Good afternoon, and welcome to ShotSpotter's Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Shamali, and I will be your operator for today's call. Joining us are ShotSpotter's CEO, Ralph Clark and CFO, Alan Stewart. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today will include forward looking statements about future events and ShotSpotter's business strategy and future financial and operating performance. These forward looking statements are only predictions and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict and may cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by those statements.
Certain of these risks and assumptions are discussed in ShotSpotter's SEC filings, including its registration statement on Form S-1. These forward looking statements reflect management's beliefs, estimates and predictions as of the date of this live broadcast, August 6, 2020, and ShotSpotter undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at ir.shotspotter.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to ShotSpotter's CEO, Ralph Clark. Sir, please proceed.
Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today. I hope everyone on the call is doing well. We're managing to stay safe at ShotSpotter and are following local healthcare department guidelines with respect to COVID-nineteen. As usual, I'm going to start with a quick overview of the quarter and our operational outlook before Alan details the quarterly results. We'll then take your questions after that.
We're pleased to report that some of our field customer facing teams have been a bit more mobile since late May. Their ability to get back out into the field has had a positive impact on both customer engagement and moving our pipeline forward. The Q2 was a solid step toward reestablishing our previous momentum after the lockdown suspended most of our sales and renewal activity. We reported quarterly revenues of $11,300,000 up 10% from $10,300,000 a year ago and net income of $866,000 or $0.07 per diluted share versus $387,000 or $0.03 per diluted share in the Q2 of 2019. We went live with 26 new miles, including expansions in Cincinnati and New York City as well as new deployments in Springfield, Illinois, Albuquerque, the U.
S. Virgin Islands and Mammoth County in New Jersey. During and subsequent to the end of the quarter, we also booked 2 new cities, Cleveland and Fort Lauderdale, and we've also been selected to provide gunshot detection services to a portion of Broward County, which is the largest sheriff's department in the state of Florida. We're also awaiting the final award decision for RFP bid we submitted to a large Tier 1 Midwest city. These client engagements are in addition to a couple of Tier 4 cities that we booked since our last earnings call.
These deals are fully staffed in active projects that we expect to bring live later this year. We also saw very encouraging progress with our international pipeline. Since the end of the second quarter, we were awarded an international tender with the City of Nelson Mandela Bay in South Africa. This was a competitive tender win accomplished in spite of multiple municipal leadership changes and the recent challenges presented by the pandemic. I believe this award evidences our international viability and we believe it will strengthen our position to win additional overseas contracts that are in our growing international pipeline.
Our deal cadence is picking up and we continue to benefit from both our direct marketing and sales team outreach as well as the referrals we get from existing clients. We constantly hear police chiefs describe ShotSpotter as indispensable and critical. They mean it. We see it in how they advocate for us with their peers that are our prospects and especially in how they advocate for us when their ShotSpotter contracts come up for renewal. We're pleased that we did not experience any attrition this quarter and we are encouraged with our strong renewal activity to date.
In Q2 alone, we renewed multiyear contracts with 6 clients, representing nearly $7,000,000 in bookings. And bear in mind that these particular renewals were signed during a period of intense scrutiny of police departments and municipal budget contraction. In some cities, such as Sacramento, where we signed a 5 year extension, we prevailed against a strong disinformation campaign led by certain supporters of the defund the police movement. That's a testament as to how valued our gunshot detection and precision policing technology has become. I want to quickly speak to the defund the police movement and how it might affect ShotSpot.
In a nutshell, we don't see it as a material threat and actually believe it may well represent a potential catalyst for our business. It's important to remember that defund the police does not necessarily mean abolish the police. What the core of the movement is calling for is a fundamental change in how policing happens in America. The kinds of changes being demanded are changes our technology supports and enables. I blogged a bit on this and I've also done some media interviews on this subject.
