Red Hat, Inc (RHT)
Q2 2012 Earnings Call Transcript
September 21 2011 5:00 p.m. ET

Executives

James M. Whitehurst - Chief Executive Officer, President and Director
Charles E. Peters - Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President
Tom McCallum - Investor Relations

Analysts

John S. DiFucci - JP Morgan Chase & Co
Kash G. Rangan - BofA Merrill Lynch
Mark R. Murphy - Piper Jaffray Companies
Keith Weiss - Morgan Stanley
Nabil Elsheshai - Pacific Crest Securities, Inc.
Michael Turits - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.,
Steven M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated
Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Reid Menge - UBS Investment Bank
Gregg Moskowitz - Cowen and Company, LLC
Edward Maguire - Credit Agricole Securities (USA) Inc
Tim Klasell - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc
Walter H. Pritchard - Citigroup Inc
Brad Reback - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc
S. Kirk Materne - Evercore Partners Inc

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is David and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Red Hat''s Q2 Earnings Call Fiscal 2012. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers remarks they will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time simply star , then the number one on your telephone keypad, if you would like to withdraw your question press the pound key. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Tom McCallum, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin your conference.


Tom McCallum

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Red Hat''s Earnings Call for the second quarter of fiscal 2012. Speakers for today''s call will be Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO; and Charlie Peters, Executive Vice President, CFO. Our press release was issued after the market closed today and may be downloaded from redhat.com on the Investor Relations page. Also, on this page, you''ll be able to find a historic reconciliation schedule of GAAP to non-GAAP financial metric as well as a schedule on currency rates.

Various remarks that we may make about the company''s future expectations, plans and prospects, including the statements containing the words believe, anticipate, plan, project, estimate, expect, intend or will, constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbors provision under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the company''s most recent annual report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC as well as the safe harbor statement in today''s press release.

In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our estimates or views only as of today, September 21, 2011, and these estimates and views may change. While the company may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so even if our estimates or views do change. And therefore, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our estimates or views at any day subsequent to today.

With that, I''d like to turn the call over to Jim.

James Whitehurst

Thank you, Tom, and let me add my welcome to all of you joining us on today''s call. Red Hat Associates around the globe executed extremely well and delivered outstanding results. While the macroeconomic environment remained volatile, we continue to experience broad demand for our open source solutions in every major geography during the second quarter.

We drove significant up-selling within our top deals and we added a number of large wins from customers who migrated away from proprietary products and other Linux distributions. Customers are increasingly turning to Red Hat as they look to modernize their data center infrastructure and fundamentally change the way they deliver IT services.

Let me review some of the highlights for our second quarter, which combined with strong demand heading into the second half of this year, provides us with confidence to again raise our full year growth outlook, as Charlie will explain later.

First, sales execution was once again strong in Q2 and we delivered accelerating year-over-year organic revenue growth for the fourth consecutive quarter. Our 27% revenue growth to the first half of this year had significantly outpaced last year''s 20% first half growth, given our investments in sales and marketing and R&D are clearly paying off.

Second, even with this focused investment for growth, we continue to deliver leverage, which enabled our operating income to significantly outpace revenue. Our operating income is up 41% in Q2 and up 35% in the first half of this year.

Third, we continue to drive strong cash flow growth with operating cash flow up 20% for the quarter and 34% for the first half of the year. I''m also pleased to report that all of our top 25 deals that were up for renewal in the second quarter, not only renewed, but they did sell at a total value of over 150% of the original value. This was our strongest up-sell percentage since we started tracking this metric, which is usually in the 120% to 130% range. Customers across a variety of segments and geographies contributed to this record.