GitLab Inc. (NASDAQ:GTLB) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Sid Sijbrandij: Yeah. Thanks for that. I think that another really interesting thing that was in that study is that AI needs to be throughout the life cycle and for multiple things, like only 25% of the time of a developer spend on coding, 75% is other tasks. And as developers get more productive, they write more code, you need to also increase the productivity of security and operations. So we’re focused on making it work throughout the life cycle. I think you’ll see parts of roles being replaced. But what also will happen is that creating software will get more affordable. And I think that will also lead to an increase in the amount of software we’re writing. If something becomes more affordable, sometimes consumption goes up and the overall number of people involved increases. We still see a lot of units being needed in even the medium term. And the productivity going up might be a good thing for the number of people in this sector.

Gregg Moskowitz: That’s helpful. Thank you.

Sid Sijbrandij: Thanks.

Operator: Next is Andrew with Cowen.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thanks. Congrats on the quarter. It’s Andrew on for Derrick. Sid, your Dedicated offering has been GA since June. Could you talk about demand trends there? You mentioned the big eight-figure deal. That’s great to hear. Talk about how large of a growth driver next year this could be. Thanks.

Sid Sijbrandij: Yeah. Thanks. We’re really excited about Dedicated. For everyone’s — as a reminder, it combines the best of Gitlab.com and self-managed to get — we manage it like gitlab.com, but just like self-managed or a single tenant, you have increased isolation and increased security through that. So we believe it’s a huge opportunity, especially to convert our current self-managed customers. I think it’s going to play out over many years. So we’re just at the starting point. We are signing those large deals that Brian mentioned, eight-figure TCV expansion in the automotive space. We see more coming. And I think there’s a huge opportunity there considering the majority of our revenue comes from self-managed today. And for the larger self-managed customers, this is a great option.

Unidentified Analyst: Thank you.

Operator: Peter with Bernstein.

Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. I think over the last quarter, you talked about kind of several exciting things both with Google and AWS, specifically the integration of GitLab into Google Cloud console and AWS introducing support for GitLab and AWS code pipeline. How can we think about the initial impact of these relationships, either being seen in new or existing customers? I mean, are we seeing more contracts through Google Cloud and AWS? Or how should we think about that?

Brian Robins: Yeah, I’m happy to start on that. We have several ways that we go to market, and through the hyperscalers is one way. As I’ve mentioned before, the business that they bring us is somewhat lumpy in nature because they’re selling to a wide base of customers. But I’m happy to report that they almost increased their bookings year-over-year by almost — approximately 100%. And so we had great contributions from them this quarter. And so we continue to work with them on enablement. We’re also technology partners with them as well. And so we have a pretty broad-based partnership with both hyperscalers.

Unidentified Analyst: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jason with William Blair.

Jason Ader: Thank you. Hi, guys. Just wanted to ask you, excuse me, on the single DevOps platform vision that you’ve been talking about for many years now. It seems that there is consolidation happening certainly from a tools perspective, Sid. But it doesn’t sound like larger enterprises really want a single DevOps tool. They want — maybe instead of 15 or 20, they want 4 or 5. First of all, do you agree with that? Do you think that could change over time. And then for the mid-market, so under that 60% that’s not large enterprise, how realistic is it for those customers? And any evidence so far that they are gravitating towards that sort of single DevOps platform vision?

Sid Sijbrandij: Yeah. I would say like it’s happening — it’s finally happening. People have gotten the message, the consolidation is happening. Some of them indeed are like, hey, we’ve got 15 tools. We’ve got to go to five. The best ones, the most advanced ones, they get it. It’s just the movement will continue. The next thing is from 5 to 1, and we have seen customers doing that and having seen customers getting amazing results. Like the more they consolidate, the more they save. The more they consolidate, the faster their cycle time. We haven’t gotten every single customer there yet. And it’s going to be really important to continue to be an open platform, open to Code Suggestions everywhere in our code base, open to having great APIs and open to having very many integrations.

We never want to allow customers in. But we know that the more they consolidate, the better the outcomes are. And we’ll keep beating that drum, and we’ll try to make sure the majority of the market gets there. I think the analysts are now also repeating the message with Gartner creating a DevOps platform category.

Jason Ader: Is it fair to say that — so source code Management CI, that’s sort of an obvious consolidation point. Is — for your larger enterprise customers, is it security and compliance that’s sort of next on the list in terms of putting it into that bundle?

Sid Sijbrandij: Yeah, I think that’s — every customer is different, but people have gotten the message in dev development. The shift is now happening in security, bringing Dev and Sec together. But the writing is on the wall. Eventually, it’s going to be DevSecOps all together in one platform. And that’s — we’re kind of spreading that cost on.

Jason Ader: Great. Thank you. Good luck.

Sid Sijbrandij: Thank you.

Operator: We have four minutes remaining in the Q&A. Gray with BTIG is next.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you very much. Maybe a question on the margin side of things. So if I’m looking at the updated guidance, for every dollar of new revenue that you add this year, a little over 50% of that is flowing through to the operating income line. Can you talk about what the main drivers of leverage are this year? And then is there any reason that, that trend would not continue in the next year?

Brian Robins: Yeah. Great. Thanks for your question. Super happy big milestone in company history. This is our first quarter of non-GAAP operating income positive. Since we were on the road show, in every quarter, we reemphasized the message, number one goal is to grow, and we’ll do that responsibly. And so we’ve been continuing getting — continuing to get operating leverage out of the model. For instance, in Q3 year-over-year, we added approximately $37 million of revenue for $10 million of additional expense, and we achieved non-GAAP operating income positive of $4.7 million. And so as I mentioned earlier, we’re early in the process of FY ’25. We’ll give FY ’25 guidance on our fourth quarter call. And so we’ll continue to operate in a disciplined manner.