Good day. My name is Ian, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Symantec's fiscal 3rd quarter 2018 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.
You.
Session. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to the vice president of investor relations, Cynthia Hiponia. Ma'am?
Good afternoon. This is Cynthia Hiponia, vice president of investor relations at Symantec, and I'm pleased to welcome you to our call to discuss our third quarter fiscal year 2018 earnings results. We've posted the earnings materials and prepared remarks to our Investor Relations Events webpage. Speaker on today's call are Greg Clark, Symantec's CEO and Nick Noviello, Executive Vice President and CFO. This is a live call that will be available for replay via webcast on our website.
I'd like to remind everyone that all references to financial metrics are non GAAP unless otherwise stated. Please refer to the CFO commentary posted on the Investor Relations website for further definitions of our non GAAP metrics. Please note, non GAAP financial measures referenced during this call are reconciled to their comparable GAAP financial measures in the press release and supplemental materials posted on our website. We believe our presentation of non GAAP financial measures when taken together with corresponding GAAP financial measures provides meaningful supplemental information regarding our operating performance for reasons discussed below. Our management team uses these non GAAP financial measures in assessing our operating results as well as when planning, forecasting, and annualizing future periods.
We believe our non GAAP financial measures also facilitate comparisons of our performance to prior periods and that investors benefit from understanding of the non GAAP financial measures. Non GAAP financial measures are supplemental and should not be considered a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Today's call contains forward looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions, and expectations speak only as of the current date, and as such, involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release for more information.
You will also find a detailed discussion about our risk factors in our filings with the SEC and in particular on our annual report on Form 10 K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. And now I'd like to introduce our CEO, Greg Clark.
Thank you for joining us and good afternoon. We are disappointed that we missed our total company revenue guidance for Q3 despite what the feel was an otherwise good quarter for our business. Our Consumer Digital Safety segment achieved the high end of our revenue guidance for the quarter, Our enterprise segment, on the other hand, recognized less revenue than we forecast despite selling and invoicing more business than we planned. This was due to an increasing mix shift towards our ratable subscription and cloud delivered products that reduce in period revenue recognition. Most of my prepared remarks will focus on our Enterprise segment.
As we've discussed on prior calls, to grow our Enterprise business since combination of Symantec and Blue Coat, we are focused on building our enterprise sales force team to in turn create the pipeline to grow the business. We had the right level of capacity and selling activity from our enterprise sales force in Q3, but we did not correctly forecast a perpetual product and license versus ratable mix, which resulted in lower in period revenue and a larger increase in our deferred revenue balance. Our customers are purchasing our ratable products much more frequently than we anticipated in our plans in FY 2018, We now expect this ratable mix shift trend to continue to a point where traditional license and appliance product sales become the exception in our business. As our cloud and subscription solutions have reached parity with our traditional appliance products, our customers are adopting our ratable solution at an increasing pace due to their evolving buying preference for cloud and subscription form factors and differentiation from our solutions. Our enterprise strategy always embraced this shift in both our selling motion and our product roadmaps, but the pace of this transition has far exceeded our expectations.
We are winning the volume of business that we expected as is represented by our implied billings growth, which is up 27% year over year for enterprise in the 3rd quarter, as adjusted for the divestiture of our certificate authority business. However, the shift towards a ratable revenue mix is a significant trend for us and will continue As a result, we are reducing our higher ratable mix for our enterprise business going forward, and we'll be providing expectations for implied billings in Q4. Ultimately, this change in our enterprise revenue model results in a greater visibility and more predictable cash flow generation. You can see strength in for us as we're now more ratable business. For Q3, even with our enterprise revenue shortfall, we performed well against other financial metrics.
Operating margin exceeded our guidance as we realized continued cost efficiencies. EPS benefited from those cost efficiencies, as well as from US tax reform, and we generated strong cash flow from operations which should benefit going forward from our strong business momentum deferred revenue and the drop off and costs associated with our restructuring initiatives. Turning to the market and how we are doing with customers. Our cross selling strategy is working. Symantec is increasingly closing larger deals with multi product platform sales.
Enterprise customers are designing us into their security architectures by adopting our integrated cyber defense platform. And are choosing our platform because it offers superior protection, cross product integration, and a lower overall cost of ownership. In particular, the proxy refresh opportunity in our installed base has allowed customers to bring us into their next generation architecture, securing their adoption of cloud and cloud applications. In doing so, customers are increasingly choosing our cloud and virtual appliance proxies over our traditional appliance form factor. The integration of our network and endpoint products has been an enabler for our cross sell strategy customers look to leverage the integrations between our enterprise products to consolidate vendors and enhance security posture.
Increased adoption of our cloud proxy also makes it easier and more cost effective for the customers to deploy additional security from Samantha such as multi factor authentication, email protection, protection for cloud applications, as well as data loss prevention, without requiring the customer to deploy appliances. This success is validating the long term growth prospects for Symantec and our vast installed base. In our large enterprise base, our new bookings are typically sold with a 3 year license term that are built upfront to customers, similar to many discounting contract terms with firm policy and practice rent extensions. Since the beginning of fiscal 2018, when we realigned our sales force and simplified our enterprise business, we have seen a number of deals over $1,000,000 growth from $37,000,000 in the first quarter, of 47 in the second quarter to more than a 103rd quarter, which is a substantial increase from a year ago. We displaced competitors in the majority of these opportunities last quarter.
