Fastly, Inc. (NYSE:FSLY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Fastly, Inc. (NYSE:FSLY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Fastly, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.32267 EPS, expectations were $-0.07. Fastly, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Abby, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fastly First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Vern Essi, Investor Relations at Fastly. Please go ahead.

Vernon Essi: Thank you, and welcome, everyone to our first-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. We have Fastly CEO, Todd Nightingale; and CFO, Ron Kisling, with us today. The webcast of this call can be accessed through our website, fastly.com, and will be archived for one year. Also a replay will be available by dialing 800-770-2030 and referencing conference ID number 754-3239 nine shortly after the conclusion of today’s call. A copy of today’s earnings press release, related financial tables, and investor supplement, all of which are furnished in our 8-K filing today can be found in the Investor Relations portion of Fastly’s website. During this call, we will make forward looking statements, including statements related to the expected performance of our business, future financial results, product sales, strategy, long-term growth, and overall future prospects.

These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. And for further information regarding risk factors for our business, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report filed on Form 10-K and quarterly report filed on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC and our first-quarter 2024 earnings release and supplement for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. Please refer in particular to the sections entitled Risk Factors. We encourage you to read these documents. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today’s date.

We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Also, during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers we discuss today, other than revenue, will be on an adjusted non-GAAP basis. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings release and supplement on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Now, we’ll turn the call over to Todd. Todd?

Todd Nightingale: Thanks, Vern. Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us today. First, I’d like to give a quick summary of our first-quarter financial results and related highlights. I’ll then discuss our revised revenue outlook and provide an update to our go-to-market initiatives and customer acquisition as it relates to our path forward to drive revenue growth. I will then hand the call over to Ron to discuss the changes in our metrics, our first-quarter financial results, and our guidance in detail. I’m pleased that we reported revenue of $133.5 million in the first quarter, representing a 14% year-over-year growth and coming in above the midpoint of our $131 million to $135 million guidance range. Our customer growth and retention efforts showed improvement in the first quarter with our LTM NRR at 114%, up slightly from Q4’s level of 113% and reversing quarterly declines in this metric since the end of 2022.

Our total customer count in the fourth quarter was 3,290, which increased by 47 customers compared to before and by 190 year over year. Enterprise customers totaled 577 in the quarter, a decrease of 1 from Q4. We brought in 18 net new enterprise customers at the $100,000 annual revenue threshold in the quarter. This was mostly offset by customers that dropped below this threshold due to seasonality. On a year-over-year basis, we grew our enterprise customer count by 37. Our gross margin continues to improve and was 58.8% in the first quarter, up 320 basis points year over year and ahead of our expectations. Our operating loss was $9.7 million in the first quarter compared to an operating loss of $14.1 million in the first quarter of 2023. I’m very pleased with this result as our loss was materially better than our guidance of $14 million to $10 million.

The upside was roughly split between higher gross margins and better OpEx cost control, and Ron will share more details with you in a moment. Lastly, we posted positive $3.7 million in adjusted EBITDA and importantly, an $11.1 million positive cash flow from operations. I’m pleased with the continued momentum on operational execution here, especially as it helps us fuel growth moving forward. Now let me discuss the highlights of the quarter. In the first quarter, we continued our success in diversifying our logo wins and penetrating new and existing customer verticals. We had amazing wins in the health care sector during the first quarter with a leading health solutions company, a major government research agency, and a leading imaging provider.

These key lighthouse accounts will help us accelerate more customer acquisition in healthcare, drive growth in an important sector, and deliver better vertical differentiation to our business. The healthcare industry has always been focused on reliability and performance, making Fastly a perfect fit. We continued to penetrate the mobile app market in high tech. In the first quarter, we won Bending Spoons, a leading mobile app developer, serving over 0.5 billion people across the globe. In France, we are now supporting MWM, a top app publisher, which selected Fastly’s content delivery and image optimization services to support its AI-driven model. In the business services vertical, we’re proud to announce that a leading customer data platform will be onboarding with Fastly.

We also won one of the world’s largest realtor companies with over 100,000 agents in over 100 countries. It’s a great example of how we landed in the real estate vertical with MoxiWorks, which we discussed last quarter, and we’re able to build upon that vertical expertise with this new real estate win. In the first quarter, we introduced Fastly Xcelerate, a series of in-person global events, developed exclusively for Fastly’s customer network of developers, security professionals, and business leaders. The first event was held at our headquarters in San Francisco on April 4, and was widely attended. We will be following up with similar events worldwide in 2024 with London, New York, and Sydney to follow. Lastly, I’m pleased to announce that Fastly’s OHTTP Private Relay won the 2024 DEVIES award for best innovation in services: application development.

