Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM)
NASDAQ: AKAM · Real-Time Price · USD
110.25
-0.50 (-0.45%)
Sep 10, 2026, 11:17 AM EDT - Market open
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q2 2019

Jul 30, 2019

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Q2 2019 Akamai Technologies, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your touch-tone telephone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Tom Barth, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Tom Barth
Head of Investor Relations, Akamai Technologies

Great, thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Akamai's second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Speaking today will be Tom Leighton, Akamai's Chief Executive Officer, and Ed McGowan, Akamai's Chief Financial Officer. 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 July 30th, 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. With that, let me turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Thanks, Tom. Thank you all for joining us today. Akamai delivered excellent results in the second quarter, coming in above expectations on both the top and bottom lines. Revenue was $705 million, up 6% over Q2 of last year. Up 8% in constant currency. Q2 non-GAAP EPS was $1.07 per diluted share, up 29% year-over-year. Up 32% in constant currency. As has been the case in recent quarters, these very strong results were driven by the rapid growth of our cloud security and international businesses, strong traffic growth in our media business, and our continued focus on operational excellence. Our adjusted EBITDA margin in Q2 was 42%, up three points over Q2 of last year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 29%, also up three points over Q2 of last year.

These results highlight the excellent progress that we've made towards our goal of achieving non-GAAP operating margins of 30% in 2020, while continuing to invest in innovation and new products to drive our future growth. Our security portfolio was again the fastest-growing part of our business in Q2, achieving revenue of $205 million, up 34% year-over-year in constant currency. Bot Manager continued to be our fastest-selling new product in recent memory with hundreds of customers and a revenue run rate now over $100 million per year. Bot Manager is designed to defend websites and applications from bot attacks of all kinds, including credential abuse, account takeover, and theft. It's been recognized as a market leader by top analyst firms such as Forrester and Frost & Sullivan, and it's tightly integrated with another of our industry-leading security solutions, Kona Site Defender.

Kona Site Defender provides a web application firewall, or WAF service, that is designed to protect websites and applications from downtime, defacement and corruption of content, insertion of malware, and theft of data. Kona has been recognized as a market leader by numerous analyst firms, including Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. In its research report on critical capabilities for cloud WAF, Gartner rated Akamai as the best among all vendors at protecting critical business applications and mobile applications. Akamai's leadership in WAF services is important because having a state-of-the-art and well-managed web app firewall is vital for any major enterprise doing business on the Internet. Well over 1,000 customers are using Kona Site Defender today, generating more than $300 million per year in revenue.

In addition to Bot Manager and Kona, we also have a third market-leading security product that's generating more than $100 million in annual revenue, and that's Prolexic. Prolexic provides protection from DDoS attacks to hundreds of customers, including many of the world's largest financial institutions. As a result, Akamai has been recognized as a market leader in DDoS mitigation by analyst firms such as Forrester and IDC. As you can see from the customer counts that I just provided, there's plenty of room for more adoption of Kona, Prolexic, and Bot Manager by our installed base of customers. These products are also driving a lot of our new customer acquisition. We're also very excited about the growth potential of our two newest security offers, Akamai Identity Cloud and Akamai Enterprise Defender.

Akamai Identity Cloud, which was formerly known as Janrain Identity Cloud, provides a complete suite of consumer identity and login management services. It's been recognized as the overall leader in the consumer identity and access management space by KuppingerCole, Europe's leading research firm in this area. Identity management was a key theme at our recent Edge World customer conference, where we were joined by a senior executive from Sanofi to explain why they selected Akamai Identity Cloud to manage identities across their global business. Sanofi is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, with operations in 170 countries. They chose Akamai Identity Cloud over the competition in part because of its superior performance, enhanced security, and ease of use. Akamai Enterprise Defender, which we formally launched at Edge World in June, is designed to provide a robust zero trust solution to protect enterprise applications from unauthorized access and data breaches.

It's comprised of our Enterprise Application Access, Enterprise Threat Protector, and Kona Site Defender products. These products become even more essential as major enterprises move their data into the cloud, where it can be more challenging to ensure that proper access controls are in place. It's still early days for zero trust, already Akamai's enterprise security solutions are drawing attention in the marketplace. For example, Forrester cited Akamai as a powerhouse of capability in its report on zero trust providers. Gartner cited Akamai in its market guide for zero trust network access, recommending that enterprises phase out legacy VPN access for high-risk use cases and begin phasing in zero-trust access. We're continuing to see significant customer wins at major enterprises like SKF. SKF is the world's largest manufacturer of bearings with 44,000 employees worldwide, they're now replacing their traditional VPN with our Enterprise Application Access solution.

In addition to having great products, Akamai's security portfolio is supported by great people in our services and support organization. We've heard of many instances where a misconfigured or outdated product has been the root to a data breach, and this is an area where our hundreds of security experts can help. Akamai's substantial security expertise can make the difference between operating safely and suffering a devastating breach, especially as enterprises make greater use of public cloud infrastructure. Akamai has six security operations centers around the world, where vulnerabilities and attacks are detected and mitigated by our security experts before they can cause harm. Well over 1,000 customers, including many large financial institutions, retailers, and media companies, now use our managed security services, and this generates another $100+ million in annual revenue for Akamai.

Overall, we're very pleased with the success that we're having with our security portfolio, and we believe that the best is yet to come. Our customers are now telling us that they see Akamai as more than just the world's largest CDN. Many view us as an Internet security partner and strategic advisor, whose cybersecurity capabilities work hand-in-hand with our delivery offerings. As a sign of this important evolution in our business, security accounted for 29% of our revenue in Q2, up from 23% a year ago. We believe that we're on track to achieve a $1 billion run rate for our security solutions in the next year. As measured by security revenue, Akamai is now one of the world's largest public cybersecurity companies, and arguably the largest when it comes to providing cloud security services.

