Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualys second quarter 2023 investor call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Blair King. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Victor, good afternoon, and welcome to Qualys' second quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Sumedh Thakar, our President and CEO, and Joo Mi Kim, our CFO. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that generally relate to future events or our 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-K. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of the 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 investor presentation are all available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Sumedh.
Thank you, Blair, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. We're pleased to announce that we delivered another quarter of healthy revenue growth and industry-leading profitability, demonstrating our increasing leadership in cybersecurity risk management and firm foundation to drive future growth. Q2 remained a tough period, with customers continuing to scrutinize deals and delay project start dates. Nevertheless, the combination of today's uneven macro and heightened threat environment is driving the need for security stack consolidation necessary for clear security outcomes, reducing vendor sprawl in customer environments, and implementing a long-term security strategy based on cost and value. Our risk management platform positions us well to deliver these outcomes to our customers, and we feel fortunate that many of them are on a long-term transformation journey with us.
This was evidenced in Q2 by the steady adoption of our VMDR solution, which is now deployed by 52% of our customers worldwide. Key competitive VMDR wins with TruRisk include multiple customers, both downmarket and in the Fortune 1,000. Qualys' VMDR solution continues to garner significant industry recognition. As recently announced, Qualys' VMDR with TruRisk was voted the best risk management solution at the 2023 SC Awards Europe. This award evaluates vendors based on input from security practitioners and is held in high esteem. We believe Qualys' placement as the number one vulnerability management solution further validates our investments in the platform and represents the gold standard for securing customer environments today and in the future. Leveraging our VMDR and single-agent approach, we have built a blueprint for delivering greater value to our customers with multiple long-term drivers in our business.
Let me highlight a couple of early platform success we're seeing with broader adoption with our customers. In Q2, a Fortune 300 global manufacturing company chose Qualys because of our reputation to deploy across large, complex environments quickly. Their existing Patch Management solution was unable to effectively patch OS, iOS, and third-party software, and they became victim to malicious activity. This customer needed to deploy a Patch Management solution quickly to over 40,000 assets to prevent a breach. The ability to deploy our solution the same day, using the same agents they had already deployed for VMDR and without the need for a VPN, saved the company from manufacturing line productivity losses. Through this brief but urgent engagement, Qualys built additional trust with the customer by demonstrating our expertise, professionalism, and technical efficacy.
As a result, this customer is now evaluating our CyberSecurity Asset Management solution with External Attack Surface visibility to further streamline their security stack. With the Qualys Cloud platform, they are eliminating legacy tools and have considerably improved their response times and security posture. In another example of continued adoption of CyberSecurity Asset Management and External Attack Surface Management, we also expanded our engagement with a Forbes Thousand food manufacturer in Q2. The customer expanded its deployment of VMDR with TruRisk and selected Qualys' CyberSecurity Asset Management and Patch Management as additional solutions. The ability to enhance this security program with comprehensive internal and external asset context, risk scoring, CMDB integration, and fast remediation on a single console while consolidating agents on an integrated platform were all key differentiators in this win.
Further broadening our platform capabilities, you may recall in February of this year, we announced TotalCloud, a unified and extensible cloud-native CNAPP solution, featuring agent and agentless zero-touch assessment scanning options, along with CSPM, CWPP, and cloud detection and response capabilities to simplify workflows and help security teams migrate workloads to public and hybrid cloud environments. With over 30 million cloud agents already supporting workloads in the cloud, we're quite encouraged by the customer feedback and early adoption we are seeing for our TotalCloud solution. For example, in a recent mid-six-figure TotalCloud win, a cybersecurity company seeking better security against advanced threats in multi-cloud and container environments chose our solution over competing cloud security providers, given its flexible scanning options, rapid detection, and unparalleled remediation capabilities from development to runtime.... all uniquely supported through our new Adaptive Subscription Model, frictionless platform deployment, and unified dashboard.
