FSLY - Fastly Inc. (FSLY) D.A. Davidson Technology Summit (Transcript)
2023-11-16 16:57:09 ET
Fastly, Inc. (FSLY)
D.A. Davidson Technology Summit
November 16, 2023, 11:45 AM ET
Company Participants
Todd Nightingale - CEO
Ron Kisling - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Rudy Kessinger - D.A. Davidson
Presentation
Rudy Kessinger
Okay. Great. So my name is Rudy Kessinger. I am the lead security and infrastructure software analyst here at DA Davidson. With me today we have management of Fastly. We've got CEO, Todd Nightingale and CFO, Ron Kisling, joining us today. So thank you both for your time.
Todd Nightingale
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Rudy Kessinger
Todd, could you maybe just start out for maybe those who are a bit unfamiliar with your business, just who is Fastly? What do you do?
Todd Nightingale
Sure. That's a gift. Fastly, traditionally, has been a performance-driven dynamic content delivery network and a CDN company and that's sort of where we were born more than 10 years ago, but the journey has been I think super interesting. In fact, we see the reality of this happening across the market right now, but we've always been in the performance side of the CDN business and from customers even years ago we got the feedback that what they were looking for is really an edge partner, edge cloud partner, more than a CDN point solution and we've built out security technology, including really all of the edge security space what Gartner calls web application and API security and that includes DDOS mitigation, bot mitigation that's about to release. It includes next-gen WAF which is really the crown jewel of that space.
The portfolio is expanded to true edge compute able to dynamically deploy bespoke workloads around the world and now edge observability and those components really build out an edge cloud platform that gives customers who are focused on user experience, focused on delivering the best performance on their web assets. It gives them a platform for that. We say at Fastly, we make the internet a better place where all experiences are fast, safe and engaging.
Rudy Kessinger
So Todd you've been in the seat for just about exactly a year now I believe and I've got two questions there. Firstly, what has surprised you about the relative to your expectations coming in either positive or negative?
Todd Nightingale
Yeah a lot of surprises. I feel like I did my research, I was hoping there'd be not too many surprises but -- the network side and the capital intensity side and then on the go-to market side of the things.
Rudy Kessinger
Sure.
Todd Nightingale
Capital intensity side, we're going to ask Ron for some help there, but look on the network side, by focusing the team on the business outcome, we were able to uncover real optimizations in our infrastructure. One of the core value propositions the strength of the technology at Fastly, is that our infrastructure is software driven. Its software-driven network, software driven infrastructure 100%. There's practically nothing in a Fastly pop other than data center switches and compute platforms and because of that we're able to build enormous amount of efficiencies and deploy it to our fleet without having to deploy a shred of new hardware.
So far this year we've deployed 35% performance increase across our fleet with zero dollars spent with no new hardware deployed and that is driving our confidence number one that this architecture has real power and like really unique ability to outperform our competitors' technology and that the algorithms behind the kind of performance advantage that we deliver continue to bear fruit, which is awesome and that's what's driving some of the capital efficiency.
Ron Kisling
Yeah. What I would add is just, it is that network that allows us to achieve the capital efficiency that we have today. I think if you look at the improvement it really is a factor of the company not having a good mechanism to really forecast traffic expectations into the future and so a lot of the investment was made absent that information and it resulted in a little bit of a over capacity over buying for the network back in '21.
We started to work through that in '22 and you're starting to see us align with what we think is really the go-forward capital intensity, which is probably 6% to 8% of revenue and that is sustainable into the future.
Todd Nightingale
And then I would say the other big change we made was around really business alignment and aligning the spend. So Ron put together an amazing budgeting and strategic process to drive clear budget alignment across the company to deliver a OpEx and an operating margin result that we're that we're proud of. We continue to beat expectations there. We hope to continue to do so. And even more importantly, on the growth driver side, taking that budget and really focusing as much of the spend as we possibly can on distinct quota carriers. We opened up a ton of regions this year. We will add up, will open up new regions next year really designed to focus our spend on driving growth specifically customer acquisition growth.
