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Earnings Call: Q3 2021

Dec 17, 2020

Moderator

Good afternoon, welcome to the BlackBerry third quarter fiscal year 2021 results conference call. My name is David, and I will be your conference moderator for today's call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a brief question and answer session towards the end of the conference. Should you need assistance during the call, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn today's call over to Tim Foote, BlackBerry Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Tim Foote
Head of Investor Relations, BlackBerry

Thank you, David. Good afternoon, and welcome to BlackBerry's third quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. With me on the call today, our Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer, John Chen, and Chief Financial Officer, Steve Rai. After I read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, John will provide a business update, and Steve will review the financial results. We will then open the call for a brief Q&A session. This call is available to the general public via call-in numbers and via webcast in the investor information section at blackberry.com. The replay will also be available on the blackberry.com website. As noted in our press release earlier this afternoon, slides will be shown during today's live webcast. These slides relate to the recent BlackBerry IVY announcement.

For those of you not on the webcast but joining via the call-in numbers, the slides are available for you to access on the investor information section at blackberry.com. Some of the statements we'll be making today constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions for applicable U.S. and Canadian securities laws. We will indicate forward-looking statements by using words such as expect, will, should, model, intend, believe, and similar. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by the company in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors that the company believes are relevant. Many factors could cause the company's actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

These factors include the risk factors that are discussed in the company's annual filings and MD&A, including the COVID-19 pandemic. You should not place undue reliance on the company's forward-looking statements. The company has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except as required by law. As is customary during the call, John and Steve will reference non-GAAP numbers in their summary of our quarterly results. For a reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP numbers, please see the earnings press release and supplement published earlier today, which are available on the EDGAR, SEDAR, and blackberry.com websites. With that, I'll turn the call over to John.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everybody. Today, I'd like to keep the financial and business updates relatively brief because I'd like to spend a little bit more time discussing our recent BlackBerry IVY announcement. This third fiscal quarter, we continued to build on the momentum from our second quarter, delivering results in line with our outlook we provided. We delivered sequential revenue growth both in the total software and services section and as well as BTS. We continued to deliver a positive EPS and positive free cash flow this quarter. BlackBerry reported total company revenue of $224 million. Software and services revenue came in at $168 million, $168. License was $56 million. Gross margin was 70%. Earnings per share was positive $0.02. Cash generated from operation was $29 million. Total ending cash and investment at November 30th was $757 million.

I'll start my business commentary with the software and services group. ARR was approximately $475 million. Dollar-based net retention rate was 90%. Net customer churn reduced to around 1%. BlackBerry Spark, as a reminder, is a combination of our BlackBerry UEM and BlackBerry UES, the unified endpoint security offerings. This quarter, we made good progress in both the government and financial services verticals with customer wins including U.S. Army, U.S. Postal Service, the IRS, the Department of Energy, and Department of Justice, as well as Raymond James Financial, Citibank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Bank of India, and the government of Rwanda. We have customer wins in other verticals, including healthcare and manufacturing. Excuse me. We continue to see progress in upgrading BlackBerry UEM customer to the full BlackBerry Spark suite, i.e., adding our UES suite. Example in the quarter, including Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Börse, ConvergeOne, and multiple ministry of the Dutch government.

Significantly during the quarter, we released BlackBerry Cyber Suite. Our AI-powered Cyber Suite, which combines our industry-leading EPP, EDR, and MDR product, is further strengthened by the continuous authentication and the mobile threat defense capabilities. This Cyber Suite is highly competitive against both traditional and the next-gen player in the cybersecurity market. This has been validated by 451 Research and other industry experts. Cyber Suite brings together the best of BlackBerry and Cylance technology. Further, Cyber Suite will be available in versions that integrate with all major UEM offerings, including Microsoft Intune, VMware's Workspace ONE, MobileIron, as well as IBM MaaS360. This integration will allow BlackBerry to provide additional security to users of our rival UEMs. Cyber Suite has only been in the market for a month, but early interest is strong, both in the new logo and existing customer base, with significant pipeline growth this past quarter.