Our solution is widely used in the top web browsers on the Internet to help extend privacy to millions of users and beginning to find other use cases in privacy and security. In the first quarter, we continued to drive focus and investment into platform unification and expansion. We enabled self-service adoption with a universal log-in feature across our solutions and improved product trials and upgrades platform-wide. Expanding our platform is key to our platform strategy, and that’s why I’m so excited for Bot Management becoming generally available in Q1. Our Bot Management Solution combats automated bot attacks at the edge and significantly reduces the risk of fraud, distributed DoS attacks, account takeovers, and other online abuse. This is an important cybersecurity milestone for the company, significantly expanding our security offering.

Our DDoS services, best-in-class WAF, and Bot Management Solution makeup incredibly tight, complete security offering in the web application and API security space. We’ve already seen significant uptick here, and it is great to see both customer expansion and acquisition, leveraging this new capability so quickly. Security is a great example of innovation velocity at Fastly. Our WAF continues to be highly differentiated with low false positives and a predominance of customers operating in full blocking mode. Our Bot Management Solution was 100% developed in-house and is already competing well against the most mature products on the market. And there is significant innovation and product enhancements to come. We set up a very strong foundation in 2023 with our newly introduced packaging motion that gained momentum throughout the year.

In the first quarter of 2024, we updated WAF packages by launching observability skews, fixed price add-ons, and enhancements to our packages, especially in security, to continue delivering simplicity, value and, choice for our customers. I’m excited to share with you that in the first quarter, we already exceeded all the customer packaging purchases sold in the first half of 2023. Our packaging motion gives customers reliable billing and shows their confidence in Fastly by signing up for longer-term commitments. Package billing provides predictable pricing for our customers and predictable reliable revenue for Fastly. Additionally, our channel program continues to grow and mature. In the first quarter, deal registrations and revenue contribution more than doubled year over year.

In fact, for the first time, the largest deal in a quarter closed through a channel relationship. Our channel partners continue to have strategic importance in our go-to-market efforts. Our CEO search has been a key focus this quarter. I’m happy with the progress we’ve made as we’re now in the final stages. We’ve interviewed numerous candidates to find the right expertise and a balance of operational expertise and the strategic ability to grow and scale. I’m pleased that we’ve narrowed our candidate down to just a handful, and we should have a selection finalized within a few weeks. I expect to announce a new Chief Revenue Officer in the second quarter. Now let me turn to address our outlook going forward. Our second-quarter guidance of 6% to 9% year-over-year growth and modified 2024 annual rent of 12% year-over-year growth are not where we expected our business to perform, and of course, are disappointing.

Ron will discuss the financial details for this forecast in a moment, but let me first address this outlook and our path forward. There are a few factors that contributed to a challenging short-term environment. The biggest factor is a reduction of revenue from a small number of our largest customers. The first-quarter revenue from our top 10 customers dropped from 40% to 38%. Many of the top 10 accounts run a multi-vendor strategy. And we did see significant volatility here. And there are a few reasons for that. Firstly, historically, Fastly has gradually won greater traffic share in our largest accounts. But with the timing of rate and volume changes, we saw increased volatility this quarter. To be clear, we have not been removed from any of our largest customers and we remain in a strong strategic position, each of them long term.

Secondly, in some accounts, we did see an addition of CDN vendors or reversal of the vendor consolidation we saw last year. And thirdly, we are seeing a slight uptick from the typical level of rerates with our largest customers, but we have not yet seen the commensurate traffic expansion usually associated with this motion. Very positively, we are seeing continued success with new customer acquisition motions, and notably, added two very large new logos in Q1, one of which will move into the top 10 over the course of the year. We aim to see the long-term results of our new customer acquisition motion having an increasing effect on our revenue as the year goes on. Going forward, we strongly believe our strategy is correct and we will remain committed to our focus on growth.

We will continue to invest in our customer acquisition and go-to-market motions. We are shifting the way we engage with our largest multi-vendor customers to focus on improving our visibility and driving traffic and revenue share in those accounts. We remain committed to platform unification and expansion, helping us drive cross-sell and growth. We will continue to drive engineering investment in this effort, coupled with the expansion of our security portfolio with Bot Management to drive stickiness and wallet share with our customers. As a backdrop to these investments, we will continue to drive disciplined in managing our spend with a clear focus efforts leading to long-term growth. In summary, we are pleased with our first-quarter performance, but we are not satisfied with our Q2 outlook and 2024 guidance.