In my mind, it comes down to the simple choice between a posture of over policing while underserving versus precision policing combined with community inspired engagement. Precision policing recognizes that violent crime is fundamentally a Pareto problem and that relatively few factors cause most of the community harm. Measurable increases in community public safety happen when these few high risk individuals receive focused policing intervention. In other words, offenders need to be policed and communities need to be served. Inspired community service happens when public safety outcomes are coproduced with law enforcement working with law abiding citizens as a trusted partner.
It's difficult for a police department to credibly claim that it protects and serves the community if it doesn't respond to 80% to 90% of gunfire events that happen on a persistent basis, even if those gunfire events are not reported in the 1st place. This leads to normalized violence, which can produce all manner of negative outcomes, including pediatric trauma. And ultimately and sadly, it builds the business case for community distrust of the police. That is exactly the problem that ShotSpotter solves. We provide that real time awareness of gunfire events that allows police to be smart on crime and protect and serve at the same time.
Our real time alerts allow faster responses to gunfire incidents, increasing citizens' belief that in fact police do care and are engaged in improving the safety of their neighborhood. Our alerts provide immediate data on the number of rounds whether there are multiple shooters with an exact location, so officers can go into each call with a greater situational awareness and confidence. And our tools also help departments aggregate and map gunfire activity so that they can allocate their precious limited resources in order to have the most impact. 1 of our most visible customers, the New York City Police Department, has continued to expand its ShotSpotter deployment. We now cover approximately 74 miles in the city.
In one of his recent news conferences, NYPD Commissioner, Dermot Shea, specifically cited ShotSpotter by name as a critical component of his department's evolution toward using intelligence and data driven tools that can keep crime down even as you build trust in the community. The public outcry and demonstrations calling for policing reform due to the violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are pushing other police departments to follow NYPD's example. The ability to help police achieve their mission is especially valuable because gun crime remains a chronic and growing problem in the U. S. And for many of the reasons that I enumerated in last quarter's call, we believe the COVID crisis has exacerbated many of the underlying causes of gun crime.
We recently reported that the number of ShotSpotter alerted gun fire incidents on a comparative basis have increased 34.6% year to date 2020 over 2019 and over 68% since the George Floyd incident. ShotSpotter is more useful and necessary than ever before. As police departments reduce and reallocate budgets and resources, a proven, automated and highly effective solution like ours become, well, we think it's indispensable. And going forward, we're working to ensure that we remain so. Our incident review center personnel are active 20 fourseven, 365 days a year, and our customers have come to rely unconditionally on us.
And even with the aggressive quarantine in California, we have kept the IRC team fully staffed and operating seamlessly. Most of you know that we're in the process of building a satellite incident review center in Washington, D. C. As a part of our new operations and sales presence in the capital. This effort has been delayed by the COVAC crisis, but we're moving forward and hope to be up and running later this month.
This will enhance our ability to advocate directly with federal and D. C. Based influencers and policymakers. It will also add capacity and redundancy to our incident review center and provide an East Coast presence for sales and marketing activity. We believe that ShotSpotter can also increase its value to customers by providing complementary solutions to our core Flex gunshot detection technology.
Our Missions platform is designed to do just that with AI driven analysis and forecasting of crime trends and activity. For many police departments, this kind of mission planning can maximize the impact of patrol and better utilize human resources. Again, an increasingly important criterion for public safety decision makers in a changing police environment. The latest version of Missions has now been available for approximately 11 months and is in place in 8 police departments. We executed 4 renewals last quarter, which is evidence that these early adopting customers are pleased with the results they're seeing and they're voting with their budgets.
Before Alan goes deeper into the quarter, I want to directly convey to our team how proud I am of the excellent job everyone in the company has been doing under tough circumstances. There's a lot of detail, large and small, technological and logistical that need to be addressed whenever we deploy or expand a ShotSpotter installation. Our teams have been handling these details with amazing professionalism and care and often from 1,000 of miles away during quarantine. We've really stretched ourselves as an organization at every level from sales to service to incident response. I'm incredibly proud and doubly confident that we've created an organization that can maximize the growth opportunity ahead of us.