A customer example of this, In the third quarter, one of the world's largest construction companies, a longtime Symantec and BlueField customer, chose our integrated cyber defense platform based on our ability to combine existing solutions to extend the security to their cloud infrastructure. Where we were previously securing all of their endpoint DLP and network infrastructure, we refreshed their existing installed base for an additional 3 years and extended our presence with Symantec endpoint protection 14.1, DLP, PGP, and proxy. We want our ability to integrate our solutions across the entire portfolio. This deal would not have been possible before the combination of Symantec and BlueCo and a great majority of this transaction is ratable business. There are many more examples of our success in selling our integrated cyber defense platform within our Q3 cohort of deals over $1,000,000.
The strength of IronPoint Protection solution is one area where our competitive advantage continues to widen. Endpoint has become a growth driver in enabling us to bring customers additional capabilities through our integrated cyber defense platform. I'm pleased to announce that last week Symantec has also once again been positioned in the latest quadrant of the January 2018 Gautner Magic Quadrant endpoint protection platforms, which we believe is further validation of our continued leadership and endpoint. Symantec has positioned the furthest among all other vendors in the latest quarter on both execution and division. I encourage you to take a look at the new vendor positioning in this Magic Quadrant, which we believe illustrates how the market and key criteria for these endpoint products is evolving.
To bring that leadership
to another customer example, in third quarter, a Global Fortune 500 Financial Services company chose our integrated cyber defense platform with Endpoint being the primary driver of this deal. In this transaction, Symantec has placed 9 vendors across 22 product areas. And in addition to selecting our platform over several different point solutions, In many product areas, the customer chose the cloud form factor of our solution. Another customer example of the vendor consolidation and ratable product adoption we are seeing in both one of the world's largest fintech companies. They chose Symantec to consolidate their security vendor landscape while gaining a stronger overall security posture.
This customer eliminated 8 other security vendors across multiple product areas, reducing the risk integration and sustainment expenses required to stitch together a portfolio of point solutions and realize new integrations across our security architecture. The customer concluded this would improve their security posture and increase their productivity. Where previously the customer had deployed 2 of our solutions. With our integrated cyber defense platform, the customer is now using 9 solutions from Symantec 5 of which are cloud solutions. Now let me turn to our Consumer Digital Safety business, which had a strong quarter.
We called that only 18 months ago, this business was in decline with decreasing retention rates and ARPU. Today, our Consumer Digital Safety business has been transformed. Revenue in the third quarter was at the high end of our guidance range, with an organic growth rate of 4% year over year in constant currency. We experienced 53% operating margins and an increased output. In summary, we are pleased with the volume of business across our enterprise and consumer segments.
We've continued strong adoption of our integrated cyber defense platform in our enterprise business and the solid performance of our consumer digital safety business. We recognized that we underestimated the timing of the shift in our enterprise business towards a higher ratable revenue mix and have reflected this change in our guidance. Nick will discuss our financial results in more detail and provide our outlook.
Nick? Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to remind you that all references to financial metrics are non GAAP unless otherwise stated. Please note, we've posted information on implied billings and deferred revenue as well as other cables in our supplemental materials and CFO commentary to our Investor Relations website. As Greg discussed in his comments, we acknowledge that we did not anticipate the speed at which the mix of our ratable versus product business and enterprise would shift.
In light of this, We have now built into our Q4 and fiscal year 2018 outlook, the impact of an ongoing and accelerated shift to ratable business in our enterprise segment and its impact to in period revenue. We will now be reporting implied billings quarterly, In addition to deferred revenue, which provides additional visibility into the growth of the enterprise business as it becomes more ratable. Let me now review our financial results for Q3 in more detail. This was comprised of consumer digital safety revenue at the high end of our prior revenue guidance range and enterprise security revenue below the low end of our prior revenue guidance range. Looking at organic revenue growth in constant currency adjusted for acquisitions and divestitures Total company year over year revenue growth was 2%.
Year over year revenue growth was comprised of Consumer Digital Safety segment revenue growth of 4%, and an Enterprise Security segment decline of 1%. At the same time, year over year deferred revenue adjusted for acquisitions and divestitures was up 5% in our Consumer Digital Safety segment and up 23% in our Enterprise Security segment. As we indicated last quarter, we look at the combination of in quarter recognized revenue and deferred revenue as a strong indicator of the health of our business segments. 3rd quarter revenue came in lower than expected, primarily due to the mix of product and ratable business in our enterprise segment. As we discussed a quarter ago, our pipeline of business coming into Q3 was significantly larger than our prior forecast and was made up of increasingly large cross sell opportunities.