The wins I have shared here today, along with several others like them, underscore Qualys' ability to help customers not only detect but also prioritize risk across all assets and environments, while remediating vulnerabilities much faster than alternative siloed solutions. In today's current macroeconomic environment, we believe our value proposition becomes even stronger as customers seek multiple security offerings from a single Qualys platform. With more and more customers beginning to perceive Qualys as a leading risk management platform that consolidates multiple security point solutions across all environments, we remain confident in our ability to drive long-term growth and gain market share. This confidence was again bolstered in Q2 as customer spending $500,000 or more with us grew 21% from a year ago to 168. Continuing our disruptive innovation, I'm pleased to announce today our groundbreaking launch of First-Party Software Risk Management solution.
With nearly every organization today becoming a software development house, most of them lack proper tools to detect, prioritize, and remediate high-risk vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within their own proprietary code base. This new capability now allows organizations to leverage their existing Qualys VMv3 platform deployment to not only detect CVEs in third-party software, but also manage risk in their own first-party software using a single platform. Additionally, given high prevalence of embedded open source software like Log4Shell in these applications, this new capability allows customers to manage risk from these components and get a complete picture of their True Risk. This new capability will be demonstrated at Black Hat next week. Encouraged by the early adoption of Qualys Cloud, we have further harnessed technology from our recent acquisition of Blue Hexagon to extend our cloud scale deep learning AI-based CBR capabilities into container images.
By flexing the power of Qualys Cloud platform to discover and identify relationships and patterns within our own highly integrated data lake, we are now enabling organizations to rapidly predict, detect, prioritize, and remediate anomalous activity that are invisible and undetectable in traditional signature-based solutions in the cloud. This latest advancement empowers our customers to proactively hunt for and respond to zero-day threats spanning cloud and container environments from development to runtime. This advanced AI-based capability is already in action with some of our customers, helping transform their security operations center, magnifying our competitive differentiation in the market. Looking ahead, we are further integrating our deep learning AI and ML technologies into our TruRisk Management and remediation solutions to provide predictive insights of known unknown vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and instances of active exploitation.
With the algorithmic expertise already in-house, over the next few quarters, we expect to further extend these capabilities to transform the user experience on the Qualys Cloud platform, harvesting trillions of data points and rich investigation and remediation using generative AI. In terms of our go-to-market initiatives, investing in our partner ecosystem continues to be a 3-key priority. In Q2, we expanded our relationship with several key cloud providers, including AWS, which is now making our new product bundles aimed at SME and SMB available in its marketplace. Additionally, we entered into a new relationship with a leading global MSSP, who chose Qualys over a competing detection-only solution, given our ease of orchestration, natively integrated platform, and single agent to simplify its operations and significantly reduce remediation time for its customers. Finally, I'm pleased to highlight that Dino DiMarino has joined Qualys as our new CRO.
Dino has an established track record in driving new business development and leading channel partnerships in high-growth SaaS, cloud, and cybersecurity companies, most recently with Snyk. He will be responsible for all aspects of revenue performance, with a focus on delivering sustainable customer value and business outcomes, the leadership of the worldwide sales and partner organization, and accelerating Qualys' growth with both new and existing customers. Dino has over 20 years of sales executive sales experience and demonstrated success in bringing out the most in the teams, which successfully align sales with the product organization in support of the customer. He shares in our passion for product-led growth, and we are looking forward to his contribution to Qualys.
In summary, our leadership as a trusted risk management platform for of record and strong financial performance stand as a testament to Qualys' dedication to innovation, of protecting customer environments, and transforming the value proposition of traditional vulnerability management technologies with cyber risk posture assessment and response prioritization capabilities. With a unique opportunity in this environment to further strengthen our strategic position as the partner of choice for customers looking to re-architect and consolidate their security tools to solve modern security challenges, we believe we can continue to grow long-term, maintain best-in-class profitability, and invest in key initiatives further extending the gap between Qualys and the competition. I will turn the call over to Joo Mi to discuss in more detail our second quarter results and outlook for third quarter and the full year 2023.
Thanks, Sumedh. Good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue, our financial figures are non-GAAP and growth rates are based on comparisons to the prior year period, unless stated otherwise. Turning to second quarter results, revenues grew 14% to $137.2 million. Revenues from channel partners grew 17%, continuing to outpace direct, which grew 12%. Channel revenue contribution remained the same as last quarter at 43%. By geo, growth in the U.S. of 16% was ahead of our international business, which grew 12%. U.S. and international revenue mix remained the same as last quarter, at 60% and 40%, respectively....