Changing topics, I'd now like to say a few words about our media business, which also performed well in the second quarter. We continued to grow traffic faster in Q2 than published growth rates for the Internet as a whole, which means that we continued to gain share. Online viewing of live sports, in particular, has grown dramatically this year. On July 9th, the ICC's Cricket World Cup semifinal between India and New Zealand attracted over 25 million concurrent viewers to the Akamai platform. That's 36% more than our previous record set in May, and it's triple the peak that we reached in May of last year. The growth in video traffic and the enormous scale provided by Akamai's unique Edge platform were major topics of interest at our customer conference.

There was also substantial interest in how our Edge platform will provide even greater benefit to our customers as 5G becomes widespread. That's because 5G is expected to connect hundreds of millions of people and many billions of devices to the Internet. Once 5G is deployed at scale, it should vastly improve the bandwidth and latency in the last mile. To take advantage of this capability and to not be overwhelmed by the resulting increase in traffic, you need servers close to the last mile, at the edge of the Internet. This is where Akamai really is unique, with 4,000 points of presence in more than 1,000 cities across 140 countries. It's taken a while, but the industry has now come to recognize that having infrastructure at the edge is critical for scale, performance, and security.

Now that leading analysts are talking about the importance of the edge, several of our competitors are suddenly claiming to have edge networks and edge services too. They aren't at the edge at all. They're located in tens of data centers in the core of the Internet, just as they've always been. Looking back at Q2, we're very pleased with our results and the strong momentum that we've established in the first half of the year. It's very good to see the impressive revenue growth for our security products, the high traffic growth in our CDN business, our strong growth and opportunity in international markets, and our continued robust operating margins. We're especially pleased that our non-GAAP EPS grew more than 30% in constant currency for the fifth consecutive quarter, even while we continued to invest in innovation and new products to drive our future growth.

In Q2, we also welcomed Madhu Ranganathan to our board. Madhu has extensive financial experience at global software, networking, and services companies, and we're very pleased to have her join our board's audit and finance committees. Now I'll turn the call over to Ed to review our Q2 results and guidance for the remainder of the year. Ed?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Thank you, Tom. As Tom outlined, Akamai delivered another excellent quarter in Q2. We were very pleased to exceed the high end of our guidance range on revenue, operating margin, and earnings. We remain confident in our ability to achieve our goal of 30% non-GAAP operating margins in 2020. Q2 revenue was $705 million, up 6% year-over-year or 8% in constant currency, driven by strong security growth and higher than expected OTT video traffic. Revenue from our web division was $380 million, up 8% year-over-year, or 10% in constant currency. Revenue growth for this group of customers continued to be driven by our strong security business, where we saw strong performance across multiple security offerings, including Bot Manager, Kona Site Defender, and Prolexic. In addition, we continued to see very solid year-over-year growth in both the Asia Pacific region and in EMEA.

Revenue from our media and carrier division was $325 million, up 4% year-over-year, or 6% in constant currency. The better-than-expected growth in Q2 came from continued very strong momentum in security and higher than expected OTT video traffic as we gained share in a few key customers during the quarter. Revenue from the Internet platform customers, which is included in our media and carrier division, was $46 million, up 5% from the prior year. Q2 revenue from this group of customers was slightly ahead of our projections due to higher than expected download and video traffic. Turning now to our total company security products revenue. Security revenue for the second quarter was $205 million, up 32% year-over-year, or 34% in constant currency. We are very pleased to see that our significant investments in security are paying off. Moving on to revenue by geography.

Sales in our international markets continued to be strong and represented 41% of total revenue in Q2, up three points from Q2 2018 and consistent with Q1 levels. International revenue was $288 million in the second quarter, up 15% year-over-year, or 20% in constant currency. We again saw strong growth in our Asia Pacific region and continued steady results in our EMEA region. As Tom mentioned earlier, we have seen significant traction with our investments overseas, and we plan to continue to invest internationally in order to take advantage of our unmatched global scale, reach, and product portfolio. Foreign exchange fluctuations had a negative impact on revenue of $2 million on a sequential basis and $11 million on a year-over-year basis.

Finally, revenue from our U.S. market was $417 million, up 1% year-over-year, which is a two-point improvement from year-over-year growth in the first quarter. Moving on to costs. Cash gross margin was 77%, down one point from Q1 levels and consistent with the same period last year. GAAP gross margin, which includes both depreciation and stock-based compensation, was 66%, consistent with Q1 levels. Non-GAAP cash operating expenses were $254 million, up $1 million from Q1 levels and slightly below our guidance due to continued focus on operational efficiencies and some early returns from our enhanced procurement function we introduced earlier this year. Moving on to profitability. Adjusted EBITDA was $293 million, down $6 million from Q1 levels, up $31 million, or 12%, from the same period in 2018.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 42%, consistent with Q1, up three points from Q2 2018, and above the high end of our guidance range. Non-GAAP operating income was $204 million, down $5 million from Q1 levels. Up $34 million, or 20%, from the same period last year. Non-GAAP operating margin came in at 29%, down one point from Q1 levels, up three points from Q2 last year, and above our guidance range. Capital expenditures in Q2, excluding equity compensation and capitalized interest expense, were $153 million. This was slightly below our guidance range due to some spend related to our new headquarters that shifted into Q3. Moving on to earnings. GAAP net income for the second quarter was $114 million, or $0.69 of earnings per diluted share.

Non-GAAP net income was $176 million, or $1.07 of earnings per diluted share, up 29% year-over-year, or up 32% in constant currency and $0.05 above the high end of our guidance range. Taxes included in our non-GAAP earnings were $34 million based on a Q2 effective tax rate of 16%. This effective tax rate is one point lower than our guidance due to a higher percentage of foreign earnings. I will discuss some balance sheet items. We continue to have a very strong balance sheet. As of June 30th, our cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $1.3 billion, up $109 million from the end of Q1, an increase driven by strong free cash flow of $185 million or 26% of revenue. Our total debt at the end of Q2 was $1.2 billion, reflecting the senior convertible notes that will be due in May of 2025.

