Good day, everyone, and welcome to Qualysys' 4th Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. This call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions for asking a question will be given at that time. Additionally, we do invite you to e mail any additional questions to irqualsys.com.
I would now like to turn the call over to June Mi Kim, Vice President of P and A and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thanks, Jean. Good afternoon, and welcome to Qualysys' 4th quarter and full year 2017 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Philippe Courteau, our Chairman and CEO and Melissa Fisher, our CFO. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward looking statements that generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance. Actual results may differ materially from these statements.
Factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and in our filings with the SEC, including our latest Form 10 Q and 10 ks. Any forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. As a reminder, the press release, prepared remarks and an accompanying investor presentation with supplemental information are available on our website.
With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Philippe.
Thank you, Jimmy, and welcome everyone to our Q4 earnings call. Melissa and I are pleased to report another great quarter that included both strong revenues and continued profitability. We closed 2017 with 19% annual revenue growth normalized for MSSP and FX and record full year EBITDA margin of 37%, while at the same time growing our headcount almost 30% to 869 full time employees. We're happy to report that we continued momentum with our cloud agents. In fact, we had a record number of cloud agent subscriptions in Q4 and we ended 2017 with almost 6,000,000 cloud agents purchased over the last 12 months, three times the amount we had at the end of 2016 and a 27% increase over the last quarter.
These results reflect our position as the leading security and compliance cloud based platform that is centrally managed and self updating, allowing our customers to consolidate their stack, while helping them build security and compliance into their digital transformation initiatives. This is evidenced by the fact that our penetration of leading enterprises worldwide has increased from 68% of the Fortune 50 in 2016 to 74% at the end of 2017 and from 60% of the Fortune 100 to 70%. And these are companies which have standardized on the Qualys platform. This market share gains have been driven by our unique ability as mentioned previously to help our customers drastically reduce the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining a plethora of security and compliance solutions across on premise, endpoint and cloud environments. This in turn enabled us to expand our share of wallet in our over 10,000 customers and attract new customers as well.
In fact, 32% of our enterprise customers have now deployed 3 or more solutions compared to 25% a year ago. Our competitive position has been further validated by our announcement today that Qualys is the number 1 is in the number 5th position in the worldwide security and vulnerability management market and number 1 position in the worldwide vulnerability assessment segment for the 2nd year in a row. According to IDC, Qualys has approximately 3% of the worldwide security As you know, competing vendors revenue are mostly perpetual software and contained services revenues. As a subscription model, Qualys market share is in fact understated as revenues recognized ratably. We continue to progress on expanding our solution set for our customers, both organically as well as through acquisition.
This quarter, I'm happy to let you know that we signed a term sheet to acquire another company in India, which has developed a well architected and comprehensive agent technology for mobile platforms and which we plan to integrate into our platform. Their solution enables enterprise to prevent, detect and response to potential malware in both corporate owned as well as bring your own devices, iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices. After we integrate this technology to our platform, we'll be able to uniquely provide enterprises discovery inventory, security, compliance and response on both enterprise owned as well as employee owned endpoints, expanding our footprint within our customer base. Our ability to then provide global asset IT inventory as well as cloud inventory in 2 seconds will be unmatched by competitive offerings. Furthermore, our ability to deliver our solution on premise in a private cloud platform is unmatched by our competitors.
This has allowed us to expand in territory or within companies subject to strict data residency regulations or policies. This is why cloud technology leaders choose our solutions to secure the global IT environment and thanks to our private cloud architecture, we uniquely provide scale, accuracy and immediacy. We also now have partnership with all the major global MSSPs as we added additional partnership in 2017, which enabled us to expand our capabilities for our customers in a cost effective manner. 2017 was an important year for Qualys during which we released new groundbreaking application to our cloud platform and completed our first two acquisitions. In 2017, let me remind you that we launched several new solution into general availability, including file integrity monitoring, FIM, the detection of indication of compromised, IOC and security configuration assessment, SCA.
In August, we acquired Navis Networks, which provides us with significant expertise in deep packet inspection, also known as passive scanning, enabling us to expand our addressable markets currently served by point solutions such as Forescout. More recently in Q4, we acquired NetWatcher to expand our reach into the real time threat intelligent market. The co founders of NetWatcher, Scott Sui and Kenneth Shelton have joined us as VP of Strategic Alliances and Business Development and VP of Engineering, Real Time Threat Coordination Platform, respectively, adding management talent to help us scale. This additional application expand our addressable market and enable us to provide more value to our customers. In addition to innovative product releases, we invested significantly in our cloud platform this year.
