Qualys Inc
NASDAQ:QLYS
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Qualys Inc
Earnings Call Analysis
Q2-2024 Analysis
Qualys Inc
In the second quarter of 2024, Qualys faced a challenging IT spending environment. However, they reported an 8% increase in revenues, totaling $148.7 million. The company's strategy to leverage its partner ecosystem paid off, with channel revenue growing by 17% compared to a 2% growth in direct revenue. International revenue also showed stronger growth at 14%, compared to a 5% growth in domestic revenue.
Qualys' calculated current billings were negatively impacted due to the sunset of their embedded solutions for Microsoft Defender from May 1. Without this, the billings growth would have been 1%. The net dollar expansion rate decreased to 102% from 104% the previous quarter due to the challenging economic environment, but they managed to post double-digit new bookings growth for the fourth consecutive quarter.
The channel continued to increase its contribution, making up 46% of total revenues compared to 43% a year ago. Products like patch management and cybersecurity asset management comprised 13% of the Last Twelve Months (LTM) bookings and 22% of the new bookings in the second quarter. Qualys also reported significant growth in customers spending over $500,000 annually, which grew by 18%.
Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $69.9 million, a 47% margin compared to 48% a year ago. Operating expenses increased by 10% to $59 million, primarily due to a 22% increase in sales and marketing expenses. Despite a challenging spend environment, they maintained a strong profitability profile with Q2 earnings per share (EPS) of $1.52 and free cash flow of $48.8 million.
Looking ahead, Qualys has adjusted its revenue guidance for the full year 2024 to be between $597.5 million and $615.5 million, which corresponds to an 8% growth rate. For Q3, they expect revenues between $149.8 million and $151.8 million, a growth rate of 5% to 7%. They also set a full-year EPS range of $5.46 to $5.62, up from the prior range of $5.06 to $5.30, and project an EBITDA margin between 43% and 44%.
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Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the 2024 Second Quarter Qualys Investor Call. [Operator Instructions]. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Blair King, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Marvin. Good afternoon, and welcome to Qualys' Second Quarter 2024 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 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, 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 and as a reminder, the press release, prepared remarks and investor presentation, all available on the Investor Relations website. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Sumedh.
Thank you, Blair, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. In Q2, we witnessed organizations increasingly optimized spend within an already tight IT spending environment. Given this dynamic, organizations are standardizing on trusted platforms to consolidate security stacks, leverage automation and achieve experienced remediation of risk.
Qualys has a unique organically built platform to address this need. Nevertheless, execution is required to fully capitalize on this opportunity. While we have made meaningful progress on several fronts, including growing our sales and marketing team, building momentum with partners, and growing our new business, we have work to do in addressing our upsell execution in the current environment, which resulted in lower-than-expected bookings growth this quarter.
With the upcoming departure of our Chief Product Officer later this month, I plan to directly oversee the product and marketing teams to position us for forward success. I'm confident in our ability to reaccelerate growth in the long term with sharpened execution of product-led growth and improved alignment between our product messaging and marketing activities to drive operational efficiencies in our go-to-market motion.
At this time, I'd like to thank [indiscernible], our Chief Officer for his contribution during his tenure at Qualys. Although Q2 was a challenging upsell quarter for us, which continued -- with continued increase in deal scrutiny, we are fortunate that many of our customers have already begun a long-term transformation journey with us.
Through the conversations I've had with many CSOs over the past several quarters, their message is clear. They are looking to pivot to a natively integrated risk management solution. In the face of sluggish macro escalating threat environment and cybersecurity skill gap, organizations need to reduce complexity and cost while presenting measurable risk reduction initiatives to Boards and C-level executives.
Against this backdrop, Q2 was another quarter of rapid innovation for Qualys, reflecting our ongoing commitment to technology, leadership and customer success. Qualys' mission has been to bring innovative new security solutions to market fueled by customer insights. As a result, we have established a strong track record of converting operational challenges into structural competitive advantages, while maximizing lifetime value, ensuring frictionless outcome at scale and driving immediate ROI on security spend.
For example, Qualys pioneered a touching category for security teams on building on this success, we commenced development of our tourist element capability several quarters ago. I'm now pleased to announce that some of these increasingly popular solution amongst our beta customers will soon enable organizations to respond to 0-defect and mitigate top exploitable vulnerability, even when a patch is nonexistent or cannot be deployed.
This new subset of our broader true risk eliminate road map which we call [ tourist mitigate ] and [indiscernible] and power security teams to apply fixable, automated and intelligent risk-based response solutions to address cybersecurity risk based on an organization's own unique operational characteristics, remediation time lines and business objectives.
With these new capabilities, soon going [ GA's ] strong customer support and over 45 million patches deployed year-to-date on Qualys agents. We are increasingly confident that we are once again transforming our customer security operations while further magnifying our competitive differentiation in the market.