The trend towards ratable business we saw in the second quarter was built into our Q3 guidance. However, that trend accelerated in the third quarter faster than we forecasted. Ultimately, the transactions we closed, some of which Greg referenced, Our proof our enterprise strategy is working. You can see the strength of our business in implied billings growth, deferred revenue, and cash flow. Operating margin for the 3rd quarter was 38%, above the high end of our prior guidance range of 36% to 37%.
The higher operating margin was the result of continued cost and operating efficiencies, including the completion of the net cost reduction and synergy programs we discussed last quarter across the business. Now turning to tax. As a result of recent tax reform, we reduced our estimated effective tax rates from 29.5 percent to 26.8 percent for fiscal year 2018. And in Q3, trude up our year to date effective tax rate accordingly. This resulted in a q 3 rate of approximately 22.5%.
On a GAAP basis, our tax provision for Q3 includes a provisional benefit of approximately one $600,000,000 from adjustments to previous deferred tax liabilities related to foreign earnings and remeasurement of U. S. Deferred income taxes. This was partially offset by a liability of approximately 800 Fully diluted earnings per share was $0.49, $0.03 above the high end of our prior guidance range, impacted by higher operating margins and a favorable impact of just over 4¢ from the effective tax rate true up. Excluding the in quarter tax rate benefit, we achieved EPS near the high end of our prior guidance range enabled by effective cost management across the business.
Fully diluted shares outstanding was lower by 7,000,000 shares at 667,000,000 as compared to our prior Q3 guidance of $674,000,000, primarily due to less dilution from our convertible notes, driven by our lower share price. Please see the dilution tables posted to our investor relations website where you can see the impact Cash flow from operating activities during the quarter was $294,000,000 and CapEx was $33,000,000. During the quarter, we prepaid $630,000,000 of principal on our senior term loans We have reduced our gross debt from approximately $8,300,000,000 at the beginning of the fiscal year to $5,700,000,000 at the end of the 3rd quarter. $1,750,000,000 of this balance is convertible notes. At the end of the 3rd quarter, we had $2,500,000,000 in cash and short term investments on the balance sheet.
$1,600,000,000 of debt was held by our foreign subsidiaries, just over $1,000,000,000 of which we have identified as available for repatriation in the near term. As a result of tax reform, we would not expect to incur additional US tax liability on that repatriation. We are considering our go forward capital allocation strategy in light of tax reform and expect to update you on our next quarter's earnings conference call. As a reminder, we have $800,000,000 remaining under our current share repurchase authorization from our board of directors. Now let's discuss in more detail our Q3 operating segment performance.
1st, Enterprise Security. Our Enterprise Security segment revenue was $639,000,000, reflecting an organic decline of 1% year over year in constant currency. As you know, we completed the sale of the WSS and PKI solutions to Digisert at the end of October. Financial results related to these solutions for the of October were as expected and are included as part of the overall Enterprise Security segment in Q3. Adjusted deferred revenue was up $316,000,000 or 23 percent year over year, $88,000,000 of which is short term, and $228,000,000 of which is long term.
And 5 billings was up 27% year over year, excluding any impact from divestitures. Please note, consistent with our disclosure around deferred revenue, we are now providing 7 quarters of implied billings historical data in the q 3 supplemental information posted to our IR website. We believe implied billings growth is an important measure of the growth of our enterprise business as we transition to a more ratable product mix. After taking into account the shift to more ratable business, and increased contract duration for new business, consistent with our cross sell strategy, we believe our implied billings growth support high single digit to low double digit enterprise revenue growth over time. And as you will hear in my guidance comments, we are anticipating percent, up over 6 points year over year as we continue to optimize the cost structure of the business.
Turning to Consumer Digital Safety. Our Consumer Digital Safety segment revenue was $595,000,000, and reflected organic growth of 4% year over year in constant currency. Moving to our consumer metrics, which were defined in the CFO commentary, Direct customer count was $21,300,000 at the end of the quarter, up slightly from Q2. Direct ARPU increased to $8.38 per month, up 4% from Q2. If you recall, we expect these direct customer statistics, to represent approximately 90% of the revenue stream at any one point in time.
Consumer Digital Safety operating margin was 53%. Sequentially, this is a 5 point increase in operating margin and is in part related to marketing spending. We pulled ahead into Q2. Timing of investments and other efficiencies. Moving to our 4th quarter outlook.
As I indicated, we are building the accelerating ratable mix shift in our enterprise segment into our outlook and are lowering our guidance to reflect this transition. We now expect 4th quarter revenue guidance of $1,175,000,000 to 1 $205,000,000. This represents an organic growth rate of Enterprise revenue of $575,000,000 to $595,000,000, down 4% year over year in organic revenue in constant currency at the midpoint due to the ratable shift in business mix. This is down sequentially from Q3 due to the WSS PKI divestiture, which contributed over $30,000,000 to segment revenue in As Greg indicated, our pipeline and expectations for business we will close in Q4 are higher than in Q3. But we are also forecasting a higher ratable mix of business as well.