We’re laser focused on revenue growth initiatives, innovation velocity, and customer acquisition. And now to discuss the financial details of the quarter and guidance. I will turn the call over to Ron. Ron?

Ronald Kisling: Thank you, Todd, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I’ll first discuss changes to our metrics disclosures before turning to our financial results and business metrics. I will then review our forward guidance. Note that unless otherwise stated, all financial results in my discussion are non-GAAP based. We continue to focus on sharing the business metrics to provide the most useful information to understand and monitor the progress of our business. Beginning with this first-quarter 2024 release, we have discontinued the disclosure of quarterly NRR, , the number of markets and countries, and our bandwidth statistics. Conversely, we are now disclosing our revenue by product line between network services, which is our core delivery products offering; security, which is our growth offering; and other, our emerging products offering, which includes compute and observability product.

We have provided a trended eight-quarter history of this revenue in our investor supplement because we are now providing revenue from our full security portfolio. We will no longer be reporting Signal Sciences revenue on a stand-alone basis. Signal Sciences acquired firewall solution has been integrated with Fastly’s legacy firewall, which we now refer to as our next-gen WAF. Our legacy firewall revenue has largely transitioned into the Signal Sciences WAF or next-gen WAF. Note that our combined security revenue reflects the impact of the decline in our legacy WAF revenue taking place during that integration. Lastly, as our supplement only includes the trailing eight quarters, I will provide the revenue breakout for the first quarter of 2022 here in my prepared comments.

Network services revenue was $83.9 million. Security revenue was $18.2 million. And other revenue totaled $0.3 million. Turning to our financial results, revenue for the first quarter increased 14% year over year to $133.5 million, coming in slightly ahead of the midpoint of our guidance range of $131 million to $135 million. Specifically on our two largest product line, network services grew 12% year over year to $106 million and security revenue grew 16% year over year to $24.6 million. In the first quarter, we experienced normal seasonal traffic pattern. This resulted in a sequential decline in revenue, highlighted by expansion in some areas, particularly gaming, offset to a lesser degree, a e-commerce related traffic, and lower traffic at our largest customers.

Our top-10 customers comprise 38% of our total revenues in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 40% in Q4 2023, reflecting the impact of lower traffic and our largest customers. Also no customer accounted for over 10% of revenue in the first quarter. Our trailing 12 months net retention rate was 114%, up from 113% in the prior quarter and down from 116% in the year-ago quarter. These figures continue to demonstrate our very low churn and healthy customer retention dynamics. At the end of the first quarter, our RPO was $227 million, down 4% from $236 million in the fourth quarter of ’23 and down 6% from $242 million in the first quarter of 2023. This decline is primarily due to our largest customers, working through their remaining obligations over their contract term.

As Todd shared earlier, we had 3,290 customers at the end of Q1, of which 577 were classified as enterprise, a net decrease of 1 compared to an increase of 31 in the fourth quarter. Enterprise customers accounted for 91% of total revenue on an annualized basis in Q1 compared to 92% in Q4. And enterprise customer average spend was $846,000, down 4% from $880,000 in the previous quarter and up 6% from $795,000 in Q1 of last year. I will now turn to the rest of our financial results for the first quarter. Our gross margin was 58.8% compared to 59.2% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Recall that fourth-quarter gross margins were 58.3% after adjusting for the onetime $2.8 million take-or-pay true-up payment, reflecting a 50 basis point quarter-over-quarter improvement.

Our gross margin improvement was a result of continued cost control efforts in bandwidth transit costs and related services costs. Operating expenses were $88.2 million in the first quarter, an 11% increase compared to Q1 2023 and up 5% sequentially from the fourth quarter. While our operating expenses were better than expected due to our continued management of costs, remember that we do see a seasonal increase in our employee costs in the first half of the calendar year, the increased employer payroll taxes. This favorability in our operating expenses combined with slightly better-than-expected gross profit resulted in an operating loss of $9.7 million in the first quarter, exceeding the high end of our operating loss guidance range of $14 million to $10 million.

In the first quarter, we reported a net loss of $6.5 million or $0.05 loss per basic and diluted share compared to a loss of $10.8 million or $0.09 loss per basic and diluted share in Q1 2023. Our adjusted EBITDA was positive in the first quarter coming in at $3.7 million compared to negative $1.9 million in Q1 2023. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with approximately $331 million in cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, and investments, including those classified as long term, up from $329 million at the end of Q4 2023. Our free cash flow for the first quarter was negative $2.2 million, a $19.7 million sequential increase from negative $21.9 million in the fourth quarter. This increase was primarily driven by an increase in our cash from operations to positive $11.1 million compared to negative $7.4 million in the fourth quarter.