And that opportunity remains large. As discussed, our solution fits the need of modern police departments. We have a technology and service delivery solution that has no real competition even as we continue to erect wider and taller barriers to entry. And our unsurpassed brand strength and reputation continue to grow. All in all, I feel confident about our prospects and I look forward to taking your questions after Alan reviews our results.
Over to you, Alan. Thank you, Rob. We're very pleased with our performance in the Q2. We successfully deployed 26 new miles with no attrition. We added 4 new cities, achieved record revenue, record gross profit and record adjusted EBITDA.
These were all accomplished despite the ongoing COVID-nineteen pandemic along with the social unrest that is affecting our police department customers. We believe our progress is a reflection of the increasing need for our services and the resiliency of our business model. As we discussed last quarter, in light of ongoing concerns around municipal budget, our full year guidance included approximately 5% attrition versus the 2% to 3% we normally expect. We continue to experience strong renewals, including receipt of the delayed 300 $1,000 we mentioned in our Q1 earnings call. With the continuing issues around municipal budgets, we're certainly not ready to say the risk to renewals is behind us, but conversations with customers confirm our belief that as Ralph mentioned, our technology, the solutions we provide and how the assist in community policing is more important than ever.
Let me provide more details in the quarter and then I will share some thoughts around the balance of the year. 2nd quarter revenues were slightly ahead of expectations at $11,300,000 a 10% increase over the $10,300,000 in the Q2 of 2019. The increased revenues reflect a significant increase in new miles as well as delayed renewals from last quarter. Gross profit for the Q2 of 2020 was $6,900,000 or 61 percent of revenue versus $6,000,000 or 58 percent of revenue for the prior year period. We also saw a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA for the Q2, which was $3,400,000 a 41% increase from the $2,400,000 in the Q2 of 2019.
As a reminder, adjusted EBITDA is calculated by taking our GAAP net income and adding back interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and stock based compensation. Now turning to our expenses. Our operating expenses for the 2nd quarter were $6,000,000 or 53 percent of revenue versus $5,700,000 or 55 percent of revenue in the Q2 of 2019. With our operations slowed, we did benefit somewhat from lower travel costs. We completed the implementation of the software that we discussed last quarter to assist our finance and customer success team and are just beginning to benefit from the increased efficiency.
Breaking down our expenses, sales and marketing expense for the Q2 was $2,300,000 or 21 percent of total revenue versus $2,400,000 or 24 percent of total revenue for the prior year period. Our sales and marketing teams continue to focus on building the sales pipeline and expanding our marketing growth. Our R and D expenses for the Q2 were $1,400,000 or 12 percent of total revenue compared to $1,400,000 or 13% of total revenue for the prior year period. We continue to invest in increasing the functionality of our Missions platform along with expanding our analysis capabilities as we evaluate applications for our data in forensic support and litigation. G and A expenses for the quarter were $2,300,000 or 21% of total revenue compared to $1,900,000 or 18 percent of total revenue for the prior year period.
Our GAAP net income for the Q2 was $866,000 or $0.08 per share based on 11,400,000 basic and 0 point based on 11,700,000 diluted weighted average shares outstanding. This compares to a GAAP net income of $387,000 or $0.03 per share based on $11,400,000 basic and $12,000,000 diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the prior year period. We went live in 4 new cities in Q2 along with 4.6 mile expansion in New York City where we now cover almost 74 miles a day.
At the end of the
Q2, 7 61 miles were live with approximately 7 70 miles under contract. Deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $22,300,000 versus $24,600,000 at the end of Q1 2020. We ended the quarter with $25,800,000 in cash and short term investments versus $28,700,000 at the end of Q1. In Q2, we spent $1,600,000 repurchasing our shares. We've now deployed a total of $8,300,000 of the $15,000,000 share repurchase authorized by our Board.