Rudy Kessinger
So I want to start, I shouldn't say start, but I guess, I'm going to kind of walk through the P&L starting on the revenue side of things and your largest -- one of your largest competitors acquired some contracts from StackPath and Lumen, who exited the business. I think that -- those two deals totalled $ 60 million to $ 70 million a year of delivery revenue.
There are some interesting things going on with some other players in the CDN space as well. Just what have you seen as far as consolidation over the past few quarters? How has that benefited your business and when you look forward, do you expect these trends to benefit even more so as we get into 2024?
Todd Nightingale
I think you can name the competitors so Akamai bought the contracts of StackPath and Lumen. StackPath and Lumen were kind of well-known as being very, very low cost providers and not that that necessarily forced them out of the market. I think being a point solution just is not that -- is not the way this market is going to go.
We were seeing platform -- the platform strategy playing out in the edge cloud space just like we saw in the central cloud, AWS and GCP and Azure finding homes where point solutions are very, very hard to maintain success. We're seeing the same thing in the edge and so point solutions are having a hard time holding on.
I think it's generally good for the space having a couple of the very low cost options removed from the market should making the pricing environment a little better for us, which is great. I think that will -- that trend we'll see echoing through the system for the next year or so, but the reality is I think it's a real opportunity for us to be honest.
There's a ton of customers that have been using StackPath and Lumen for content delivery. I think they're going to be picking their heads up and making a vendor selection regardless of who bought their contract and we plan to earn their business.
Rudy Kessinger
Yeah, that's fair enough. On security just tell us about where you're at with security today? I believe it's 14% of your business today that's predominantly just with the WAF solution you're coming out with bot and DDOS here soon. What is going to be different about your products? I guess what is different about your WAF product, but also how are you going to differentiate with your bot and DDOS and come to the market with a security offering that is advantage versus your peers and I'll start there then I got a follow-up.
Todd Nightingale
I think we do have a great track record here. The WAF solution is market-leading especially in efficacy and you see this in the tech bake-offs across the industry, including Gartner. It's great tech and it comes in through an acquisition signal science from a couple years ago. I love the tech. I love the way it's deployed. It gives customers real choice, but we do have work to do on easing the cross-sell from existing content delivery customers into our security space and we're working very closely to make sure that that is really accelerating our cross-sell.
We moved all of the single science technology into the infrastructure. So it's already running in all of -- on all of our machines and all of our pops. Our customers are able to leverage it on the same data plane, but the management plane having a single dashboard for both things that will give us a really nice leg up and ease our sales motion there. So we're very focused on that that'll be coming out in the first half and I think that will be a huge, huge step to making sure we have the best product because it's the easiest to use.
Bot mitigation is in beta right now. We have a ton of customers on it. It's going live. I don't go limited availability this quarter actually. So we can start closing some business, but it'll go GA in Q1. Again, we did a very exhaustive survey of the market here of all the anti-bot technologies available. This is an interesting emerging space. We believe what we will have because it has so much platform information that we have so many signals coming from next-gen WAF, coming from our content delivery will be able to be a real premium offering in this space, which is super exciting.
We launched a managed service, security managed service, which is proactive and not reactive. We've had great response on that and that revenue base is starting to grow where customers are starting to trust Fastly not just for the security tech, but actually the monitoring and managing of that as well.
Security track or security team's track record really has been phenomenal. The security proxy work that they launched for browsers, we picked up our third large browser customer this past quarter in Mozilla and that's been very successful too. So, I feel -- if we look -- when I look at our business, I look at content delivery and network service is sort of our core and security is our growth with compute and observability incubation I feel really good about the security business.
Rudy Kessinger
And then just a quick follow-up in terms of the potential financial impact as you lean more into security, do you have any aspirational goalpost in mind in terms of what percent of the business you would like to see come from security over the next couple years. What be it your new bookings on a quarterly basis, be it the actual revenue mix of the business.
And then secondly, just drawn if you could refresh your memory I believe when Signal Sciences was acquired, the gross margins were in that -- were said to be 80%-ish plus and so remind us about the creativeness of the security business to gross margins as it grows as percentage of the mix?
Todd Nightingale
I think there's an opportunity for this to be, when I look at a customer -- individual customer that is well deployed in CDN and security, I think security can be 40% of their spend. In the fullness of time, I hope security winds up being a third of our business, with compute coming behind and content delivery probably leading for some time, but there's no reason it couldn't be that large.