Now I will review our use of capital. We continue to focus on the importance of returning capital to shareholders. During the second quarter, we spent $81 million on share repurchases, buying back approximately 1.1 million shares. Our aim remains to fully offset our equity compensation dilution during 2019. We have approximately $1 billion remaining on our previously announced share repurchase authorization. We intend to continue to return a large percentage of free cash flow through share repurchases, balanced against preserving our flexibility for strategic opportunities. We believe our discipline and balanced capital allocation approach will allow us to continue to drive shareholder value through investing organically in the business, pursuing M&A, and continued share repurchases. In summary, we are very pleased with our Q2 and first half results, and we remain confident in our ability to execute on our plans for the long term.

I'd now like to provide Q3 guidance and update our previous 2019 guidance. Looking ahead to the third quarter, we are projecting another solid quarter on both the top and bottom lines. As a reminder, in Q3, we face the normal summer month traffic seasonality, especially in our media business, and we expect further FX headwinds. At current spot rates, foreign exchange fluctuations are expected to have a negative impact of approximately $4 million-$5 million compared to Q3 of 2018, and a negative impact of approximately $1 million sequentially. We are estimating Q3 revenues to be in the range of $692 million-$706 million, up 4%-6% in constant currency over Q3 2018. It is worth noting that we renewed two of our Internet platform customers at the end of Q2.

We expect our Internet platform accounts to decline in Q3 by approximately $4 million, which we have factored into our guidance. At these revenue levels, we expect cash gross margins of 77%-78%. Q3 non-GAAP operating expenses are projected to be $257 million-$261 million. This uptick from second quarter spend levels is driven by the expiration of the Limelight patent royalty payments, higher expenses related to our new headquarters facility, and our annual employees' salary merit increase, which takes place at the beginning of Q3. Factoring in the cash gross margin and operating expense expectation I just provided, we anticipate Q3 EBITDA margins in the range of 40%-41%. Moving now to depreciation, we expect non-GAAP depreciation expense to be between $89 million-$91 million. Factoring in this guidance, we expect non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 27%-28% for Q3.

Moving on to CapEx, we expect to spend approximately $170 million-$178 million excluding equity compensation in the third quarter. This includes approximately $31 million related to the continued build-out of our new headquarters, as well as a more significant network investment in anticipation of increased OTT traffic in 2020. With the overall revenue and spend configuration I just outlined, we expect Q3 non-GAAP EPS in the range of $0.98-$1.02, or up 6%-11% in constant currency. This EPS guidance assumes taxes of $32 million-$36 million based on an estimated quarterly non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 17%. It also reflects a fully diluted share count of 165 million shares. Looking ahead to the full year, we are increasing both our revenue and EPS guidance.

On the revenue side, we are increasing our range to $2.84 billion-$2.87 billion, which is an increase of approximately $15 million at the midpoint of the range compared to our previous guidance. As a reminder, Q4 tends to have the widest range of outcomes given the large role that holiday seasonality plays with both online retail activity for our e-commerce customers and traffic for our large media customers. For the full year, we anticipate adjusted EBITDA margins of 41%-42%. We expect 2019 non-GAAP operating margins of approximately 28%-29%. Moving on to CapEx. Full year CapEx is expected to be 20%-21% of revenue. Included in our CapEx spend is roughly $100 million of 1x costs related to the buildup of our new headquarters.

Excluding the spend, we project the full-year CapEx to be at the high end of our long-term model of 16%-17% due to increased network build-out in anticipation of more significant OTT traffic in 2020. Moving on to EPS, we are increasing our non-GAAP earnings per diluted share range to $4.23-$4.30 for the full year 2019, which is up $0.14 at the midpoint compared to our previous guidance. Our guidance assumes a non-GAAP effective tax rate of 16%-17% and a fully diluted share count of approximately 165 million shares. In summary, we are pleased with our performance of the business in the first half of 2019, as well as our ability to again increase our guidance for the full year. Thank you. Tom and I would be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you have a question, please press the star then the one key on your touch tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. To prevent any background noise, we ask that you please place your line on mute once your question has been stated. Our first question is from Brandon Nispel from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is now open. Pardon me, Brandon, please check your mute button.

Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets

Sorry. Yep, was on mute. Can you guys update your guidance in terms of the CDN revenue growth and the cloud security revenue growth for this year? Maybe if you could also just break down what the enterprise security is within your business, that would be great. Thanks.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

This is Ed. I'll take that. For the cloud security business, we had previously guided in the mid 20% range. We now take that up to mid to high 20% range, and the CDN will still be flattish for the year.

Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets

Enterprise security.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Enterprise security. We don't break out enterprise security as of now. That's still a pretty small % of our total security revenue. As it gets more material, we'll break that out.

Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets

I guess as a good follow-up, you announced some new agreements with two of your IPC customers. Can you just help us understand maybe the change in those agreements? Any update on your thoughts in terms of the new streaming services that are coming in 2020? Thanks.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. With the giants, the internet platform customers, I talk about having two customers that renew. This is pretty standard. It's really just a contract that comes up for renewal. We're just negotiating pricing. I talked about how we'd expect to see those customers decline in Q3, but I do expect that group of customers to grow from Q3 levels into Q2. We will pick up a little bit more share with one of them, and we expect to see pretty strong seasonality in Q4 with the rest of them. Again, that's pretty normal. As you think about that group, as the contracts come up for renewal, we'll have a price down. Generally, we get more traffic. Again, we'll be down $4 million roughly in Q3 and then up again in Q4.

In terms of the new streaming services, I guess the best way to talk about this one is we talked earlier about how we had a number of customers that were renewing in Q1 and Q2 that were large consolidations in the marketplace, some of whom have announced new streaming offerings. The good news is that's now behind us, so we've renewed all those customers. We've talked a bit about updating our CapEx to build out in anticipation for what we expect to be some increase in demand. It's really hard to predict exactly how successful these launches will be. We'll have to wait and see. Tom and I talked about being cautious here and making sure that we build out in advance, so to the extent that there is volume, we're there to take as much volume as we can.

To the extent that it doesn't pan out, our core traffic is growing, so we can just grow into that additional CapEx. I think we're really well prepared for it. We'll give you an update certainly on our Q4 call as we start to see some of this traffic come online in Q4, and we'll get a better sense of what the next year looks like.

Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets

Great. Thanks, Ed.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Sterling Auty from JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Sterling Auty
Analyst, JPMorgan

Thanks. Hi, guys. Wanted to see if you can give us an update on what's the early progress and traction with Janrain or now the Akamai Identity Cloud?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Doing well and grew in the quarter. It's still early days. We're integrating it with our Bot Manager solution to provide a more comprehensive capability at understanding really who is logging in, making sure it's the person we expect, managing the user's data in a secure way so it can't be stolen. I would say early days and looking positive.

Sterling Auty
Analyst, JPMorgan

One follow-up on the media side, I think there was a comment about gaining share in some key customers. Is there some additional color that you can give us on that front?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, sure, Sterling. Yeah, during the quarter, with some of our U.S. customers, we were able to pick up additional share. In the media space, the share shifts based on a number of factors, one of which is better performance. The media team's done a great job of really focusing with some of those large customers on improving performance specifically for the use type that they have, whether it be live video or video that's on various devices so that we can pick up some additional share. We were pretty happy to see that. That's part of what put us over the range for the quarter.

Sterling Auty
Analyst, JPMorgan

All right, great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Heather Bellini
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you so much for taking the question. I had two, if I may. First one was going to be, you obviously mentioned the growth with the internet platform customers on the CDN side. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the trends in the business, ex the big five, with that segment being down, I think it was 2% year-over-year this quarter and down 2% last quarter. Is there anything you could give us color on about how we should expect the balance of that business, ex the big five to trend? Then just had a follow-up on the Janrain question. Was wondering who you're typically seeing in competitive RFPs with them, and if there's any update on revenue contribution, if it did better than your expectations for the quarter. Thank you.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, Heather, I'll take the first one here on the business excluding the giants. Yes, you're correct. It was down 1% or 2% this quarter, and that was as expected. I talked about earlier how we had some major customers on the media side that we were renewing in Q1 and Q2. That is as expected, and given that we're kind of getting into a seasonally low quarter, I expect that to be flattish. You probably increase 1% or 2% in Q4 with our strong seasonality. I think another way to look at it is what is a catalyst that could potentially drive that business higher?

I think as we look at 2020, you've got a number of factors, whether it's an even year where you have more traffic associated with things like the Olympics, the presidential election, excuse me, and you also have a number of OTT offerings. In that business where it's primarily driven by traffic growth offsets your pricing declines. That's essentially the math there. In a year where you see accelerating traffic, that's when you start to get into a bit of acceleration in growth. That's what we'll be looking for.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, in terms of Janrain, the large majority of our prospects were competing with a homegrown solution or do-it-yourself. The challenge they're seeing as they grow their business is scaling the homegrown solution, getting performance out of it. It can be hard to use, and security is a big deal. You're dealing with very personal user data. Security is really important there. When we do see a competitor come into the account, typically would be Gigya. Occasionally Okta. Okta really works more on the enterprise side of the house, but they do have some capability on the consumer side. I would say, most often it's a do-it-yourself solution that the customer has. Oh, and the revenue question, yeah, our revenue there is in line with expectations.

Heather Bellini
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Tim Horan from Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Tim Horan
Analyst, Oppenheimer

Thanks, guys. Tom, any more color on edge-based compute? Do customers understand how unique your infrastructure is, and are they starting to utilize it? Maybe what applications or just any other color when it might really start to take off? Thanks.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, we've been supporting edge compute in various forms for almost 20 years. At our Edge World customer conference, we talked a lot about our new EdgeWorkers solution, which gives them even greater capabilities over and above Edge Side Includes and Cloudlets. We also demonstrated our new IoT Edge Connect solution, which has message broker support, MQTT support, and also compute at the edge in the IoT model. There's a lot of interest in that. I think the interest will increase more, especially as you see more IoT applications out there. There was a lot of buzz among our customers as talking about the IoT applications they're working on. Clothing companies or sneaker companies talking about putting sensors in your shoes or clothes. Our airline customers are sensing when you get to the airport so they can update you automatically on your flight.

Merchandisers tagging items for sale so they can keep track of it and have automated checkout. I think 5G is going to help enable a lot of these applications that people are talking about now. Edge compute is a big part of that because you have to do the processing of data, sometimes at a massive scale. Latency can make a big difference, especially with gaming consoles or automobiles when those are the devices or the thing in the Internet of Things. I do think people are really starting to realize

Just how important our Edge platform is, not just for delivering content, but doing compute, and certainly for security.

Tim Horan
Analyst, Oppenheimer

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Sanjit Singh
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Thank you. This is Sanjit Singh for Keith, congrats on the great security results this quarter. I actually had a question on the OTT business. I was wondering if you can give us a sense of how your typical OTT deal is structured, in terms of, are those typically single source, dual source, or triple sourced? Then in terms of thinking about how is revenue contracted, is that just going to be a pure function of subscribers, or are there sort of minimum contracts associated with some of these streaming services that are being launched in the coming months?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. I'll take that one, Tom. There really is no typical deal. They're all pretty unique. Most customers in the large OTT space do use multiple source, whether they do it themselves or have multiple CDNs. Your typical contract, if there is such a thing, it really depends. Typically, we'll sign up for anywhere from a year to two years contract length, volume-based pricing based on the traffic that comes over the network when it comes to delivery. All of our other services, whether it's security, professional services, et cetera, are priced in a different manner. In terms of the volume commitment, that can vary as well, and that also is a factor in terms of the unit pricing. In this world, we're trying to get as much share as you possibly can.

Given the fact that we've got the most amount of capacity, and we've got capacity in all the right places around the world, we typically do pretty well in a multi-CDN environment in terms of getting share. That's basically the way those OTT contracts work.

