Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Allot's Third Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. All participants are at present in listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. You should have all received by now the company's press release. If you have not received it, please contact Allot's Investor Relations team at EK Global Investor Relations at 1-212-378-8040, or view it in the news section of the company's website at www.allot.com. I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Kenny Green of EK Global Investor Relations. Mr. Green, would you like, would you like to begin? Welcome to Allot's third quarter 2023 conference call. I would like to welcome all of you to the conference call, and I'd like to thank Allot's management for hosting this call. With us on the line today are Mr. Erez Antebi, President and CEO, and Mr. Ziv Leitman, CFO. Erez will provide an opening statement and summarize the key highlights of the quarter. We'll then open the call for the question and answer session, and both Erez and Ziv will be available to answer those questions. You can all find the financial highlights and metrics, including those we typically discuss on the conference call in the earnings release issued last week. Before we start, I'd like to point out the following safe harbor statement. This conference call contains projections and other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future performance of the company. These statements are only predictions, and Allot cannot guarantee that they will in fact occur. Allot does not assume any obligation to update such statements. Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected, including as a result of changing market trends, delays in the launch of services by customers, reduced demands, and the competitive nature of the security services industry, as well as other risks identified in the documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I would now like to hand the call over to Erez. Erez, please go ahead. Thank you, Kenny. I'd like to welcome all of you to our conference call. Thank you for joining us today. Our third quarter revenues were $22.6 million, 10% lower than the comparable quarter last year. In September 2023, our SECaaS ARR was $10.6 million, 9% higher than our SECaaS ARR in June 2023, and 52% higher than our SECaaS ARR for September 2022. 2023 continues to be very challenging for us. The transition of the business into SECaaS's recurring revenue model has proven to be slower than we originally anticipated. In addition, our core DPI business is experiencing macro-related headwinds. While we don't expect these challenges to disappear in the near term, given the challenging economic backdrop, we continue to make progress with the aspects of the business that we can control. During the second quarter, during the third quarter, our cash balance fell by $5.5 million, mostly as a result of the operating loss and decrease in accounts payable. Cash burn continues to be a major area of focus for us. As our cost-cutting efforts come into effect partially in the first quarter and in full in 2024, we expect to improve our cash flow. While our visibility remains challenged, we remain committed to reaching profitability in 2024. Our gross margin in the second quarter was 48% due to our deal mix. We continue to target 70% gross margins for 2024, consistent with our historical performance. As we announced in July, given the challenges facing our business, the board formed an executive committee that has worked with management to identify and recommend opportunities for further improvement, with a focus on driving sustainable profitability and enhancing shareholder value. The executive committee and management continue to work together to prepare the budget and operating plan for 2024. As we discussed in the previous call, in order to conserve cash, reach break-even profitability in 2024, and ensure that we have staying power, even as SECaaS takes longer to ramp up, we implemented a cost reduction plan towards the end of the third quarter. We reduced approximately 30% from our employee headcount from the end of the third quarter of 2022 to the end of 2023, while also implementing other cost reductions. Our third quarter numbers include a one-time RIF cost of approximately $1.5 million. As you know, Allot operates in two business lines, Allot Smart and Allot Secure. On the Allot Smart front, while we continue to see growing interest globally from governments as they look to block illegal activities such as drug trafficking, child pornography, and terrorism, our CSP and enterprise businesses remain soft. While some of the weakness is due to cutbacks in spending, we also recognize the need to continue shifting our resources and focus to developing countries and governments as developed countries and enterprises embrace the cloud. On the Allot Secure front, while spending by CSPs remains challenging, our SECaaS revenues are growing steadily. While we are not seeing the pace of growth we had expected, given a slower deployment, there are quite a few positives worth highlighting. I would like to start with the North American market. Verizon Business has successfully launched their network native security service, which incorporates Allot NetworkSecure. The launch is going well. The number of customers is growing, and we are discussing with Verizon several expansion opportunities to different customer segments. While we cannot be assured of our success in adding additional customer segments, I believe Verizon is the largest signed SECaaS opportunity for Allot. Furthermore, as other CSPs see Verizon's success, I believe some will follow suit. We are already getting enhanced interest from other operators to better understand what Verizon is doing and how they might do the same. In APAC, we recently launched another SECaaS service in Tonga. As this is a small deal, we guaranteed the revenue for Allot, regardless of penetration, as per the revised direction we