A few comments during the call I found interesting because they are guiding amidst COVID concerns. In terms of guidance, it’s one of the only signals I’ve seen among so much noise. In other words, they are providing guidance on 17 March 2020 instead of a week ago or a month ago
These comments bear out what Saul and others have said about SAAS and enterprise software holding up during a recession. And a couple of the analysts on the call congratulate them on trying to provide guidance. could change of course, but again it’s a signal, not a pontification from an analyst
FROM THE OPENING REMARKS:
Our current assumption is that the disruption caused by COVID-19 will impact Q1 revenues by approximately $1 million to $2 million and fiscal ‘21 revenues by approximately $15 million to $25 million due to anticipated weaker bookings in the first half of the year. To be clear, at this point, we are seeing minimal impact across our sales channels around the world, including closing transactions in the first quarter, even in the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. However, as a management team, we believe that it is now prudent and responsible to incorporate that into our outlook that we expect what could be a much more challenging economic environment in the coming weeks and months.
We have assumed – as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have assumed a normalization of activity in the second half of the year. So, obviously, if things persist or prolonged, we of course would have to reevaluate that approach. But fundamentally, I think, we’re exceptionally well-positioned in the market overall. We haven’t seen any meaningful impact in the business to date. We have the benefit of having a wide diversification of customers and geographies and industries that we serve. There’s certainly some industries that are harder hit and other industries that are actually benefiting. And that diverse portfolio is certainly working for us. But, we wanted to try and do our best to sort of call it out, recognizing how the situation continues to evolve.
FROM A Q&A:
Question:
- Great. And let me add my congratulations to trying to estimate the COVID-19 impact. I think you’re the first ones to do it. Yes. So Dev, the – what sorts of tools – and I’ll give you an example in a second. But what sorts of tools do you have to manage the business maybe a little differently if we are heading into a real economic slowdown? And as an example, we hosted a call with Salesforce this morning and they talked about how. In the last downturn, one of the things that any office really focused was making sure they maintain the customer relationship even if it meant. So keep the contract even if it means it says lower pricing or significantly lower contract value, the theory being that when you come out the other side, it’s easier to expand in existing customers and to time up again. So just in any kind of tools like that, that you guys have, like what the other thing might be?
Answer:
- Point number 2 is, we obviously spend or invest a lot of time with customers. And with Atlas, we got even higher levels of data and instrumentation of how customers are using our platform. And so that gives us a sense about like, are they using it properly? Are they running into any issues? Have they configured their database correctly? Are they seeing any performance degradation, et cetera. And again, the database is the heart of every application. And so people care very quickly if there’s any issues. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on making sure that we’re getting a lot of satisfaction and delight from both MongoDB and from Atlas.
And so I would say in general, we don’t see today any real impact on the business. But we do again, prudently think that there will be some impact, which is why we gave a guide that we did. And we’re obviously going to monitor this very, very carefully, both in terms of our pipeline – our sales pipeline. We’re also tracking obviously our self-service funnel, that funnel was also very, very strong. And – but if we see any changes, we can respond very, very quickly.