duration of 20% year over year. I'm wondering if you've seen the same trend to Q4 and what your expectations are for 2024 on this front? Thanks.

Speaker 8

Yes, but still it was strong again in Q4. So we're really pleased with Really seeing those contracts being extended out beyond 1 year contracts. We're seeing a lot of 3 year contracts, both on the new and the renewal side.

Speaker 6

I would just say that goes to what we talked about, you know, us becoming and being a strategic provider. I think our most part of the team is that, like, if you look over the last 3 years, We have become a very strong strategic provider of security and you see that both reflect in our consolidation offerings As well as our ASPs and ARR, as well as the length and the duration of the contracts that customers want to do with us. So, yeah, I think that's fair.

Operator

And that's all the time we have for questions. I will now turn the call back over to Corey Thomas for closing remarks.

Speaker 6

Well, thank you all for joining us on the call today, and I wish you all a good evening. Thanks.

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Earnings Conference Call
Rapid7 Q4 2023
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