Continuing our innovation to help our customers address risks coming from the use of latest technologies like AI, LLM, we are pleased to announce our newest capability, which we call Qualys Total AI. As organizations rapidly deploy AI LLM technologies, the security teams are looking for help to quickly find and comprehensively assess vulnerabilities in these models.
With seamless AI security posture management integration, these new adaptive capabilities discover AI LLM usage within customers' environment scan for vulnerabilities and prevent data leakage for comprehensive risk assessment, prioritization and remediation across the entire attack surface with a single click of a button.
In addition, we are pleased to announce an extension to our top cloud [ SNAP ] platform, which now discovers and assesses the risk of all known and unknown in-use idn images, leveraging our own AI and [ ML ] technology, we are establishing a baseline for normal behavior for each host container, [indiscernible] function and other objects.
Now through real-time observation of file system processes and network activity, our new [indiscernible] security tools provide organizations with a predictive and threat-based protection to actively detect anomalous activities, prevent zero-day attacks, automated response and help ensure [ PCI RO ] compliance in both containerized and legacy environments. These new container run time insights, combined with toxic is factors within a unified actionable dashboard allow for immediate threat qualification, prioritization and remediation from core to cluster. We believe this new capability uniquely sets us apart to enable secure and compliant cloud consumption at scale.
Turning to our federal agenda. We recently reduced Fed moderate certification for our total cloud [ SNAP ] and [ EDR ] solution, marking another key milestone for the company. We continue to expect our pending [indiscernible] high certification for several key applications later this year, making Qualys the only modern alternative to legacy on-prem scanners for federal state and local government agencies at the high impact level.
Our investments to establish a public sector presence are starting to yield results, supporting our confidence to address this new vertical and drive incremental growth in the business over time. Finally, with respect to our upcoming enterprise use management solution, we remain on track for GA later this year. This extension to our platform is currently in private beta with select field design partners.
The ability to bring first and third-party data into our platform to holistically detect, quantify, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities with automated workflows on a unified dashboard across on-prem cloud and multi-cloud environments is evolving into the go-to risk management solution for enterprises, especially with the context of -- in the context of a tight spending environment.
The early customer feedback we are receiving is very positive. And it's great to see CSOs from around the world actively attend and engage in many requantification workshops we have been conducting over the past several months. These innovative new approaches to cybersecurity risk management, along with several others we have showcased at [ Black had ] this week allow our customers to reduce complexity and cost and of equal importance create multidimensional paths for durable long-term growth in our business.
Moving to our business update. We believe that with continued deal scrutiny comes larger opportunity for Qualys over the long term as our natively integrated risk management platform helps customers consolidate technologies and achieve better outcomes within less fewer resources and immediate ROI. With many of our customers already embracing Qualys to help re-architect and consolidate their stack, Qualys [ VMDR ] solution has translated into an enviable customer base, deep penetration and significant industry recognition.
As recently announced, Qualys VMDR with [ true risk ] as we get the best vulnerability management solution at the 2024 SC Awards Europe for the second consecutive year. We believe Qualys is placement as the #1 VM solution further validates our investments in the platform and continue to represent the gold standard for securing customer environments today and in the future.
Given Qualys' blueprint for delivering greater value to our customers, our VMDR solution with Truist is not only fueling new logo ads but also helping increase platform adoption, especially in the areas of cybersecurity asset management with [ EAS ] patch management and cloud security.
Let me share a couple of recent wins with new customers, which illustrates why companies turn to Qualys to help consolidate their security tools and improve their security posture.
In Q2, a large federal government agency became a customer of Qualys. This new customer was previously using multiple legacy and next-gen solutions to manage a variety of risk management use cases across their security IT and [ DevOps ] teams. In addition to the complexity of using multi-point products, this government agency was frustrated with increasing costs associated with on-prem deployments.
Looking to migrate into a natively integrated cloud-based [ Pedram, ] high-impact level ready solution that met the security, the CISA BOD guidelines. They replaced 2 of their existing vendors in a high 6-figure bookings Phase 1 deployment using multiple Qualys modules right out of the gate. These initial deployments include cybersecurity asset management with [ ES ] and [ VMDR ] with true risk and patch management.
Through this highly strategic and competitive win this customer is now able to leverage unified dashboards that provide them with greater insights and automation that many of the competitive products they evaluated, while taking full advantage of the speed and scale of an integrated platform. This win is a further testament to the investments we're making to expand our federal business, and we are also very pleased with the turnout and encouraging feedback from many large government agencies at our public sector -- first public sector cybersecurities conference that we held in May.