Our cash capital expenditures were approximately 9% of revenue in the first quarter, coming in just above the high end of our guidance of 6% to 8% of revenue we shared on our Q4 call. As a reminder, our cash capital expenditures include capitalized internal-use software. For 2024, we anticipate our cash CapEx will be in the 6% to 8% range with deployments to be weighted toward the first half of the year. I will now discuss our outlook for the second quarter and full year 2024. I’d like to remind everyone again that the following statements are based on current expectations as of today and include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially, and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the future, except as required by law.

As Todd shared in his remarks, we are facing a challenging environment of revenue declines in our largest customers, overshadowing the impact of new customer acquisition and product pipeline. Our guidance reflects these dynamics in our business and the visibility that we have today. We expect a flattish to modest sequential decline in Q2 revenues compared to our Q1 results due to lower traffic, specifically at our largest customers. We also will not benefit in 2024 from the favorable impact of the CDN consolidation that occurred in early 2023 that drove favorable sequential growth in the prior year same period. For the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $130 million to $134 million, representing 6% to 9% annual growth. We continue to be very disciplined in our network investment and cost of revenues, which contributed to our first quarter gross margin being approximately 60 basis points better than we had initially expected.

We typically see a seasonal decline in gross margins in the first half with improvement in the second half as we build capacity for peak traffic. For the second quarter, we anticipate our gross margins will decrease approximately 130 basis points relative to the first quarter, plus or minus 50 basis points. As we mentioned previously, our Q1 operating loss was moderately better than our earlier expectations on continued cost management and slightly slower hiring. Our second-quarter operating results will reflect the impact of the seasonal decrease in gross margin and the impact to our operating expenses of higher first-half employer payroll expense. As a result, for the second quarter, we expect our non-GAAP operating loss to increase to $16 million to $12 million and our non-GAAP loss to be $0.10 to $0.06 per share.

For calendar year 2024, we expect revenue in the range of $555 million to $565 million, reflecting annual growth of 11% at the midpoint. We expect to continue to see gross margin improvement in 2024 and to continue our spending discipline while increasing our investment in go-to-market and product development. We anticipate our 2024 gross margins will improve by approximately 200 basis points plus or minus 100 basis points relative to 2023. As a result, we expect our non-GAAP operating loss to increase to a range of $28 million to $22 million, reflecting an operating margin of negative 4.5% at the midpoint, an improvement of over 35% over 2023’s operating loss margin of 7.2% and by over 70% over 2022’s operating loss of 17.7%. We expect our non-GAAP loss per share to improve to $0.12 to $0.06, reflecting the improvement in our operating loss expectations, and we expect our free cash flow to be close to breakeven in 2024 compared to negative $59 million in 2023.

Before we open the line for questions, we would like to thank you for your interest and your support in Fastly. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from Rishi Jaluria with RBC.

Rishi Jaluria: Wonderful. Hey, Todd. Hey, Ron. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Todd, let me start with you. Last quarter after the kind of first guide down, you talked about the pricing environment being relatively in line with how it’s been historically. It sounds now like there’s maybe a little bit more intensifying pricing pressure in spite of the fact that there is consolidation going on, as you pointed out, and vendors in this space. Can you speak to what has maybe changed in the past 90 days in terms of that? And what tools do you have in your arsenal to maybe start to counteract those headwinds? And I’ve got a quick follow-up for Ron. Thanks.

Todd Nightingale: Yes, appreciate the question. I think in the general market, I would say the pricing trend that we have been seeing sort of continues. But what we saw in our top-10, 15 largest accounts, we saw some or slightly more kind of pricing pressure than we’re used to. And that’s got an outsized impact for us, and we are trying to make sure that we’re doing the right adjustments to our projection based on that. Usually, with these kinds of pricing changes, we see a commensurate volume increase as well, and we still hope to see that, especially in some of these key accounts. But it’s really in that high, in the large, primarily media conferencing, a little bit more pricing pressure than normal. But rest of the market, I still feel pretty confident in the pricing. Trends have been pretty good. Anything, you’s add there, Ron?

Ronald Kisling: No, I think the period more — we saw more modest rerates, historically, I think that continues across kind of the broad market, but we have seen a change in the largest accounts.