Where the new technology components to enable us to ingest, process, analyze and store a high volume of sensor data coming from our agents, scanners and passive analyzer and correlate information at near speeds in a distributed manner for millions of devices. We have over 250,000,000,000 security data points indexed in our Elasticsearch clusters, providing almost instant query results. This gives our customers the second visibility without them having to index large amount of data. As we continue to broaden our platform and grow our business, we continue to attract talented people to Qualys. We recently hired Bill Solms, who was CEO of Wild Rock Security Group and formerly the CEO of Wave Systems as our VP and General Manager Federal.
We see significant growth opportunity in the federal segment for Qualys. We also hired Niraj Sharma, who came from Jetronics as our VP of Ops for India. Additionally, Amit Godbold, who previously managed large financial functions in India for Symantec and BMC, joined us as VP of Finance India. We're continuing to expand our presence in India and we have now 58% of our R and D operation and customer support employees in Pune. This represents an important strategic advantage as we can add world class talent at rates favorable to our cost structure.
As we look into 2018, we're expecting further growth and customer adoption of our solutions, expansion of our customer base and the release of many new features and offerings. Our current plan include the release of container security, cloud inventory and security assessment, certificate inventory and assessment, passive network discovery, patch management, secure access control as well as certificate management and cloud security management. Acquisitions will continue to be part of our strategy as we seek to accelerate our product development and expand into adjacent markets. As such, we announced today designation of $25,000,000 for venture investing from which we will invest in early stage opportunity related security and compliance technology in a similar manner to our approach to acquisitions. Additionally, as we continue to generate cash in excess of our current use for M and A, we announced today $100,000,000 share repurchase program, which will enable us to reduce dilution from employee grants and acquisitions.
In closing, we are very pleased for our shareholders that Qualys was the best performance securities stock in 2017 as one of our analysts noted. We're very excited about our opportunity in 2018 as we see our momentum picking up as evidenced by our 1, strong business performance as reflected in our new business renewal and the percent trends 2, a winning product and partnership strategy with an expanding and fully integrated product portfolio and new key partnerships And finally, a balanced financial strategy as we continue to grow the top line of our business, building a strong foundation of recurring revenues, while maintaining industry leading profitability. With that, I'll turn the call over to Melissa to discuss our financial results and guidance for 2018. Thank you.
Thanks, Philippe, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue and billings figures, all financial figures are non GAAP unless stated otherwise. 2017 was another great year for Qualys as we successfully released several new products, features and enhancements, while growing revenues by 19% and achieving record EBITDA margins of 37%. Despite our continued investment in the business, including 27% year over year growth in headcount in 2017. As Philippe mentioned, we sold 6,000,000 cloud agents in 2017, 3 times the amount we have sold at the end of 2016.
Our Cloud Agent platform, as you may recall, is the underpinning technology of many of our new solutions, including FIM and IOC, and these results provide a solid foundation for adoption of these newly released solutions. To be a strategic solution for our customers as we experienced a reacceleration in bookings for our vulnerability management category, partly influenced by customer adoption of newer VM related solutions like Cloud Agent and Threat Protection. In fact, the percent of bookings contributions from new products released since 2015 more than doubled to 12% in 2017 from the previous year. Continued adoption of our platform is a contributor to larger deal sizes. We saw a meaningful expansion in average revenues for enterprise customers with multiple Qualys Cloud apps in 2017.
As an example, at the end of 2016, enterprise customers purchasing 4 more solutions generated on average approximately $180,000 in annual revenue. At the end of 2017, we saw that level of revenue generated with enterprise customers purchasing only 3 or more solutions. Turning now to the 4th quarter results. We are delighted that both revenues and profits exceeded our expectations. Revenues in the 4th quarter were $62,900,000 which represents 22% normalized growth over the Q4 of 2016.
There was a negative impact on our Q4 2017 revenue growth rate approximately 60 basis points from the MSSP contract as well as approximately 70 basis points from FX. We continue to see healthy demand driven by our strategic positioning as the leading cloud platform in our markets. The percent of enterprise customers with 3 or more quality solutions rose to 32% this quarter, up from 25% a year ago and their average revenue in the quarter increased 20% year over year. We saw strong demand this quarter from existing customers in terms of renewals and up sells and deal sizes continue to increase in Q4 growing 15% year over year. EMEA continued to perform very well both from existing and new customers.