In a second new high 6-figure customer win, hyper-growth, cloud-native SaaS business, standardizing Qualys enterprise risk platform. This company's security team struggled with managing multiple consoles, lack of integration, complex workflows, misdetection and extended remediation times which restricted their ability to protect themselves. This customer is now consolidating on the Qualys enterprise tourist management platform replacing several competing vendors through a natively integrated multiproduct solution, including Cyber Security Asset Management with ESM, VMDR with Truist, Patch Management and our total cloud SNAP solution.
Now with the comprehensive multisensor solution, single user interface and single platform, they have complete visibility and automated remediation across their endpoints and multi-cloud environments. With seamlessly integrated solutions delivered natively on our platform to solve more unsecurity challenges. More and more police customers are beginning to understand how cybersecurity transformation drives better security outcomes, saves time and costs less.
As a result, customers spending $500,000 or more with us in Q2 grew 18% from a year ago, 299. Beyond these wins, 0we are also increasingly gaining leverage from our partner ecosystem. Our pipeline of business opportunities with partners continues to grow, and our partner-led win rates increased again in Q2.
As our market perception and brand awareness continue to strengthen, we anticipate partner integration with our platform will continue to increase further strengthening our strategic position, expanding our ecosystem and broadening our reach.
In summary, our rapid innovation engine underscores our growing thought leadership and the value proposition we deliver to customers seeking to transform, consolidate and fortify their security posture. Given the large market opportunity in front of us and multiple growth drivers in our business, we anticipate that we can grow at scale long term, generate cash and invest in key initiatives that will further extend the gap between Qualys and the competition.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Joo Mi to discuss in more detail our second quarter results and outlook for the third quarter and full year 2024.
Thanks, Sumedh, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenue, all 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 8% to $148.7 million with channel continuing to increase its contribution, making up 46% of total revenues compared to 43% a year ago. As a result of our continued commitment to leverage our partner ecosystem to drive growth, we were able to grow revenues from channel partners by 17%, outpacing direct, which grew 2%. [indiscernible], 14% growth outside the U.S. was ahead of our domestic business, which grew 5%. U.S. and international revenue mix was 58% and 42%, respectively.
As for calculated current billings, we would like to note that our Q2 calculated current billings were negatively impacted by the sunset of our embedded solutions for Microsoft Defender as of May 1. Earlier this year, we announced that we will be retiring our integration on Microsoft Defender and transitioning to BYOL model.
Since subsequent in Q2, we have been fielding inbound from former policy on Microsoft Defender users working closely with them to ensure that they understand the value of our cloud security solution, total cloud [indiscernible]. Normalize for this change, our calculated current billings growth would have been 1%.
In Q2, with the continued challenging spend environment, resulting in lower performance and [ upsell ], our net dollar expansion rate declined to 102% from 104% last quarter. Conversely, we continue to see strong returns on our new business initiatives and achieved double-digit new bookings growth for the fourth consecutive quarter. With this momentum in new customer bookings growth, we believe we're building a stronger foundation to drive expansion and share gains over time.
In terms of product contribution to bookings, patch management and cybersecurity asset management combined made up 13% of LTM bookings and 22% of LTM new bookings in Q2. [indiscernible] Solutions, total cloud [indiscernible] made up 4% of LTM bookings.
Turning to profitability. Reflecting our scalable and sustainable business model, adjusted EBITDA in Q2 was $69.9 million, representing a 47% margin compared to a 48% margin a year ago. Operating expenses in Q2 increased by 10% to $59 million, primarily driven by a 22% increase in sales and marketing, investments aimed at capturing the market opportunities in front of us.
As we continue to increase our investment intensity, and focus on sales and marketing enablement, customer success and productivity. We believe we will be able to drive wallet share and long-term returns.
EPS for the second quarter of 2024 was $1.52 and our free cash flow was $48.8 million, representing a 33% margin compared to 37% in the prior year. In Q2, we continue to invest the cash we generated from operations stock into Qualys, including $1 million on capital expenditures and $35 million to repurchase $233,000 of our outstanding shares. As of the end of the quarter, we had $230.7 million remaining in our share repurchase program.
With that, let us turn to guidance, starting with revenue. For the full year 2024, we are now expecting our revenue to be in the range of $597.5 million to $61.5 million, which represents a growth rate of 8%. This compares to revenue guidance of $601.5 million to $68.5 million last quarter.
For the third quarter of 2024, we expect revenues to be in the range of $149.8 million to $151.8 million, representing a growth rate of 5% to 7%. This guidance assumes continued deal scrutiny and no improvement to our net dollar expansion rate through the back half of this year.
Shifting to profitability guidance. For the full year 2024, we expect EBITDA margin of 43% to 44% and free cash flow margin in the mid- to high 30s. With [ set ] full year EPS to be in the range of $5.46 to $5.62, up from the prior range of $5.06 to $5.30. For the third quarter of 2024, we expect EPS to be in the range of $1.28 to $1.36.