Rishi Jaluria: Okay. Got it. That’s helpful. And then Ron for you, when I look at the investor supplemental, you talk — you’re highlighting now RPO as a metric. Can you maybe speak to why this is now a more relevant leading indicator, especially given you still do have a good amount of the business on consumption that isn’t pre-committed and what we should be making of the fact that RPO declined sequentially? And then even more so year over year, what needs to happen for that to kind of return back to more healthy levels? Thank you.

Ronald Kisling: Yes, that’s a good question. First and foremost, over time, as we start to see more and more of the business packages, see that momentum gain. As Todd mentioned on the call, we saw more packages in Q1 than we saw in the full first half of last year. Those will be additive. So over time, it will be a better indicator of our business. And as it grows, it’s also going to reduce some of the volatility that we’ve seen, particularly in the first half of this year. In terms of the decline, first and foremost, we really look at it on a year-over-year basis. A lot of our customers do have annual commit, but some of our largest customers do have two-year contract. And so what you’re really seeing is some of our largest customers who have multiyear contracts as they sort of burn through that ahead of their renewals is creating some headwind or declines on a year-over-year basis in the RPO.

Todd Nightingale: I’ll just add that I think the reason I do believe that’s a good metric for us to start looking at and will become more and more relevant over time is that for the packaging transition we’ll start to hi. We’re seeing more and more of our large enterprise and even midsize enterprise accounts engaging on packaging. And that impacts can be shown on that line as we move forward.

Operator: Your next question comes from Frank Louthan with Raymond James.

Frank Louthan: Great, thank you. First, just to kind of clarify on the guide, last year at the Analyst Day, you guided to free cash flow breakeven for the year. That’s still attainable. And then Todd, you mentioned the shift in the engagement approach to customers. How long is it going to take to train the sales team on this engagement shift? And when can we see that turn into higher growth and net retention rate? And then what gives us the confidence in the strategy here versus where you were in mid-February and the market clearly was different? And what have you learned in that last few weeks, and the guide are going the right direction.

Ronald Kisling: On the free cash flow, I think we have worked continued commitment to managing our expenses in line with our revenue outlook. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, this does create some headwinds, but we expect to be very close to breakeven for 2024 on our free cash flow.

Todd Nightingale: As far as the large account management and large account engagement, look, I think that’s incredibly important question for us right now. And I believe you have to react to the realities of the market and you have to react with real conviction and real speed. And that’s what we’re doing right now. The top 15 or 20 accounts at Fastly, they carry a lot of our revenue and the way that we engage with them, the way that we drive platforms like product line penetration, the way we drive price control and discount control, the way that we optimize their performance and driving more significant and complete technology solution, I believe we have an opportunity in all of those categories to improve the way that we engage and dedicate more resources and more focus to it.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. Right now, we have already launched a new engagement model. We’re driving a far higher touch across all those major accounts. We’ve been running it for a couple of weeks now, and we’re — I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. But just looking at the — where our projection is for those accounts and how much it’s changed in just one quarter, like you said some plus February, I think decisive change in our engagement model was warranted. And that’s exactly the transition that we’re undergoing right now.

Frank Louthan: And you’ve been doing this for two weeks. And that’s — and now — and you think that you have the right formula? Or is this going to take a little longer to evolve? How should we think about it?

Todd Nightingale: I mean, look, I think we’re going to be evolving that formula for quite a while, but I think we have the right resourcing on it now. We have deployed a lot of resources, a lot of the most significant resources into that effort, very quickly, and I’m happy with the progress so far.

Operator: Your next question comes from Madeline Brooks with Bank of America.

Madeline Brooks: Hi, team. Thanks so much for taking the question. Todd, I guess more so for you, if we look at the back half of the year and if I look at your guide right going down to 7.5% growth for second quarter, and then this reacceleration in the back half of the year to 12% growth, what’s giving you the confidence in that right now? And additionally, too, if we look into second quarter, what about second quarter is driving so much of the volatility?

Todd Nightingale: Yes, as I look at the second half projection and ROn can add color on this as well. We’ve got ramping customers and new customer acquisitions been strong. We have been able to move the needle there. We’re seeing those revenues ramp and new customers being added to the platform. And so I think we’ve got pretty high conviction that we’re going to see that revenue materialize in second half. The weakness and the shift in the projection from last quarter this quarter is really in those large accounts, and it’s why we’ve changed our engagement model with them, so significantly. But the reason really comes down to that. We’ve seen a little bit of a pullback in the vendor consolidation trend. And that’s reversed and we see some folks even adding a additional vendor here and there. And we see a little more pricing pressure up there. And that has — for the large accounts for us and have a large impact.

