Akamai Technologies Inc (AKAM) — Q4 2018 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you, Bryan, and good afternoon, everyone, and we appreciate you joining Akamai's fourth quarter and fiscal year-end 2018 earnings conference call. Speaking today will be Tom Leighton, Akamai's Chief Executive Officer; Jim Benson, Akamai's Chief Financial Officer; and Ed McGowan, Akamai's Senior Vice President of Finance. Before we get started, please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding revenue and earnings guidance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in Akamai's filings with the SEC, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements included in this call represent the company's view on February 12, 2019. Akamai disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances. As a reminder, we will be referring to some non-GAAP financial metrics during today's call. A detailed reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP metrics can be found under the financial portion of the Investor Relations section of akamai.com. And with that, let me turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Tom. And thank you all for joining us today. Akamai delivered excellent results in the fourth quarter. Revenue was $713 million, up 8% over Q4 2017 and up 10% in constant currency. Q4 non-GAAP EPS was $1.07 per diluted share, up 51% year-over-year and up 52% in constant currency. These very strong results were driven by the continued rapid growth of our security business, the continued improvement in our media and carrier division, and a robust holiday commerce season in our Web Division. Our bottom line also benefited from a lower tax rate and from our continued focus on operational excellence. EBITDA margins in Q4 expanded to 42%, and non-GAAP operating margins expanded to 28%. Q4 marked our fifth consecutive quarter of increasing margins, and we anticipate further margin expansion in 2019. We also have a clear line of sight to achieving non-GAAP operating margins of 30% in 2020, while continuing to invest in innovation and new products to drive our future growth. For the full year, revenue was $2.7 billion, up 9% over the prior year. Non-GAAP EPS for 2018 was $3.62, up $1 or 38% over 2017. We're especially pleased to report that we generated over $1 billion in cash from operations last year. This was up 26% over 2017 and represented 37% of our revenue. In Q4, our security portfolio continued to be the fastest-growing part of our business with revenue of $185 million, up a very strong 38% year-over-year in constant currency. Security accounted for 26% of our total revenue last quarter, and our Security business exited 2018 with a revenue run rate of $750 million per year. We now expect our security business to top the $1 billion mark in annualized revenues in 2020. That's a remarkable milestone, but we're not planning to stop there. With our acquisition of Janrain, which closed on January 23, and the development of our new Zero Trust Enterprise Security Solution, we anticipate that our security business will continue to grow at a very fast pace for many years to come. Janrain establishes Akamai as a market leader in the customer identity and access management space. Their solutions are designed to manage user logins and data for major consumer-facing websites. They verify the identity of the end user and make sure that the user experience is optimized and secure. Janrain does this in part by keeping track of how users access their accounts. For example, which devices they use and from which locations. We believe that we can use this data to help strengthen all our security solutions. And by combining Janrain's technology with our Bot Manager Solution, we believe that we can make it even harder for attackers to hack into or steal user accounts. Janrain will also help us protect enterprises from data breaches. That's because Janrain stores user information, so that the enterprise doesn't have to. And if an enterprise doesn't keep user information like usernames, passwords, phone numbers, and addresses, then it can't be stolen from that enterprise in a data breach. Keeping user data safe means more than just not having it stolen. It also means complying with the various data privacy laws that are being adopted by governments around the world. And it means helping end users have more control over who gets access to their data and what they can do with it. This is going to be increasingly important in the future, and we believe that our unique security solutions can help position Akamai as a company that can be trusted in a world where big tech companies are being called out for their questionable uses of personal information. As we look forward, we're also excited about our new Zero Trust Enterprise Security Solution. Last quarter, we signed our first Zero Trust deal worth more than $1 