have previously explained. We remain excited about our SECaaS opportunities as operators continue to be interested in launching network-based security services, and we have a differentiated, scalable solution for CSPs. Looking ahead, I want to summarize our expectations for 2023. We expect SECaaS revenues for 2023 to be around $10.5 million-$11 million. We expect the SECaaS ARR for December 2023 to be between $12 million-$13 million, and our total ARR, including support and maintenance, to be between $51 million and $53 million. Regarding our total revenue, operating loss, and cash flow guidance, we are providing a wide range because of a specific large expansion deal we expect to close this year. We expect our total revenues for the full year 2023 to be between $89 million and $94 million. Non-GAAP operating loss to be between $42 million and $44 million, including the $14 million doubtful debt reserve, and cash burn for the whole year to be between $31 million and $38 million. As I stated, we remain committed to reaching profitability in 2024. We expect the first quarter revenues to be $20 million-$25 million. Our strategy remains the same. While we believe that our DPI business has limited growth potential, and the lumpiness of the business makes it difficult to forecast over short time frames, we think we can maintain a stable level of revenues through new use cases and market share gains, and we are using DPI's profitability and cash flow generation to invest in our SECaaS business, because our SECaaS business is where we see significant future growth opportunities. While our SECaaS revenues are being recognized later than we would have liked, and later than we expected, I remain convinced of the large potential of this business, and I'm confident that it will grow significantly in the coming years. I have full faith in our company, our team, and our products, and I believe the actions we are taking make our goals achievable. And now I would like to open the call for questions and answers. Ziv and myself will be available to take your questions. Operator? Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press star one. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are using speaker equipment, kindly lift the handset before pressing the numbers. Your questions will be polled in the order they are received. Please stand by while we poll for your questions. The first question is from Max Michaelis of Lake Street. Please go ahead. Max? Oh, sorry, I was on mute. That's my apologies. When we look at... My first question is, looking out at 2024, just with the visibility being fairly cloudy, I mean, are you confident you guys will be able to guide, coming to toward March? I'm sorry, can you repeat the, your, your last, the, really the last sentence? Are we comfortable we're able to guide? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So just given visibility, just kind of want to get sense what you're seeing in the market, and are we confident on giving a 2024 guide? At this point, we're not giving a 2024 guide. We will be giving guidance once we finish our AOP and budget for 2024, which will be towards the end of this year. In the next earnings call, I expect we'll be able to provide guidance on 2024. The challenge you stated is correct. It's the visibility is tough, and yet we are going to guide to the best of our ability, and we're going to focus very hard to turn profitable in 2024. ... And then my next question here is just on gross margin. A little bit of a downtick here in Q3, I think it was adjusted gross margin around 48%. What's giving you guys confidence you guys, you can get back up to that 70% level between Q4 and then in between? And then maybe go into what caused that downturn in Q3. Hi, Max. As we said in our previous conference call, we were expecting around, gross margin around 50%, this quarter. So 48 is in, is in the same range. And the reason was, few deals with a very low, gross, margin. As we explained, sometimes we decide to take, deals with a very low gross margin when it's a, competitor replacement, when it's a strategic deal for us, when we expect a future, expansion. And, also bear in mind that, we can get a larger deal, but the amount that we recognize, in the first quarter is much lower than the total deal, because it includes also support and maintenance for future years. So we care about the amount of support and maintenance, which will be recognized later at a higher, margin. Now, till Q3, for the last many years, our gross margin was around 17%... 70%, seven zero. Also in the first half of 2023. And we do believe that in spite of the low gross margin in the second half of 2023, we will be able to come back to the, to the 70% gross margin. Next year. All right. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. All right. The next question is from Nehal Chokshi of Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you, and pleased to hear that there are some healthy folks there. It sounds like, you know, given that you have limited visibility, the buildup of how you're guiding has changed. A, is that correct? And B, if so, how has it changed? I'm not sure I follow the question now. Sorry. How- Yeah, let me try to clarify. So for example, in prior quarters, your guidance may consist of some sort of bottoms-up basis, where you're looking at your pipeline and assuming some sort of close rate. Going forward, have you changed that process or changed the parameters that you utilize in that process? No. I think we're still building it bottom up from what we see. And, you know, we're trying to accurately forecast what the results are going to be, and we do that in a very detailed bottom-up process that we do internally and follow up on basically weekly. And it's true that over the past couple of years, our ability to forecast the probability and timing of closing deals has diminished, so our forecast has become less accurate. But the process itself has not changed. It's simply become harder for us to nail the numbers