From a product perspective, we saw strong performance in the vulnerability management and policy compliance categories. We continue to see very good growth from both Cloud Agent and Threat Protection. New products released since 2015 contributed approximately 15% of total bookings in the quarter. These new product bookings are mostly due to cloud agent, which includes the associated subscription to either vulnerability management or policy compliance and include renewals that convert to Cloud Agent. Turning to our deferred revenue balance.
The current deferred revenue balance was $143,000,000 as of December 31, 2017, 25% greater than our balance at December 31, 2016. Normalized for the impact from FX, our current deferred revenue balance would have grown approximately 24% year over year. Calculated current billings, which is revenue plus the change in current deferred revenue, was $74,000,000 for the Q4 of 2017, up 27% from the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the Q4 of 2017 was $23,800,000 representing a 38% margin as compared to 35% in the Q4 of 2016. In Q4, our outperformance in revenues drove an increase in gross margin to 79% from 78% in the Q4 of 2016.
Gross profit increased by 21% year over year to $49,500,000 in the Q4 of 2017. Operating expenses in Q4 increased by 14% year over year to 30,800,000 dollars Q4 expense includes 1 month of the NetWatcher team. We're excited that Scott, Kenneth and Lauren have joined us. Like Nevis, Netwatcher not only provided us with technology, but significant talent as well. Research and development expense increased to $9,800,000 or 24% year over year, primarily due to higher headcount.
Sales and marketing expense increased to $15,600,000 or 10% year over year, primarily due to higher headcount related costs as well as greater spend on freight shows. G and A expense increased to $5,400,000 or 9% year over year driven in part by higher headcount and higher payroll taxes. Net cash from operations in the Q4 of 2017 increased by 93% to $25,900,000 compared to $13,400,000 in the same period in 2016. The year over year increase in operating cash flow was driven largely by the growth in our billings and profits. Our Q4 operating cash flow also benefited from the reimbursement of $5,400,000 in leasehold improvements for our new headquarters.
Excluding this payment, operating cash flow would have grown to 53% year over year in Q4. Capital expenditures were $11,200,000 in the Q4 of 2017 compared to $4,400,000 in the Q4 of 2016. Out of the $11,200,000 $7,400,000 was for our business operations and $3,800,000 was for our new headquarters build out. Now I'd like to talk to you about 2018 guidance, starting with revenues. For the full year 2018, our revenue guidance is from $275,500,000 to 278,500,000 dollars which represents a growth rate of 19% to 21%.
For the Q1 of 2018, we expect revenues to be in the range of $63,400,000 to $64,100,000 representing a year over year growth rate of 19% to 21%. Given the growth opportunities ahead of us, we will continue to invest in operations, people and systems. And so we expect full year 2018 operating margin to be roughly flat. We expect capital expenditures in 2018 to be in the range $23,000,000 to $28,000,000 and in Q1 of 2018 to be in the range of $6,000,000 to 7,000,000 dollars Our 2018 income statement will be positively impacted by the adoption of 606, which requires the capitalization of commissions from our new and up sell bookings, which were previously expensed. We expect to capitalize these commissions over 5 years and estimate this to impact our operating margins by approximately 150 basis points.
Additionally, tax reform has driven a meaningful decline in our effective tax rate and this provides another driver of earnings and cash flow growth for Qualys. That is illustrated in our non GAAP EPS guidance, which calls for 28% and 32% growth in 2018 earnings per share. As we enter into 2018, we expect to share new metrics as our business continues to evolve. Additionally, as we consistently grow and generate cash due to our highly profitable operational model, we've continually reviewed our capital allocation. We finished 20 17 with $356,000,000 in cash and investments and because we expect to generate meaningful cash in 2018 as well, we've announced today 2 important initiatives as part of our continual efforts to increase shareholder value.
First, as part of our initiatives to accelerate growth through M and A, we've announced the designation of $25,000,000 for venture investing. Additionally, we're delighted to announce $100,000,000 share repurchase program focused on offsetting dilution from employee grants and M and A. We plan to execute this program through open market share repurchases, which is baked into our EPS guidance. In conclusion, for both the quarter and the year, we delivered strong top line growth and industry leading profitability. We delivered an impressive suite of new technology and application components for our cloud platform and completed our first two acquisitions.