million per year. And we sold it to a manufacturer in Asia. Now, as most of you know, manufacturing is not a vertical known for buying our traditional web services, but manufacturing companies do care about cybersecurity and protecting their enterprise. And the same is true for just about every major company today. And so, with our enterprise security solutions, we see an opportunity to dramatically expand the range of companies that we can serve. And since companies typically spend more on enterprise security than they do on web security, we expect this emerging business to have a more meaningful impact on our revenue beginning in 2020. We're also continuing to invest in other innovative technologies that could bring substantial future returns. For example, today we announced a new joint venture with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group of Japan. The joint venture will offer a new blockchain-based online payment platform called Global Open Network or GO-NET for short. GO-NET is designed to enable next-generation digital financial transactions to be scalable, fast, efficient, and secure. The new platform is expected to become available in the first half of 2020. We were also very pleased to see the continued improvement in our media and carrier business in Q4. Traffic growth last quarter remained very strong in our OTT and gaming sectors. And in December, we achieved another record for peak traffic driven by software downloads from Microsoft and Fortnite and streaming of the UEFA Champions League. We continue to grow traffic faster than the Internet as a whole in Q4, which means that we continued to gain share. And because of our relentless focus on efficiency, we actually spent less on network costs in 2018 than we spent in the prior year. Overall, we're very pleased with the progress we made last year. We accelerated revenue growth. We made dramatic improvements to our margins. We grew non-GAAP EPS by nearly 40%. We developed innovative new technology that we believe will drive substantial revenue growth in the future. And we delivered excellent value to our customers, further decreasing our already low customer churn rate. And we managed to do all this while keeping Akamai a great place to work, where corporate social responsibility is a strong part of our culture. For example, we rank as one of the Forbes just 100 companies doing right by treating workers and customers well, protecting privacy, producing quality products, minimizing our environmental impact, giving back to our communities and providing ethical leadership. We rank as one of the best employers for diversity out of 50,000 U.S. firms with more than 1,000 employees. And we scored a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of the talented employees on our global team for all their hard work on behalf of our customers and shareholders in 2018. Because of their continued innovation and great customer service, Akamai is very well positioned for the years ahead. I also want to take this opportunity to say a special thank you to Jim Benson. As you may have seen in today's press release, Jim is planning to retire from Akamai later this year. And he'll be transitioning his CFO duties to Ed McGowan in March. Jim has been a great CFO, and I'm very grateful to him for his many contributions to Akamai's growth and future success. Over the last 10 years, Jim has developed an outstanding finance organization, and he's instilled a strong operational and financial discipline across the company. He's been a great business partner not only for me but for the entire Akamai senior leadership team and the Board. His many contributions to Akamai will be fondly remembered for many years to come. Although Jim is stepping out of the CFO role after filing the 10-K in March, I'm very pleased that you'll be staying on as an Executive Advisor to help ensure a smooth transition. While we're sad to see Jim leave, we're also delighted about Ed's promotion to CFO. Ed is a highly accomplished finance executive and an 18-year veteran of Akamai, with broad knowledge of our business, our customers, and the industry. He began his career with us in finance and sales operations and then took on executive roles in Corporate Development and Global Media and Carrier sales. Most recently, Ed served as SVP in Finance, overseeing business finance, customer revenue operations, and FP&A, as well as leading a key transformation project to drive increased levels of sustained profitable growth. Having worked closely with Ed for over a decade, I'm looking forward to benefiting from his experience and knowledge in the role of CFO as we work to deliver profitable growth for our shareholders in 2019 and beyond. Now I'll turn the call over to Jim to review our Q4 and 2018 results, and then Ed will share our guidance for Q1 and 2019 as well as some preliminary thoughts about 2020.