Ultimately, we expect, excluding any impact from divestitures, Double digit implied billings growth year over year in Q4, evidencing
the growth
of our business and supporting our medium term growth outlook. Consumer digital safety revenue of $600,000,000 to $610,000,000, representing an organic growth rate in constant currency of 6% year over year at the midpoint, consolidated operating margins of 33% to 34% and effective tax rate of 26.8 percent and EPS of $0.37 to $41 on an underlying share count of 680,000,000 fully diluted shares. Now moving to our updated fiscal year 2018 outlook. We now expect full year revenue guidance $4,915,000,000 to $4,900,000,000, down from our previously guided $5,000,000 to $5,100,000,000 reflecting the transition in our Enterprise Security segment. Enterprise revenue of $2,585,000,000 to $2,605,000,000 This represents a decline of 2% consumer digital safety revenue of $2,330,000,000 to $2,340,000,000, representing an organic growth rate in constant currency of roughly 3% year over year.
Consolidated operating margins for fiscal year 2018 of approximately 34%, compared to previous guidance of 35 to 36 percent. EPS for fiscal year 2018 of a dollar 60 to a dollar 64 compared to previous guidance of a dollar 66 to a dollar 76. Fully diluted shares of 669,000,000 And fiscal year 2018 cash flow from operations around the high end of our previous guidance range of $800,000,000 to $1,000,000,000. Let me address our outlook for financial model will be in transition as we evolve to a company with a higher mix of ratable revenue in our Enterprise Security segment. We continue to expect that our Consumer Digital Safety segment will grow organically We expect that as we exit fiscal year 2019, our Enterprise Security segment revenue growth will be in the mid to high single digits.
With high visibility and growing from there. During this model transition, implied billings growth will be an important measure of the trajectory of our Enterprise Security segment and during the transition, expect disciplined management of costs and investments across the business and strong cash flow. With mid to high single digit revenue growth and EPS growth in the low teens. We continue to expect consumer digital safety organic revenue growth in the low to mid single digits and enterprise security segment organic revenue growth in the high single to low double digits. We expect our effective tax rate will benefit from the tax reform bill and are currently estimating a rate in the 21% to 22% range.
We expect to further hone our effective tax rate estimate over the next few months, and we will consider reinvesting part of the savings from a lower effective tax rate as early as fiscal year 2019. We will provide our full financial outlook and specific guidance for on our fourth quarter earnings call. Let me now turn
Thank you, Nick. I am told I am a pretty optimistic person. In spite of our 3rd quarter revenue miss, I have never been more excited about the opportunity headed to Mantic. Our strategy, technology, and value propositions are resonating with customers and we are executing well on our growth drivers. We are largely a service delivered software company now.
We are winning in the marketplace as customers design us into their future security architecture. We are disappointed that we did not accurately forecast the speed of the ratable mix shift in our enterprise segment. But this transition is a long term benefit for our business, and we have good reasons for optimism about our future growth prospects. In Enterprise, our pipeline of business continues to grow. As we head into fiscal 2019, We expect to deploy even more sales capacity into the field.
Our integrated cyber defense platform is resonating with customers. We don't want to sit together a portfolio of point solutions and that cloud solutions are leading the way. Our enterprise business remains healthy with implied billings growth up 27% and deferred revenue 23% year over year in third quarter adjusted for acquisitions and divestitures. Our enterprise growth strategy is intact, driven by the TAM we operate in, the cross sell and up sell opportunity we have by nature of our large installed base, and the sales capacity we have in the field. These drivers are expected to provide momentum to continue to support our medium term enterprise revenue growth outlook.
Our Consumer Digital Safety has transformed into a growing business with future growth opportunities in cross selling and international expansion. We have now set guidance at levels that reflect the Enterprise segment financial model transition, which will provide us with higher revenue visibility going forward, and this entire management team and Symantec employees are focused on delivering the growth potential we have worked so hard to create. With that, Nick and I are happy to take your questions.
Limit yourself to one main question and one follow-up question. Our first question is from the line of Brad Zelnick from Credit Suisse.
Thank you very much and good afternoon guys. Greg, it's great to hear the platform strategies working in those customer examples you shared. And I appreciate you're selling a lot more product that's cloud and virtual. Where do we stand today against the $1,000,000,000 proxy refresh opportunity And how much of it is left as we look out into next year?
Yes. Hey, Brad, thanks. Thanks for the question. So, what we're seeing in that proxy refresh, as I mentioned in my, prepared remarks, is that we're getting a lot of, of that business coming in that cloud pool. In fact, the people buying a cloud version of our proxy And in addition to that, we are seeing a strong uptick of our proxy customers really going after protecting the cloud applications with our CASB and the cloud pool and factor on top of the proxy stack.
What that means is we are hitting the right number of dollars in that refresh, but it's coming in the cloud delivered form factor and also in our software defined networking element, which is our virtual appliance with proxy SG. So customers are picking those choices more than they used to, which means we're selling less appliances. But we are in a good place with the proxy refresh. And we believe that, our conversion rates and the proxy refresh are strong like they were last time. And, you know, our customers that purchased that from us are very happy that we have extended the value proposition of the on premise story from 4 years ago to the cloud generation.