Sanjit Singh
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Understood. Maybe a follow-up question, maybe on the topic of taking share. I think for a number of years now, what we're used to is when big contracts come up for renewal, that gives an opportunity for Akamai to take share, but that results in a little bit of a revenue headwind in the near term. Are there any initiatives, I think you guys described this a little bit at the investor meeting a couple of months ago, any initiatives to sort of smooth that cadence out? I think you have zero trust out there, but what are the things that could be done to maybe create less of a revenue headwind when some of these contracts get repriced? Anything that can be done on that side of the house?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, great question. I think one of the things that we've seen, and the media team has done a great job here of selling security. It was a vertical where we didn't have a lot of security penetration, and we've seen enormous growth in our security business across many sub-verticals within the media space, whether it's your OTT video space, your publishers, your gaming customers, et cetera. What that does is that fills in some of the hole in terms of the revenue decline, because obviously you take a price decline and then traffic will ramp over time. Generally, as I talked about in the earlier question around commitments, sometimes getting larger commitments to get guaranteed share is a way to also offset some of the revenue declines.

Sanjit Singh
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Colby Synesael from Cowen and Company. Your line is now open.

Colby Synesael
Analyst, Cowen and Company

Great. Thank you. Just looking at the difference in growth rates across the different geographies. Obviously, the U.S. has been much slower for some time now relative to the various international geographies. Is the slower growth in the U.S. really just a function of the maturity of the business model in this market, or is it really a reflection of just a greater level of competition that you're seeing? I'm speaking ex the Big Six. Secondly, as it relates to the Big Six, I had in my notes that you were expecting one price renewal in the second quarter. I could have had that wrong, and I think you said that there were two. Just with that as the backdrop, are there any other large Big Six price renewals that you are anticipating for the remainder of this year? Thank you.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

All right. Why don't I take the last question first. In terms of the price renewals, what we had talked about, we actually didn't call out the Big Six price renewals, and the reason we didn't do that was given the fact that there's only six customers, so we didn't want to single that out. What we had talked about was there were a number of consolidations that I talked about at the beginning of the year that were up for renewal in Q1 and Q2, so there was one remaining in Q2, and that is now done. We're done with that. As far as the question on the Big Six, what I would say is any activity that we anticipate in the Big Six has been factored into our guidance.

I don't want to get into specifics of any additional timing around revenue, but I did talk about declining revenue this quarter related to the renewals we did in Q2, and then in Q4, we expect to grow. In the U.S., the question around U.S. growth. Just a couple of things to keep in mind with the U.S. growth rate. This is the area within the web business where we have the most pressure from a macroeconomic standpoint with our U.S. commerce retail vertical, which is a pretty significant vertical for us. That's put some pressure on the U.S. growth. This is also where those renewals I talked about in media sit as well, where you've got some price pressure that we had to go through here in the first half of the year. That's also put some pressure on our growth rate as well.

Just if you look at some compares, last year in Q1, we had The Olympics in Q1 of last year, which did not repeat this year, so you saw some softness in Q1. Also we had a very strong nominal quarter in Q1 of last year, which didn't repeat in Q1 of this year and has been kind of in line with what we expected here in Q2. Those are some of the factors that you have to take into consideration. I know you said you excluded the Janrain, but the Janrain are in the U.S., so anytime we see some pressure there, you'll see our total company, U.S. growth rate decline a bit.

Colby Synesael
Analyst, Cowen and Company

Great. Thank you very much, Ed.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Brad Zelnick from Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

Brad Zelnick
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Excellent. Thank you so much for taking the questions. I've got two. First, what's giving you the incremental confidence from three months ago to tick up your CapEx into the back half of the year ahead of the OTT traffic you're expecting next year? While I don't expect you'll provide guidance for next year, how would you frame the opportunity you're playing for in CDN, perhaps your view of what the dollar market growth opportunity looks like?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah. Hey, Brad. I don't want to provide specific guidance. The only reason I don't want to do that is just that, it's somewhat out of our control, the user adoption. Obviously very, very powerful brands, which gives us confidence to say that we believe that there'll be some significant traffic to gain. We have good relationships with all the players that are announcing OTT offerings. We can't control the timing. We can't control the user adoption. It's hard for us to sit here and say that there's a big number because it becomes somewhat binary. If I call out a big number on traffic for next year for one or two of those and it doesn't show up, it's hard to make it up. We'll update you in Q4 on a much better view of guidance on revenue.

On the CapEx side, it's a more simple calculation for us. As we look at planning out for our network build, we've got a core business that's growing fairly nicely, from a traffic perspective. Strategically, we want to be positioned to be able to take as much traffic as possible. If these services do take off and are wildly successful, we're in a much better position because we have the largest network, we have the most capacity, we have the capacity in the right locations. Strategically, it makes sense for us to do that. As I mentioned, if we're wrong and the traffic doesn't really materialize, we can grow into it and take our CapEx down for next year. As we talked about it as a team, we thought it was the right bet to make to position us for that growth.

Again, I just don't want to speculate right now until we start to see some of that traffic exactly how big that will be.

Brad Zelnick
Analyst, Credit Suisse

That's fair, and I appreciate the color. Ed, it's good to hear today's commentary recommitting to 30% operating margins in 2020. As we look beyond 2020, how do you think about the margin potential of the business, and is there any reason Akamai can't get back to the mid-30s type op margins where it was a decade or so ago?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, we're not going to give guidance beyond 2020 or a 30% operating margin. We always want to operate as efficiently as we can, and there are certainly scenarios where the margins could increase beyond 30%. We're not going to give any comments on that today.

Brad Zelnick
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Fair enough. Thanks so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from James Fish from Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open.

James Fish
Analyst, Piper Jaffray

Hey, guys. Thanks for the question and an awesome quarter. One thing, as I look at your Q3 guide for the top line, you're guiding down sequentially, Akamai has never had a sequential decrease from Q2 to Q3. Can you just help us bridge that?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. One of the items is the fact that you have the Giants, or the internet platform customers, excuse me, that will be down about $4 million sequentially. The other thing is the FX headwinds. I know we're expecting at least another $1 million of headwind there. That's something just to dig in a little bit on the FX side. You've got about 40% of our business is outside the U.S., now not all of that is in non-U.S. dollar. Maybe a third of that is. If you think about our major currencies, you've got the euro, the yen, and the pound as the three big ones, and there's obviously a lot of pressure, especially in the pound. Some FX headwinds there.