Thank you for the kind words, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. This is a great team here at Akamai, and I am very proud of what we've accomplished over the last nine years. With revenues approaching $3 billion a year, a rapidly growing security business with a $750 million annualized run rate, and a more diversified portfolio, I believe Akamai is well-positioned for long-term success. We have demonstrated industry-leading profitability and a consistent focus on managing the business for long-term goals while delivering short-term results. As I approach my 10th year in leadership and after discussing my desire for change with Tom, I’ve decided it’s the right time for Akamai to transition to a new CFO to lead us into the next phase of growth and expansion. The company has shown strong business results, and we have an immensely talented finance team in place, with many exciting growth opportunities ahead. I am very pleased to hand over the reins to Ed McGowan, with whom I have worked for the past nine years, most recently as my Senior Vice President of Finance. I look forward to helping Ed, Tom, and the team in the near-term while spending more time with my family and considering my next professional challenge. I am confident that this transition will be seamless. Now, let me provide details about our strong Q4 financial results. As Tom mentioned, Akamai continued to perform well and delivered an exceptional fourth quarter to close out a fantastic 2018. We exceeded the high end of our guidance for revenues, operating margins, and earnings, delivering substantial operating margin improvements for the fifth consecutive quarter. We executed effectively and demonstrated the leverage in Akamai's operating model. We are confident that we will make further progress in 2019 and have a clear path to achieve our goal of 30% operating margins in 2020. Q4 revenue exceeded the high end of our guidance range at $713 million, marking an 8% increase year-over-year or 10% in constant currency, and an 11% increase if we exclude the six large Internet platform customers. Notably, this marks the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year double-digit revenue growth excluding the Internet platform giants. Revenue growth was solid across most of the business, driven by the rapid growth of our security services and higher-than-expected holiday season traffic, especially in our media and commerce verticals. Traffic was robust across our core installed base, with particularly strong growth in gaming, over-the-top services, and commerce. Revenue from our media and carrier division customers totaled $328 million in the fourth quarter, up 8% year-over-year or 9% in constant currency, and up 14% in constant currency when excluding large Internet platform customers. Revenue from Internet platform customers remained stable at $43 million, in line with our Q3 expectations and consistent with previous quarters. This segment now represents just 6% of total Akamai revenues, our lowest level of revenue concentration historically, showcasing our progress in diversifying our revenue base across customers, solutions, and geographies over recent years. Turning to our Web Division, revenue from these customers reached $385 million, a 9% year-over-year increase or 10% in constant currency, reflecting slight acceleration from Q3 levels due to a strong online retail season for our e-commerce customers. We also saw robust uptake in our new product areas like Bot Manager, Image Manager, and Digital Performance Management, along with significant growth in our core security solutions. In terms of our security solutions, fourth quarter revenue was $185 million, a 36% year-over-year increase, with 38% in constant currency, demonstrating strong revenue growth driven by increased user adoption globally. We are particularly pleased with the revenue growth in our security offerings during Q4 and throughout 2018 from both Web and Media division customers. Entering 2019, our rapidly growing security business is now at an annualized revenue run rate of $750 million. As Tom noted, we believe security presents an exceptional growth opportunity, and we plan to continue investing in this area to enhance and extend our product portfolio and market capabilities. Our recent entry into Customer Identity and Access Management exemplifies how we are adding complementary capabilities to our security offerings while acquiring additional enterprise sales talent. Regarding geography, sales in international markets continued to be strong, representing 39% of total revenue in Q4, up 1 percentage point from the previous quarter. International revenue totaled $279 million, a 20% year-over-year increase with 23% in constant currency, driven by robust growth in the Asia-Pacific region and another solid quarter in EMEA. Foreign exchange fluctuations negatively impacted revenue by $3 million on a sequential basis and $8 million year-over-year. U.S. market revenue reached $434 million, a 2% year-over-year increase and up 4% excluding large Internet platform customers. Moving on to costs, cash gross margin stood at 79%, up nearly 2 percentage points from Q3 and 1 point above guidance due to higher revenues and improved efficiencies. We are pleased with our ability to manage network costs efficiently. GAAP gross margin, which includes depreciation and stock-based compensation, was 66%, also reflecting a 2 percentage point increase from Q3. Non-GAAP cash operating expenses for the quarter were $262 million, up $18 million from Q3, slightly above guidance due to increased year-end commissions and bonuses linked to revenue overachievement. Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $301 million, up $28 million from Q3 and $56 million, or 23%, from the same period in 2017. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 42%, up 1 percentage point from Q3 and 5 points from Q4 2017, meeting our guidance. Non-GAAP operating income for Q4 was $201 million, reflecting a $20 million increase from Q3 and a $42 million increase, or 26%, year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating margin improved to 28%, a 1 point increase from Q3 and a 4 point increase from last year, aligning with our guidance. I am pleased with the consistent margin expansion we have achieved over five quarters and am confident in our ability to meet our 30% non-GAAP operating margin goal in 2020 while continuing to invest for growth and leverage. Capital expenditures in Q4, excluding equity compensation and capitalized interest, amounted to $125 million, consistent with our guidance. Full-year capital expenses made up 16% of revenue, aligning with our long-term model. Regarding earnings, non-GAAP net income was $176 million or $1.07 per diluted share, exceeding the high end of our guidance by $0.04. These strong earnings results were driven by ongoing revenue execution, efficient network and operating expenses, and a lower tax rate. Taxes in our non-GAAP earnings were $32 million, based on a Q4 effective tax rate of just over 15%, slightly lower than guidance due to a higher mix of foreign earnings and a year-to-date adjustment. For the full year, the 2018 non-GAAP tax rate was just under 18%. Concerning GAAP earnings, I want to highlight a noteworthy item that impacted our Q4 results. We recorded a $13 million restructuring charge in Q4 and expect an additional charge of approximately $10 million to $12 million in Q1, primarily related to workforce reductions affecting around 125 employees in January, or about 2% of our total headcount. The restructuring charge also includes minor software impairments from deprioritized investments that didn’t meet expected commercial success and ROI. It's important to understand that these actions are intended to rebalance our investments, exit certain areas, and position the company for long-term growth and scale. Considering this GAAP-only restructuring charge, GAAP net income for Q4 was $94 million or $0.57 per share. I will now discuss our capital usage. We remain committed to returning capital to shareholders, spending $124 million on share repurchases in Q4, buying back approximately 1.9 million shares. For the year, we repurchased 10.2 million shares at a cost of $750 million, representing 124% of our free cash flow, resulting in our share count declining from 171 million to 165 million in the fourth quarter. We have $1.1 billion remaining on our share repurchase authorization and intend to continue returning a significant portion of our free cash flow to shareholders through share buybacks, balanced against maintaining flexibility for strategic opportunities. We believe our disciplined capital allocation approach will enable us to drive shareholder value through organic investments, pursuing additional M&A like we recently completed with Janrain, and returning capital to stockholders. In summary, we are satisfied with our performance in Q4 and throughout 2018, and are confident in our ability to execute our long-term plans. I’d now like to turn the call over to Ed to present our Q1 and 2019 guidance along with some preliminary thoughts for 2020. And again, I want to express my pleasure in handing over the reins to you. I know we are in good hands.