Our planned capital expenditures in 2024 are expected to be in the range of $12 million to $16 million for the third quarter of 2024 and the range of $47 million. Consistent with prior guidance, for the remainder of 2024, we intend to align our product and marketing investments to focus on specific initiatives in driving more pipeline, supporting sales including enhancing our partner program and expanding our federal vertical. As a percentage of revenues, we expect to prioritize an increase in investments in sales and marketing as well as related support functions, systems and people with more modest increases in engineering and G&A. With that, Sumedh, and I would be happy to answer any of your questions.
[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Joel Fishbein of Truist.
Congrats. Joo Mi, really great growth internationally, and I guess Sumedh as well. Can you talk about what drove the international growth? And then maybe, Joo Mi, if you could talk about more specifics about some of the investments that you're making in sales and marketing going forward? That would be very helpful.
Yes, happy to. The international growth, we're seeing a stronger demand in that region relative to the U.S. With that said, the U.S. growth rate is impacted by the Microsoft Defender and so that's been a headwind on the U.S. business as well as the direct business. So we just share the growth rate for.
In terms of the sales and marketing investments that we feel like it has been doing really well under a higher return on ROI, it's from the investments that we made on the partner side. As you can tell, our initiatives when it comes to enhancing our partner relationships and really working with them to revamp how we go to market and further incentivize our partners to understand why it makes sense for them to propose and put Qualys as a vendor of choice has been resonating. And so for us, it's #1 partner.
And then #2, of course, primarily our investment is related to the headcount. As we're targeting continuing to grow the sales and marketing head count by double digits in 2024, and we are on track to meet that goal. We're positive with the momentum that we're seeing in the business today.
Yes. And Joel, I'll add to that is while we had a tough upsell quarter for Q2, I think our investments that we've been making in the last few quarters have really given a lot of positive things that we are excited about as an example, with our new business growing double digits because of the way that we're enabling our new business sales team because of the way as Joo Mi said, we're investing with our partners and the partners pipeline is increasing their win rates with our partners are increasing as well.
I'm pretty excited about our investment that we started last year in the federal space, which again, had getting a 6-figure new -- net new business deal in the federal space for us is exciting. And we -- it also highlights the opportunity that we have on the federal side. And including within our existing customer base as well, our investments in terms of taking our learnings from what we have been able to be successful with our new business, being able to train our post-sales teams as well to be more of hunters to enable them in a much better way, et cetera, has led to customers were spending $500,000 and more with us also growing 18% from last year in the same quarter.
So those are a lot of the things that our investments are leading to positive trends. I think clearly, we see an opportunity in this macro environment that we have and the scrutiny that we face from our customers with [ VM ] to really be able to get our sales team to our product and marketing teams to align better and our sales team to execute better on the upsell opportunities that will come with the new way the customers are looking at their security spend and focusing on risk management and really being able to spend their money from cybersecurity where the risk is. And that's the big question a lot of people are not quite able to answer is where is your risk exactly. And that's what our [ ATM ] platform is going to help.
Our next question comes from the line of Shrenik Kothari of Baird.
So Joo Mi, you mentioned, of course, the channel revenue now making up 46%, which is kind of really ticking up nicely. Can you just help provide some more details on kind of overall, I would say, a breakdown of the contribution for different types of partners if possible? Of course, you highlighted how you guys were trying to partner with some of the cloud providers and marketplaces like AWS, Azure or Raco. Just curious if you can provide us some more color in terms of those drivers? And then I have a follow-up.
Yes. Shrenik, we don't break it down that way, but I can tell you that right now, our channel partners or resellers are definitely working very closely with us and really bringing us a lot of the opportunities because they see the comprehensive set of capabilities that we can very rapidly bring to the customers who are currently in the market, have a project and have a budget to execute on that. So they are sort of the first folks who are working closely with us.
In the last quarter, we released our MSSP portal, so we're seeing traction with service providers who are continuing to a patch management as a service because just having VM scanning as a service is not a big differentiator and some more and more of them are leveraging Qualys for now providing path management as a service. And now we're starting to see that same thing from partners on being able to provide services around cloud security deployments as well.
And we have a really nice, strong partnership with OCI on the GTM side but as well as working with AWS on the ADP credits with joint customers or some of the areas that we're really seeing good momentum. And we don't break it down exactly like that, but that should give you a high level sort of view of where we're seeing success with partners.
Got it. That's very helpful, Sumedh. And Joo Mi, one quick follow-up. Of course, Sumedh, you highlighted the development of enterprise risk platform kind of helping and how you're monetizing that offering. Just curious, like, given on the other side, there is aggressive overall pricing in the core VM that we are hearing from other players kind of perhaps undercutting pricing there. Just curious like how were you able to show the upside on the gross margins as well in this kind of environment? And can you provide us some quantitative insights into that and expected impact of net dollar retention rates as well?