The other thing, if you remember from last Q3, we had the Cricket World Cup, so that added some extra dollars into Q3 of last year. If you factor all that together, you can see why we're sort of guiding to at the midpoint down slightly at the high end, roughly flat.

James Fish
Analyst, Piper Jaffray

Got you. Then one more for Tom, probably. Maybe could you talk about how the new online gaming streaming services that are coming out, can you talk about how Akamai can monetize on that traffic and what needs to be done from a tech perspective in order to deliver that traffic with nearly zero latency given the nature of online gaming?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Well, yeah, you'd have to be delivering it from the edge. That's where we're located. We're in a good position to help with that. I think we have great relationships with a lot of the gaming companies. I think, in terms of Google's service, they probably do it themselves. We've really been having discussions about that capability for probably over a decade now with some of the world's largest gaming companies. The challenge I think for them is the economics. In terms of who's paying for the CPU, who's paying for the bandwidth, who's paying for the colo. Akamai can certainly handle the streaming with very low latency and at scale and do a really good job of it. If this does take off, that's a source of increased traffic for Akamai, which is a good thing.

James Fish
Analyst, Piper Jaffray

Great. Thanks. Great quarter, guys.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Thanks.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Mark Mahaney from RBC. Your line is now open.

Mark Mahaney
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Great. Two questions, please. I know a couple people already asked you about Janrain, but just to nail the point down, you're still expecting about $20 million in revenue from that this year, and the contribution in the June quarter was roughly $4 million-$5 million, is that correct?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

That's correct, Mark. It was about $5.5 million for the quarter, and we're still expecting approximately $20 million for the year.

Mark Mahaney
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Tom, you had mentioned 5G early on, and maybe paint that picture with a little bit more detail. When do you think that could become material in the field, and when do you think it could be material? I get the Akamai pitch of you need to have servers at the edge, and this really could open up a new era of even more intense applications than we're realizing today, and IoT is probably going to be at the forefront of that. When do you think that could actually come through for Akamai in terms of material new wins or more business with existing customers? Any more color on that would be appreciated. Thank you.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, I think it'll be gradual, to coincide with the gradual deployment of 5G around the world. Basically, the way to think of 5G is it increases the throughput at the last mile, it decreases the latency. Now, increasing the throughput, also it gets more people connected. Now, doing that increases the demand for traffic, that's just existing business growing faster because of 5G. Having, in addition, the decreased latency and the better scale in terms of how many connections can be supported does help to enable IoT kinds of applications, that's where I think you could see things that maybe we haven't even thought about yet in terms of IoT. To this point, IoT has been a little bit of a buzzword, I think just judging from what I see in our customer base, that's going to start to get more real.

You need to take advantage of that low latency. That means you got to have servers at the edge where Akamai is. We're in a great position, especially with our IoT Edge Connect platform, to support those applications at scale with low latency, and to offer compute at the edge. I think it'll be not all at once. It'll be sort of a steady growth, both for our organic business and for new applications and our IoT Edge Connect platform, that's now just, of course, in early days.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Jeff Van Rhee from Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. A few for me. On the retail commerce side of the business, can you talk about the dynamics in that space, particularly the competitive landscape, and then just some thoughts maybe on how you see growth rates trending over the next few years?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Well, there's certainly a lot of competition in the CDN space, and always has been. I think the fundamental change is that our customer is under pressure, from Amazon in particular, and that puts them in a harder position. That decreases their business and puts pressure on our revenue as really a flagship vertical for Akamai. They still need our services, they still need the best performance, they really need security, and they want that, of course, as a packaged capability, and that helps us. That's why I think our churn is incredibly low. Despite the fact they're under pressure, we do have some of them going bankrupt, we see very little loss to any of the many competitors that are trying to get some of that business. A very high percentage of the major retailers out there use Akamai.

Every indication is that that should continue, but their businesses are under pressure, and that puts our revenue under pressure.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

If I could just add something on this in terms of your question around growth. As Tom mentioned, the pressure will still continue on the core business, on the delivery business, but the web team's done a great job of going in and selling security, similar to what I talked about with the media team. As you see some of these price declines, our security revenue in the commerce space is growing, which is great. Taking the pressure on the acceleration business but augmenting some of that in the security side.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Got it. Great. On the enterprise side, can you talk about the sales motion and close rates as you've developed that sales org? Maybe some color as to how that organization has matured, what still needs to be done.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

We have an advanced technology group that they have expertise on the enterprise security side of the house, and they work with the reps on our existing accounts and new prospects. It's, I would say, a typical sales motion for a new capability. It's early days for zero trust. You're now talking to enterprises who have managed their enterprise security one way for a long time. There's the notion of the moat around the castle, perimeter defense, it doesn't work anymore. It's going to take them some time to really change. We're seeing early major enterprise wins, which is great, and we're growing. The bookings are increasing year-over-year, I think there will come a time in the not-too-distant future where we really see very strong growth there. Already, the major analysts are out there saying zero trust is the way to go.

I gave some quotes during my prepared remarks, and Akamai is clearly one of the early leaders with this capability.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Just one last one, if I could. Any update on the blockchain initiative, both timing and scope?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

No particular update. We're really excited about our partnership, GO-NET, our joint venture with MUFG. Their goal now is to be offering this as a service in Japan in early next year. We're about a year out from commercial adoption, and so far, so good.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Good. Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Alex Henderson from Needham. Your line is now open.

Alex Henderson
Analyst, Needham

Great, thanks. I was hoping you could spend a little bit of time unpacking the 20% constant currency growth internationally. Is that a function of security uptake? Is it a function of share? Is it the higher traffic volumes internationally? Could you break those down and maybe rank order what the drivers were?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. As we look at the growth outside of the U.S., the nice thing is that both EMEA and APJ are growing at double digits. Asia in particular, we're really seeing strong growth really across everything you talked about. We're seeing some pretty interesting initiatives in the media side where we're picking up lots of traffic. With security, we're really seeing great growth across both EMEA and APJ, and across many different countries. If you remember, a number of years ago, we started to make investments in our sales force and grew our sales force outside of the U.S., and that's really starting to pay dividends for us. It's a number of factors.