Thanks, Jim. It's been a pleasure working closely with you over the past nine years. I look forward to following your example of professionalism and business leadership in the years ahead. Before I move on to guidance, there are three housekeeping items that I wanted to highlight. The first relates to a change in our network server useful lives. As some of you may recall, we announced on our Q4 2012 earnings call that we were required to extend the useful life of our network servers from three years to four years based on the actual server useful life trends. We carefully monitor the useful lives of all of our capital assets annually, and based on the outcome of that review, we now need to extend the useful lives of our network servers from four years to five years, similar to when we made the change six years ago. This extended useful life is a direct result of the continued software and hardware initiatives that we have put in place to manage our global network more efficiently. Because we are now using our servers in our network for an average of five years, we have determined it is appropriate under GAAP accounting to adjust our useful life policy to five years, and this change will be effective in Q1. Please keep in mind this change has no impact on cash flow but will result in roughly a $24 million depreciation benefit in 2019 and a benefit of approximately $7 million in 2020. We have provided a supplemental table in the Investor Relations section of our website that details the impact of this change. Also during Q1, we closed on our recently announced acquisition of Janrain. As we previously stated, Janrain will be approximately $0.05 to $0.06 dilutive to non-GAAP EPS in 2019, but we expect it to be accretive to non-GAAP EPS in 2020. Finally, just a reminder that our $690 million convertible bond is maturing on February 15, 2019. We are expecting to repay bondholders at par value using a portion of our $2.1 billion of cash on the balance sheet as of December 31, 2018. Moving now to guidance. Today, we are providing guidance for both Q1 and full year 2019 along with some early thoughts on 2020. Looking ahead to the first quarter, we are projecting another solid quarter on both the top and bottom line. We do expect to see some normal sequential revenue decline that we typically see in Q1 due to seasonality, and perhaps a bit more pronounced this year due to the very strong holiday season this past quarter. In addition, we expect some foreign exchange impact from the strengthening U.S. dollar. The current spot rates foreign exchange fluctuations are expected to have a negative impact of approximately $14 million compared to Q1 of 2018. Therefore, we're expecting Q1 revenues in the range of $690 million to $704 million, or up 5% to 7% in constant currency over Q1 of 2018. At these revenue levels, we expect cash gross margins of approximately 78%. Q1 non-GAAP operating expenses are projected to be $252 million to $256 million, down from fourth quarter spend levels even as we absorb the incremental expenses associated with the Janrain acquisition. The decline in Q1 is partially due to incentive compensation plans resetting at the beginning of the year, partially driven by the recent workforce reduction actions Jim mentioned a few moments ago. Factoring in the cash gross margin and operating expense expectations I just provided, we anticipate Q1 EBITDA margins in the range of 41% to 42%, consistent with Q4 levels. Moving on to depreciation, we expect non-GAAP depreciation expense to be between $90 million to $92 million, which includes the impact of the network server useful life change I mentioned earlier. Factoring in this guidance, we expect non-GAAP operating margin of 28% to 29% for Q1. Moving on to CapEx, we expect to spend approximately $126 million to $136 million excluding equity compensation in the first quarter. With the overall revenue and spend configuration I outlined, we expect Q1 non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $1 to $1.05 or up 31% to 37% in constant currency. This EPS guidance assumes taxes of $35 million to $37 million based on an estimated quarterly non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 18%. And it also reflects a fully diluted share count of 164 million shares. Looking ahead to the full year, we are anticipating revenue in the range of $2.81 million to $2.85 million, which factors in a negative impact of roughly $16 million due to foreign exchange. We also expect revenue by quarter to follow the same quarter-over-quarter trends that we saw in 2018. For the full year, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 41%, and we expect 2019 non-GAAP operating margins of approximately 28%, up approximately 1.5 points over full year 2018 levels. And we are on a trajectory to further expand non-GAAP operating margins to 30% in 2020. It is worth noting that we do see some expense headwinds in 2019. We expect approximately $8 million per quarter of additional operating expenses beginning in Q3 as the benefit of our patent royalty payments from Limelight comes to an end, and as we take on higher rent costs related to our new Cambridge headquarters. Therefore, we expect to see a slight decline in both EBITDA and operating margins in Q3 with an improvement in Q4. Moving on to CapEx, full year CapEx is expected to be approximately 19% of revenue. Included in our 2019 CapEx spend is roughly a $100 million of one-time costs related to the buildout of our new headquarters that is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Excluding our headcount related spend, our CapEx levels are in line with our long-term model. At these revenue and margin levels, along with an expected non-GAAP effective tax rate of approximately 18% and fully diluted share count of approximately 164 million, we anticipate non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $4.15 for the full year 2019. At the midpoint of that range, non-GAAP EPS would be up 14% year-over-year when adjusted for foreign exchange. We are pleased with how full year 2019 is shaping up, particularly from a margin expansion and profit perspective. In 2019, we plan to continue investing and innovating in areas we believe will drive future growth, continue to refine and optimize our go-to-market efforts, and ensure we are well-positioned to capture a growing share of the OTT market as we continue to focus on quality, cost, and scale. We are optimistic that our efforts in 2019 across the company will result in an acceleration in growth rate for both revenue and EPS in 2020. Given our expectations of significant traffic growth in 2020 due to more events such as the Olympics and the U.S. Presidential election, as well as more direct-to-consumer offerings coming to market later in 2019 and early 2020, strong adoption of our new Customer Identity and Access Management products, increased market traction of our enterprise security products, and continued strong growth in our core Web security products such as Kona Site Defender and Bot Manager. In closing, we are very bullish about the opportunities ahead for Akamai. We are confident in our ability to deliver revenue growth along with margin and earnings expansion, achieve our 30% operating margin goal in 2020, and continue to invest in innovation to drive future growth. Thank you. Tom, Jim and I would like to take your questions.