These achievements position us well to continue expanding our solution set, helping our customers secure their digital transformation and consolidate Saks for better visibility and security. Our platform and unique operational model enable sustainable growth and economic leverage for Qualys both now and in the future. With that, Lise and I would be happy to answer any of your questions.
Thank Our first question comes from Citi Panagrahia of Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a good quarter. Philippe, just at a macro level, I just wanted to get your view on IT security spending, your expectation for this year and some of the drivers such as like GDPR or anything that you're seeing going to help drive growth for Qualys?
I think we discussed quite a few times. I think what is driving our business, so there's 2 questions here, what is the overall spending and what drives Qualys? So that would say about what continue driving the security spending is obviously the fact that attacks are not subsiding at all. But what we see here is that buyers are seeing a bit more careful in the sense that they absolutely the huge demand that we see everywhere is to consolidate the stack. And that's, of course, is very good for us because that's exactly what our platform does, do more with the same amount of money.
So we don't see contraction in spending. We see much more wiser in the purchasing. As far as Qualys is concerned, there is the what drives our business naturally is the fact that people realize that because everything is interconnected with almost everything, you cannot secure what you don't know. So that's essentially as our customers are now deploying more of the VM solution not less. So that's of course is very good.
We see that in Europe particularly. GDPR is an element, but not we don't see that as an immediate driver. I think what we see in GDPR is that it forces company to rethink the security because the cost of compliance is too onerous. So we see GDPR as accelerating the growth, the initiative of company to essentially accelerate the transformation, which means retooling their IT solutions and then thinking of building security into their platform. That's what we do with and quite a few other companies.
And that also is very good for our business. So for us, we see all these changes which are happening very favorable for Qualys because essentially of that unique cloud platform that we have created which allows to consolidate the stacks, give you visibility, deploys absolutely globally across endpoints, on premise and cloud environment. I think we're extremely well positioned.
And then, I mean, it's quick to see cloud as end adoption. But as you look into 2018 guidance, what are the new products that you mentioned? What are the new products you expect to contribute in a significant way in 2018?
So today we have, as you know, we won GA with our file integrity monitoring with our detection communication compromise. We start to see adoption of those services very well received by our customers. And I think all the other services that we mentioned, we're going to deliver the same scenario. Customers are absolutely telling us we're doing the right things. So it's difficult for us to say today which is the one which is going to accelerate faster than the other one in few months.
Of course, we'll have enough data points to be able to tell you that. But today, we see adoption from all of them very well received and a lot of customers waiting for our new services to hit the road.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Howard Smith with First Analysis. Your line is now open.
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. First, just housekeeping. Melissa, is there any effect, material effect on revenue or deferred balances or billings from NetWatcher kind of inorganic numbers?
Yes. No, NetWatcher transaction was very small. The numbers are immaterial.
Perfect. And then in terms of the new customer additions over the years, so nice metrics there. And we've talked about the company being exceptionally good at harvesting and penetrating existing customers. But it seems that you're doing a better job of landing some large new customers. Where do you feel you are kind of in where you'd like to get to in terms of your capabilities there?
Are you most of the way there kind of exiting the year or you still have significant emphasis to put forward as far as new logo acquisition strategy?
Yes. So as you have seen, we're very proud of the fact that we essentially accelerated our penetration at the top line quite significantly, going from 70% of the Fortune 50 to 74% and also to now to 47% of the Fortune 500. So we continue penetrating very well at the high end and this is because we have a unique scalability. Now we start to see that now we have an ability because we have more new services to really accelerate our penetration on the mid market And we see a huge opportunity now for the SMB where we are starting to do significant deals. I mean the SME market which is a smaller 1000000 enterprise which today we can characterize as a company between 500 to 5000 people.
A large deal was $50,000 a year. Now today we see deals of 100 and dollars even to $200,000 So we see a very unique opportunity because of course there's many, many customers. So you're going to see us being more aggressive now that we have more services to offer, totally integrated to really go be more aggressive in that mid market, which is also by the way moving very much into the cloud and there are integration capabilities
Great. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Joel Fishbein with BTIG. Your line is now open.
Congratulations on the excellent execution again, guys. I have one for Philippe, if I may, and one for Melissa, if I can. Philippe, very excited about the 2 acquisitions that you did, but you mentioned in your prepared remarks that M and A is going to still be part of the D and A. It looks like you guys have a lot on the plate right now. Is there still room for M and A in the near term?