I think, one of the things in terms of competing in the marketplace, making that large investment in our go-to-market, our services, and our support organization, having 24/7 support, is something that really does help differentiate us in the marketplace. Also, our investments in the countries where a lot of these companies operate and where some of their end users are, also separates us in the marketplace. We're finding really good growth in a number of countries across the world.

Alex Henderson
Analyst, Needham

Could you rank order those factors, share gains, volume, and security uptake? What was the largest driver?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

I would say it's probably a combination of traffic growth and security.

Alex Henderson
Analyst, Needham

Great. Could you do something similar for where the upside was within the security business? Obviously, security was very strong. It accelerated. Where was the upside? Was the growth evenly distributed across the product lines?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. Great question. We did expect to see strong sequential growth quarter-over-quarter, but this was stronger than we had originally modeled in. Part of that is related to some comments we made earlier last quarter around our bookings and that the majority of our bookings now are coming from security sales, both to existing and new customers. Our services team did a great job of getting a lot of these customers' revenue generating earlier than what our model would suggest, so we had more months' worth of revenue in the quarter. Also, our web division had an acceleration in year-over-year growth rate across many verticals. I mentioned the commerce vertical, we're seeing very nice growth, but also across financial services, public sector, high tech. Great participation across a number of verticals.

To Tom's earlier point in his earlier remarks, we've got strength across multiple products. We saw great quarter-over-quarter growth in Bot Manager, Kona Site Defender, and Prolexic. Janrain added, if you look quarter-over-quarter, about $1.5 million to compare our Q1 results to Q2. Really just strength across the board, both here in the U.S. and also outside the U.S.

Alex Henderson
Analyst, Needham

The upside was across the board then? I thought Janrain was in line, for instance.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, Janrain was in line. I was just saying, if you look at sequential growth quarter-over-quarter, as I started saying, we expected to have pretty strong sequential growth. Just wanted to outline what that was and show that a lot of the growth came from our core security across many different verticals, both divisions, and from getting customers who had signed up over the last quarter or so, revenue generating faster than we expected.

Alex Henderson
Analyst, Needham

Good. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Michael Turits from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Michael Turits
Analyst, Raymond James

Hey, everybody. Good afternoon. One question on CDN and one question on security. On the CDN side, we understand it is an odd year, so traffic down. We also are traffic lower growth, and we also understand that you had some renewals on pricing. You said you're taking share on a traffic basis. Cisco says about 29% IP traffic expected this year. You guys are flat. That's a pretty big delta. As you move into next year and you get past the price down on the big six, do you expect that that delta will narrow and have less of a pricing impact, and you'll have revenue growth closer to volume growth?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, I don't know that you get traffic growth directly in line with revenue growth. The reason for that is that you have staggered renewals throughout the year. I think the way to think about the math is if you look at taking a unit of delivery and a price per unit, as prices decline, there's a certain amount, depending on how you model it, you would need to get just to be flat. Really the way to think about it is as you go into 2020 or any year where you have line of sight to more traffic, the question becomes, does that traffic accelerate at a rate that is greater than your expected price decline? We will have a number of renewals next year like we always have.

Some of our contracts do have volume discounts, so as you push more traffic, there can be lower unit rates. Really the way to think about it and the question you need to think about here is, will we see enough traffic from these new OTT initiatives and things like the Olympics, from the presidential election that will offset that price decline? The good news is we've gotten some of our larger customers repriced here, so that again, I think, it's possible. We're really just going to see how successful these launches are as they come to market.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

You reported the Cisco traffic stat, in fact, we're growing our traffic a lot faster than that.

Michael Turits
Analyst, Raymond James

Great. Then on security, one of the things that you showed on the booths at the conference was the launch, the product of the roadmap for the launch of Secure Web Gateway. Can you give us an update on that? How directly, once that gets launched, do you plan to go up against Zscaler?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah. That's on track. Enterprise Threat Protector 3.0 with the full suite capabilities later this year, that will go up against Zscaler. We already compete with Zscaler, with not only Enterprise Threat Protector but Enterprise Application Access, and we are competing very successfully.

Michael Turits
Analyst, Raymond James

Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Lee Krowl from B. Riley FBR. Your line is now open.

Lee Krowl
Analyst, B. Riley FBR

Great. Thanks for sneaking me in, guys. I normally hate asking innings questions, but I think it's relevant just given how much progress you guys have made on the bundling front with some of your e-commerce and web customers. Could you maybe talk about what innings we're in with being able to bundle the security solutions with CDN across the customer base?

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

I'd say it's very relatively early days. We do talk a lot about protect and perform, in fact, when you buy Kona Site Defender, that comes with Dynamic Site Accelerator. It just all works on the same Akamai platform. We're processing all the requests to provide the security on KSD, and so just by the fact that we're processing with our edge network, you're going to get faster delivery. If you buy Bot Manager, that of course, rides on top of Kona Site Defender. So when you want these security services, you get some basic delivery and acceleration with that. I think the bundling is very important. It gives us a real edge in the marketplace. It makes it really challenging for a web customer to want to go to another provider, that not only will their service, their applications slow down, but they won't have security.

Also makes it challenging on that side of the house to split traffic, because, in fact, we've had a couple of large performance customers want to try to use two vendors, and if you only have 1/2 your site secured, you're not secure at all. They've come to switch back to use Akamai because they need the security. We're pretty unique out there in terms of having these dual capabilities, and the best part is it's all one platform, all on one service. There, I would say, viewing us today as I talked about before, we're not just a great CDN. We have that, but we're a market leader by far in terms of security.