Thanks for taking the question. Just can you talk about the security business and how you've seen the sales go between sort of the core DDoS, and then, some of the other products that you've sold? From a customer perspective what types of products taking all services from you guys? Thanks.

Yes. We're seeing strong adoption across the board starting with DDoS, then we have Kona Site Defender, which protects applications from being corrupted or taken over or the Web site content from being corrupted during transactions. Bot Manager, as we've talked about before, is our fastest newly selling product and memory. The majority of transactions today are no longer human. There's bots, and particularly the bots are trying to take over user accounts. The vast majority of log-ins today are not legitimate people but bots who are trying out stolen credentials. So, very strong adoption across the board, and we're starting to get traction now with our Zero Trust Enterprise Security Solution. As I mentioned, we signed up our first $1 million a year customer. And what was really nice about that is it came from an account that would never have likely bought our normal content delivery, Web acceleration products. So, the security business just across the board is doing very well.

From a growth perspective, can you provide some insights on whether the growth is coming from new customers or from existing customers increasing their volumes?

It's both. The large fraction of our new customer bookings are for security today, and we are getting good upsell with the new products within the existing base. For example, Bot Manager being a new product with our enterprise security offerings, early days, but there's both new customers like the one that became our $1 million customer, they weren't a customer before, but also selling that within existing accounts. So, I would say both are strong new customers and upselling the new security offerings within existing accounts.

Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Congrats on a great Q4. And Jim, it's been great working with you, and we look forward to working with Ed, so congrats on a great run there.

Thank you.

You're welcome. Just a follow-up on the cloud security question, cloud security remains really impressive. How should we think about the sustainability and the visibility that you have here to the growth? And can you comment on pricing trends for WAF and DDoS in the market?

Yes. We anticipate continuing a very strong growth rate probably not in the 30s over the next couple of years, but I would say certainly in the mid-20s. We did benefit last year from the acquisition of Nominum and their security products, which are doing quite well, but with the acquisition we got a boost in 2018. In terms of pricing; the pricing is very strong. We have unique capabilities, and they are very much needed by major enterprises. So, we're in a very strong position there to maintain growth.

Thank you. And Jim, just to follow-up or add perhaps, in Tom's remarks, he had mentioned that you'd spent less on network costs in 2018 than in the prior year and Jim in your prepared remarks as well. You talked about efficiencies with bandwidth and qualification costs. Can you just remind us once again the sources of efficiencies along the entire stack and how you're able to do that and what the limits of these are as we look out into achieving 30% and perhaps even beyond in the years to come?

That's a great question. This is not new for Akamai. We have made considerable advancements in network efficiencies for a long time. Some of the progress includes continually implementing new software to enhance the throughput of our servers. Due to our extensive reach and the volume of traffic we handle, we benefit from favorable bandwidth pricing, and in some instances, we even provide free bandwidth to our customers. The same applies to co-location, where we have cut our spending by minimizing our footprint and improving server throughput. I want to emphasize that this is not a new initiative; we have been focused on this for quite a while. We are consistently working on engineering innovations and negotiating with providers, and I expect this will persist. As I mentioned during our Investor Day in June, I anticipated that our network costs and gross margins on a cash basis would be in the high 70s, and we are currently ahead of that expectation. I believe we can stabilize those margins from their current state. We are approaching our goal of 30%, with roughly 28% at this point. We're looking to enhance efficiency in our general and administrative costs, particularly through new procurement capabilities which will lead to more savings. We have undergone some facility consolidation and will continue to do so, along with IT enhancements that will help reduce G&A expenses. Going forward, most of the efficiency gains will come from G&A, but we are also seeing some improvements in our go-to-market strategy as we create a more efficient model in both our Web and media divisions. While G&A will be the main source of incremental margins, we will also witness ongoing enhancements in our sales and marketing expenditures.

That's really helpful. But just to be clear, the tick up in CapEx in 2019, that's really just due to the $100 million one-time expenditure towards the new headquarters, correct?

Yes, I mentioned at the Analyst Day that we would see a significant one-time increase related to the new Cambridge headquarters. As Ed pointed out in his remarks, if you account for that, we are actually in line with our model of 15% to 16% of revenue. The increase in capital expenditures is solely due to the Cambridge headquarters.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Thanks guys. Tom, can you give us an update on your major hyperscale customers essentially? Where are they with do-it-yourself, do you think you're pulling ahead in terms of technology and cost capabilities versus them? And maybe the same color with some of the sort of competitors that are out there. Thank you.