Although customer dollar retention was largely unchanged in Q2, the selling environment was challenging, with new business down and our net dollar expansion rate on a constant currency basis at 108%, down from 109% last quarter and 110% last year. While there continues to remain room for improvement from smaller customers spending less than $25,000 with us, we remain pleased with the continued strong revenue growth of 17% from larger spend customers. In terms of new product contribution to bookings, task management and CyberSecurity Asset Management combined made up 10% of LTM bookings and 19% of LTM new bookings in Q2. We attribute the success to our customers' needs for broader contextualized awareness of their task service with natively integrated risk management and remediation workflows across all environments on a single platform.
Reflecting our scalable and sustainable business model, adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2023 was $65.8 million, representing a 48% margin compared to a 45% margin a year ago. Operating expenses in Q2 increased by 6% to $53.4 million, primarily driven by investments in sales and marketing, including headcount. Although we remain focused on driving growth, with our disciplined approach to investing, we are being mindful of where to further increase investments while optimizing returns in others, which resulted in EBITDA margin exceeding our expectations in Q2. This demonstrates our ability to maintain high operating leverage and remain capital efficient while continuing to innovate and invest to support our long-term growth initiatives.
With this strong performance, EPS for the second quarter of 2023 was $1.27, and our free cash flow for the second quarter of 2023 was $50.1 million, representing a 37% margin. In Q2, we continued to invest the cash we generated from operations back into Qualys, including $1.4 million on capital expenditures and $42.3 million to repurchase 346,000 of our outstanding shares. As at the end of the quarter, we had $145.7 million remaining in our share repurchase program. Before turning to guidance, I'd like to provide a few comments. We continue to foresee a challenging environment for new customer growth, although we have been successful in building our pipeline in Salesforce.
With the impact of the macroeconomy still unfolding, we are closely monitoring the business environment and shifting our priorities accordingly. With that said, given our ratable SaaS subscription model, our guide for revenue growth for the full year 2023 remains largely unchanged at 13%, with a revised range of $553 million-$555 million. The high end of the range, down from $557 million last quarter. For the third quarter of 2023, we expect revenue to be in the range of $140.5 million-$141.5 million, representing a growth rate of 12%-13%. Considering the long-term growth opportunities ahead of us and our industry-leading margins implying further room for investment, we intend to continue to make responsible investments to align our product and marketing strategy.
In doing so, we expect to prioritize these investments on specific initiatives aimed at driving pipeline growth and supporting sales. With our new CRO having just joined us this quarter, we naturally expect to revisit planned initiatives, which may push out some investments by a few quarters. We expect the full year 2023 EBITDA margin to be in the mid-40s, with full year EPS in the range of $4.50-$4.65, up from the prior range of $4.13-$4.28. For the third quarter of 2023, we expect EPS in the range of $1.10-$1.15.
Our planned capital expenditures in 2023 in the range of $10 million-$15 million, and with the third quarter of 2023 in the range of $2 million-$4 million. In conclusion, in Q2, we delivered a healthy top-line growth and industry-leading profitability and remain confident in our ability to deliver on our growth opportunity long term, while investing responsibly to maximize shareholder value. With that, Sumedh and I would be happy to answer any of your questions.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by. We compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question is off the line of Jonathan Ho from William Blair. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning, good afternoon. Just wanted to, you know, maybe dig a little bit into your guidance. Can you maybe help us understand some of the assumptions that you've now baked in, and maybe what's changed relative to your macro expectations, and particularly around, you know, sort of the new customer add side?
Yeah, I think, I think Joo Mi can provide a little bit more color, but overall, I think we feel like, based on what we see right now, the guide is appropriate, and we're not assuming any improvement in the macro given kind of what we see and, the way customers are, are working through and, in some cases, pushing out deals, et cetera. We did see additional scrutiny on the upsell this quarter, which was, which is something that we worked through with customers. While our win rates are down, we are excited about the pipeline that has been generated with some of the investments that we made in -- making in the last couple of quarters.
Now with Dino coming on board, of course, like with any executive coming on board, we're looking forward to the contribution he's gonna make in the long term. You know, there probably will be some disruption in the short term there. Taking all those factors into consideration, really, we feel at this point, we believe the guide is appropriate for what we see.