Cyber Suite obviously allows us to give our prospects and customers greater options for increasing their cybersecurity while protecting their UEM investment. As a result of these technology enhancements and positive customer receptivity, we will, in turn, step up our investment in sales and marketing to compete more aggressively. Before I move to BTS, I'd like to highlight the security certifications we have achieved. This quarter, BlackBerry UEM achieved the National Security Agency (NSA) commercial solution for classified program approval. This adds to the portfolio of U.S. government certifications we have received for BlackBerry UEM, including the NIAP certification, the Department of Defense Information Network Approved Product List, which I think we talked about last quarter, called IN-APL or -INAPL, FedRAMP, FIPS 140-2. No other software vendor in the cybersecurity space has been awarded more security certification by the U.S. government than BlackBerry.

BlackBerry achieving NSA certification comes at a time when most of our major competitors have been identified having vulnerabilities that are being exploited by nation state hackers. This should give our customer and prospect a higher degree of comfort about the cybersecurity protection they receive from BlackBerry. Moving on to BTS. QNX, the largest component of BTS, reports sequential revenue growth. QNX remains on track to be back to its normal run rate by early next fiscal year. In the quarter, we have 17 new designs, design wins, sorry, 16 auto, and 11 in general embedded market. Our expansion in the GEM continues, with diverse wins, including a controller system for power turbines, a next generation satellite receiver system, and a rail traffic management system from the Seoul Suseo Subway. In auto, we have design wins in both connected cars and electric vehicles.

The wins included instrument clusters, a couple of them in domain controller, a handful of them in ADAS designs, the advanced driver assist. Speaking of electric vehicles, we are very pleased to share with you our strong position in the EV market. QNX now has design wins with 19 of the top 25 electric vehicle OEMs, which together had 61% of the EV market in the first half of this calendar year. We are working hard to recruit the remaining six. Moving on to secure communication, which includes AtHoc and Secusmart. Secure communication had a strong quarter. This strength was primarily due to ongoing transition to remote working, which has been obviously greatly accelerated by the pandemic.

AtHoc had some strategic wins this quarter, including the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as well as the California Department of Justice. I believe that no one now can claim to power the entire state of California. Other notable renewals and upsells from AtHoc in the quarter, including the United States Army, Navy, as well as the Air Force, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA. We also renew within the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Department of Energy, Treasury, and Agricultural, as well as the FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. Finally, I want to touch on licensing. Revenue for the quarter came in at $56 million. As before, the majority of the licensing revenue comes from our IP licensing business.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, I'd like to spend some time discussing BlackBerry IVY, which we are very excited about. Modern cars continue to generate huge amounts of data, I think you all agree and know. The auto industry is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics because this data is difficult to collect and interact with without very costly integrations. BlackBerry IVY's mission is to make it easy to gather, securely transport, and analyze this data in a standard and a cost-efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform. This will allow the developers' ecosystem to use the data to provide intelligent insights and applications on a global scale. We have entered into a multi-year exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement with AWS. This type of agreement is rare.

BlackBerry and AWS engineers have been working very closely to jointly build the platform. Under the terms of our agreement, BlackBerry will own all the commercial relationships with customers and will share revenues with AWS. Each side contributes the key capabilities required. On the BlackBerry side, BlackBerry QNX brings over 20 years of auto industry experience, as well as relationship, as well as a huge footprint of over 175 million cars. We are a trusted leader with a deep knowledge of automotive safety and security software system. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider with a vast developer community and outstanding expertise in consumer experience, interfaces, as well as IoT. Combined, we're able to provide a full end-to-end platform. We expect an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry IVY platform over time.

We will work with AWS, a proven builder with successful developer communities, to help drive the process. With BlackBerry IVY, we are creating a recurring revenue data business, recurring revenue model that is, targeting revenue on a usage as well as a subscription base. An important difference between BlackBerry IVY and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data, and with that, the relationship with their customers. We are already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access, and we have received positive initial feedback. The target is to be in the 2023 year's model, with possibly potentially some professional services prior to it. While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry IVY addresses a very large market opportunity that will greatly increase our ASP.

With that, let me turn the call over to Steve to provide more details about our financial performance.