Yes. Some of the largest Internet platform companies have do-it-yourself efforts. They are used for large software downloads, some basic delivery. Our services we believe are a lot more effective at doing this; offer a lot more scalability and higher quality, and that's the reason there are so few of the companies that really could think about affording to do it themselves because that's a big cost for them. I don't see any fundamental change in that landscape. In general, the competitive landscape as a whole hasn't really changed all that much. There are a lot of competitors, the folks that have been doing CDN for a long, long time, plenty of startups out there trying to get in the business. And of course, the do-it-yourself. No fundamental change. I think we continue to gain share, and we do that through superior performance, competitive pricing, the largest scale that's available on the Internet, and increasingly our security solutions are very helpful for us in terms of gaining share especially with the performance solutions. We sell packages that protect and perform in the same platform that accelerates the site or delivers the content and secures it, and security is really important for our customers and nobody really is in a position to offer the kinds of capabilities that we do there.

Thank you.

Great. Thank you. A few questions on growth. I was hoping you can give us what the organic growth was in 2018, so backing out the benefit from some of the acquisitions that occurred in parts of 2017. And then also what the implied organic revenue growth is for 2019 and maybe as part of that just what your assumptions are for Janrain. And then, my other question just has to do with the performance segment, I know you don't break that out anymore, but when you give your guidance for 2019, what is your just broad expectations or assumptions for that that went into that? Thank you.

Yes, sure. This is Ed. In terms of our organic growth last year, it's around 4.7%. If you look at Nominum, it added about $40 million roughly last year to the growth rate. As far as our expectations around Janrain, expecting it to be approximately $20 million, it's not significant for 2019 in terms of revenue. But we do expect to get significant traction in the marketplace with our customers and expect to see significant growth going into 2020 in new Janrain products. And as far as the organic growth now, we're expecting our cybersecurity solutions to be growing in the mid-20s as Tom talked about it, and if you do the math on that, basically it would suggest that the CDN and other businesses is roughly flat, and a lot of that is driven by trends that we're seeing in media. We had a very tough compare this year in terms of media in terms of the gaming sector. We have a number of large renewals in the first half of the year. We've got some industry consolidation that's really adding to the impact of some of those renewals, and a lot of these deals were put in place about 18 to 24 months. So I'd say that's really normal things that you see in the media and entertainment space. As far as the Web Division, we are continuing to see a little bit of pressure here in the commerce space as we talked about in the past, and that's really what's adding to the flattening of our CDN and other business. We do expect to see that return to growth in 2020 as we expect to see a significant uptick in our media business going into 2020.

Great. Thank you.

I wanted to ask a question about the enterprise security products specifically. In the past, I compared the enterprise business to what the security business was in its early days. I would like to know how the enterprise business has been performing relative to those expectations. Specifically, how has the adoption, bookings, and overall interest been compared to your initial expectations for that enterprise business?

Doing very well. Obviously, early days, but we had very strong bookings this year, up substantially over 2017. And so, and we're anticipating even stronger bookings next year. So, I would say we're very pleased with the progress in enterprise security. I think in the long run, it should be a bigger business than the Web security business. You think about enterprises, more of them, almost all of them in fact care about enterprise security. And only really certain verticals are focused on Web security, which is our current product set. And the amount of money that enterprises spend today on firewalls and trying to prevent data breaches is much greater than what companies will spend on securing a website. So, I think the market's bigger, and I think we're really at the cusp of a major change in how enterprises secure themselves. The notion of Zero Trust is what everybody is talking about right now. It'll take years for enterprises really to fully make the transition, but the first customers now are embracing that and adopting Zero Trust Solutions. So, I think it's a very exciting future.

Yes. Thanks. Hi guys. First, Jim, congratulations on completing a great tenure as CFO and Ed, congratulations on your promotion.

Thank you, Sterling.

And then, in terms of, you talked about the different detail around the growth dynamics into 2019. I think that's very helpful. But you did mention in the prepared remarks especially the OTT strength and with preparation some of the launches that have gone on. What are you seeing in terms of the uptick there and is the pricing in those opportunities different than what you've seen in traditional media delivery?

Yes. So, a couple of things there. And I'll start with the back, the last part of the question around pricing. Really pricing in the media space is really driven by volume. So, there's really no difference in terms of high volume with OTT customers or high volume software download customers. We do tend to get additional value on our OTT space from security sales and professional services, etc. But in terms of the traffic expectations as we look at the guidance, we take a look at the customers that we have today, we've got pretty good trends and track record in terms of understanding how their businesses grow. As we look out, I talked a little bit about some of the launches that may be coming in the back half of '19 and '20. We tend to take a bit of a conservative approach there for a variety of reasons. Many of the things that go into an OTT launch that went past us really revolve around traffic growth and there's a lot to think about in terms of the exact date of the launch. Sometimes launches can be moved. It is very complex technology, and workflows that are involved. Sometimes customers want to launch them either in a limited fashion. It's really not until it gets to be a service that is a market that we really get a good handle in terms of what we expect in terms of volumes. Also, other things that impacted is the service of paid subscription services, is ad-supported, what is the user adoption, what's our share of traffic, what's the engagement time of the user, what's the bit rate? So, as we look at 2019 any of these OTT offerings that are coming in the back half of the year, we're very, very conservative in terms of the adoption rate, the impact on outcome.

