Tenable Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TENB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steve Vintz: Yes. Hi, Rob, so we mentioned the outperformance in public sector, which weighed on CCB. And specifically, we saw — if you look at our performance in public sector, specifically U.S. Federal, it was twice as high this quarter in terms of mix of business as any quarter we’ve experienced previously since going public. So a much higher mix of business, Fed procurement bias is more weighted towards perpetual licenses, and these deals are large and complex and strategic in nature and came with a higher level of services. So it was the combination of both perpetual licenses and professional services that’s not fully reflected in CCB. With regard to perpetual licenses, these perpetual licenses are in effect, amortized over five years.

That’s how we recognize revenue. So consequently, only one-fifth of the annual contract value related to these deals are reflected in calculated current billings. Professional services will be delivered over the course of the next several quarters. And unlike our enterprise customers, these services cannot be built upfront and consequently, they’re not included in CCB.

Rob Owens: Great, thank you for the color there. And then, Amit, for you. Obviously, very unfortunate with the geopolitical situation in the Middle East right now. And I know Ermetic is over there. I’m just curious given when it was acquired and what’s transpired since any changes to timeline, thoughts of integration into the cloud security suite as well? Thanks.

Amit Yoran: Yes. I’ll start off just by saying our team there is incredibly resilient and incredibly proud of the work that they’re doing and their ability to keep focus. That said, we do anticipate some modest delays in integration activities. But for the most part and at a strategic level, they continue to move forward and feel like those changes will be modest.

Rob Owens: Great, thanks for the color.

Operator: Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Joel Fishbein with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Joel Fishbein: Thank you for taking my question. I have one for you similar to Brian. But on the OT space. That space seems to be crowded, but it seems like you are doing well there. And I’d love to just understand the competitive dynamics of the space and then why Tenable is winning there? A lot of the companies we cover are talking about OT, but it seems like you’ve got some real traction there. We have to just get a little bit more color. Thank you.

Amit Yoran: Yes, we’re incredibly bullish about our OT business. And that comes on the heels of a couple of quarters in succession here where we’re talking about it on the earnings call, saying we’re pulling down larger six-figure and seven-figure deals. We’re winning larger opportunities in both public sector, significant opportunities in public sector with OT and continued traction in critical infrastructure. We think these are markets that will continue to grow in importance from a cybersecurity perspective. There’s a couple of key differentiators for us. One is we’ve got a very large and robust and diverse customer base on a global basis. They’re used to coming to us to help them evaluate cyber risk. And we think that visibility, which we can provide on a unified basis across both OT and IT is a strategic differentiator for us relative to what most OT vendors provide, which is just a very myopic focus on control systems.

If you walk through a factory floor, if you look at a pipeline, if you look at manufacturing operations, data center automation. What you’ll see is that all of these systems, all of these activities have a combination of OT and IT in their environment, and it’s impossible to help someone assess and understand the risk to that operation looking all the ad control systems. So we think we’ve got a highly competitive product. We think it’s strategically differentiated in our ability to combine IT and OT in the evaluation of risk. And we’ve got a significant customer base and distribution for that technology into a — what is a rapidly growing market.