Yeah. To add a little bit of additional color to what Sumedh just said. If you take a look at our annual revenue guidance, it hasn't really changed all that much. We've been consistent in emphasizing that we believe that we'll be able to achieve 13% revenue growth. Underlying that, is our belief that our net dollar expansion rate isn't going to materially change.
It has ticked down by a percentage this quarter. It could continue to do so. We, we don't think that even with that, our current billings was able to reaccelerate back up to 11% from 9%. We don't see that to change in the second half of this year.
Great. maybe just to dig into that, that last comment a little bit more around the net dollar expansion, is there a way you could make just a little bit more color, in terms of, you know, what's impacting the net dollar expansion? Is there anything on the churn side, or is there anything, on your ability to sort of upsell product that's, that's impacting this? Thank you.
Yes. Our retention continues to be strong. The 1% downtick is primarily due to the headwind and the upsell that Sumedh commented earlier. We are seeing additional deal scrutiny, extended deal cycles on with existing customers. We are looking and revisiting potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and that contributed to the percentage down quarter-over-quarter.
Great. Thank you.
One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi, this is Anusha for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking my question here. It's good to see current billings accelerate, versus last quarter back to double digits growth. Maybe how should we think about billings growth in the second half of the year? Should we expect billings growth to continue to accelerate? If so, could it accelerate back to mid to high teens growth, given, comms ease in the back half of the year?
Yeah. We typically don't guide to correct billings because we don't actively manage to that number, and then it, it could fluctuate due to the billing terms of the customer. With that said, what we're seeing right now in the business is, you know, 9%-11%, we don't see that materially ticking up in the next quarter. I think it'll be more like the same, assuming that there are no significant changes in the billing terms of existing and new customers coming in. Q4 is a little too early to tell, and but at the same time, we, we don't see it going down to single digits right now.
Got it. You significantly outperformed in profitability, with 48% EBITDA margin, which is a significant step up, from last quarter. Can you talk about what's driving that outperformance and improved leverage?
It's primarily due to the fact that, you know, we've always taken a very disciplined approach to investing. We've been very flexible because, the, the way we look at investment opportunities, we take a look at invest initiatives that we have set planned for the full year, and then we tend to prioritize based on the returns that we see, from each of the investments that we've already made. Right now, we just didn't see that there was a reason for us to accelerate and increase investments in multiple different areas, and especially because we, we knew that we were looking for a new CRO. We had planned on finding the right person this year, and we're very fortunate to have Dino on board.
With him on board with us right now, we'll be reassessing all the initiatives to understand maybe it makes sense for us to increase investments in Q3 or Q4. Based on what we see right now, we think that the most likely scenario is ending the full year at EBITDA margin in the 45% range.
Got it. Thank you.
One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger from D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for, for taking my questions. Joo Mi, I, I just wanna maybe clarify on the current calculated billings and, and maybe the revenue guide. I know last quarter, you had said you expected current calculated billings growth to accelerate throughout the rest of the year. Obviously, it, it's, it popped 2 points here in Q2 over Q1. Just to be clear, you expect current calculated billing growth to remain roughly flat in Q3 and Q4? I just wanna make sure that's what you're saying. you know, on the guide, again, for the full year, growth about the same at the midpoint, but I think exiting the year, the guide now implies growth closer to about 11% versus probably, you know, 13-ish % previously. it does appear to be a step down in the growth exiting the year.
Just wanna make sure that there's nothing I'm missing there.
Yeah. So in terms of the Calculated Billings, we knew that even though we don't manage it, we knew the 9% Q1 was an anomaly. It wasn't really representative of the business momentum that we were seeing. So that's why we had indicated that it would be higher for the remainder of the year. Looking at 11% in Q3, I don't think that will be materially different. I don't see it kind of ticking down from that 11% right now. Q3 and Q4, I think it'll probably be more in line with that, that 11% achievement that we had in Q2, or potentially higher.
Okay, maybe just one last one on the models. Gross margin stepped up, good amount, Q2 versus Q1, and I think just, probably the highest you've shown at least several years. Is that kind of a new go-forward bar for gross margins, or was there anything that you benefited from one time in the quarter?