Or are you just saying that that's part of the DNA going forward? And then I'll ask for that.
Yes, absolutely. In fact, we as you know, everything we do, we try to do that in a full and measured way. We don't jump into a position to boost the top line. We do that because we see, first of all, that our customers are really asking us to provide these capabilities. Also very careful that not integrating companies where we will have to redo everything, re architect because that's a long road.
So we want to do acquisition where we can inject, if you prefer, this new DNA or new technology into our platform. And that's what we have done especially with Nevis and with Netwatcher and with the company that I've just mentioned that we have entered into a term sheet that would be exactly the same thing. And third, we absolutely do not want to pay this absolutely insane premium value that today we have in the U. S. Where you see these companies have very little revenues and you have to pay $200,000,000 to get them and then you will have to re architect everything because very few of them are really cloud based.
So we are shying away from these ones. But yes, we're going to continue very aggressively to look at small companies, which have very good technology that we can integrate and that we pay a reasonable price. We are starting to divide some metrics of how many engineers you have like in the old good days of Microsoft, when Microsoft was saying, okay, we're a core a company and how many engineers do you really have, okay, you have and we pay $1,000,000 per engineer and that's what their formula. And so we're starting to derive some of these interesting metrics with the acquisition that we have done and the few that we have today either works. Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes great sense. And Melissa, just a quick follow-up. Obviously, you guided margins flat for 2018, which is very understandable considering how much you guys have expanded margins and accelerated growth at the same time. But as we've talked about before, it feels like there's still more leverage in the model long term. Is that the case?
And I know you're not giving guidance past 20 18, but there still feels like there's leverage left to go.
Yes, I would agree with that. We continue to believe there's an opportunity to accelerate revenue growth and expand margins. Given the growth opportunities ahead of us, we are continuing to invest, but we're able to do that in a way that still maintains industry leading margins. And said 2017 was going to be an investment year and we ended up expanding margins. As of now, we believe the margins will kept flat, but there's absolutely opportunity for the
future. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Melissa Franchi of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you for taking
my question. Philippe, you talked about how the vulnerability management business accelerated in the quarter. Just wondering if you could touch on what's driving that acceleration and then what you're seeing in terms of competition?
So as far as the acceleration is essentially people realize that you cannot secure what you don't know and that's and then that you have to look at vulnerabilities everywhere. So the old days of doing few critical servers and the perimeters are gone. And so that's good for our business. And because we uniquely scale for our existing customers, it's pretty easy to deploy. It costs almost nothing except sending us you know, I think expanding their subscription and that's to go back to our to Avedis competition is to really differentiate us very well with the competition, especially at the high end of the market as I alluded earlier.
And by the way, the point I want to make when you some of our competitors, they say that they have a huge penetration of the enterprise. So yes, they may have some servers here and there, but for us, we say that 70% of the Fortune 50 or 47% of Fortune 500 or 70% of Fortune 100 are using Qualys. It means they have standardized essentially on the productivity management and a few other applications on our Qualys platform. So this is not just one small instance. This is really true standardization.
So as far as the competition is concerned, you saw the IDC reports, which clearly show that compared to Rapid7, if you look out to, as I call them, the 2 last men standing, Rapid7 and Tenable. So Rapid7 is really starting to lose significant momentum here. As we can see in the vulnerability management space, you saw that most of their growth came from the acquisition of the web application scanning, which added $8,000,000 to the 2016 numbers. This is the IDC numbers, which I always really believe in IDC. I think I mentioned that quite a few times.
I believe in their methodology. They check the numbers. So this is really well thought through. We have followed them over the years. And Tenable is Tenable, we're not strong in government yet.
In fact, we're now starting to really gear up to go in the government. So I think we're going to compete big time against them there because this is their stronghold. They're also very strong in the consulting, the Nessus, which they are trying to upgrade to Tenable. Io. So you're going to see us also much more aggressive there as well.
So we don't see really Tenable in the large deployment. In fact, we have replaced quite a few of their homegrown solutions, which we recently did with a major cloud provider. So all in all, I mean the competition is there which is good, but I'm not losing my sleep over them essentially.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.
Great, thanks. Hi guys, this is Jackson Ader on for Sterling tonight. A question from our side. With 27 percent headcount growth in 2017, what are we kind of factoring in maybe for 2018? I know margins being guided flat, but with the 150 basis point tailwind from ASU 606, looks like there's going to be some incremental investments.