Steve Rai
CFO, BlackBerry

Thank you, John. My comments on our financial performance for the fiscal quarter will be in non-GAAP terms unless otherwise noted. Please refer to the supplemental table in the press release for the GAAP and non-GAAP details. We delivered third quarter non-GAAP total company revenue of $224 million and GAAP total company revenue of $218 million. Third quarter total company gross margin was 70%. Our non-GAAP gross margin includes software deferred revenue acquired but not recognized of $6 million and excludes stock compensation expense of $1 million. Third quarter operating expenses were $142 million. Our non-GAAP operating expenses exclude $32 million in amortization of acquired intangibles, $11 million in stock compensation expense, $4 million for software deferred commissions expense acquired, and $95 million fair value adjustment on the convertible debentures, which is a non-cash accounting adjustment driven by market conditions.

Third quarter non-GAAP operating income was $14 million, and third quarter non-GAAP net income was $11 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.02 in the quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $31 million this quarter, excluding the non-GAAP adjustments previously mentioned. I will now provide a breakdown of our revenue in the quarter. Software and services revenue was $168 million. Software product revenue remained in the range of 80%-85% of the total, with professional services comprising the balance. The proportion of software product revenue that is recurring was approximately 83% due to product mix. The decrease in ARR this quarter, similar to the prior quarter, is primarily due to BTS. We include QNX royalties in our ARR metric to give a total company view.

We expect to see the impact of COVID on ARR normalize early next fiscal year as we return to our normal revenue run rate there. Licensing and other revenue was $56 million. Now moving to our balance sheet and cash flow performance. Total cash equivalents, and investments were $757 million at November 30th, 2020, a decrease of $220 million during the quarter. This is mainly due to the early redemption of the $605 million of convertible debentures and issuance of $365 million of new convertible debentures on September 1st. This represented a $240 million reduction in debt financing, partially offset by cash generated in the period. Our net cash position increased to $392 million at the end of the quarter.

Third quarter free cash flow was $27 million, and cash generated from operations was $29 million, with capital expenditures of $2 million. That concludes my comments, and I'll now turn the call back to John.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Thank you, Steve. Before I provide our outlook for the remaining of the current fiscal year, I'd like to highlight some noteworthy partnership in addition to the BlackBerry IVY that we're very excited about. This quarter, we partnered with Zoom to provide a BlackBerry secure version of Zoom, which is highly secure way to hold virtual meetings in this new work from anywhere environment. It provides increased protection from corporate data leakage as well as cyber threats. In the quarter, Verizon launched their business internet secure offering, which includes our Cylance Smart Antivirus product and Cisco Umbrella security service. This new product is aimed at Verizon large number of small and medium-sized business customer. During the quarter, we announced the integration of AtHoc with both Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow Now Platform.

Microsoft Teams, as most of you know, is the market leader in collaboration software with over 115 million daily active user. The Now Platform has 51% of the IT service management market. These integration will further enhance AtHoc's reach and the ability of enterprise to protect their assets. I'll now move on to our outlook. We continue to expect total company revenue for the year to be around $950 million, as we indicated last quarter. We expect licensing revenue will finish the fiscal year a little stronger than previously indicated. We expect revenue for BTS to continue to grow sequentially in the fourth quarter, and as we talk about, as we return to its normal runway early next fiscal year. This quarter, we continue to make good progress. We delivered solid financial as per our outlook.

We have developed exciting new business model, the recurring revenue model for QNX, as well as partnership, which I outlined. We deliver industry-leading products as per our roadmap. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our operator to conduct a Q&A session, please. David?

Moderator

Yes, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. We will pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We request that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question today will be from Daniel Chan with TD Securities. Your line is open.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Oh, hi, Dan.

Daniel Chan
Analyst, TD Securities

Hi.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi.

Daniel Chan
Analyst, TD Securities

Thanks for taking my question. I don't know if you guys mentioned it or if I missed it, did you provide a metric on the billings growth?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

No, we did not. You didn't miss it. We haven't provided that.

Daniel Chan
Analyst, TD Securities

Okay. On the ARR declining speed, you talked about how it's declining because of BTS. Can you just remind us what you're including there from BTS and why that's causing it to drop?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Go ahead, Steve.

Steve Rai
CFO, BlackBerry

Sure. Our ARR is a total company metric for software and services. The QNX part of it's basically a trailing four quarters that feeds into that metric. There is a lag effect in it. With the COVID impact that we've been discussing consistently, that's going to lag the effect, making it back into the metric as we move forward and recover.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Dan?