Nothing to call out. I think that one, one change that we did make this year is employee PDP merit cycle was done a little bit later, so that will hit in Q3 versus Q2. If you take a look at the gross margin at 82%, we expect to hover around the 81%-82%. We are getting some cost savings just because we are taking a disciplined approach, making sure that we're getting the efficiency where we think that we can. It's nothing material to call out there. We think that it'll hover around that range.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
One moment for our next question. Our next question from the line of Mike Walkley from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.
Great, thanks. Wanted to ask maybe about the GovCloud introduction. You know, how is the early feedback from the Fed and government customers, and are you seeing that maybe Fed customers might be more or less willing to work towards vendor consolidation in your enterprise space?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's really been exciting for us to see the, the conversations that we are having with the federal customers. I think, these are one of the best conversations I have seen since I've taken over, and so I think that's very encouraging for us. We had, you know, a couple good wins last quarter. We highlighted that as well from the federal side, and we have a good pipeline that's developing. Primarily because when you talk about FedRAMP High ready and, you know, the fact that the platform can do batch management and vulnerability management, all of it in one, there's no other vendor right now that has that FedRAMP High batch management, as an example. So the engagement really becomes very comprehensive.
It's not just about, "Can you scan and give me a FedRAMP High scanner?" Those conversations become more holistic in nature. What's also interesting is that the FedRAMP High and the GovCloud conversation is also driving commercial customers that want to also provide FedRAMP High services to the government to have these conversations with us. Because they want their clouds to be their solutions to be FedRAMP High. It's not, not just the pipeline building from the federal government, but also the pipeline that we're encouraged to see the early signs from commercial customers who are saying, "We, we need to go FedRAMP or go FedRAMP High," and Qualys is one of the only platforms that is providing that kind of a risk management side of the house, which has the FedRAMP High side of.
Great. That's good to hear and helpful. Just for my follow-up question, congratulations on adding Dino DiMarino to the team. Just, just to clarify on OpEx, is it area you, you've slowed in the near term as you wait for him to kind of formulate a, a plan, and that's the higher profitability, or is it just overall cautiousness given the macro backdrop? Thank you.
It's more the former, because we really believe that We are focused on balancing growth and profitability, and we think that there is a huge upside and opportunity ahead of us. But then again, we wanna make sure that we time it so that we maximize the return. Right now we are just reassessing, regrouping to make sure we understand and we can justify some of the investments that we're gonna double down on.
Great, that makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question, come from the line of Yun from Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Okay, great. Thank you. Just following up on that question, congrats on the hiring of the new CRO. Should we expect any change to the go-to-market motion in second half of the year? What are some of the investments around go-to-market that you are initially planning in second half, that you plan on, on, on delaying into next year?
You know, I think one of the, the reasons why we were so excited to have Dino is we have that product-led growth mindset, and so I think which really gels well with the culture here at Qualys, given all the capabilities that we have on the platform and so many opportunities that we have, as you saw today, even with the first party risk assessment capability. I think, if you look at some of the investments that we have been driving, even before Dino came on board, pretty excited to see that, some of them, those investments in, that we have in marketing and partner are actually showing some good early signs with a strong pipeline, very good interaction with our partners, et cetera.
You know, there are other areas where sales enablement, et cetera, where we're continuing to invest. Those, some of those are going to continue because I think we have strong conviction in the, in, in the go-to-market motion around building that pipeline. As Dino comes on board and he is sort of looking at, you know, how the sales team is structured and how we're going to address larger accounts that are spending $25,000 or more versus the, the smaller accounts of $20,000 or less. There are certain areas where we are looking at where do we make the investments? Where do we optimize the investments that we already made, right? We, we have a good growth in investments last year relative to the year before.
Some of those investments, we need to, to optimize them to make sure we're getting the value out of those. Dino will come and as he's on board now, he will look at some of those areas as well, and then we'll formulate, you know, an overall thesis. I'm, I'm involved on a day-to-day basis, every day with the business, and so him and I are gonna partner to make sure that we continue our focus on growth and profitability, and, and balancing those while looking at additional opportunities to improve our execution in sales, as well as the rest of the GTM and improvement in partner motion, et cetera, so that we can set ourselves up for the longer, the longer term growth that we believe that we can bring.