We have no short or long term debt. However, we expect to raise the borrowing limit on our revolving line of credit from $10,000,000 to approximately $20,000,000 in the near future to improve financial flexibility. We are narrowing our full year revenue outlook to $43,500,000 to $45,500,000 from the previous outlook of $43,000,000 to $46,000,000 The midpoint remains the same. The timing of adding new miles throughout the remainder of the year would determine where we end in this range, along with our continued success in minimizing attrition. At the midpoint of our guidance, our revenue growth will be approximately 9% for the year.
We now expect to remain profitable in both Q3 and Q4 as well as 2020 as a whole. We expect revenues to be flat from Q2 to Q3 with an increase in Q4. Expenses will increase nominally in absolute dollars in each of our operating expense categories throughout the remainder of the year. I don't need to tell you that despite our strong quarter, the world does not back to normal. Yet as we continue to be encouraged by the resiliency of our business, including our employees and customers, in addition to our operating model.
Our optimism about ShotSpotter's long term opportunity has only increased and we are encouraged that even in the near term we can grow and increase profitability. As always, thank you for your support and partnership in helping the ShotSpotter team do well by doing good. Now back over to you, Wes. Thank you very much, Alan. I'll close by reiterating a point that I made last quarter that while we don't believe ShotSpotter is recession proof, we do feel the company is somewhat recession resistant because public safety is always top of mind with those that control and influence municipal budgets.
And our service is a critical element in cost effectively addressing public safety in its most acute form, gun violence. Our unit economics remain strong. Our scale and operational efficiency continue to expand, creating a solid profitable foundation on which to grow. And now we've not only proven that we have the resiliency to survive, but can even modestly thrive in a difficult operating environment. Thank you very much for joining us today, and we're now prepared to take your questions.
Our first question is from Joe Osha from JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Hello. This is actually Hillary on for Joe. And I just wanted to first kind of touch on your revised guidance range. I was just wondering if you could provide any clarity on what that might look like broken across those different revenue buckets that you spoke about at the Analyst Day?
Yes. So this is Alan at this point. So I mean we just narrowed the guidance because we're getting more visibility into how the rest of the year looks. We raised it at $500,000 at the bottom and just lowered it to $500,000 at the top as well. The midpoint remains the same.
So we feel pretty optimistic right now about how our renewals are going. We had originally thought we might have as high as 5% of the renewals or attrition in the renewals, and now we expect that to be significantly lower back into our normal range, somewhere around 2% to 3% in terms of actual attrition. But the range itself is predicated on the miles actually lighting up and going live. So we just thought it was appropriate to keep the midpoint of the range where it was as we evaluated how fast the deployments are actually going. Travel has improved, access to customers has improved and deployments have improved a bit, but they certainly aren't back to normal and we continue to monitor that.
Okay, great. And then I was just wondering, when you look at New York City, obviously, the deployment there has been hugely successful. I was just kind of wondering like what's the potential there to see further expansion or is kind of the 74 miles kind of cover the key target areas there? Thank you.
Yes. So this is Ralph. Thank you for that question. So I think New York is fairly well deployed at this point in time. We're across 5 boroughs.
We're in over 70 square miles and they're just doing an incredible job in responding to and following up on ShotSpotter activation. So I don't think it would be appropriate for us to really expect too much more out of New York City at this point in time, although of course anything is possible. I know we said that earlier, yet we're able to get a very small expansion here in this quarter. But I've got to feel like we're pretty close to being top ended in New York City, which is our 2nd largest customer in terms of miles deployed at this point in time.
Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you. And our next question is from Richard Baldry with Roth Capital. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks. I'm sort of curious
if you can talk about how the selling cycle is changing in the work from home environment either for the core gunshot detection or missions as well, how well that's working with your prospects?
Yes. So this is Ralph. I'll start and Alan jump in as appropriate. So I think like a lot of other companies, I mean, we're finding very creative and inventive ways to do things digitally and remotely. We've made a little bit of an investment, I would say, in kind of perfecting the art of giving presentations to prospects over Zoom.