Moderator

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Hi.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi, Mike.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Great, thanks. Hi, John. Thanks for taking my questions.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Sure.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Best wishes to everybody on the call for the holiday season and to stay healthy.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes, you too.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Great. Thank you. Just a question for me, just building on IVY, lots of interest and excitement around it. I know you're not sizing it yet because it's early days, John. As you've shared longer term about getting to kind of ASPs into the high teens to $20 per car, how does this help close the gap if things go really well? How do you see ASP for car developing over time?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

As I said, we don't really have all our kind of the revenue laid out yet because the earliest we'll get the revenue, I believe, is the model year 2023. We do expect this to help close the gap or increase ASP in a very big way. It has a lot to do with not only the base platform to collect sensor data and analyze it both at the edge and in the cloud. OEM could then take advantage of all these sensor data and the combination of those sensor data to make certain decisions at either real-time or in the long term. It also is depending a lot on how many application could we spin up. The OEM is going to build the application, the tier one will build the application using our platform, so will other third parties.

If there are more applications, then obviously there are more instances that could increase our ASP per vehicle. We're very hopeful that this not only have a recurring part of it, but it also will bring us a good chunk of revenue going forward.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Great. Thanks, John. Just my follow-up question, kind of longer-term also with BlackBerry, you guys have launched several new different software security modules. As you look at your sales force, what are they feeding back to you in terms of their ability to land and expand customers? What are they leading with, and what are some of the upsell opportunities that they're excited about with the new modules that you've launched over the last several quarters?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

First off, on the product side, our cybersecurity suite is a very timely offering to the market because of all the hacks and the vulnerabilities going on right now. We have been invited to more cases nowadays because of the environment and the attention switch to cyber protection and all the hacking that's going on out there. For example, knock on wood, we haven't been successfully, I guess, intruded yet. That's not to say this is not a challenge. This is just a stale affair at this point. On a medium term, our sales force are very focused on upgrading all our UEM base, which accounts for, depending on who you listen to in terms of industry analysts, is somewhere between 9%-12% of the market share, UEM space. We are very busy upgrading that.

To sell them the UES on top of the UEM. Then, very soon, and literally we're talking in months, we will release our UES platform onto the competitors' UEM, which are Intune, MobileIron, AirWatch, and IBM MaaS360. Not all at the same time, by the way, sequentially, but we're probably going to start with Microsoft first. That's another aspect of it. That part is the cybersecurity play. That should keep us busy for the next couple of years, and give us a lot of opportunities going after the market.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Okay. Just one last follow-up question, I'll pass the line. Just on the UES, going to other UEM platforms, what is the feedback or interest level for that, and who do you see is even able to offer those similar capabilities for the mobile market?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

The interest levels are reasonably high. I don't have a specific quantitative answer to your question. When I speak to customers or groups of customers at the same time, they all think that makes sense. It gives them an ability to protect their current investment, whatever UEM that they already invested in, if you're happy and comfortable with your pros and cons on each of the vendors. They could then use this BlackBerry security, which we believe is the best of the bunch in terms of technology, and I laid out all the certification we got from governments, and so obviously we have the best technology in cyber protection. That gave them the best of both worlds without having to rip out their investment, which of course, there's no big hurry to do that, even if they wanted to do it in a long term.

This helps to add value to what they have and keep their investment, so everybody's happy about at least have that choice to look at.

Mike Walkley
Analyst, Canaccord Genuity

Okay. Well, best wishes for the new year. Thanks for taking my questions.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Sure. Thank you.

Moderator

Your next question comes from the line of Trip Chowdhry with Global Equities Research. Your line is open.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi, Trip.

Trip Chowdhry
Analyst, Global Equities Research

Hello, John. This quarter was phenomenal, both from execution point of view and from partnership point of view. Two strongest companies, Amazon AWS and Zoom. My question is more on the IVY platform.

When do you think the developers can get a hand of pre-alpha version, so that the excitement in the developer community is very strong, and I was hoping that they could start capitalizing the imagination on your platform sometime in 2021. Do you think that's reasonable to expect?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Good question. Thank you, Trip. I know that we will have a beta version be ready in third quarter next year. Third quarter, our quarter, sorry. Our quarter, third quarter, it's a September date. We will have a developer version. We're hoping to have a developer version before that. I would say be safe to say that about mid-year next year, the application provider will be able to lay their hands on that.