Okay. All right. That makes sense to me. And then, one follow-up would be, you gave the 28% operating income margin guide for 2019. I want to make sure I'm thinking about this the right way. What would that guidance have been under the old depreciation rules in terms of the four years instead of five years?

Yes. I said it's about $24 million FX, so it's a little less than a point. Yes, keep in mind also that I mentioned that we're taking on Janrain as well. So, included in the guidance was the impact of Janrain. So, you'd have to add that back in. So, if you add those two things roughly net each other out.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Thank you, guys for taking the question and a nice quarter. Two questions from me, one just more broadly and I guess this is a question for Ed. Kind of walk us through again sign of where you guys get the confidence to sort of this for accelerating growth into 2020? And I mean forecasting is tough. But what are the mechanical things that you can see better growth in 2020? And then, one, this is probably for Tom. How do you enter in 2019? How do you feel about sort of your sales forces ability to sell outside of your traditional customer? I mean like the selling point within a customer of going from the guy who's traditionally in charge of the website to now selling directly to a different area within the organization who hasn't traditionally been the sweet spot for Akamai.

Sure. I'll discuss 2020 and our confidence in it. First, I'll address media and then the Web. In media, there is a phenomenon related to odd and even years, and as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, 2020 will feature additional events that we didn't see in 2019. This contributes to the lower growth rate in our media business this year since we had some large events in 2018. Additionally, there are significant renewals approaching, and I've noted the consolidation within the industry, which has been considerable. This consolidation can lead to a decline in prices because the combined companies do not generate additional volume. Moreover, some companies might reduce their professional services engagements to just one, among other factors. However, these effects are temporary. We observe a decline in business initially, but as traffic increases, we anticipate revenue growth to follow. On another note, we are experiencing substantial security growth across both our verticals. Back at the start of the year, we adjusted our compensation plans, resulting in a notable revenue increase from security, with considerable potential remaining. Regarding the OTT offerings I've mentioned, while I was cautious about 2019 and 2020, we believe these offerings will gain traction in the market, and we are well-positioned to capitalize on that. This positioning involves addressing concerns around consolidation and partnering to achieve cost synergies. On the Web side, we have implemented several go-to-market initiatives, and we are beginning to see promising traction from our new customer efforts established in 2018. We are seeing significant growth outside the U.S. in regions like APJ and EMEA, as well as good growth in APJ and Media. Additionally, general security within the Web Division shows plenty of opportunity, and we are optimistic about the demand for Customer Identity Access Management and an uptick in our enterprise security products. All these factors give us confidence that we will see accelerated growth in 2020.

And on your question about selling the security solutions, we've made a lot of progress there. Pretty much all of the sales force is expected to be able to sell security solutions, and they're doing that with the Kona sales, the CSO with a security organization pretty much always involved there even though that's sold to for the website. With the Bot Manager product and being all about fraud prevention there, that's the security organization typically heavily engaged with that. Prolexic, that's a data center protection level sale really nothing to do with the website per se. It protects all the assets in the data center. So, there we're dealing with the data center networking security side of the house. We're putting a lot of effort into our marketing to get better known as a security company. The past year we hired a new Global Head of Web Sales, Scott Lovett, who's well-known as a security expert. In fact, the large majority of our new customer bookings are led by security now. So, I would say we're doing very well and making the transition in terms of a sales force that sells CDN to a sales force that sells security. Now, the Zero Trust Solutions is the next step in that direction. And we're off to a good start there.

Thanks. That sounds great. Thanks a lot, guys.

Great. Thank you. Thanks for taking the question. I'm going to ask a growth question again. So, you mentioned the CDN business will be flat in 2019, but return to growth in 2020 due to the big events. What do you think is sort of two-year stacked growth rate, and what's sustainable in that business over a multi-year timespan? That's one. And two, just to be clear, I guess more of a housekeeping, does your guidance embed pricing declines from some of the consolidation that's going on? Thanks.

Sure. I'll take the last question. This is Ed. Yes, we did embed the expected pricing declines in our guidance. In terms of the core CDN business, if you look at our core CDN business excluding the large giants, just as the giants can sometimes skew some of the results. They grew at about 4% in '17 and above 4% in '18. We're calling for roughly a flat year here as we go through some of the items that I talked about and then a return to growth. So, I think looking at that trend low single digits is probably the right way to think about that business. I think one of the things that Jim pointed out, some of their cost initiatives that are going on in that business, it is a very profitable business for us and it's something that we're going to continue to optimize as we go forward. And really in terms of the next big leg up in growth, OTT once that becomes a significant portion of users viewing time, that's the decision to begin to accelerate.

Great. Thank you.

Hey, guys. Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Jim, of course, congratulations to you, and a privilege working with you, and Ed, welcome to the slot and congratulations as well.

Thank you.

Two questions, one on CDN, one on security. First one on CDN, in terms that that flattish growth for 2019. Is that any different in terms of the growth expectation for the media delivery piece as opposed to the Web performance piece within the CDN segment?