correctly. Nehal, please remember that in previous years, till like two years ago, we had a much larger backlog, so it was easier to forecast the quarterly revenues. Now, when the backlog is much lower, we are dependent on the same quarter booking, so we have a challenge to forecast the revenues with a high degree of accuracy. I see. That's helpful. And just to be clear, I mean, given the commentary around limited visibility, are you using lower probabilities to compensate for that lower visibility? And lower probabilities of closing, rather. We believe the sales forecast is realistic and achievable, but it's not conservative and it's not aggressive. We think it's realistic and achievable. And to directly answer your question, then, yes, we're assuming lower probabilities on things because it's becoming harder to forecast. Okay, thank you. And then, I think, you know, you mentioned that you're looking to drive profitability, and it sounds like, you know, the main driver to drive that profitability is continue to rightsize the OpEx portion of the overall business. And while most of your OpEx is commingled between the SECaaS and the DPI, is there some amount of minimal investment that you're going to want to maintain strategically on the SECaaS portion? We will definitely maintain what we—I don't know if the word minimal is the right. We will maintain a balance between our investment on the SECaaS portion and our drive to reach profitability, and it will limit the amount that we're able to invest. So no doubt we will be investing less than we have this year, and definitely less than we invested in the year before. It's, yeah, let's say, you are correct that a significant part of our drive to reach profitability has and continues to be expense control. There's because when we look at the top line, then I would expect SECaaS revenues, like, you know, like, like we've been showing over quite a few last quarters, they're consistently growing. So I would expect them to continue to grow into next year, which will help us. But the absolute numbers themselves are not very high. So we remain with trying to forecast and see how much can we count on the DPI or Allot Smart segment for revenues. That area, which relies heavily on operator spending, is still affected by significant headwinds and cuts and reductions in operators' budgets. So while I think we are roughly around the you know, in a general sense, without stating any numbers, I think we've roughly reached the sort of the bottom of the curve here. I don't think we can rely on a significant growth in our DPI or Allot Smart segment. So the combination of that leads us to reach profitability by reducing the OpEx, which is what we have been doing so far. Just to be clear, would you be able to cut your OpEx further if you believe you needed to, in the case that DPI does not stabilize here? We didn't prepare our 2024 budget yet, so we don't know. As I said, it will be a combination between the revenues, which we think will be achievable, and the right level of OpEx, and we keep our goal to be breakeven next year. Last question for me. So as you mentioned, you had announced a special committee to explore options for Allot, and subsequently, you announced your founder retiring from the chairman position and a new chairman. Does that represent the conclusion of that special committee, or is that still ongoing? And then what do you expect the new chairman to bring? So I'll say a couple of things. One is that the committee was formed, and I'll, you know, I'll reiterate what I said. The committee was formed to work with management to identify and recommend opportunities for improvement, for further improvement, with a focus on driving sustained profitability and enhancing shareholder value. The work between the executive committee and management, one of the results was that, of that was the OpEx reduction and cost cutting that we implemented during the third quarter, in late August. And that work continues, like I said earlier, this fall, continues to work together with management to figure out what is the right operating plan, goals, and and expense levels and budget for 2024. Now, Yigal, who was our chairman until recently, he decided to resign for his own reasons, has nothing to do with the executive committee and is not a derivative of that in any way, shape, or form. Do you expect the new chairman to bring anything different here? I think, the new chairman, you know, you can feel free to ask him yourself when, if and when you meet him. But, I think anybody that has, and definitely our new chairman, David Reis, has, you know, vast industry and operational experience. I think anybody that brings with them a fresh look, different perspective, can bring significant value to the, the company, and that's what I believe they will contribute. Thank you for taking my questions. The next question is from Marc Silk, Silk Investment Advisors. Please go ahead. Thank you. So earlier in the process, when the SECaaS deals a few years ago, you would basically lay out your capital with no commitment. So can you kind of... ... explain how going forward that's going to be. Like, are you going to, before you spend penny number one, you're going to get a commitment if you hit benchmarks? It's just, you know, trying to clarify, you know, you're kind of spending in risk-reward in regards to obtaining more CSPs customers. Okay. So I'll give you a, you know, a bit more detailed answer maybe. You're right, that that's how we, that's how what we were doing with our network security product, in the past. Now, you know, when we look at it, we looked at it again, you know, about a year and a half or so ago, and we said that, okay, the fact that we are outlaying capital without getting a firm commitment from the operators, and then they take a long time to launch, and, and they take a long time to ramp up and generate revenue and so on, it's not a good way to go forward. So for most, most new deals, definitely for the smaller ones, we're looking for a firm