Ron Kisling
and I think from a gross margin perspective, I think that 80% certainly is a good number when it's running kind of by itself. When it's running on top of delivery, it is incremental revenue for some of the same traffic and so you actually can see margins when it is part of a delivery solution being much higher probably even in the 90s.
I think where we really see benefits of gross margin is when we're selling across the platform fully utilizing the platform, getting paid for multiple solutions on either that same traffic or on the same hardware where you start to see really that leverage our gross margins favourably.
Rudy Kessinger
Shifting gears to go to market and what you've been doing with the channel and packaging, could you just quickly recap the initiatives you guys have leaned into there and just the early success you're seeing?
Todd Nightingale
Yes on the packaging side, we made a move to build a lower friction motion for customers to buy Fastly technology and in so in doing that analysis, we found there were a handful of really tougher -- tough feedback from our customers and prospective customers. It's hard to know which features to buy up front when they want to make the initial purchase and it can feel like a little risky to start buying Fastly and you don't know exactly what the bill will be at the end of the month.
And so we instituted packaging, which allows people to buy CDN and edge compute for the first time as in what almost feels like a SaaS motion. It's a package with predictable billing, no overages unless you're significantly over your usage limit and a suite of features that is most of what you'll need or for practically everyone everything you'll need and put that in the market, we got great response early on because of predictable pricing now. We're getting great response from our sales team because it's easy to sell and easy to sell through the channel.
Standard pricing on each package doesn't have to be custom negotiated standard discount strategy across the board, that's great. We're seeing them pick it up. This last quarter was a big success in terms of the packaging motion and you can see it in the RPO results. Packaging is great business for us because it's a monthly -- it's a monthly predictable bill, which shows up as an effectively a monthly commit from our customer, which is awesome.
Second piece on the on the channel side, I've always believed in systems integration channel for a company like Fastly and the reason is that Fastly is an edge platform. There's so much development work and systems integration work can be done on the platform and that can be used to integrate into our customers infrastructure and that can be done faster and easier by systems integration partners and so by bringing those partners on board, we get two benefits, the customers that use them can find the staff augmentation they need to ramp up Fastly usage faster that's tends to be good for, Ron loves that. It's good for our bottom line.
But our partners more than that when they become experts at using Fastly, we're really starting to see this now, they are finding new deals in their accounts and they're registering those deals with Fastly, which is great that should starting to show some confidence from the channel and yeah we continue to invest there. We'll push hard in '20. I think '23 is going to be important. '24 is going to be an important year for channel. We're going to push hard next year.
Rudy Kessinger
And on the channel, I know you're not disclosing what percentage of revenue comes from the channel, but you have said I think in this past earnings call, you've seen a 3x and deal registrations from the channel year to date versus all the '22 and also 50% growth in channel revenue. I guess have we started to fully see the revenue impact from the 3x in deal registrations or when does -- what is the lag and when should we start to see the full effect because 50% revenue growth versus a 3x and deal regs, that's a bit of a variance between those two figures. So when do we start to see the full impact of the momentum you're seeing there in the bookings front?
Todd Nightingale
Deals take between let's say for eight months to close. So that's what the lag is on a deal reg to close and then the bookings ramp from there. So like there is a lag for sure. We're going to see it. It's going to -- you're going to see what eight month to twelve month lag on that stuff, but that's why we're trying to give you visibility especially in partner activation. So like bringing partners on board, we closed Q3 with 55 partners on board up from low 30s I think.
That result, that's a really solid leading indicator for me, deal reg being the next indicator that those partners are being activated and bringing deals into the system, not just closing existing deals and of course the revenue, but we all know the revenues a lagging indicator. I hope that we're going to always be seeing this. We're going to be tracking deal registrations that hold a large amount of revenue that'll be pushing their way through the system and that number will always be growing.
Rudy Kessinger
And then just a quick follow-up in packages. I know you've talked about it reducing the buying friction. Do you have any data yet where you can conclude that the average sales cycle is notably shorter for customers who buy packages or what does that look like?