Yes. In terms of the gross margin, we were very pleased to post that 84% gross margin, up from 82% last year and then even 83% last quarter. It's primarily due to our optimization when it comes to our data centers in addition to the fully depreciated assets that we're seeing right now. As you know, we have both hardware as well as on the cloud assets, and we're just leveraging and optimizing to make sure that we're getting the margins and we think makes sense for our business today.
And then on the VM question that you asked, look, I think we've talked about this for the last many quarters that is evolving and customers are really looking to focus on remediation as well. And so when they are looking at scan-only solutions that only gives them more things in CVs to fix, when they are looking to optimize their budget for an outcome, they are looking at how to balance the scanning with patch management.
And that's why our true risk eliminate capability that we came out with, giving customers more solutions they can buy from us in terms of being able to mitigate the risk is the most important because today's cyber budgets have been tied and the question that cybersecurity professions are getting asked is well, what's the outcome? What -- how much risk are you reducing?
And if you're not able to articulate the risk and how much risk you're actually reducing, that's really when they face challenges with -- should we get an increase in this budget if we're not focusing on remediation.
And so just in the first half of this year, getting 45 million patches deployed by Qualys agents really highlights that VM today is about vulnerability assessment, but also combining with patch management and ability to mitigate the risk. And we see that in the numbers today. with our patch management, cyber security asset management for net new bookings customers when they're coming to us and why we are seeing good success with the new business is we offer a unique differentiator in the market when people are looking to change their scanning solution because we're offering them patch management combined with the scanning solution.
And that's really where the vulnerability management has been evolving, and this is nothing new. That's why we invested a few quarters ago to really focus on the remediation aspect of vulnerability management because there is no M in the VM if you don't actually fix things.
Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg of RBC.
It sounds like NRR dipped down to 102. I think from 104 last quarter. I'm curious, does that -- do you feel like that's starting at the bottom now? And do you think perhaps in the second half, whether it's pipeline or other drivers, we could see a rebound there?
I think once we work with our customers, we're definitely facing scrutiny on their -- when they have to do additional spend with Qualys. So that's where we are working medicating a lot of great engagement, and that's where we are leading to the more conversations. How they optimize their spend, how they can balance their spend in the scanning side with the spend on patch management and asset management side, and that's where you see. In some cases, they optimize right now for getting some additional solutions from Qualys where they can grow in the future.
I think we will have to continue to see in the next quarter how the conversations that we are having this quarter translate into additional upsells for the customers because, as you know, in this current environment is a little bit harder to -- with the continuous in the face to know what is the timing of when they will adopt these additional solutions, especially with cloud security, et cetera.
So we're pretty excited about the opportunity that we see. I think we're going to have to watch the next couple of quarters on how this rate evolves. But over long term, definitely feel like we have all the goods that customers -- existing customers are going to invest additional in which is, in my mind, is patch management, cloud security overall sort of risk management and more importantly, now questions coming up about AI security.
And so our new solution that we announced that we're going to get out in September, which is really helping customers identify all of their AI LLMs and looking at the risk of those are going to be very positive in those conversations, how they lead into additional upsells on the timing of that is something that we're watching very closely.
That's great. That's super helpful. And then in terms of the Microsoft Defender headwinds, can you remind us again when those will abate officially and not become a drag on billings?
The sense that was effective May 1, so it hit us for the first time in Q2. So the biggest impact that we expect to see is in Q2.
In other words, then -- so what you're saying, Joo Mi, is that it's not going to be as big of a headwind in Q3 in Q4? Or maybe just think about that headwind as late in the next couple of quarters?
That's right. That's right. It's not going to be material enough for us to normalize it in Q3 and Q4. Q2 is really the biggest quarter based on the billing schedule. And that's why when you take a look at our calculated current billings, a 2% decline normalized for this, if it hadn't happened, then it would have been approximately 1%.
Our next question comes from the line of Kingsley Crane of Canaccord Genuity.
So you've done a remarkable job building out the platform in the past couple of years. I just want to ask broadly, how would you describe VM demand at the moment? How cyclical is this? How secular is this? And then why do you view VM foundational? And then how can you leverage that to expand spend with existing customers?
Yes, great question. See, VM continues to be very foundational for any risk management exercise that any organization has. If you look at every single cybersecurity standard out there requires regular scanning and patching for VM. I think as we have talked about and I have talked about this in a few earnings calls in the past as well is that VM is evolving, and so the -- while the overall focus on our customers remains on within VM, it's really customers are focusing on how do we get the outcome of actually being able to reduce the risk by fixing the things that are being discovered by VM.