Yes. So, it's roughly the same, Michael. Give or take a percentage point or two.

Right. So, it sounds like that's maybe a slightly an improvement, maybe in performance stabilizing a bit?

I would say it's more stabilizing a bit.

All right. And then, my next question is on Security. So, security isn't great. As you pointed out, it's about a $750 million run rate and you're looking to get it to $1 billion by 2020. But I think it's probably been mostly WAF and DDoS up to this point. But, the combined market for those two is only about $2 billion. So, it seems as if we're going to get to $1 billion yourself. Unlikely you'd be 50% of that market, so you must be anticipating a really good contribution outside of WAF and DDoS. Can you give us some sense for how big you think the non-WAF and DDoS piece of your security business could be by 2020?

I think the vast majority of it will be WAF and DDoS in 2020. We do command a very strong share because we have really unique capabilities there in the market. Now that said, over the longer term, we're looking for the non-WAF items, particularly enterprise security, Zero Trust to drive a lot of growth. We also get smaller contributions from Nominum with their enterprise security solutions that we sell actually to carriers and they provide it as a channel. And there's smaller pieces here and there with the fast DNS, but the vast majority is WAF and DDoS. And I think it'll take a little bit of time for the other pieces really, which will be led by enterprise security and the Zero Trust solutions to be a big share of that. I would count Bot Manager as part of WAF, when I say Bot Manager that's part of WAF because that's a very fast-growing product and that's a pretty good share of what we'll see in 2020.

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I was just wondering in the non-GAAP operating margin guidance for the year, is there anything else that's one time holding that back besides the depreciation in Janrain, anything related to headquarters, or is that all in CapEx?

Yes. As I mentioned in Q3, we will begin to see the impact of rent expenses in Q3 related to the new headquarters building. Aside from that, there are no one-time items to consider. The Limelight patent royalty will cease in Q3, but beyond that, there are no additional one-time items. However, you should also take Janrain into account when considering margin guidance.

Got it. Thank you.

I want to follow up on two of the OTT questions. Could you at least outline the opportunity in OTT for Akamai, setting aside the timing? How much incremental opportunity do you see in this area? Some of the launches are well-publicized regarding who plans to launch an OTT service, but without discussing specific customers, are there any of those potential launches that represent clear opportunities for you, or some that aren't because you've never worked with those companies? Please outline the opportunity on both the low side and high side for 2020 and 2021. Thank you.

Yes. Without talking about timing, we work with all the companies that have been rumored to have OTT offers. When Ed talked about before, it's really hard to predict timing and scale success, adoption and those kinds of things. So, we tend to take a pretty conservative view there in terms of our guidance. I think if you look longer term in what could be on a global basis for OTT, there's tremendous opportunity for growth. If you get to the point where the majority of TV or video watching is done online, which a lot of people think will happen, and it's done at high quality say at least 10 megabits per second, there's the opportunity for orders of magnitude of increased traffic. Now timing on that is really hard to predict. As you know, there's a couple of companies that either do it all themselves, and so we don't participate in their revenue, but for the large majority of the OTT providers, those that are setting up new services both here and globally, we have very good relationships and are in a position to benefit.

Operator, we have time for probably one more question.

Yes. Thank you very much. And Jim and Ed congratulations on your next steps. A couple of questions here. I saw some nice leverage on the R&D line in the fourth quarter. Can you speak to that specifically what exactly is going on? Obviously, that division has probably been impacted somewhat by the consultant recommendations and other sort of efficiency initiatives that you have. Secondly, if you can just talk about the churn rate, this is the second quarter in a row where you mentioned that churn rate has gone down. Can you specifically address what are some of the key initiatives that you've taken to make sure that this means a continued dynamic? Thank you.

On the R&D leverage. I mean as I outlined earlier, the bigger source of leverage for the company for margin expansion is really going to come from G&A, sales and marketing to some extent and also some network costs. We did see a little bit of leverage in R&D. As you know, we capitalize a fair amount of our R&D spend for new innovation and you should view that as good because that effectively means that new product innovation that's being incubated. We saw a bit of an uptick on that from Q3 to Q4 in our kind of capitalization activity, which has a benefit in your operating expenses. But I think by and large, we expect our R&D spend as a percent of revenue to be roughly flat over the next couple of years because we don't want to under-invest in a critical area to drive growth for the company.

Yes. In terms of the churn rate, that's all about making the customer happy, providing great performance. We have great professional services. Our people are really great, and the customers like that. Innovative new products. Our customers want to see a roadmap and investment and innovation to help them stay ahead of the game. A low rate of service incidents, things that go wrong, and we listen to our customers and engage with them. And provide them the level of service that they're looking for. So, in general, our customers are very, very happy with Akamai, and that's directly reflected in a very low churn rate. And we are very pleased to see it decrease further in Q4 and 2018.

Well, thank you. In closing, we'll be presenting at several investor conferences throughout the remainder of the quarter. Details of these can be found in the Investor Relations section of akamai.com. And we thank you for joining us and wish you a very nice evening.