Todd Nightingale
No, I'm going to get that data, but I don't -- all I have -- what I have right now are anecdotes. The one there's a -- I certainly have data on this. There is a friction that's removed with predictable billing for sure. So cost like in it more than half of the initial tranche of customer wins in those first two quarters, more than half of the customers mentioned predictable billing as a reason they went ahead which is awesome. So that lowers the friction from the customer side.
The sales motion process side I'm going to find some data for you on that. I believe there's a huge win here in standard pricing standard discount, but yeah, I don't have any data on it. It's a good question.
Rudy Kessinger
Got it. Ron I want to come to you on gross margins. I know you have never faced questions on gross margins before. Could you quantify, I know you're facing some near-term headwinds from some ramping traffic in some less mature regions. Could you quantify the impact of gross margins in Q4?
Ron Kisling
Yes. So I think in Q4 those headwinds are probably -- it's about a 100 basis point headwind in our gross margins and it's really driven by increasing traffic in some of our smaller remote international regions where we've had very low traffic in the past, but this is part of a good process going forward because as we see this spike in traffic, we're able to go back into these markets renegotiate our bandwidth rates as we see traffic come up we can increase peering and turn those from what a relatively higher gross margin or higher cost markets into more in line with what we're seeing across the platform and apply those gross margins to all the customers in that region.
Rudy Kessinger
And what -- I'm not sure exactly how many regions you're seeing that, but how many regions have you repriced those contracts thus far and how many do you have to go?
Ron Kisling
It was not a specific number. I would say certainly we renegotiated one of those regions in the third quarter. Our head of infrastructure was in Southeast Asia, last week renegotiating contracts there. I'd say there's a handful and I think we'll work through those over the next quarter or two. At that point, I think these headwinds tend to abate and I think we're back on our trajectory of seeing our incremental 80% gross margins that we talked about it investor day.
Rudy Kessinger
Yeah, so I want to come to some of those gross margin targets the investor just to be clear for investors as they look at their models, that 100 basis points impact you feel it'll be fully abated by Q2 of next year.
Ron Kisling
Yeah it's sometime in the first half.
Rudy Kessinger
Okay and then coming back to those targets you gave at the investor day, again it was 80% incremental gross margins on a year-over-year basis going forward, understanding quarterly, you've got some seasonality that yeah that can mess with things, but in 65% gross margins by 2026, are you guys still confident in achieving those?
Ron Kisling
Yeah we are. I think implicit in that 80% gross margin is, one of the benefits of this traffic is it does allow us to optimize some of these more remote regions, so that our global network is more efficient. As we drive new customer acquisition, expand the number of products that customers have, we talked earlier about the gross margins that security has particularly where you have multi-product deployments and we continue to increase the diversity of our customer base. All of those are going to drive improved gross margins and that's what drives the incremental 80% gross margins on a year-over-year basis that achieves that 65%-ish gross margins in 2026.
Rudy Kessinger
Maybe just linked quarter, like what -- to get to that 65% target, what is -- what's the most important factor -- what's the second most important factor between security, between what those, what you just named?
Ron Kisling
I think what I would say is under underlying those are foundational is sort of the rigor and the forecasting we put into our overall network costs. Todd spoke about the efficiencies that we've been able to deploy via software. There's probably another round of those efficiencies that we're able to deploy into the software, continuing to increase peering and negotiate rates broadly are foundational to achieving these results.
I would say then it really comes down to continuing to grow the business at the rates we spoke about, increasing the deployment of products across security and compute. So we get higher attach rates across multiple product deployments. This is kind of the order. And then I think continuing to diversify the verticals where we deliver product and building out the mid-market, those are all contributors to that higher gross margins.
Rudy Kessinger
And as you look just step it down to OpEx and getting to those operating margin free cash flow margin targets you laid out as well. where should we see the most operating leverage over the next couple years?
Ron Kisling
Yeah you're going to see the biggest operating leverage in G&A. I think we're where we've seen is efficiencies in terms of our overall operations and most of that you're going to see in our general administrative costs. I think that's we're going to see the biggest leverage, but as we drive efficiencies in our operations, it is going to fund improved efficiency across product and engineering and sales and marketing, which helps fund the investments we're making in product and go-to-market.