Ronald Kisling: The only thing I would add is acceleration as — go ahead.

Madeline Brooks: No, go ahead.

Ronald Kisling: The only thing I would add on second-half acceleration is typically, we do have seasonality in the business that we historically have about — second half tends to be up about 10% or 11%. So when we took a look at the second half, we looked at where the business was in Q2 and as Todd mentioned, the number of new customers that we’ve signed and we believe that seasonality that we’ve seen is intact coming off of the dynamic we’re seeing in the second quarter.

Madeline Brooks: And then maybe just a quick follow-up, too. As those customers ramp, understand what’s going on with customer acquisition. But if we just stayed in those 15 large customer accounts, do you see those accounts stabilizing after the second quarter [Technical Difficulty] or do you think we should expect and model declines in that cohort through the end of the year, just given the trends that you’re seeing in the market now?

Todd Nightingale: Yes. I mean, we are — I think our projection is relatively conservative. I believe we’re going to see traffic levels come up and we’re going to find some success in recovering revenue in those large accounts. We’re signaling the guide here because obviously there’s certain new projection and we want to reflect that. But look, I believe there’s an opportunity for us to beat that projection, and reverse, not just stop the declined, but really reversed the trend in the second half.

Operator: Your next question comes from Fatima Boolani with Citigroup.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Good afternoon, guys. This is Mark on for Fatima. Thanks for taking our question. Maybe just to kick off, on the package and bundling uptake, maybe just give us sense of penetration in these currently and the impact on from a new logo acquisition pipeline endpoints and then understand [Technical Difficulty] variability and improving on the visibility on revenues. Can you maybe just quantify in any way how push going up in the today?

Todd Nightingale: Yes. Look, I think in the long run, the channel engagement will help us drive customer acquisition through deal registration and we’re starting to see some effect of that broadening significantly beyond where our channel was strong 1.5 year ago, which was really just in the security portfolio. We’re seeing the channel engaging across the board. This past quarter, our largest deal closed — our largest new bookings closed not just through the partner, but also on the packaging solution. And so I think both of these trends are helping not just in the midsize and small accounts, but in large accounts as well. So we’ve had, I think, some real success on the channel growth and the importance of the channel on the go to market.

The packaging has, I think, in large part, helped us move more quickly, bringing new customers to the platform, especially midsize and large traditional enterprise into the platform. It has a very attractive feature of no overages model for those customers that give them very predictable billing. And it really gives us much more predictable revenue, which has been a great — has had great impact so far. I’m pretty happy with both of those. And I think it — we’re doubling down on both of those initiatives and really that — a big part of this kind of initiative across the board where our biggest focus is on revenue growth and driving that right, bring the growth back up into the 20s, where it really should be.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you for that. Maybe just a quick follow-up. Can you just touch on some of the recent regulatory scrutiny that one of your largest social media customers is seeing. Just wanted to get a sense of how you’re thinking of the logo and the impact on the business overall. And is this also reflected in updated guidance?

Todd Nightingale: I’m sorry, you broke up a little bit. Could you repeat that, Mark? I think you asked about restructuring in social media customers.

Unidentified Analyst: Oh, no. Can you hear me now?

Todd Nightingale: Yes, much better.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay, great. No, I just wanted to touch on some of the recent regulatory scrutiny that one of your largest social media customers is seeing. Just wanted to get a sense of how you’re thinking of the logo and the impact on the business. And is it also reflected in updated guidance? Thanks.

Todd Nightingale: Yes, completely. And thanks for repeating the question. For sure. I think first and foremost, we are fully committed to supporting all of our media customers through any sort of transition they happen to be having. In this case, that you’re referring to, should there be any sort of transition or significant transition there, we’re doubling down on being able to support them and support them through that transition, however it may come to light. But our engagement with that account has been super strong and we’re pretty positive on the way that will shake out any way you slice it. We are, of course, modeling some risk in here, but I’m pretty confident in the path forward.

Operator: Your next question comes from James Fish with Piper Sandler.

James Fish: Hey, guys, maybe the best way to ask this one is not [Technical Difficulty] set to the minimum contract levels you guys haven’t created. What are you assuming for those customers that you’re seeing the issues with? And per our discussions, you said you really weren’t seeing any large renewals like a competitor — your main competitor was this year. Are you just seeing that currently now just because you saw more volumes than anticipated and so that moved up? Or walk me through that.