And so we were wondering if that was going to be adjunct related and where that would be spent?
Yes. So when we do our budgeting and planning process, we look at across each function what's needed. I would expect some growth in headcount for this year, but there are there is also other spend going on in terms of spending servers and storage for the platform. There's new systems that we'll be putting in for the first time this year in HRIS system and FP and A system. So there's other areas that are going to add to it.
And also if you look at our headcount specifically, so they are in a way a little bit misleading because of our significant expansion in India. If you look at the 2 acquisitions, the acquisition we've done with Nevis, this is an acquisition in India. We are planning that the term sheet is another acquisition in India. So obviously, the accounts in India, if you look from a cost perspective, we have almost a 1 to 10 ratio. So that's a significant advantage that we have here because we have established a significant stronghold in India, a very good operation of close to 400 people now there and we'll continue hiring there quite aggressively.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ann Meissner with Susquehanna. Your line is now open.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. First question is for Philippe. As you mentioned, it looks like you're investing a lot more in the federal space, which is an area that I believe should be a huge opportunity for Qualys. And I was just wondering, would you expect your new VP and GM to kind of grow the go to market presence for that vertical? And is this the year that we should expect to see an inflection point in terms of the revenue contribution from federal?
So the answer to the first part of your question is yes, absolutely, that's the mission. And in fact, we're also gearing up from the partner side as well to have essentially expand, if you prefer, our partnerships in the federal space. As far as the second question in terms of generating revenues, we are still pretty modest because it takes time. We may receive it, I think we're hopeful that we could get some boost at the end of the year in September when budgets have to be spent. But essentially the growth in terms of revenues is 2019 because it takes time.
But we believe we are really going to be very successful in the federal because not only we're federal and certified, which is a must, but more fundamentally we have what they need. Today the federal market has a problem, which is they have absolutely a need for scale and none of the current solution are satisfying them and they cost more and more and more to maintain and to update. And of course the attacks are not slowing down. So that complexity is there. So we can really absolutely add the federal government.
So our time has come fundamentally.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Nolan with Baird. Your line is now open.
Okay, great. Melissa, a follow-up on 606. I think you said 150 basis points of impact. Is that starting in FQ1 and would that be a couple of pennies of upside there?
That is starting in Q1, but that's already baked into our guidance. So we'll obviously share the impact as we get into the official adoption by the end of the quarter. And it's obviously going to depend on ultimately what the mix of new and renewal bookings are versus our other commission expenses. But as I said, that's already baked into our guidance.
Okay. And Felipe, a question on new products. You've launched a lot of products and you've got a nice pipeline for this year. And I guess the question is on sales structure and the introduction of a new product. Could you remind us how you're structured and how you enter a new product and what the sale is there a sales overlay team that works with account management, but that would be interesting?
Yes. So first of all, and probably the most important point is that all the new services are already enabled in our platform. So if you're an existing customer, it just you can request a trial directly from your application and it's already provisioned. In some cases, you may have to ask for a more appliances and so forth, this is pretty minor. And so you can really try and buy.
So that facilitates the deployment, the sales is absolutely unique with our model. Now as far as the sales force is concerned specifically, yes, we do have an overlay of SMEs. In fact, we made some recently some changes in the structure itself where our subject matter experts now we make them reporting to the product management team so they could get closer to engineering fundamentally. And so we could accelerate the feedback from customers or when this product go to market, the feedback so it can directly be pumped into back into engineering, so we could make this new solution evolve much quicker. And so that's the new change we have done, but that's not really it's important, but I think we serve the sales force much better.
And on the sales force itself, we're also now segmenting our sales force a bit more with the sales force more dedicated to the very large account because we have absolute multimillion dollars account and essentially creates a kind of a support structure which reflects our sales structure which reflects the different type of accounts. And finally, we are now also aggressively looking at adding new business salespeople because we have again more solutions. And you're going to see us launching quite a few free services to create market awareness and the generation. So 2018 is going to be a fantastic year for us. And with all these new services coming because they become a huge differentiator vis a vis all of our absolutely it's absolutely it's all transparently integrated.
So that's where we are. So I think we're very confident.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Gur Talpaz with Stifel. Your line is now open. Hi. This is actually Chris Spiroz on for Gur.
Can you talk about the drivers of the success you've seen in your land and expand strategy? Specifically, are multiproduct customers primarily cloud agent customers that have deployed multiple agent products?