And so what we see with our customer base is that they are -- with the tight budgets that they have and the scrutiny that they're putting on the conversations, they are actually looking to balance between how much they focus on scanning. And what's the point of scanning everything if they're not able to actually remediate stuff. And so how do they balance the investment in the VM sector between scanning and patch management and also asset management as well as how do you expand the scanning into the cloud environment.
And so those are the conversations that we hear a lot more. I think the VM as a key part of risk management for the organization continues to be a key priority for the customers that we talked to. So I think we -- as they are working with tight budgets right now and looking to balance that. I think we see this as a good opportunity for us because it is giving us opportunity to get our additional products like patch management, cyber [indiscernible] asset management seeded in with these customers as they're buying smaller amounts. But in the future, this quarter lead them to cover more of the estate that they currently have with us with scanning.
Great. That's well said. And then one more. So I want to just talk about dynamics when selling cloud security, whether that's total cloud [ app ] or something individual like CSPM. Post [indiscernible] outage, vendor concentration has been widely discussed rightly or wrongly. So big picture, how do you think the outage will play out specifically in cloud security, given how nascent the space is and how much of an opportunity do you see?
Look, I think the questions customers are obviously valued in terms of how do you balance the risk of the security solution [ they ] being deployed itself versus very mitigating that. And I think the advantage I've seen for Qualys is that we are not concentrated on the agent as being the foundational way to deliver service security service to the customer like some of the other providers where the agent is the main and the only way that they can deliver services.
We have a pretty comprehensive capability of delivering security services that match the customers' operational appetite of deploying different ways to assess risk. And so we have agent [ less cabin. ] We have snapshot scanning. We have agent-based scanning. We have offsite scanning. So there's many different ways. And so what we see with customers, we obviously got a lot of questions asked around one of the best ways that Qualys is, of course, ensuring that we are testing.
We are very confident about the way we roll out our update for different technologies. But also the fact that they can actually, with their licensing balance their risk of where they want to deploy agentless scanning versus where they want to deploy agent-based scanning. And we give those options to them, which they are pretty happy about that they don't have to really take that big risk of only having an agent and that's the only way to deliver the service.
And so in cloud, I think the advantage is that you can do a good amount of assessment of CSP and just using APIs without deploying a particular scanning. And so we -- this is why about a year ago when we released our [ Flex scan ] which is a part of our total cloud CNAP solution. The license actually includes the ability for the customers to do 4 types of different scans on the same asset, and they can pick and choose.
So if they want, they can do an API assessment with absolutely nothing installed. On the workload, they can use an agent to be installed automatically. They can use an automatic network scanner in that environment or they can use a snapshot scan of an image that is not actually live. So I do see that in cloud security, while the questions will come up. It's not so much about, in my mind, the vendor concentration.
It's really about the sensor concentration in my mind, which is your vendor providing you multiple different ways to assess your environment in leveraging basically the different types of risk both you might have on different assets.
All right. I agree with that. Again, congrats.
Our next question comes from the line of Yun Kim of Loop Capital.
Okay. Great. Sumedh, on the Microsoft Defender headwind, I am assuming you plan for that. Clearly, there was some execution issues that you did not anticipate. If you can elaborate on that a bit? And then also, what are the products that were directly affected by the lower attach rate related to Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft was leveraging our very basic sort of scan-only legacy capability, right, which was that it was not the MDR. So those customers, and we did not have access to those customers to be able to work with them to upsell them to all the other things that our current customers subside to whether it's cybersecurity asset management, whether it's patch management, whether it is a cloud assessment or now with the new AI scanning that we are releasing.
So for us, it was customers in that environment, we're only using scan-only solution from us. And as we all see right now what's happening in the market is really customers are looking for more holistic comprehensive outcome of their VM solution, which includes actual fixing in reduction of risk and not just more scanning. And so that's really where we see the opportunity is customers don't just want more CBE reporting.
They want a way to say this is -- these are the things you should fix that will reduce the risk and then a solution that can fix that. And so that's where we see the opportunity if these customers come to us, we can focus on helping them see the bigger picture of how they can reduce the risk from their vulnerabilities rather than just keep looking at them and not doing anything about them.
Okay. Great. Joo Mi, anything that we should be aware of in regard to pricing, especially with second half renewal season coming up?
No change from our perspective from a competitive standpoint and no change from our own pricing.
Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho of William Blair.
I just wanted to maybe dig in a little bit more in terms of understanding the need to balance profitability with some of the investments that you've been making on the channel side. Can you give us a sense of how the initial investments sort of paid off the way that you expected? I know it takes a little bit of time to translate into billings and ultimately to revenue, or has it been disappointing? Has it been sort of -- just wanted to get a sense of how you're thinking about that?