Trip Chowdhry
Analyst, Global Equities Research

Beautiful. Also in terms of some OEMs, EV OEMs, you did not name them. If possible, can you name a few that you think we can keep an eye on as we move forward and see what kind of applications and how they are embracing your platform?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Well, I don't think they will appreciate me naming them. I would say this, the initial groups of company that we have been in contact with and have gotten positive feedback, it's in a group of about 20 people, 20 different OEMs. Obviously, not all 20 will sign up, I will commit to the following thing. As we getting customers sign up, we will try to make a public announcement when, obviously, the customer has to agree to it. Both Amazon and us are very excited, I was very busy in making presentation and getting strong feedback today.

Trip Chowdhry
Analyst, Global Equities Research

Beautiful. Congratulations and all the best.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Thank you.

Moderator

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi, Paul.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Hi, John. Good evening.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Good evening.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

A couple follow-up questions. On the Amazon relationship, I know you're not giving details on revenue, but could you speak to the details of the partnership itself, in terms of maybe the duration of the exclusivity period and then maybe the magnitude of Amazon's commitment for co-development and co-marketing? Also related to that, does the agreement allow you to open it up from Amazon to other cloud providers at some point in the future?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes. We agreed for a multiple number of years, that we will be exclusive with using the Amazon cloud and developing that product. They will be exclusive with us. They will not market or develop with any other party in the auto sector and in the same area of data platform, analytical platform. It's a very broad agreement. It does allow us to open it up for other cloud, but we probably won't do that until this particular one is done. Not meaning the exclusive period is done. It's at least get the product out and presenting to the customer. It's a co-development and co-marketing agreement, exclusive in both dimension. As I pointed out, BlackBerry will hold the commercial relationship, meaning that we will transact the deal with the OEM or the tier one or the application provider.

We'll lean on the help of AWS to get the ecosystem up and going with us. They have a lot of engineers assigned to this. I will refer you to a number of keynote speaker at the AWS re:Invent conference. It's public information. Starting with Andy Jassy, the CEO, and how he describes our relationship with AWS, as well as the head of the IoT. When he made his keynote, he specifically spent quite a bit of time on this relationship. You could see that they're very serious. The seriousness not only come from the cloud side, but it come from the IoT side also at Amazon.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

All right. Thank you for those details. Very interesting. Secondly, I'm just looking at the transition to work from home globally and all the uptake of various cybersecurity and other applications. How do you see BlackBerry benefiting from that? How has BlackBerry benefited from that trend? Could you dovetail that against the net revenue retention in the quarter? What's been driving the net revenue retention to fall, I think, a little bit in the quarter, versus this transition to working from home?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

I can only tell you that the UEM license were doing well initially in the COVID-19 shutdown because a lot of our customers wanted to expand their number of licenses to cover everybody to work from home and work remotely. As you know, most of our customers are large institutional in the banking industry as well as in the government. The volumes are quite high at that time. Gradually, it shifted to two other areas. One in the secure voice technology area, as they work remote from home. Both government and all the regulated industry sectors are seriously looking at the secure voice. The emergency alert systems. It used to be that are reasonably focused by user, are reasonably focused in the government space.

It's now expanded to medium to larger enterprise, where they want to be able to reach their employees and all the constituents. We see very good pickup in those areas that clearly has benefited from, unfortunately, the pandemic situation, but the pandemic situation drove the realization of secure communications as very important. There we see a lot. Then, of course, there is an indirect effect on CyberSuite, although, we just released the CyberSuite. As you know, we've been behind in EDR, but we believe we are caught up, and we ran enough tests to show that. You should see some revenue start coming from those areas. Those are kind of the area related to the work from remote.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Just reading between the lines, the one you didn't mention was the legacy Cylance business. Should we take-

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Oh, that's part of the CyberSuite. Sorry.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

For the net revenue retention, the slight drop there, is that driven from just the older Cyber, the older Cylance products? Maybe some churn there.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

That number is the total company number. It's not just the so-called, the older Cylance product. It's a combination of all our enterprise product.

Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Okay. Thanks for taking my question.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Sure.

Moderator

Your next question comes from the line of Todd Coupland with CIBC. Your line is open.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi, Todd.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Hey there, John. Good evening.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Good evening.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

I just wanted to ask you about the Q4 outlook.