And so to answer your question, we believe the proxy refresh is in good shape, but the mix has shifted to ratable form factor.
It's very helpful, Greg. And just one for Nick. Nick, I'm already being asked this. Just it's difficult for us to reconcile the strong enterprise billings growth with your revenue outlook. Can you give us a sense of duration on these subscription deals and how billings duration compares year on year or perhaps an annualized look at the business, which is how I imagine you're looking at it internally?
Sure. And and, Brad, thanks for the question. And we're doing all of that work. So expect, first of all, we've given you the set of implied billings numbers. It's important for you to understand, you know, this is the first quarter of being able to give you, a set of data here on enterprise.
That allows comparability period to period. In terms of the overall number at 27%, that obviously is going to have in it a theoretical shift, and it's also going to have, in it, some contract duration side, as we cross sell and bring these things together. You can expect to hear more from us about both of those items, and more from us about, you know, how contract duration is changing period to period. Suffice to say overall, we've done a a good amount of work internally. We believe that, you know, overall, we are supporting the overall growth rates of enterprise that we expect over time, which is the high single, low double digit time frame.
So more to come on that topic, Over time, we'll obviously, give you much more on our Q4 earnings call and into next year. But you know, we put out a set of numbers that you you can understand what implied billings are comprised of, how we've calculated it, and, and we'll give more to you, go forward.
And just to add one piece to that, Brad, we know that you need contract light We are we are going to do more for you in Q4 on that, but we do have very strict adherence to standard terms for new business. Around contract length and also for renewal business around contract length. We also have aligned our sales commissioner plans with these terms, So we're incented to, keep that in the right place. And we're doing work on these topics. We expect to have more commentary for you following our q 4 actuals.
As we move into 'nineteen. I think it's important to note that, you know, Q3 marks the second quarter of us selling our integrated cyber defense package which is the integration between a lot of the Symantec elements and the blue cut elements. So we have a couple of quarters of actuals there. We are happy with how our sales force has been behaving in yes Estated terms.
And our next question is from the line of Saket Kalia from Barclays Capital.
Hi guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. First, maybe for you, Greg, I think most of us get the increase in mix of subscription and the impact to rev rec. But just to make sure we address the headline lowering on enterprise revenue. Can you comment at all on whether you saw a change in win rates in any part of the enterprise business?
No, I think there's a lot of products in our enterprise business and I think it's important just to focus on a couple of those of those elements. We're seeing a really strong uptake, in the initial release of our EDR capabilities and in what we call set 14.1. That is, you know, the set 14.1 with our ATP package. That is going well in our endpoint installed base, and we're also seeing a very strong uptake of, the DLP attachment to our cloud stack. Which is a very, very good business for us.
We have a bigger DLP installed base, and that is a very strong, market force that's happening, especially in the in the limelight of, compliance issues in GDPR. Outside of that, you know, I think it's we are selling an integrated cyber defense package. It is a bundle of, components. And I tried to talk about in the examples in my prepared remarks that when we do go in and sell a set of those products that were seeing a larger proportion of the ratable form factor of those. Comment on that, I think, is helpful in terms of understanding what's what's doing well.
When we offer a customer an appliance form factor or a very powerful virtual appliance form factor, We are seeing more propensity to purchase the the more flexible and easy, more flexible deployment model that you get from the software defined side. In addition to that, because we have such a good growth in the cloud area, we are seeing things like our cloud DLP carrying carrying a good, good water. So it's more mix shift and, you know, very happy with the total level of selling volume in Q3. We sold what we thought we were going to sell. And, you know, the the major product lines that our growth prospects around fed well in that.
And as you can see, it's hard in the conference call to talk about each separate product line because there are quite a few very elaborate set of elements to our integrated cyber, you know, cyber defense. So hopefully that's helpful.
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe for my follow-up, maybe for you, Nick. First of all, thank you for the billings numbers in enterprise. Can you talk about what percentage of those billings are now coming in ratably versus historical? And then also looking forward, where that mix could sort of top out
Sure. Sure. Good question. So I think, 1st of all, thinking about, Q3, okay. And when we came into Q3, we planned a set of business.
We talked about a set of business that was moving more ratable in Q2. And we looked at pipeline We applied that that ratable, by the end of Q2 into our guidance for Q3. Just for context, the ratable mix of business moved five points between our forecast for Q3 and the end result. Okay? So that's a good sized chunk.
Our ratable business is now over 80%. So that that's on the the bookings billing side as it comes in. So think about that as over 80%. So it's substantial. So as we'd also build into Q4, we've built not only that, but an increasing ratable mix into our overall revenue guide.
So we're trying to be thoughtful about this, not only in terms of the acceleration from Q2 through Q3, but also be in conscious that this is the selling motion, and as Greg indicated, this is working out very well with customers and we're going to move this direction.
And our next question from the line of Sarah Hindlian from Macquarie.
Hi, great. Thank you very much. A couple of questions for you guys. I'd love to hear about, how the Digisearch JV is progressing. What's going on over there and, how you're thinking about that going forward to start with.