Ronald Kisling: So I think if you look at each customer that you were the large customers, there are different dynamics in each one. And within their multi-year commit, the amount of traffic that they’re running, in some instances, as Todd spoke about, we did see some pricing changes that were not accompanied with traffic increases. Our renewals sort of spread across the year. And then secondly, we did see some of our largest customers where they added in additional CDN that reduced some of our traffic levels at those customers. So those were the dynamics, which was a little bit different, but it was really a combination of some pricing changes, your traffic share with increasing the number of CDNs at some of our largest customers.

James Fish: Right, Ron, but my question is more — look, you guys tend to have ,– RPO doesn’t reflect this to receipts earlier kind of question, where RPO debt won’t include essentially, but the minimum contract levels that you guys have. I think historically you guys have had roughly 80% visibility to any given year just on those minimum contract levels. So as we think about this kind of revised guide, I guess, how much above the minimum contract level are you guys having that? We’re not going to be sitting here in another 90 days saying, why does that re-dropping guide again?

Ronald Kisling: Yes, I guess two things to clarify. When you look at our largest customer, while some of them do have commitments. Significant portion of them are utility base, not commitment based. So I guess that’s not reflected in the RPO when there is not an underlying commitment under customer contract. And so you’re going to see a mix of customers that do have a commit and customers where they don’t — even in the cases of commit, the customer maybe running traffic above that consistently. And so we are still predicting it or forecasting it based on a level of traffic or utility basis.

Todd Nightingale: To look at that just from a slightly broader one, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve seen some more rerates in our largest 10 or 15 accounts in this past quarter. And I think your point on the competitive messaging we’ve heard, I think that is a fair point. Plus I have got high confidence in the adjusted guide here because I think we should ship through that largely, and we’re really moving back to the path of growing those accounts and expanding not just the volume we see, but the product penetration in those accounts as well.

Operator: Your next question comes from Tim Horan with Oppenheimer.

Tim Horan: Sort of hammer on the same topic here, but — so maybe when you mentioned like multiple products, like what else is in that network services revenue, like how many of those — how many different products do you have in there? What are you typically selling to customers?

Todd Nightingale: Yes, on the network services side of the house, we sell services around obviously content delivery which includes both video streaming and full-site delivery and replication around the world. We sell it different kinds of technology in terms of image optimization and live events and streaming and live event monitoring, rate reservations, et cetera. When I talk about product penetration across the platform, I’m talking about expansion into security, expansion to observability, and largely — and starting to really gain traction expansion into compute as well.

Tim Horan: And thanks to the revenue breakdown, but I mean, it looks like compute only 1% of revenue. And is observability and network services or is that in a different category?

Todd Nightingale: Observability falls into other.

Tim Horan: Okay. And one of your largest competitors last quarter said they were going to bundle really aggressively with compute. They kind of implied there were going to use price on CDN to win customers back. I mean, are you seeing them pull back on that at this point? I mean, it would seem like that would last for a year or two, if they’re going to make comments like that and pursue that strategy. Are you seeing a pull back? Or do you think your quality at this point is such that your core customers are not going to be impacted by what they do on the pricing or bundling front?

Todd Nightingale: The largest customers, I don’t think they’re going to be impacted on the pricing front there because it is — these are high-tech customers that are deeply engaged in the performance, service level for reliability especially. And there’s — I think the customers are extremely mature. And there’s only so much pricing flexibility that you can deploy in an account like that. We are super aggressive, not just on the performance, but on the pricing as well in those top 10 accounts. And again, I think we’re driving a new level of engagement in those accounts to really return that cohort back to growth. But I do think that bundling has real potential, stronger bundling down market. And if anything on the competitive front, that’s where I’ve seen some success. We are also with our packaging solution getting more aggressive in bundling. And we’ve seen success there as well.

Tim Horan: But I guess to be fair. I mean, Akamai has — they’re going after basically legacy virtual machine workloads and legacy storage, which is a huge market and you don’t take a price stack down. Would that impact customers’ decision on the core — on your core network services business? Or do you think that’s like not enough them many customers move back to Akamai or somebody else?

Todd Nightingale: I think customers who are moving to Fastly are looking for sort of next-gen solutions, serverless compute, edge storage, that type of technology that we’re delivering. Moving back to sort of legacy virtual machine, I don’t see that as being compelling. I do think though there’s real opportunity on the compute side. I wouldn’t discount it because it’s currently small. It’s growing quickly. It has extremely — it drives extremely high stickiness with accounts. Our compute customers are — have very high customer stack. We’re pushing on that business very hard because it works so complementary with our CDN business, that helps drive both sides of our customer engagement there.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from Rudy Kessinger with D.A. Davidson.