$950 million for the year. It's, I don't know, $20 million or so higher than where Street is for the year, according to FactSet. You called out IP being higher. I'm wondering within that mix, will software and services be up sequentially?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Okay. can you sort of characterize-?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Wait, wait. I always get into trouble with lawyers when I answer that. It is my expectation and the current model that it is up sequentially.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Okay. Can you characterize sort of the puts and takes within that? I know there's a few pieces in the bucket there.

close that loop for us on that.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yeah. We believe secure communication will continue to do well. It's a combination of AtHoc and Secusmart. We believe that UEM will be relatively flat. BTS will have a sequential up quarter. Those are kind of the major pieces.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Yeah. Okay. You've talked in the past about sort of COVID slowing new customers deciding, and as you're

for, I guess, enterprise decisions just broadly. I know there were some other questions about this earlier, but as you are thinking about the next fiscal year, is there enough loosening now, sort of, post the vaccine, et cetera, where you can start to see some of those enterprise decisions loosen up? Can you just talk about your thinking on that for the next year or so?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yeah. Our assumption is they will loosen up, and we are in the process of building our annual operating plan, our AOP for next year. Our assumption that it will loosen up and get back to normal. From the auto sector point of view, we already start seeing that. We will start seeing it also on the commercial side. I am reasonably sure. Cybersecurity is like I said earlier, it's a topic that everybody want to talk about. We have to kind of double down on that ourselves, in terms of reaching the marketplace. We have a number of products and channel programs, and which I didn't, in the interest of time, I didn't put it in my script, but we have a very robust channel program that combined the Cylance and BlackBerry channel program together.

There are a few things that we're doing we believe will both see the growth and be able to execute for the growth next year.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Okay. Last question. I guess it's not really stock specific to certainly my thesis, but just curious. You've seen a few major tech companies come out and say, back to the office by September, work three days in the office, but you can still work from home.

Have you decided how you're thinking about BlackBerry from that perspective once that opportunity is there?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

No, we have not decided. September of next year seems to be a little far away. Well, let me put it simply, we would have been speaking at least another few times.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Yeah

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

before that. We're open-minded. I'm an advocator. I'm an old-fashioned guy. I'm an advocator that we should be together to build a business together, to build a team, in person. That's just me. I also recognize the fact that there are some reality and there are people who like the flexibility. As long as it doesn't lose productivity, I'm willing to try a couple of things.

Todd Coupland
Analyst, CIBC

Yeah. Okay. I appreciate your comments. Thanks very much.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Absolutely. Thank you.

Moderator

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Lee with Raymond James. Your line is open.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Hi, Steve.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Thank you. Hey. John, just a clarification first. The $950 outlook, that's your non-GAAP revenue number, correct?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes, that's the non-GAAP revenue number. Yes, correct.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Okay. You'd expect BTS to grow sequentially, you said enterprise software as well to grow a little bit sequentially in Q4?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes. That's what I said.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Okay. All right. John, on IVY, do you see IVY as a bit higher ARPU compared to some of the other modules, or would you expect it to be in the same range?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Oh, no. In terms of the ASP?

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Yes.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

I'm hoping it's higher than Okay. In order to be fair, let me maybe reset here for the following. You know that our current module, whether it's Hypervisor, ADAS, Clusters, Cockpit, IVI, ranges anywhere from the low single-digit dollars to literally high single-digit or low double-digit dollars per module.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Yeah.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

That's the range. I would expect this to be more towards the higher end of that spectrum. When I said, "Oh, no" earlier, I was thinking about IVI. Compared to IVI, this will be a lot more.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Right. Okay. You will split that with AWS?

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Yes. I will have to have a revenue split with AWS. Correct.

Steven Lee
Analyst, Raymond James

Okay. Got it. Okay. Thanks a lot.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Sure.

Moderator

I would like to turn the call back over to John Chen, Executive Chair and CEO of BlackBerry, for closing remarks.

John Chen
Executive Chair and CEO, BlackBerry

Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending today's call. I know we have this thing now on your early evening, or most of your early evening, if you're on the East Coast. I apologize for that because, A, I'm sheltering in the West Coast, and B, we had our board meeting today, so this is one reason why we're doing it at this hour. I hope it's not overly inconvenient to you all. Before I sign off, I'd like to wish you and your family a very safe and happy holidays, and I hope to see each and every one of you in person next year. With that, have a good day. Thank you.

Moderator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.