And, and then I have a couple other follow ups, as well.
Okay. Hey, Sarah. So let me start with the DigiSearch side of the fence, and I'm sure Greg might add some comments to this as well. So, you know, we, we obviously closed the transaction in the quarter. You'll see in the math here that we have about $35,000,000 of revenue inside the enterprise segment from from, from the business before it transitioned across.
We are in the servicing of TSA world now. We are in the, the area where TSAs are starting to come off. We've got more planned over time. So going well operationally, obviously, they're working on the business on their front as well. And then Greg maybe has comments on that.
We do not have built into this guidance, anything on the, in terms of the equity interest. Reason being is we don't have any numbers yet. So it's impossible to build it in. We'll be watching that. And then as we exit the fiscal year, we'll give you a perspective on how we're gonna build, the, the equity interest, into the numbers and what you should be thinking about.
And I think, Sarah, you know, the transition from an operations point of view of the team and the infrastructure and stuff over the digital and the and and then getting going in the market, you know, that's in great hands over there. They're excellent, at what they do. And the, you know, the, the cornerstone of the Symantec team is, is, is there, and, they're continuing to meet their deliverables We're a big customer of it, and we've seen nothing, nothing nothing wrong, so we think that's going going well in the market. They are the, £900 gorilla of certificate authorities now, and I think they can, you know, they've got a good future ahead.
Okay. Thank you, Greg. And just one more to follow-up with you on, we've got a couple of quarters of life lock under the belt now, and, you all we had some benefit from the Equifax data breach. But I'd love to hear about how the go to market is going and, both customer retention and reception around the bundled identity and endpoint protection suite together?
Yes, I think I can't I I would say, praise our internal team on the, LifeLock, Milton integration work that has gone extremely well. And we did have, a a very good quarter, as you can see in our results. And, you know, I think we're expecting to to see another great result in Q4. But just in general, that package is extremely valued by the consumer, community we saw as we reported in our remarks, a slight increase in subscribers, And if you go back 18 months ago and have a look at what was happening in the business at that point in time, that was different. And we are seeing really promising conversion rates at renewal, between when we present the bundled offering to either side of the cohort, whether it be the life off side or the northern side.
So we do think that we are going to see a stable business there going forward.
Okay, great. Thank you both very much.
And our next question is from the line of Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley.
Great. Thanks. This is Melissa Franke calling in for Keith. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to dig into again, the transition to ratable and trying to understand what's driving the meaningful inflection over the past few quarters to ratable.
Is it largely customer preference, or are you doing anything internally to either incent your Salesforce or the customer base to move to more subscriptions And then the follow-up to that is just over what time period do you think this transition will be kind of fully complete? Okay.
Yeah. So, so thanks for the question, Melissa. And, let me start off on the first part. So what we are offering when we go into a customer is you know, don't don't don't think of it as we're showing up with a bunch of BlueCurve products and then a bunch of Symantec products. We're showing up with an integrated product suite where we have really done the work to integrate the important elements of our property stack with the key pieces of of the Symantec portfolio.
And to give you an example, if we want to take care of PII compliance and cloud applications for enterprise customers, which is a very strong market right now. We come to the customer with an offering that says, you know, you can put that in, on premise proxies, or you can put that in our cloud proxies. And it's integrated with the DLP. We have a cloud DLP module, and you can get it integrated with our multi factor authenticator. Which is our VIP product.
And when we show up with those things integrated and ready to go, what we're seeing is our customers are picking the cloud form factor of that and the virtual, appliance form factor of that way more often than we thought they were going to. We thought it might be in some of that. Even in the more regulated industries, we're seeing the cloud adoption faster than we thought. And when we looked at what's in the bill of materials in the pipelines, and we see the big elements of that in there. That is what is, getting us to advise the community that we see this as a long term trend and we're taking down that we're increasing the ratable software percentage in the business and our long term models to accommodate for that.
But it really is customer choice and the fact that we have integrated the product sets together in a way that is very compelling. And, when when you see that, you don't have to buy an appliance and deploy it and you don't have to go and do a bunch of work and you can turn it on just like you do it at, software delivered as a service. It is winning in the market, and that is where we think long term trend, the value proposition is strong. And we think it's, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we are a service delivered software company.
And so, Melissa, maybe, yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. No.
No. You go ahead.
I was gonna, indicate that, you know, so in my prepared remarks, we talked about the, you know, the transition. So we're in the transition. And, you know, you might have a few minutes ago. I indicated that our percentage or proportion of ratable businesses is up over 80% as we plan for this and we give up guidance for this fourth quarter. Obviously, as we then think about the revenue side of the fence, we roll through a period of time where we're transitioning off of a product sale in quarter that has heavy in quarter revenue contribution, to that ratable business.
And we think that is a transition that is through, fiscal 'nineteen. And I talked about in the prepared remarks that we really think, we'll see the the revenue growth side of that, in the, in the back, or as we exit fiscal year 2019 back to that mid to high and that supports going from there, the high single to low double, top line of the enterprise that we look at in our medium term as in our FY 2020 type of forecast.
