Elastic N.V. (NYSE:ESTC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Anushtha Mittal: Got it. And then when thinking about the 13% risk you announced recently, if you could just talk about how we should think about the cost savings or the margin impact of that in fiscal ’23 and fiscal ’24?

Janesh Moorjani : Yes. So we provided a view on that. When we reported, the 13% rift was a little bit more than 400 people. That’s really what helped us to drive the sequential increase in the operating margin from Q2 to Q3 and allowed us to raise our outlook for the year when we took that action as well. And that actually played out — we — that played out as we expected here in Q3. In fact, if anything, we saw a little bit of timing that some of the actions happened earlier than expected. So that’s factored into the outlook now for Q4 and also for fiscal ’24. As I said, I think that action was sufficient for us. We don’t need to take any further actions on that front. And from this point, based on the run rate of operating margin that we have, achieving the 10% goal for next year is largely going to be a function of the operating leverage that is already inherent in the model as we grow revenue faster than expenses.

Operator: The next question comes from Joel Fishbein with Truist Securities.

Joel Fishbein : I actually have one for Janesh and one for Ash. Ash, can you address the security market specifically and trends you’re seeing and any changes in the competitive dynamics? And then, Janesh, I just wanted to ask about the puts and takes on the net expansion rate.

Ash Kulkarni: Yes. Thanks for the question. So in terms of security, we are seeing really good traction on SIEM and XDR. I talked about several examples. We are also seeing a lot of interest in our cloud security capabilities. Last quarter, I talked about the fact that our CSI benchmarks, the work that we’ve been doing for cloud security there, we had about 30 customers using that capability. That number is now closer to 300. So we’re seeing good interest. We’ve been recognized, as you’ve seen in some of the prepared remarks that I made, in security analytics as one of the leaders. And all of that is benefiting — we’re seeing our ability to really differentiate ourselves and do well in these deals. So from a competitive standpoint, I feel really good, especially given that underlying all of this is our ability.

We present a very scalable and open solution to our customers, which is getting a lot of interest. And so a lot of the customer commitments that we talked about, and even in some of the examples that I gave, I gave some security examples in there, a lot of this is coming from all the work and innovation that we’ve done in security over the years that has just strengthened our ability to compete. So we feel very good about how that business is continuing.

Janesh Moorjani : And Joel, on a net expansion rate, the decline that we talked about, that really reflects the 2 themes that I mentioned earlier on commitments and consumption. So as I mentioned on the prepared remarks, for cloud contracts, commitments generally don’t count towards the net expansion rate, but consumption does. So the stronger commits that we saw in the quarter are not reflected in that number, but the slower consumption is. So over time, as consumption of committed contracts ramps, that will help the net expansion rate. And then to unpack the drivers a bit further, if you think about expansions, that was a little bit slower than a year ago on the self-managed side. And on the cloud side, where the commitments were strong, as I said, those commitments were generally not included in the calculation until consumed.

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