We are still seeing some really good uptake on our marketing outreach, our inside sales group outreach to prospects. And I would say we have a number of customers that seem just because of the recent social unrest and the uptick in gun violence that we're seeing a little bit more of a frothy, I would say, inbound activity than what we've seen. This is very similar, I think, in many ways to what we saw several years ago after the Ferguson event, the Michael Brown Ferguson event, where the nature of the conversations around policing and how policing gets done changes and that generates a lot of interest with potential prospects. I would say for our existing potential prospects. I would say for our existing customers that we're always in dialogue with some of which we're having dialogues with them around expansions.
It's kind of 2 buckets, I would say. There are some that we've been talking with them about expansions and those conversations have been accelerated, I would say. And I think there's other conversations that we're having that have maybe been pushed back a little bit. They're still very interested, but their attention is really being taken away by kind of dealing with the pandemic response and now social unrest response and maybe their budget thing is a little bit less clear at this point in time, but they're still interested. So I think there's some puts and takes there.
But overall, we're feeling really, really good about the relevancy of our solution and the market's understanding about how we can make a difference and how they police in this modern era.
And I had a follow-up. I think last quarter, you said Missions was operational in 2 cities, but with 4 more sort of booked waiting to go live. So could we get an update on that and how you feel about its pipeline going into the second half? Thanks.
Sure. You want me to go ahead, Alan? Yes, go ahead. Yes, I'll go ahead. We've gone live on 2 more of the emissions customers and expect the balance of those to go live fairly soon.
Missions is something that requires a lot of in person activity for data ties and things like that. So it is something that we do expect to be a little slower at least for the next couple of months, but it is actually picking up, the interest is there and it is something we're still very optimistic about over the longer term.
I'm not sure if you're willing to comment on this, but I'm sort of curious about the disinformation campaign you alluded to, so we can understand the types of things that we might see in the media and sort of your responses to those, how you overcome those types of objections? Thanks a lot and congrats on the big adds in the quarter. Great.
Thank you. So I think in general, I would say, there's a lot of energy around defund the police and there are certain segments, I would call extreme segments of defund the police where they are actually being quite literal. Fortunately, that's a bit of a minority. It's a significant minority actually. That's been our observation.
I think the core of the movement, as I mentioned earlier, is really more around how we reimagine and reprioritize how policing gets done, so that they continue to over police less and underserve more. I mean, they want we want to move leasing where they're appropriately serving at risk communities, particularly around gun violence. One of the interesting things that I've observed around what's different kind of post pandemic in terms of how city council meetings happen is before you'd have to be really motivated to kind of drive down to city hall and participate in a discussion around a funding issue and the like. In this world now where things are being done digitally, all of a sudden people can show up from their living rooms through Zoom or whatever and proffer any amount of opinions that they have on things. And that was a little bit of what we saw in a few of our renewals where this is very active mobilized front where people are saying things like defund police, but in a very not constructive way, I guess I would say, because it's just not practical to abolish the police or cut their budgets by 50% and expect that you can have public safety outcomes.
And so what we've tried to do in that environment, I think we've talked earlier about our renewal task force. We're always pretty intentional around how we communicate and discuss our value proposition with customers so that they can feel good about it and then take that forward. We're not actually doing presentations in many of these city council meetings. It really has to be the police department and the local elected officials that have a really good understanding about how the technology is being used, applied and the difference that it's making in achieving public safety outcomes. And we kind of give them the tools and data to be able to do that and be able to articulate it, but they're the ones really carrying the water.
And I think in this particular environment, we've just been hyper, I guess, aggressive about making sure we're getting in front of folks and reminding them of the great work that we do together as a team. And that's been very, very successful we've seen. I think at this point in time, again, it's we're only halfway through the year, but I mean we're basically batting $1,000 on the renewals, notwithstanding the lost customer we talked about in the last quarter's earning call, the Atlanta Smart City initiative. But everywhere else, we're running a really good track record and it's really quite affirming to hear the terms indispensable and critical have really come about when we've had conversations with our customers around the value proposition. They're kind of coming back to us and saying, hey, I cannot do without ShotSpotter.