Oh, great. Thank you for that. Joo Mi, there, there was a huge sequential increase in the long-term deferred revenue. Is there, like a concerted effort to sign longer duration deals? Or was that just a couple of larger deals that just tend to have bigger deals in the quarter?
It's latter. We're happy to have multi-year prepays, but it's not something that, that we were actively seeking.
Okay, great. It's not something that changed this past quarter, the strategy around those deal contracts length?
No.
Okay, great. Thank you.
One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Hey, this is Patrick on for Josh. Thanks for taking my question. First, on the billings in the quarter, linearity seems strong. Did you all see any benefit from deals that may have slipped out of 1Q and into 2Q? Then with the adjusted EBITDA commentary moving up to 45%, the 45% range for the full year, does that change the commentary around the low to mid- 30s% free cash flow margin expectations for the full year? Thanks.
Yeah. I'll answer the EBITDA margin and the free cash flow margin guide. We're guiding to midpoint of 40% for the EBITDA, and then free cash flow will be in the mid-30s% now, not low-30s% because of that.
Okay, great. Then on the billings, did you all see any benefit from deals that may have slipped out of 1Q?
Not particularly. We typically call out if there's a large deal that impacted current billings. We didn't really see anything in Q1 or Q2 to call out, but naturally, there's always slippage, right? Sometimes we have some benefits, and we have some takes.
Okay, great. Thank you.
One moment for our next question. Our next question comes line of Matt Saltzman from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. I'm just curious around any potential contributions from the MOVEit hack inter quarter. I know you mentioned, you know, it's still a tough period with deal scrutiny and delayed starts, but I'm curious if you saw kind of any incremental demand related to the hack, and if so, if you're just able to maybe quantify what the, what the potential benefit was.
No, nothing meaningful changed from that perspective. I mean, it's the same pattern that we saw even back with SolarWinds or whatever it is. Our customers typically, you know, they and prospect, they engage to understand and come out with a more long-term strategy around addressing these things rather than an immediate reaction of having to find and deploy sort of immediately more licenses, et cetera. We really didn't see any impact on Q2 of that. Of course, you know, it continues to highlight the importance of vulnerability management and patching these vulnerabilities in time, because that was one of the biggest thing, was not just that the vulnerability was there, it was actually being exploited pretty rapidly.
The conversation from our customers that we had was more around: Hey, can you help us fix it and patch it, not just, you know, can you detect that with a scanner? You know, I think what we're seeing is just continued engagement, where vulnerability management and risk management around that is a strong focus for customers, but nothing to call out from a contribution in this quarter.
Got it. Thanks. Just as a quick follow-up, on the announcement around risk assessment for first-party apps, I'm curious if the plan is to directly monetize this and, and that it'll have an incremental ASP uplift, or is this more about just bolstering the overall VMDR platform and, and, you know, making it stickier, making it more attractive for customers to adopt, you know, multiple solutions? Thanks.
Yeah, I think that's always what I dream of every night I go to sleep and wake up, is continued adoption and, and how all of these things will contribute towards, you know, better retention of VMDR. Look, the way we look at this is, is the third party risk assessment with CVEs has been something that Qualys and others have been providing for a while. Today, over half the software running on servers, et cetera, is homegrown software, and that does not have a good way to, to create signatures and find vulnerabilities that are very specific to each individual customer. So for us, providing this additional capability will be an add-on to the VMDR platform that customers will have to purchase.
What we do see is that, because it then brings their third-party and first-party vulnerabilities and misconfigurations into a single view, and with the initial conversations that I've had with about seven CISOs in the last couple of days, we're quite excited about the initial feedback that we are getting, where they, they really don't have good tools right now, where a lot of them are writing their own scripts by hand. If they could just leverage the deployment of Qualys that they already have on the same asset to also look for their own custom vulnerabilities, a lot of them really want to, to take a look at it and evaluate it, and it will be a additional, you know, revenue, that we will look for.
It's too early at this point to call out for how that traction of, of embracing that will be from our customers and the adoption, et cetera. You know, we'll continue to, to look at it and monitor it. Just like we've done for Patch Management and CyberSecurity Asset Management, we will continue to look at this and Total Cloud as the additional newer areas that we're getting good feedback on and see how they will start to contribute towards the ASE.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. With that, we'll end our Q&A session. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.