Great question, John. Look, when we embarked on this journey a couple of years ago, really, we've been focusing on a few different things. And some of them sometimes work, some of them don't. But overall, like I said, we are pleased with the investments really bringing us that improvement in 4 straight quarters of double-digit growth for new business, which we have not had as much in the past and then just looking at opportunities coming from partners looking at partner opportunities, having better close rates, looking at continuing for $500,000-plus customers actually increase in the staff environment by 18%.
So I do think that different things that we have done in terms of training our new business sales reps in terms of investment in channel have brought us those sort of opportunities. And now in the further quarters, we need to focus on working through those opportunities, closing through those opportunities, continuing to invest additionally with our channel partners.
But like we said, we are in a fairly unique position this year to continue to actually invest in our sales and marketing in GPM because we see the opportunity in -- most of the companies are really cutting down on their sales and marketing investment. And I think that's really what we look for in the further quarters is to improvements in our upsell rates similar to what we are seeing with our new business and really continuing our investment on the federal side.
Like I said, just getting a good 6-figure deal in the federal net new businesses on the federal side is also very promising for us because of the investments we're making with the team that we have built, the marketing investment we made this year to actually host a conference just specifically for federal, which is our first one.
And also the investment we have made in being Fed moderate, but more importantly, we're just really, really anticipating and waiting for the [indiscernible] certification, which we are looking forward to getting end of this year. And I think that investment over the next couple of years should give us a really significant advantage because there's no other [ FedRAMP ] platform that has so many so many different capabilities and modules are going together with that.
And so I think there are certain -- these are some of the things that have worked and continue to work and we are looking now to take the learnings from the new business improvement and apply those to our existing business so that our post-sales farmers learn how to do a little bit of hunting and be able to find some of these deals in a tough macro environment and be able to bring additional opportunities. We are working closely with the partner side on the upsell just as the way we are working on the partner with the partner's omnibusiness as well.
Excellent. Just a quick follow-up. So as you take on additional Chief Product Officer responsibilities, can you help us understand where you see the biggest opportunities? Is this narrowing of the product focus? Is this approaching new areas? I'm just trying to understand how you think about sort of taking on these additional responsibilities and what you see as that opportunity.
Yes. Look, you guys -- you know my history, it's a little bit hard to get the Chief Product Officer out of me, it's always there somewhere. But if you look, we -- for us, we have always been innovation-driven, really listening closely to our customers and bringing solutions to market like we do Patch Management was all about operational efficiency, which is what the securities are looking at.
And so as I look forward to the next couple of years, if you look at the current environment, the challenges cybersecurity provisionals are facing when you look at the almost flat budget increase in cyber overall is because of not being able to articulate the question, well, how much risk is cyber bringing to our business. And so because without that, you cannot really -- if you don't know how much risk you have, you can articulate that risk and dollar value, you cannot decide on exactly how much do you spend, which is the appropriate amount to take down that risk.
And that's really what I'm excited about with our ATM platform that we're coming out with and our -- some of our beta partners that are there. It's not -- there are multiple different security as we can implement to reduce risk. But let's first focus on being able to identify, being able to articulate the risk in dollar terms to the business. And from there, you can decide which are the most effective security controls that you can put in place to bring down that risk, and it may not be the exact same control in every environment.
In some cases, maybe a [indiscernible] is a better security investment, given the risk here versus in other cases, maybe [indiscernible] patch management solution is enough to reduce the risk. And so as I look at from a product perspective, first, I'm glad that has built a good theme and they are taking more and more focus on the GTM side.
So it gives me additional opportunity to focus and work with our product and marketing teams to not only look at the future products that we are coming up with, especially on risk management, risk articulation, but also in the short term, the opportunity, given what we are seeing with our total cloud solution, the conversations that we are having with customers being able to align my product management and product marketing teams together so we can execute better on marketing our total cloud solutions and being able to create additional opportunities. So some of those things are really what I'm looking forward to, as I look into this Chief Officer.
Our next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger of D.A. Davidson.
I guess just on the tough upsell environment, your net expansion rate is down to 102%, but it's almost down to basically no upsell. I guess are you seeing contractions with any sizable portion of your customer base, not customers who churn the customers who are staying with [indiscernible] are they reducing their footprint? Or I guess just where could that bottom? Obviously, we would think it would about out 100%, but it could potentially you can go lower than that.
Great question, Rudy. So as we mentioned, overall, our gross retention has stayed the same around 90%. And so I think for us, it's really about customers, as I mentioned earlier, are looking to balance the set of solutions that they have from Qualys. Looking at how can they have a better impact by adopting additional solutions from Qualys like patch management, sub-security asset and sometimes based on -- they may decide that this particular environment. I would rather take those licenses and focus more on patch management than my server environment and because currently, the budgets are tight.
