NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTCT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Fish: Yeah. Maybe just looking that up for you. You mentioned long-term objectives here. Can you just refresh us where we are on those long-term objectives and how you’re thinking about those? And additionally, you mentioned on that deal that it’s the first time that this customer purchased cybersecurity from NetScout, do you have any sense to what the white space opportunity is, or your current penetration of accounts is with security?

Anil Singhal: Yeah. So I think basically, we have current — so cybersecurity is a little bit continued. We have an ongoing business with Arbor, which is roughly 25% of the total business. This other stuff, which we talked about today, was the new product we announced Omnis Cyber Intelligence and CyberStream last year and which was a slow uptick notwithstanding this big order or a couple of big orders. And so in terms of number of customers, I mean, less than 5% of our service assurance customers who can use our cybersecurity product has been sold the cybersecurity product. So, there’s a lot of scope, and this is only first nine months. And so we are counting on much bigger growth from that source and from the DDoS business, flat to single digit up and then additional stuff coming from the Omnis Cyber Security.

And that’s what we are saying that, while we did get a couple of big orders on this from existing customers, the penetration rate has been slow and we are putting more resources and creating a — relaunching that product in April, which will have a big, I think, impact next year.

Jean Bua: Hi Jim, this is Jean. So, in reference to the question that you were asking about the effect of orders that we received in Q4 versus — Q3, I’m sorry, versus Q4. I would say that the pull-forward was probably close to $25 million with a little more than half of that being a radio frequency calibration modeling projects that gave us the higher gross margins. So, you’re looking at the math that is at the midpoint of our guidance, which is $910 million, the number of — I think you said $92 million in Q4 for product revenue would be accurate. That would represent still a 12% year-over-year growth from Q4 of 2022. And at the midpoint of guidance, we would have about a 6% year-over-year growth from FY ’22.

James Fish: Very helpful. Thank you, guys.

Jean Bua: You’re welcome.

Operator: Our last question comes from Kevin Liu from K. Liu & Company.

Kevin Liu: Good morning. I just wanted to get some of your thoughts around kind of the CapEx cycle from the large Tier 1 providers in North America. Could you just comment a bit on if you think NetScout has benefited disproportionately from kind of the outside spend they had on Seabed spectrum deployment this year? And then, whether there are any sort of emerging 5G use cases that you think will continue to carry the business forward on the service assurance side?

Anil Singhal: Yes. So we are relying a lot, Kevin, on our incumbency with the top end carriers around the world. And there were some challenges two years ago, where slow spend on 5G or competition from other sources, and that has all settled down, and we started seeing a lot of business initially in the calibration area, some of it was in the backlog starting this year, , which helped the revenue and other is just more 5G spend. So, we think that there is still a lot of spend to be done in the — with the same customers to put additional capacity in 5G area. But given some recent announcement of some NEMs and infrastructure companies, potential slowdown CapEx spending, we are just having this wait-and-see attitude until April.