Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ:QLYS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So this is definitely an area that Dino and I are very much in line with and looking forward to continuing our focus and investment on the partner side of the house.

Jonathan Ho: Got it. And just as a follow-up, I guess, I’m a little bit confused because in the prepared remarks, you talked a little bit about indications that more and more customers are taking on a platform view of Qualys and sort of buying into the broader vision, but then we’re seeing sort of the net retention shrink a little bit. So is this sort of customers are buying in, but because of budget constraints, they’re just sort of renewing what they have, are they sort of reducing assets? I’m just trying to understand sort of how those — those two data points align? Thank you.

Sumedh Thakar: Great question, and I think it continues to be challenging for our customers as well in terms of managing their spend and managing their security spend and optimizing that. And so today, we were — we continue to be happy with our overall retention rate, which is healthy. And so the customers are pretty excited to continue to work with Qualys, and then there are definitely opportunities with — that we work with our customers in terms of maybe they want to optimize some of their spend on a certain area of the product and then bring on other Qualys products on a platform approach, while not maybe significantly increasing their spend in this year, but creating opportunity for in the future when those budgets open up to buy additional licenses of — additional new capabilities that we deploy with them in the current deployment that they have.

And so in some cases, they are adding additional and in some cases, they are — leverage creating new opportunities for the newer products to be deployed right now in small quantities instead of maybe some of the existing products that they have. But the conversations are definitely more on the positive side of working towards bringing more Qualys solutions and then creating opportunities for us in the future as their budgets open up a little bit so that they can expand on those additional licenses as well.

Jonathan Ho: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And again, one moment, please for our next question. Our next question will come from Brian Colley of Stephens. Your line is open.

Brian Colley: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just talk about how the competitive environment and how win rates as well as pricing trended this quarter?

Sumedh Thakar: I don’t think you saw much of a change from what we have seen in the last couple of quarters. I think we definitely continue to see the similar players that we’ve always seen in the VM space. I think we see tremendous opportunity in the cloud security space where we are looking at and we talked a couple of examples, so we’re displacing some cloud point solutions that are out there. So we see opportunities there as well. I think overall, win rates roughly a more stable sales from the last quarter. So we see opportunity as customer budgets open up and our execution also continues to improve with Dino coming on Board to be able to do better on that side as well. And I think we continue to see that similar discounting from competitors to try to get business.

And that’s where the opportunity for us to go back and then sort of just driving the price down, bundled capabilities like cybersecurity asset management, Patch Management that our competitors don’t have is, again, creating opportunities for us where — which is reflected in a way in the LTM 11% of overall bookings that already have CSAM and Patch Management, but also the fact that the new business, the bookings that are coming from new business, LTM looking there, over 19% of that is coming from these additional capabilities. So we are being able to take advantage of the broader platform play in competitive and discounting situation. So we can compete effectively.