Okay. That's helpful. And once
So when we get to our 4th quarter announcement, we will print out another quarter, and we'll be able to give you some really good indications of how we think that's going to go.
Right. Okay. Great. Just one quick follow-up for Nick. If I just revisit the guidance at the Analyst Day for operating margins.
I think you, you guided to over 30% operating margins in the enterprise business in FY19, FY20. Does that still hold true, just given the increased mix to ratable or any other factors?
So, that's a good question. And, you know, one of the things we have to be thoughtful about is obviously the transition, and what does that mean in terms of top line revenue? And, you know, regardless of the very good, cost management we have in place here. A top line revenue that in that is impacted by in quarter versus ratable, it's going to have some implications to operating margin. The other thing, to think about and the other thing that we're being thoughtful about is the implications of tax reform.
And in my prepared remarks, I indicated that we have a substantial reduction in our ETR, to a we're estimating right now in a 21%, 22% range. So we need to look at that as well in terms of potential for reinvestment in certain areas, of the business, as we go. The final thing I'd probably have you just keep in mind is that you know, back at Financial Analyst Day, we had website security, PKI and the numbers. So, we had updated that enterprise operating margin perspective between then and now, but suffice to say there's a couple of things to keep in mind there. If I net it all out, which you should keep in mind, overall, we've done a lot of work here on cost side in terms of cost optimization.
We have achieved all of our targets on the cost side of the fence. That is part of the, of the perspective that, that Greg brings into the firm So you should expect that we are very focused on that. However, we will look at the tax reform as one opportunity to, to look at some of that for reinvestment as as others, certainly you're talking about.
And our next question is from the line of Gabriel Boorhees from Goldman Sachs.
My first question is for Nick. I wanted to revisit the pricing scenarios that you put forth at the Analyst Day where we looked at the appliance dollars with maintenance, and then we looked at the subscription model dollars over time. Could you just remind us when do you break even versus the old model of selling on the subscription side? And are there scenarios where the virtual form factors are expanding the use cases that you can address at existing customers or perhaps moving down market at all?
Yes. So good question. And so in that financial Analyst Day, we were talking about with 4, 4 year type of breakeven term. And we're looking at those form factors at the time, knowing that in Q4, we had announced that we had kind of, completed the technological side of the fence of equaling, the capability, whether it be VA or cloud or physical. I would say and one of the things that, you know, Greg talked about in his prepared remarks is that you know, the opportunity with the integration of products, has really created, a nice cross sell motion here.
And that is certainly one of the reasons and one of the areas that's accelerating, this move towards ratable.
I think, Gary, you're asking your down market question on some of the new offerings we have. We have some we did some announcements in the quarter. That I think are really powerful. We announced a product in AWS. We announced product in Azure.
We announced product in Google Cloud. And we also have our SEP cloud product, which is being represented by, Tier 1 Telecom, companies that that was also announced that is bringing very powerful technology to a mid market and even small market where you can get the power of this Mantic endpoint protection, whole cloud managed, and that is That is a route. That is definitely enhanced by some of those new products. Over time, we do, up to We build our prior dominance in the small because we have some very, very strong products there. And some of our competitors, didn't fare well in the malware crisis amongst those kind of companies that really don't have an IT staff.
We also have made good progress with some of the managed security service providers. We announced a very good deal with Airtel in India. Bringing that product set into the top few thousand customers in India with them. So we are I think the ability for us to deliver in cloud does open up easier reps to deployment and new customer segments.
That's helpful. And Greg, as a follow-up, you mentioned a couple of big examples during the prepared remarks on cross sell deals. I'm curious when you look collectively across the from a 9000 direct accounts that you have as a company, where are you seeing the biggest patterns emerge on cross sell. It sounds like a lot of it is proxy and DLP. Are there other areas or other product lines that you think are cross selling particularly well?
Yeah. So I think we've got, really strong, traction with the proxy stack CASB, DLP, multi factor auth, and then upselling that into ability to process email. That is a great set of of stuff where you've got to go get 4 vendors today and you can get 1. And it's a real crisis on cloud compliance right now, and that's in that top cohort. That's great.
That is a really strong piece of business for us. And some of the examples, you know, we can see where we're like that. The other area, which is great, is we're having a pretty good time right now picking up the other adjacencies to the endpoint market. And the reason why we, won the Got in a Magic Quadrant, this year on both the vision and execution, so not just because we're big and we can do a lot actually got there on on ability to deliver feature set that's relevant right now. We are now able with one agent to go in and take down all of the EBI pieces, as well as the deception.
And then we can come back in and cross sell our DLP endpoint in there as well. And, you know, in we are, we've later on, as we talked about when we announced the Symantec Blue Truck merger, we will be delivering a very strong integration of that endpoint with our proxy stack as well. We think that that's the only ramp to the cloud. For the future, and that's a really nice place for us. So we've got in that cross sell, we've got a number of angles that fit that sort of top 10,000 accounts.