commitment for revenue before we take upon ourselves any, any commitment to invest capital or, or deploy the network and so on. And investing capital is not just hardware, right? It can be hardware, professional services, things like that. Now, it's not, not all operators are created equal. I can tell you, you know, let's say, I don't think it's, it's any secret. Verizon was not willing to give us a, a firm upfront commitment, for revenues. But we have, but I think the opportunity has proven itself, and it was right of us to, to sign this deal and launch with them, even though they didn't make an upfront minimum revenue commitment, to us. So I would expect that there could be other such such operators in the future, but we will strive 100% with the small and medium-sized operators. With the large ones, we may need to be to be more more pragmatic, but we will strive with the with the other ones to get a commitment. All right. Thank you for taking my question. The next question is from Todd Seltzer of 88 Management, LLC. Please go ahead. Todd, are you on the line? Todd, would you like to ask your question? The questioner is not asking his question. We'll continue to Rory Wallace from Outerbridge Capital. Please go ahead. Hi, Erez. Good, good to hear you're feeling better. I was wondering if you could elaborate at all on the launch at Verizon, how they're thinking about the offering in terms of their strategy around cybersecurity, maybe how they would view potentially expanding the deal. It's obvious that for Allot, it would be wonderful to expand outside FWA since the opportunity there is an order of magnitude larger outside that footprint. And do you think that Verizon is viewing this solution as something that's very additive, both to revenue, to churn, or in other strategic ways that would give them a real impetus to expand the deal? Okay. I'll try to respond, and I'll tread lightly here. Now, first of all, Verizon is a very, very large corporation, right? And there are many, many people in Verizon, and they have different views. But I'll try and state what I believe from my interaction with many people at Verizon, what I believe the general consensus to be. First of all, the security services launch is perceived to be going very well. They believe it is something that their customers value, and that salespeople find are comfortable in selling it because the customers perceive value, and it's good for them. Second, I would say that, yes, it's definitely showing nice revenues for Verizon, and I think that they're overall happy with the way it's going, not just technically, but also commercially. I would add to that that, you know, we're hearing sentiments from people in Verizon, which say things like, okay, they are. They understand that they as an operator are losing more and more the grip on the end user devices as people bring wide range of devices, doing different things from different sources and so on. And here's a value that is from the network. It's network native, it's on the network. It's a value of the Verizon network, which is, and the network itself is their pride, so this fits very well along with that. And we're discussing with quite a few people in Verizon options of where to take this further, because it's considered something that is inherent to the Verizon... an inherent value that can be added to the Verizon network. It's valued by customers, and there are many different segments that can enjoy this. So, you know, without getting too much into details, I think the opportunities there are large, but like I said in the call. So So we cannot guarantee that they will eventually expand this to other segments, but we are in serious discussions on it, and, and I think it's a good potential. Thanks. And with Far EasTone, they've announced they've hit 550,000 subs, which I think is 10% or so of their post-paid base within one year. Seems like a great curve of growth. Are they doing anything really unique as far as how they're approaching the service? I think the answer is probably yes, but can that be replicated elsewhere with future launches, or where do you see them taking it next? I know they're merging with another telecom carrier. They're acquiring another Taiwanese telecom carrier. Do you think there's an opportunity to continue to grow that at a rapid rate within FET? What FET is doing, you, I think that is different from other operators is the... I would say, the attitude of the executive management. The person who took who is in FET who took the, let's say, the initiative on this is their CEO. And she, she decided that FET should be, she wants to make FET considered as the most secure operator within Taiwan, which is her market, of course. Now, by doing that, then she has decided to their go-to-market to be very aggressive. So they are selling security at almost every touch point. I think on every touch point, I'll say cautiously, almost every touch point they have with, with customers, whether it's stores, advertisement, their call centers, excuse me, et cetera, which is pushing the, you know, it's pushing the results. And that's what creates, what, what generates at the end, the sales and the, the uptake in the, in the service. Can this be replicated? I would certainly hope so, and I think we discussed this in previous calls. I think that when there is an alignment of the strategic interests of the operator, with security, or I'll rephrase that. When the operator sees security as aligned with their strategic interest, that drives many things internally in the operator and the way they go to market and the priority we put, they put on this, et cetera, and that then drives adoption and revenue. Now, I mentioned just as a, a, just to put some color on it, that we initiated actually a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, we initiated a marketing conference in Europe, where we had marketing people from various operators using our product meet with each other and compare notes on what exactly they're doing, what they should do, how somebody else is doing something better, what their takeaways are, and so on and so forth. That's a role that our marketing department has been doing, sharing the information as best possible between them, but this time, we gave them a platform to do it with each other directly. I think it was very encouraging, and we had quite a few operators walk away and come to us at the end of that, not just touting the value, but saying, "Okay, we learned that this other operator is doing this and that, and we think that's a good idea, so we're going to see how we can implement it and drive higher adoption and revenues in our market." We have quite a few of those, so we're trying definitely to get that to happen. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that sounds positive. And thinking about the SECaaS revenue going into next year, it's, it's clearly going to grow. I think you, you can't control the adoption curve, but Verizon is gonna be almost all incremental next year, and then FET should generate decent growth, I would say, if, if you just kinda model out what they've been doing. So is there anything we should think about on the flip side with SECaaS, why it wouldn't grow at a rapid rate next year? And taking it to the next level, when does that business really reach a profitable scale in your opinion? And obviously, subject to change, but I think it's important to consider when that business might become cash generative and what it would take to get there, if it's Verizon expanding a deal or if it's winning several new operators, and how you see that evolving over the next year or two. I think you've asked, I think you're asking the right questions, and I think that those are the answers we need to answer ourselves as we're building our plan and budget for next year. With, you know, with... I would like to be a bit more cautious, and I prefer to address those questions more, in more detail after we have our plan, budget, and numbers for next year, and I feel more confident, and can give you more detail on that. That's fair. Thanks. And then just a couple questions on the model. One is on product revenue. This year it looks like it'll probably be the lowest product revenue you've had in 10 years or more. And I guess versus the expectations you had coming into the year, what does your gut feel about how much of the miss was driven by macro? We know it's a very bad carrier spending backdrop. Everyone has confirmed that outside of you, versus some of these secular issues or even execution issues, frankly, that might have contributed to the revenues coming in lower. ... I think the majority has to do with the macro. We did a loss analysis on the deals during this year. We went one by one, and everything that we were working on and did not materialize into a deal, and it is not, you know, still in process. We haven't, or say most of the business that did not close, did not close because of macro-related issues, budget issues, expense cuts on the operators, things like that. I think our competitive positioning is still strong. And I think the number of execution related problems, they exist. I'm not saying they don't. We can always improve on execution, but I don't think it would have made a materially different result. The most of it is macro. Got it. And then with the expense structure, you mentioned there's $1.5 million of OpEx related to the RIF. Where does that show up in operating expenses? I wasn't sure looking at the release. This is, this is part of the OpEx because it relates to the people that there were RIFed. It's like the one-time expense of the RIF. So if- Was that actually shown on the press release? I, I'm not sure. Yeah. So for instance, if X, X people were RIFed from R&D, the relevant one-time RIF expense is in R&D. If there are people from G&A, it will be shown in G&A. In the same place where we book the salaries. But we don't break it out on separate lines. Yeah, you didn't break it out. 1.5 on the sources. No, the 1.5 is not in separate line. It's embedded in the R&D, SG&A, COGS, and so on. Understood. Understood. It wasn't shown separately. That's just what I wanted to confirm. Then, if I adjust for the 1.5, it gets me roughly you know, $21 million or a little, you know, under $21 million of base recurring OpEx in Q3. Then we should expect that there's a $15 million expense reduction that will flow through the P&L over the coming quarters, which should reduce expenses by around a little shy of $4 million a quarter. Is that a reasonable way of looking at the model and where expenses should land? I'm not sure it's the right number, but we would like to refer to those numbers only in February, after we finalize the budget process, and we will be ready with our 2024 guidance. Got it. And one last question. Thank you for being patient with my question. So you mentioned a large deal that was potentially gonna drive a variance in cash flow in Q4. Is that a revenue deal, or is that a booking with a prepayment and the revenue shifts outside of the quarter? I would say that it could go either way, so that tends to have a wide range. Let's see where we end up there. If we close it and how it closes. Okay. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Thank you, Rory. If there are any additional questions, please press star one. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. Please stand by while we poll for more questions. There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Antebi, would you like to make your concluding statement? Yes. I want, I want to thank everyone for joining us on the call today. Thank you for your support during these, nontrivial times. For those of you in the U.S., I'd like to wish you a happy Thanksgiving weekend, and I look forward to seeing you either at latest in our next call, and if not before that, perhaps in person. Thank you very much. Thank you. This concludes the Allot Third Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. Thank you for your participation. You may go ahead and disconnect.