Rudy Kessinger
Lastly for you Ron than Todd I want to come back to you for a moment, you guys have been making some discounted repurchases of your convertible notes at a pretty rapid clip I think you announced two $40 million to $50 million repurchases just within the last week. I know you're being opportunistic there Is there any like in terms of your net cash balance, excuse me, or your gross cash balance where you don't want to go below?
Ron Kisling
I think we've spoken about kind of given our business and of course we expect in 2024 to be cash flow break-even, that the right cash balance for us is probably between $300 million and $400 million. We're just under $400 million with these last repurchases. So we're -- I think we're in a good place in terms of where the repurchase are.
Again we looked at this sort of opportunistically and it was a good opportunity to bring down at a big discount by more than half our convertible debt at a par savings of over a $100 million and so I think we feel really good about where we are and I think the cash balance feels really good right now.
Rudy Kessinger
Yeah. So Todd I think for investors who have followed the story for a while or even my set myself and my counterparts, we've been hearing about edge compute for a long time and I think there's still a lot of confusion out there about what exactly it is edge compute, but also when does it actually become a meaningful portion of your business because today it's not and so what maybe try to help give some clarity, what is edge computing, why are you guys well positioned to address that market and then when does it actually impact numbers because it seemed to be a thing that you and various other competitors have talked about for a while, but actually becoming a material driver seems to escape the various players out there?
Todd Nightingale
Yeah look I think it's an incubating market, there's no doubt about it. Wishing that the growth of that kind of technology would happen in two years instead of five years doesn't make it true, but the -- but it's an incredibly important piece here. If I think about the reason that people move to a technology like Fastly to deliver performance, it's deliver user experience and content delivery can only get you there for static content.
Fastly has deployed the most dynamic, the most sort of real-time content delivery possible. In fact we have technology that's borderlines on edge compute that's embedded within our delivery network and that gets a ton of personalization built into that, but to take that to the next step to get truly dynamic content, specifically personalization, for your web experience, what kind of content is recommended to you? What kind of purchases and products are recommended to you? How is your checkout experience, your shopping cart experience? What does it feel like on the high-tech side what a real-time alerting feel like in true real-time, true performance side to look at the high at the dynamic part of the internet to deliver that with the same kind of performance as the static content you need edge compute and that is why we're so focused on it, that's why customers are moving to it.
I'd love to give you like a date when I think it'll be a substantial part of the business, but in the next two years we are going to see an enormous transformation in this space. There's no doubt about it. It's why we're investing so much in it Fastly. It's why my competitors are as well. I wouldn't discount that and it's why we're seeing this influx of customer acquisition and that's how I measure that business. I measure them on customer acquisition, not on product releases or press releases where we are bringing customers on to that platform and those customers will drive a significant revenue stream in the near future.
Rudy Kessinger
IN in terms of the macro, I know you called out on this last earnings call, it showing up in some elongated sales cycles, was that new had you guys not been seeing that up until Q3 or were -- it sounded like you -- it got worse. I don't know what did you see and what are you seeing?
Todd Nightingale
Well I got that question -- I get that question every earnings call for the last three and I really hadn't seen anything before that week. There's a lot -- I know that there's a lot of weakness in like SMB customer base and maybe some of the mid-market, but we just don't have a lot of exposure there and there's some exposure, there some of our competitors saw it in like financials, we don't have a lot of exposure there to maybe Telco again.
Our customers tend to see Fastly, it's not a nice to have, it's not something that can be compromised. It's a must-have in -- part of their infrastructure that drives their revenue, that drives their user experience. So we hadn't really seen anything. This is the first time I caught a hint of it and that was deal elongation right at the end of the quarter. We had three or four deals slip.
They've all closed now and it looks pretty clean and we'll see maybe at the end of this quarter., I'll have an update for you man. I don't know, but it's been -- our business has been pretty well sustained through the macros that macro effects that other people are seeing.
Rudy Kessinger
Yeah it certainly appears that it has good. Well, Ron, Todd, thanks again for the time. Appreciate it and we'll go ahead and wrap things up here.
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Fastly, Inc. (FSLY) D.A. Davidson Technology Summit (Transcript)