And we had a Salesforce, and I think the number one thing that gave me a lot of conviction about Q3 was could our sales force sell it? And the answer to that is our sales force did sell it, and you can see it in those billings numbers. And, you know, for for those of you that say, okay, let's talk about the time we know, and we're gonna get you that data. Okay.
And our next question is from the line of John DiFucci from Jefferies. I'm sorry. Your line is open. Can you hear me okay?
Hey, John. You have to go ahead.
Hey, Greg. And Nick, well, I guess this question is for both of you. So, just one second. Sorry. We sort of get the mix shift, and and we really appreciate all the data you gave us.
So we'll get through that. We'll go through that. Which will take a little bit of time. But I guess I have two two questions regarding that. I guess the first one is one that I keep on getting emails from people on, and and I think it's it's a fair question.
You gave guidance for this quarter, the full month into the quarter. So given at least my understanding of how how deals close, especially with the enterprise, it's just a little surprising that this would surprise you at that given when you gave guidance at that point that the quarter would shift that quickly in the last 2 months of the quarter. So if you can, I don't know, just talk a little bit about that? And then Secondly, as a if a if you have a customer who's been a proxy appliance user and he decides to go to cloud based solutions, or any, any sort of, any moving from anything to sort of a subscription, especially though, when you have an appliance, wouldn't he have to consider if he's doing his job, consider alternative solutions at that point since he's making change anyway? And I guess how how do you manage that risk?
So, let me take the last question first, Sean, and I'll pass the other one back over to Nick to give you some insights So every time there is a, you know, set of of proxies that come up for refresh and these, you know, these dates are published on our website. Every competitor on the planet tries to come in there and get those. Last time, that's happened, you know, same thing. They even built web pages for it. So it's a competitive situation.
And, you know, that's just the way it is. And and and, but switching it out is a little more difficult than just going to get a new one. There's policies in there that you gotta go change and all that kind of thing. What we've done with the BlueCard proxy state is we have virtual appliances that are ratable that are if you put them on the right, underlying hardware platform with the right network stuff that was built for virtual machines, they are capacity comparable to a to a proxy SG piece of hardware. So those do move, from from hardware to virtual because it's easier for people to deal with it in their big VMware installations and things like that.
Then we get the reason why people would buy more capacity often is is the roaming users, and the roaming users are being picked by the cloud phone factor and more often than not. And when they add the ability to take care of cloud applications through things like CASB, they actually prefer that that runs in an Amazon kind of be form, the instantiation. So we do see what would be the traditional upsell in a refresh being ratable in a pretty strong way. And then, you know, the last BlueCoke refresh, we picked up a lot of the other adjacencies at the time, which we like to malware analyzes and the decryptors and all that kind of stuff. The adjacencies in this refresh are the CASBys and the running user pieces, which are all cloud based.
So again, it is competitive. I think the other thing too, you know, when when people rely on channel checks and to see how much the box movers are moving boxes, box movers, not as relevant anymore as they used to be in this because there's SLAs and MSAs. And so the routes to some of this stuff is different than it was a few years ago. Okay? Over you on the floor?
Yes, let me, let me talk to you about that real quick. So, John, you recall in our last quarter call, we indicated that coming in, we had a bigger pipeline, coming into Q3, if we had a bigger pipeline, and we applied all the knowledge we had from q2, I. E. Radical shift, familiarity, etcetera, to that pipeline to come up with our numbers and our guidance range. And, obviously, there lot of detail that goes on and a lot of work that goes on around that.
However, we also have back end loaded quarters. And with back end loaded quarters and but we indicated on that call last time, larger transactions. Those can move from a product license based transaction to a ratable transaction And when they do, that's gonna impact. So we had an acceleration of that ratable mix, and that acceleration happened in the end of the quarter, and that's the, the net impact we have here. So we apply all of our logic to this, and it accelerated in the quarter, and that's what I was describing on a few of those other questions.
We're trying to obviously be thoughtful about that as we go forward. And there's 2, you know, really 2 things we're doing. Number 1 is, you know, even more, work, scrutiny, etcetera, on the pipe, and on the transactions that we're looking at for quarter, what we know, what size those transactions are, etcetera. But in addition, We've not only taken just the where the ratable gut to. We are increasing that and we are increasing our expectations on ratable business.
Because, obviously, we don't like being in a place where the forecast doesn't work out either. So we've made some additional changes for the go forward.
I really take full responsibility. I apologize for not getting that right We've talked about mix on the conference calls a number of times over the while we've been in transformation. Of Symantec we talked about when we mix lots of line items together on the same purchase order, it converts the the, what would be the end period pieces of that. If you put a discount on it, you know, gets caught back into the into the maintenance pieces, We talked about the fact that we got it wrong. We sold more cloud, and we are we did not expect to see the volumes of that that have and that is definitely, something that we are seriously doing better on now.
And at this time, I'm showing we have no further questions. Presenters. I turn it back to you for closing remarks.
Great. Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon, and we look forward to updating you again on our next call.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the Symantec's fiscal 3rd quarter 20 eighteen's earning call. We thank you greatly for your participation. You may now disconnect.