Lee Krowl
Analyst, B. Riley FBR

Got it. Just my second question. Last couple of quarters, you've had a nice tailwind from the gaming vertical. In your prepared remarks, it kind of seemed to fall off the growth drivers. Just your thoughts on the gaming vertical specifically and maybe your expectations for the second half.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. We had a very strong quarter in gaming in Q1, and came off a very strong year in 2018. Gaming can be somewhat seasonal, not necessarily based on the calendar, but based on when new games come to market. Q2 was a lighter quarter in terms of gaming traffic for us, not because we lost any share, but more just kind of a lighter gaming quarter in general. Hard to predict when and how popular games will be, but again, I don't think there's anything to be concerned there, just a lighter schedule.

Lee Krowl
Analyst, B. Riley FBR

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Will Power from Baird. Your line is now open.

Charlie Erlikh
Analyst, Robert W. Baird

Great. Thanks, guys, for taking the question. This is actually Charlie Erlikh on for Will. I'll just ask just one quick one. Could you talk a little bit about the growth split between the new and existing customers? Maybe particularly how the new customer acquisition has gone since making some of these go-to-market improvements in the last year or two? Thanks.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. Still the majority of our business comes from our existing customer base. The sales organization does a great job of selling additional capabilities into that base. We have been very pleased, and we've seen a consistent return on our new customer acquisition. We don't break it out specifically, but we have seen some pretty good traction. As I mentioned earlier, we've been leading with security, so a lot of those customers are coming on as security customers.

Charlie Erlikh
Analyst, Robert W. Baird

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Rishi Jaluria from D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Rishi Jaluria
Analyst, D.A. Davidson

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Two quick ones. Wanted to start on live video. The record, I think you said, with the concurrent viewership with the India and New Zealand match, as painful as that memory might be, really impressive. Just help me understand what's driving some of this international traffic growth and maybe, thinking from a financial perspective, given that a lot of the viewership, for these types of things might be in emerging markets, should we expect that to be a little bit of a drag on ARPU, or is that less sensitive from a pricing perspective? I've got a follow-up on the Zero Trust side.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Sure. I'll take the last part of that question in terms of the size of the traffic. One of the things as you go into some of these emerging markets, you mentioned Cricket, there's been some forces in the market that have enabled much better-quality video access to millions of users, and that's a great trend for us. In terms of the price sensitivity, as I've talked about before in the media market, really, it is a pretty efficient market around volume. We don't notice anything specific relative to emerging markets having lower prices because they're in emerging markets or whatnot. It really is a function of volume. What's driving those volumes is you've got lots and lots of people consuming media. The teams have done a good job of gaining some customers in some of these countries outside the U.S. that are big traffic pushers.

You think about cricket, not a big sport here in the U.S., but very big internationally. We tend to go after whoever has rights for live video, and like I said earlier, we've got the best platform, the best technology, and the capacity in the right places, so good business for us.

Rishi Jaluria
Analyst, D.A. Davidson

Got it. Thanks. That's helpful. Just on the zero-trust side, I think we all get that it's a big opportunity, and clearly the way the puck is going when it comes to security. Can you just maybe help us understand or remind us your differentiation on the zero-trust side, just given that every single security vendor out there says they have something in zero trust? Thanks.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

It's starting to become a kind of a buzzword. Everybody says they got it, even though they don't. With Akamai's solution, we do access at the application layer instead of the network layer. That's a big differentiator because at the traditional approach of doing it at the network layer, once you're in, you pretty much can go everywhere. Now, there's a lot of folks that'll sell extra equipment to do network segmentation, but you still have the same challenge, and then you get even more overhead. By doing it at the app layer, which we do as a service, we're not selling boxes like the typical approach, then we can sit in between the device and the user and the application, just the same way that we do for public-facing applications. We can bring Kona Site Defender to bear.

We authenticate it really is the user that they really have access to this particular application, not just to the corporate intranet, then we make sure that they don't ever touch the enterprise application or data directly. Everything comes through us, we scrub it, we defend it. That just isn't done today, nobody has that capability out there. We're unique in being able to do that because there is no real competitor to Kona Site Defender, never mind bringing it to bear to enterprise applications. Then you have our edge platform with the massive scale, which is really important for the large-scale attacks, you have Bot Manager, which we can bring to bear to understand really what is that entity that is coming to access the application. Also, where is that entity going otherwise?

We can catch, for example, HVAC systems that are exfiltrating sensitive corporate data because we're monitoring everything that the devices do inside an enterprise to make sure it's safe. It really is a unique solution and very different than all the other folks that are talking zero trust.

Rishi Jaluria
Analyst, D.A. Davidson

Great. That's really helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thanks.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Operator, we have time for one more question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Ken Talanian from Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

Ken Talanian
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Hey, thanks for taking the question. You mentioned getting guaranteed commitments as a way of offsetting the revenue decline. I was wondering if you could describe how that's trended over the past year, what you're thinking about for the back half of the year, and then 2020 in particular around the forthcoming OTT launches.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah. We're not going to give specific guidance for 2020, but in terms of how it's going with the revenue commitment side, it varies by customer. What that does, it enables us to, one, have more confidence in going out and building ahead of plan. Customers vary from customer to customer in terms of how much they're willing to commit. Sometimes we can get a percentage of traffic, sometimes it's a dollar commitment, et cetera. It's always something that we try to get as part of our sales when we can.

Ken Talanian
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Okay. Just curious if you could highlight the primary drivers of the margin upside and rank order those and what you think might drive upside in the back half?

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

Yeah, sure. You're talking about the margin upside for the quarter we just delivered, correct?

Ken Talanian
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Correct.

Ed McGowan
EVP and CFO, Akamai Technologies

As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, part of that is just our operational efficiency, and I talked a little bit about how we're starting to see some good returns from our procurement function. We've always had some procurement function, but we really enhanced that, and we're starting to see some fruits of our labor there. Just in general, we're investing in efficiencies in IT for scaling our G&A operations and managing our headcount more effectively as we experience turnover.

Ken Talanian
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Okay, great. Thanks very much.

Tom Leighton
Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai Technologies

Oh, yeah. Great. Thank you, Ken, and thank you everyone for joining us this evening. In closing, we will be presenting at several investor conferences and events throughout the quarter. Details of these can be found on the investor relations section of akamai.com. Thank you for joining us and have a wonderful evening.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.