No, it's all listed. It's from everywhere. In fact, essentially, if I will say Kat will summarize, we are building and delivering good solutions that do what we advertise. We don't hype as many of these other security solutions that you hear that it all works together, it deploys, it works. So that's fun and you can try if you are a customer.
So we don't push things. We let the market we let our customers go at their own pace. And so it's much more effective for everybody. So now I think it's every services is growing at their own pace and very well. And we're just there to make sure that our product works and that we continuously improve them and then that we continuously innovate.
And that's and Qualys has learned how to do that very well. And of course we have an growing customer base. That's the power of what we do, A very good renewal rates and of course the more services they adopt, the more sticky we become and of course the more growth the more profitable growth we have enabled.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Erik Suppiger with JMP. Your line is now open.
Yes. Congratulations on a very good quarter. Thank you. You had talked about new product billings in the 15% range. Can you give us any sense for how much of that is cloud agent versus the other services?
Yes. It's still today mostly cloud agent, Eric, which as I've mentioned, we move very positively as we see our club agents as a Trojan horse for the adoption of our new solutions to try on the agent.
Can you give us a sense of how rapidly the non cloud agent component to that 15% is growing?
They're both growing very well. It's mostly Cloud Agent and Threat Protection, which is the overwhelming portion of those, and they've both been continued to do very well.
Yes. As I mentioned earlier, we start now to see the adoption of fat integrity monitoring and detection of indication of compromise of 1 GAA just a few months ago.
Okay. And then I think you said Europe was going well. Did you have any comments on how North American business, how that was performing in the quarter?
So American business is performing as we have been performing quite well. But Europe, we saw some increased momentum in Europe because for the and this is something as you may recall that I predicted because in Europe, the network are not as big. So in the U. S, our growth has been driven by bigger upsells essentially or bigger revenues from new customers. In Europe, the growth now is fueled by existing customers expanding essentially their vulnerability management solution to see more of their network as well as adding new services.
So smaller networks, but now there is more the growth is coming from a combination of more VM deployment and addition of few of the new services of other services. So very, very pulled together.
Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes our final question comes from Patrick Colville with Arete Research. Your line is now open.
Hi there. Great quarter. I've got a couple of questions. You mentioned that Netwatcher is immaterial to your revenue and guidance billings guidance for fiscal year 2018. Is it also immaterial on the cost side?
And is that a factor behind the flat op margin guide?
No. Overall, the company was very early stage. So it's really immaterial to our financial statements. And just as a reminder, we don't give billings guidance, we give revenue guidance.
Okay. And for a typical GDPR customer, related customer, which kind of products will they be using, which yes? So the big thing with GDPR is that obviously with GDPR essentially forces you to demonstrate to the regulator that you have been a good guardian of course the privacy of the security of the data of your customers. So part of that is of course having a very strong vulnerability management program and a very strong compliance program, which where Qualys excels. So that is a natural driver for us.
But there is a bigger start. What we see happening in Europe is that GDPR is forcing company to accelerate the digital transformation. And what is very unique with Qualys, why because they have realized that 2020 was throwing this enterprise software solution, security solution that are very expensive, that are difficult to deploy and do not speak with each other, it's a little bit of futile. So to say, something has to change here because we're never going to prove the regulator that we're doing a good job. And even if we do, it will cost us a fortune and it will take us a long time.
So that's fundamentally what every, every, if you prefer, CIO in Europe now is thinking that most of those that I've spoken with, everybody is on the same map here. And so the name of the game now is let's accelerate our digital transformation like the Cite de General publicly announced. And then the question is, we cannot continue bolting on the security solution by throwing this additional enterprise lie down. We need to really build the security in and this is where our cloud, private cloud platform becomes extremely unique because now you cannot really secure the cloud from another cloud. So you need to be capable of going inside of this new architecture and that's exactly what our cloud platform does, not only our agent, but the entire cloud platform itself.
So we're extremely well probably the only company today who can claim that we can help you build the security into your digital transformation and you're going to hear us speaking more loudly about that during RSA in April.
Thank you. I show no further questions in queue. So I'd like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Jumi Kim.
Thanks, Jean, and thank you all for attending our Q4 and full year 2017 earnings call. We look forward to seeing many of you later this month at the Jefferies 2018 Cybersecurity Summit in Austin, Texas and JMP Security Technology Conference, Morgan Stanley PMT Conference in San Francisco.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference. Thank you very much for your participation. You may all disconnect. Have a wonderful day.