Barracuda shares tumbled 24% after it cut billings guidance, blaming poor EMEA sales. In addition to slightly missing FQ2 revenue estimates (while slightly beating on EPS), Barracuda has guided on its earnings call for billings to rise 10%-13% Y/Y in FQ3 and FQ4, below prior guidance of 16%-18%. Soft EMEA and Asian sales are blamed.
Billings totalled $98.4m in FQ2, +11% Y/Y (+14% excluding forex) and above revenue of $78.4m. CEO B J Jenkins: "The currency environment and longer sales cycles which we experienced in EMEA in Q2 impacted our gross billing performance this quarter. Our storage category billings grew in the mid-twenty percent range year-over-year on a constant currency basis in Q2. However, we do see some evidence that growth in the overall storage market has slowed and that customer requirements are evolving, and we are adjusting our approach accordingly."
Enterprise storage demand has been soft in recent months, it says; cloud storage adoption is widely seen as a culprit. Appliance revenue rose 8% Y/Y to $22.3m; recurring subscription revenue rose 17% to $56.1M. Non-GAAP costs/expenses rose 13% to $70.3m. Separately, Barracuda has announced it is buying Intronis, a provider of cloud backup and disaster recovery software for managed service providers (MSPs) catering to SMBs. Terms are undisclosed. Intronis claims nearly 2000 MSP partners with more than 36K end-user customers. B J Jenkins: "We believe a larger opportunity exists to add Barracuda's award-winning security and data protection solutions to the Intronis platform to expand its offerings." Intronis supports backups for servers running VMware and Microsoft's virtualization platforms, as well as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.