Now that I have it deployed, I see what it does. I can't go depth, dumb and blind to incidents of gunfire that we now know, we now know 80% to 90% of the time that a gun is fired, people don't call 911 because it's become so normalized. So that's a pretty scary proposition to a police department that has that real experience with our solution to know now that they're in a much better place to be aware of it and respond. And so we've been very successful as a result of that. Great.
Thanks.
And our next question is from Zach Cummins with B. Riley FBR. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the solid results. Ralph, I know you were talking about you've done a really great job in terms of renewal so far this year, especially in Q2 with no attrition. But can you give us a sense of, I guess, how you're feeling as we go into some of the budgetary meetings for these other municipalities in the back half of the year? It sounds like there's a little more clarity there, but just to get some of your perspective on that would be very helpful.
Yes. So I think we're feeling pretty good. Our first line of defense really, as I mentioned earlier, is really around fortifying our value proposition. That's the first line of defense. And if you do a good job, if the solution works and we know it works very well and we're very intentional around establishing, reestablishing, reaffirming our value proposition.
That's the very first line and the most important line of defense around a renewal. And then after that, as Alan and I talked about, we have some other tools in our toolkit that there is truly a budgetary issue. The second line of defense is to go help them find funding to go support their ShotSpotter service offering. And so we're ready and have resources to be able to lean in with an agency if there truly is a budget issue where that second line of defense is, hey, I understand the value, but now I still don't have the money. Let's go work together to figure out how to go get the money from other sources.
Fortunately, we've seen a lot of stimulus dollars that have been provided by the federal government. In fact, I was recently reading an email from the U. S. Conference of Mayors where the White House and Republicans were really arguing that a lot of the money that they've given a number of cities, 38 cities in fact, have not been spent. And the numbers are pretty big numbers, I think, in the case of New York City, there's $1,500,000,000 of stimulus that's there.
That's still unspent. Sacramento, dollars 90,000,000 Denver, dollars 127,000,000 So in as much as these municipal budgets are challenged, they're a little bit offset from some of the federal stimulus money. So I think we're feeling quite constructive. We're not out of the woods yet, as Alan said. It's not going to be 5%.
It's clearly not going to be 0%. We think we're going to do better than that, I think, at this point in time. And Alan, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we're feeling that if we end the year with our normal attrition cadence of 2% to 3%, I think we would count that as a very big win in this really interesting year. Does that answer your question?
Yes, it does. Thank you for that. And in terms of the ever changing restrictions across each state and municipality with COVID-nineteen restrictions, it sounds like your deployment teams had some more mobility in this quarter. But are you still seeing some challenges in certain pockets of the country where you're unable to get feet on the ground to do these deployments?
Absolutely. Yes. Yes, it's not back to normal yet.
Got it. And just one final question. In terms of opportunities at the pipeline, sounds like you are in the final stages with the Tier 1 city. I was just wondering if you could provide some extra context around any of the other opportunities that you're seeing in the pipeline at this point?
So this is Dan. I would say, yes, I don't know that we want to comment too much on that other than to say that our pipeline is strong, probably as strong as it's ever been. And we are seeing some opportunities that are even maybe more short fused and have a shorter sales cycle. And we'll be talking about those in the future. But I don't think we really want to comment too much more beyond that.
Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions and best of luck in Q3.
Thank you. And our next question is from Matt Pfau with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Hey guys, nice quarter and thanks for taking my questions. Wanted to ask on some of the wins that you mentioned both at the end of the second quarter and subsequently some obviously some big cities that are in that mix. Were these opportunities that were in the pipeline pre COVID and then perhaps got delayed a bit and then finally closed or were they put in during COVID? And then I guess what each one is probably different, but what sort of was maybe the tipping point that made these cities feel comfortable with executing the contract with you?