Rudy Kessinger: Hey, thanks for taking my question. So I just want to understand, I mean, you guys gave that guide halfway through Q1. When exactly in the quarter did these customers start repricing contracts and adding other CDNs and moving share, et cetera? And with these repricings, I guess, you guys just have no control over it whatsoever. And they just asked for repricing, you guys do it within a couple of days. I mean, I just don’t understand how, you know, three months ago, you told us you didn’t have any barge repricing expected. And now, it turns out you did within a six-week time frame.

Ronald Kisling: Yes, I think a couple of things. I think in terms of the dynamics that Todd spoke about, both in terms of the pricing, a lot of that arose really at the end of March and in early April, when we saw, one, the motion of some of our customers, kind of, reversing their trend to consolidating on CDNs, which affected our traffic projections for the year. And then as we engage in some of the rerates that we knew were coming, those negotiations resulted in bigger discounts than we thought that did not come with the typical increase in traffic that we’ve seen historically. And so those were the big drivers. I would say the timeframe really was late March, early April, when we saw these different dynamics. But all affecting some of our largest customers that have an outsized impact on our revenue outlook and growth rate.

Rudy Kessinger: Okay. And so is it larger-than-expected pricing pressure? I guess, it would go against the conventional wisdom when several of the smaller low-cost vendors have exited the space over the last six months. And so just any thoughts on why you had to concede so much on price with less traffic growth than typical, given there’s fewer competitors, fewer low-cost competitors in the space? And then lastly, Ron, just what level of visibility do you have to second-half revenue? Like what percent of that second half — implied second-half revenue guide is actually the minimum commitment?

Todd Nightingale: Yes, I’ll take the first half. I think — look, I think it’s a fair question. We did see — the pricing and traffic projections changed a lot at the end of the quarter and the beginning of this quarter, Q2. But I think it’s — I think, an important piece of it is, look, a small number of accounts where we had — where our projection, our revenue projection has pulled back. And those are large accounts that have very significant swing and they need to be handled and managed and optimized very specifically. It’s why we’re changing our motion there and look I believe we have an opportunity to move back to growth in those accounts. But our projection reflects where we currently are.

Ronald Kisling: I think the only thing I would add on the second part is again a significant portion of our business is utility basis. The largest accounts had their pricing and all these adjustments in traffic still in March and April. And so our outlook reflects those activities that occurred in those largest accounts, and so the variability in the smaller accounts should have less volatility as we move through the year.

Operator: Your next question comes from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum.

Unidentified Analyst: Thanks for taking my questions . It’s Daniel on for Jeff. You referenced earlier the volatility with some of the larger customers. Can you just expand on in terms of volatility, the volatility as a term referencing some one-time changes or some quarterly changes, just to this quarter? Just what did you mean in terms of some of the volatility?

Todd Nightingale: Yes, we had a couple of accounts in that very large set that negotiated rerates in the past quarter. Usually, a rerate like that would come up — would come with like a commensurate volume increase. And we tried to model that very carefully. But our projections there was a little bit aggressive, I believe. And we have seen this trend towards — which we saw a strong trend last year for vendor consolidation, as folks with, you know, five or six CDN vendors consolidate all the way down to two or three. We saw a little bit of pulling back there and people adding a vendor here and there. And those two trends caused some volatility which affected our projections.

Unidentified Analyst: And then just a second for me on I believe earlier when you were asked about the assumptions contemplated in the guidance and just with the top 15 customers, what sort of is baked in in terms of the traffic levels? Let me just read you back and see if I got that correct. With the notion that you expected you were modeling in for those traffic levels to stay flat from Q2 into Q3 and Q4, although you actually thought that was conservative, you thought it could actually tick up from Q2. Is that correct? And what would you think would drive those to actually go back up somewhat here in Q3 and Q4?

Todd Nightingale: What we’re modeling all the time is sort of the seasonality of our traffic patterns. But I believe we have an opportunity to increase the revenue and the wallet share at those large accounts by demonstrating superior performance , showing and demonstrating the ROI, using Fastly more clearly, and expanding the product portfolio that those accounts use. And so it’s why I think it was so pertinent for us to really change our engagement model and move very quickly here to react to what we’re seeing in the market, why we are pushing so hard on that right now.

Operator: And ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the conference back to Mr. Todd Nightingale for closing remarks.

Todd Nightingale: Thanks so much. I want to thank all our employees, our customers, our partners, and our investors. We remain focused on execution, bringing lasting growth to our business, and delivering real value to all of our shareholders. Thank you so much for your time today.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.