So what we are seeing is right now, our overall gross retention continues to be about the same. It's more about customers looking at optimizing and balancing their spend between the different capabilities. And as part of that adopting additional capabilities, which may not in the immediate term in -- immediate upsell from a total amount perspective in that particular opportunity, but it also creates a further opportunity in the future that we can increase the costs there.
And so again, I think this is sort of -- we had a tough quarter on this overall industry expansion rates are coming down, but we're going to take the conversations that we are having because of this right now and see how they're going to -- those conversations are leading to opportunities we'll close in the next couple of quarters. So again, we -- of course, we look forward to improving our net expansion rate over the next few quarters. When that -- the timing of that exactly is something we are also keeping a close eye on.
Our next question comes from the line of Rob Owens of Piper Sandler.
This is Aidan on for Rob Owens. Can you provide more color on the economic backdrop in the quarter related to deal scrutiny? And also, what did you see related to demand from enterprise and SMB customers?
I think macro generally continued to be the same as we have expected. We are -- it's budgets are generally flat. We are seeing customers trying to think about, in some cases, cybersecurity versus AI, which is why we're excited about the AI security product.
Overall, I think the macro has stayed the same. We faced additional scrutiny, I would say, this quarter from customers just looking to say, should we continue to adopt different solutions while keeping the overall spend the same? Or should we just keep as is and not expand too much?
So I would say that for us, it's really about -- and I don't think we saw any major difference between the enterprise versus SMB segment from the last -- from what we've been seeing in the last few quarters. And so I think the environment continues to be tough, and we continue to face or at least this quarter, we faced additional scrutiny on the projects.
Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Tilton of Wolfe Research.
This is Patrick on for Josh. I wanted to dive a little deeper on the customers impacted by the sunsetting of the Microsoft partnership. You mentioned that you were having conversations with those customers throughout the quarter. So can you just talk about your updated expectations for those customers moving over to Qualys to use your solutions directly? And then also, the size of that opportunity look like?
I think as Joo Mi said, right, we -- the onset actually happened just recently in May when the actual [indiscernible] something happened. I think for us, it's we did not have access to those customers, so we can't -- we couldn't quite reach out to them as we had mentioned earlier.
I think it is about as customers are sort of transitioning to a different solution or have the option they are looking at, and sometimes they come and talk to us. So we've had a few customers come and talk to us. We may not always know that they are coming from that Microsoft thing because a lot of times, they may have additional footprint already with Qualys, and they may just expand and buy additional licenses for the Azure environment and sort of what they were doing with Qualys with the Azure integration.
I don't think at this point, we're thinking of that opportunity as anything that -- from what we see as a material thing in Q3, Q4, I think we'll continue to see how the conversations evolve and see how many of those actually continue to come to us, but we're not assuming any additional benefit in the guidance that we've given from -- coming from that opportunity.
Okay. And then just a quick follow-up. Is there any color you can give us on how you expect billings growth trend for maybe 3Q or the full year?
Yes. We don't guide to current billings, but we did indicate that the annual current billings growth will be trend more or less along the lines of the same ad revenue growth rate. So I would assume the same for the second half the revenue growth guidance will be more or less in line with the current billings.
Our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex of JPMorgan.
I was wondering if you could maybe dig in a little bit on customers spending more than 500 and overall customer count in aggregate, how should we think about that faster-growing large customer cohort versus the smaller customers and puts and takes there that maybe give us an indication of where you're focusing your efforts from a sales and marketing perspective?
For the sales marketing perspective, we are focused more on the enterprise. It's just because that's where we've seen more success -- and as you can tell by our larger customers, we continue to increase their spend with us. And we've seen success there. We are have -- we are continuing to see some headwinds on the smaller and smaller customers or the SME and SMB space.
And those 500-plus customers, is that revenue from those customers that are growing 18% or is that the customer count that's growing 18%?
The customer talent and the dollar amounts are growing both at 18% actually. So the 18% that we referenced is the customer count, but the dollar amount is about the same.
Our next question comes from the line of Hamza Fodderwala of Morgan Stanley.
[indiscernible]. I think this was done earlier, but having -- can you hear me better?
Breaking up or your [indiscernible].
But just a question on the current billings for Joo Mi. I think -- so it was down 2% this quarter. I believe you mentioned the Microsoft headwind without that, it would have been up 1%. Anything else that -- if you could give Microsoft customer as a partner as well as the customer -- any changes in commerce?
We couldn't quite hear the last part. Can you repeat the last slide about the customer?
Nation ship -- if Microsoft remains a customer, any changes in [indiscernible]?
No, no change. It's as expected with respect to the impact on our top line from both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft customer for this year.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.