FireEye CEO: Kudos To Our Channel Partners For Their Investments

FireEye CEO Dave DeWalt had strong praise for the security vendor's growing base of channel partners on the company's second-quarter earnings call Thursday, saying partners are helping accelerate the company's growth plan.

"A strong VAR channel continues to be an important part of our go-to-market model," DeWalt said. "The quality of our channel is higher today than a year ago," he continued.

While the company continued to grow its channel, ending the quarter with 1,200 active partners, DeWalt highlighted the growing maturity of the partners in the program. He said partners are investing "substantially" more in technical assessments and accreditations, a trend that led to increased deal registration and partner-enabled bookings.

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"The models that we have, [the] amount of registrations that we're getting from partners, is helping the marketing engine and the lead engine," DeWalt said. "The amount of business we're doing through the channels is continuing to improve."

FireEye also revealed a series of executive changes in its earnings call, most notably the departure of CFO Michael Sheridan to a CFO role at a "private technology company in an unrelated industry," according to the company. He will remain with FireEye until early August to oversee the company's second-quarter financial filings. He will be replaced on an interim basis by Vice President of Finance Frank Verdecanna.

Revenue for the quarter was $147.2 million, up 56 percent year over year and exceeding guidance of between $140 million and $144 million. The company reported a loss for the quarter of $133.6 million, compared with $116.8 million in the same quarter last year.

While losses continued yet again for the Milpitas, Calif.-based company, DeWalt said that the company is "accelerating" its path to cash-flow break-even by more than two years. Given the accelerated growth path, he said he expects the security vendor will break even for the first time this year.

Revenue growth was seen across all areas of the company, driven by an expanding customer base, new partnerships and product development, Sheridan said on the earnings call. In particular, Sheridan said email, endpoint, analytics, FireEye as a Service and network forensics contributed to growth.

"The power of our virtual machine platform of now network endpoint and cloud coupled with our powerful Mandiant services continues to drive a lot of new opportunities for the company, and really best-in-class growth across the security industries," DeWalt said.

As the company expands into more security platform areas, DeWalt said it is seeing more customers increase the number and value of multiple product purchases. That trend is particularly true for FireEye's Mandiant business, DeWalt said.

"We're in very early innings of the cross-sell upsell opportunity," DeWalt said. "I estimate there's an enormous opportunity in our install base, even if we never close another new customer. And as our innovation engine continues to release new products, I believe this opportunity will continue to expand."

FireEye expects that growth to continue into the third quarter, raising its outlook for the full year. FireEye said it expects revenue for the third quarter to be between $164 million and $168 million and full-year revenue to be between $630 million and $645 million. FireEye expects third-quarter loss per share to be between 44 cents and 48 cents and loss per share for the full year to be between $1.70 and $1.80.

PUBLISHED JULY 31, 2015