Varonis Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRNS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Roger Boyd: Thanks, Guy.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Andrew Nowinski: Okay. Thank you for taking the question. I think last quarter, your guidance was for SaaS to account for about 45% of that new and upsell business because of the expected contribution from the U.S. Federal deals. So, I guess given how much higher SaaS was relative to your guidance this quarter, is it fair to assume that the Fed demand was not as strong as you expected? And if so, what happened to those deals? Thanks.

Guy Melamed: So, the growth driver this quarter was overall the enterprise business. And when you look at the 59%, it was driven by the enterprise business. It’s a strong reflection of how customers in the enterprise business are adopting SaaS. When you look at the federal industry as a whole, we definitely see the opportunity there. But it’s still small, mid-single-digit percentages out of ARR. But when we look at the opportunity, we feel very confident about our ability to grow there.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani with Citi. Please proceed with your questions.

Fatima Boolani: Hi, thanks for taking my questions, and our prayers are with you and the entire employee base in the conflict zone. Yaki, a question for you a bigger picture one actually, we’ve been hearing a lot about data protection, data security posture management and sort of all the new monikers that are coming up as well as more traditional backup and recovery vendors on the infrastructure side, talk a lot about the importance of data protection and data recovery. I wanted to get your perspective on how you are interfacing with buyers as buying psychology changes around data protection? I wanted to get your sense of how those conversations are changing for you, if at all and if these sort of “Changes in the competitive landscape” are benefiting you in a way in providing a spotlight to what you’ve been saying all along with respect to the importance of data protection?

Yaki Faitelson: I think that we just don’t see the backup and business continuity in data protection. We are much more on data security. But it’s just people understand that they need to protect valuable data. Regarding posture management and all of this stuff, I think the organization understands very well that this is the first time that we are benefiting from other people doing marketing. And in order to solve the problem, you really need these three use cases and need the Metadata and something that is very hard to do. And everything really eventually in order to solve the problem need to be under one umbrella of the data security platform. You think it’s most breaches people are doing this lateral movement between a data store and you need to enrich the data.

So, definitely see that the marketplace understand that they need one big platform. You need to be able to classify in one place and then in all repository to do it at scale, to have the profile of how people and identities are using data and to be able to do remediation in a very reliable automated way. So, we definitely see that everything that is happening in the ecosystem benefiting us. And we are very excited to have a tailwind from the marketing that other vendors do.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Chad Bennett with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Chad Bennett: Great. Thanks for taking my question. So, just on, I know it’s early, but just in terms of kind of the type of customer converting from on-prem subscription to SaaS, I think you’ve talked before about that 25% to 30% uplift, and I think you gave a couple examples on the call already. But is there any commonality in terms of where the on-prem subscription customer is in their license journey when they’re converting? And is there — are you seeing significant cross-sell up-sell on that conversion from a license standpoint? Or is the hope, obviously, like a lot of conversion stories, that once you get them to SaaS like-for-like product, that whole cross-sell up-sell just becomes easier and kind of accelerated?

Guy Melamed: Chad, I think that’s a very good question. And when you — well, I’ll start by saying that the SaaS offering is so much better for our customers, but it’s a no-brainer for them, and we’re seeing that with the amount of conversions that are happening in a natural way. When conversions happen, we can get an uplift in the number of licenses that they buy because we’re selling the platform. They don’t have the opportunity to buy individual licenses. We can get an uplift in the fact that the number of users goes up, and we can get an uplift in their ability to consume more of the product. It really depends on the situation of the customer, where they are in terms of the renewal, whether they want to speed it up and/or wait for the actual renewal date to come to place.

So, it’s very individual, but at the end of the day, once we get them to the SaaS offering, their ability to see value and the simplicity of the usage of the product gives us a tremendous opportunity to continue to sell them more and more licenses. So, I would say there’s no one straight answer on how it happens, but at the end of the day, it just works in our favor to get them to SaaS with good confidence in our pricing methodology as we see it so far.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Rob Owens: Great. Thank you for taking my question. I was curious if you could comment on just what the channel response has been regarding the move to SaaS, and are you getting the breadth of channel participation that you would hope in new transactions? Thanks.