Yes. So Miglia, this is Ralph. I'll try to take that. And I think I don't think we want to comment specifically on any individual deal. I would say it's a category of deals.
Most of those deals were deals that we had been working on prior to COVID. I think you know the company to know that we typically talk about our sales cycles being 12 to 18 months. I would say that there was a sum greater than 0 of things that kind of happened post COVID. I think Alan alluded to the fact that we're seeing some things that are happening on really, really short pieces because of this really significant uptick in gun violence that we're seeing. And hopefully, we're going to be able to say a lot more about that in the next earnings calls about things that we're seeing in terms of sales cycles and how they might be differing for certain types of customers.
But I think I would say it's a mix at this point in time and leave it at that. Okay, got it.
And then in terms of your Latin American opportunities, how are those progressing?
Sure. This is Alan. We think the pipeline is as strong as it's ever been. We still do expect to have at least 1 Latin American booking before the end of the year and more to follow on that.
Got it. Great, guys.
That's it for me. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Our next question is from Jeremy Hammond with Craig Hallum. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, guys. This is Ryan on for Jeremy. You guys talked a little bit about inbound interest being a little frothy, I think you said. Can you talk about the level of interest you've seen? And I know the environment is wildly different, but if you could maybe put it into context compared to last year at this time?
So this is Eric. And that's what I would say. Yes, it's a hard comparison to make in terms of in the middle of COVID and the social unrest right now versus last year when neither of those were there. But I will say that if we were to take a snapshot and just take a look at the pipeline, it's stronger now than it was then. And I think gun buying, as Ralph mentioned in his earlier comments, is increasing at a rapid rate.
And I think that's also one of the reasons that some of the opportunities are coming in. And I would we stay frosty or whatever, but they're coming in faster than some of us would have expected. But I don't know, Ralph, other thoughts there? Yes. I would use this opportunity just to remind folks, too.
And the difficulty of like doing point in point comparisons is, and I say this every earnings call, our business is lumpy. And so I guess I would be a little bit reticent to try to make too much of a comparison for any 1 quarter this year versus a quarter last year, just understanding that things happened lumpy. And this was a fantastic quarter. We're really pleased with it. And but you don't want to draw too much of a parallel or comparison to other cores just because of the lumpiness of our business.
Okay. Thanks guys. That's helpful. And then I guess sort of housekeeping a little bit. You mentioned travel getting back to normal.
Kind of curious with cases rising again, have you had to restrict travel or any sales efforts in particular places that have been hit hard by the sort of second wave that we've seen? And I guess going into the back half of the year, how are you guys thinking about that and doing with things on that front?
Sure. This is Alan and Ralph feel
free to
augment. Travel is not back to normal. So I think when we say getting closer to normal, it means that as opposed to the latter part of March April where we had a travel ban, in May, we did allow our team to go out and do business necessary travel, which includes some sales calls, implementation, things like that. But some of the areas are still locked down, not accessible, certainly not like they were last year or even into January. But we are working around that.
Our customers are working around that. And notwithstanding things getting even worse than they are, we are able to conduct a significant amount of our meetings and do what we need to do and working around that. But there's things like we talked about Houston, maybe this is the time to talk about it. We haven't yet been able to make substantial progress in Houston because they still have a lot of problems down there that they're dealing with. So our ability to work on that pilot program has been delayed.
It's not going away, but it's been delayed, but that's just an example of some of the limitations in travel.
All right, great. Thanks guys and congrats on the quarter. Thank you.
At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. If your question was not taken, you may contact ShotSpotter's Investor Relations team by emailing sstigatewayir.com. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Clark for his closing remarks.
Great. Yes, thank you very much. I really hope that everyone is doing well and keeping safe and really appreciate your support over the quarters and looking forward to chatting with you in the next 90 days or so when we're reporting on Q3. Everyone take care. Thank you.
Thank you for joining us today for today's call. You may now disconnect.