JFrog at Morgan Stanley TMT: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

On Thursday, 06 March 2025, JFrog Ltd (NASDAQ: FROG) presented at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, highlighting its strategic initiatives and financial outlook. Despite facing geopolitical and administrative hurdles, JFrog reported robust growth in 2024 and outlined plans for continued expansion in 2025. The company is focused on enhancing its cloud services and security offerings, while maintaining a cautious financial outlook.

Key Takeaways

• JFrog achieved 22.5% business growth in 2024, with a 400 basis point increase in operating margin.
• The company forecasts 17% revenue growth for 2025, with large deals de-risked from projections.
• Cloud revenue grew 41% year-over-year, reaching $168 million, or 39% of total revenue.
• Strategic partnerships with GitHub and AWS aim to enhance market reach and service offerings.
• JFrog is investing in machine learning operations and security to drive future growth.

Financial Results

• Business growth of 22.5% in 2024, down from 25% in 2023
• Operating margin expanded by 400 basis points, nearing 15%
• Security revenue accounted for 3% of total revenue
• Cloud growth exceeded 40%, contributing significantly to overall revenue

Operational Updates

• Secured three of the largest multi-year, multi-million dollar deals in company history
• Developed a partnership with GitHub to streamline software supply chain management
• Signed a strategic agreement with AWS to facilitate cloud migration for customers
• Acquired Quoc for $230 million to integrate machine learning model training and delivery

Future Outlook

• Aiming for 17% revenue growth in 2025, with potential upside in the latter half of the year
• Focus on expanding security solutions within the existing customer base
• Continued investment in go-to-market strategies, particularly in security and MLOps
• Long-term financial model targets include $800 million in revenue and operating margins of 21% to 23%

Q&A Highlights

• Large customers serve as a reference base, enhancing confidence in JFrog’s capabilities
• The GitHub partnership aims to clearly define roles in source code and binary management
• Collaboration with AWS offers co-customers discounts for cloud migration
• JFrog remains on track with its long-term revenue and margin targets

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed overview of JFrog’s presentation at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: All right. Good morning. Welcome to day four of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. I have to say this is the best Thursday lineup I’ve ever seen. This is my eleventh Morgan Stanley TMT Conference.

We’re going to continue the program with the J. Frog mansion team. We have Chief Financial Officer, Ed Gudscheid and VP of IR, Jeff Schreiner. Ed and Jeff, thank you for joining us once again at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference.

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Thank you for having us.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Awesome. I don’t see my disclosure. Give me one second. Here we go. Get the disclosures out of the way.

For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstonley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that, let’s go ahead and start the conversation from a high level. In 2024, the business grew 22.5% from about 25% in 2023, while operating margin expanded about 400 basis points to just under 15%. Ed, looking back, where do you feel the team executed well?

And what were some of the challenges that 2024 presented?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Well, 2024 in general was a very interesting year. We also had geopolitical situation that we had to deal with. And We also had geopolitical situation that we had to deal with and it was an administrative year, an administration change, five headlines that normally you have one or two in a year, we had five. So that in itself created challenges, but we’re very happy with where we ended for the full year. First, security.

And when I look at security and what we did in terms of the achievement in security and we’ll talk more about that I’m sure, but the fact that we delivered 3% of our revenue in security was a big win for us and the penetration in terms of security budgets. Secondly, the cloud, you remember after Q1, we were punished. We did 47% growth in the cloud and we were punished for 47% growth. We still for the full year after we saw cloud growth decelerate for many companies, not just JFrog, we still delivered more than 40% growth in the cloud. With all of these challenges, we delivered three of the largest wins in the history of JFrog.

So this was the efforts that we’ve invested in over the past several years with our go to market efforts, and we brought in three of the largest deals, multi year deals, multimillion dollar deals. So it was a significant win in terms of second half for us and we’re very pleased. Now what did we learn? There was also learnings. We have to be patient.

As we move more upstream and we start to work more towards enterprise large deals, we need to be patient with those deals. Those deals will not happen overnight. And by waiting, the magnitude of those deals can become much larger. Secondly, we also have to think about how we guide. And these deals because of the negotiation, the time to close a rigid procurement environment like we saw during Q2, we have to derisk those deals from our guidance and from our outlook.

So we learned that as well and we’ve taken that into our philosophy going forward.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. Those are very important call outs. And so let’s talk a little bit about the outlook before we get into the meat of the business. For the full year, you guided a 17% revenue growth, a similar growth rate for Q1 as well, which implies a similar level of growth throughout the year. So can you sort of outline, of course, the key assumptions with respect to the outlook in terms of what you’re baking in for those large deals, migrations, the security uptake and maybe the size of the renewal base?

How should we think about the assumptions that underpin this year’s outlook for growth of 17%?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So first off, we only have real clear visibility in the first half. And this is what we’re guiding to right now is what we see in the first half. There’s a lot of unknowns, as I mentioned, administration change, tariffs, no tariffs, how is it going to impact interest rates. So for us to make a decision around where we’re going to be for the full year and be bold would not be prudent. That would be a mistake.

So we’re only guiding really based on what we know in the first half. Secondly, we saw what happened, the dark side of what happens when we have these large deals in our guide and when you miss the magnitude of revenue that contributes from those deals could have a significant impact on the revenue that we deliver in that quarter. Therefore, many of those deals, these are multi year deals. They typically include a migration, security component to them, and these are large enterprise deals typically in the 7 to 8 figures. We have derisked those deals from our guidance going forward.

We also know that many of these deals regardless of when we start negotiations in the sales process tend to land towards the back half of the year. And this is what we’re seeing. We derisk them. We don’t include them in our guidance. They’re not part of the first half.

If those deals were to mature and likely convert, it would be more towards the second half. And this is why you see this philosophy and what you’re calling the flat 17% from first half to second half. If there was to be an acceleration, we would start to see some of these large deals closing, maybe even cloud. Today, where we do not see usage over minimum commits, where there’s a reacceleration in the cloud, that could also impact and much of that would happen towards the second half of the year. And

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: I’ll just add Sanjeev, I apologize. Investors have been asking me, was there a threshold? Is it $1,000,000 Is it $5,000,000 Is that what pulls it out of the pipeline? And I think just for clarification purposes, it’s really more as Ed discussed the fact that it’s a complex deal because security is being brought in. Look, some of those 8 figure TCV deals we closed in Q3 of last year were certainly not that size at the beginning of the year.

So I don’t think it’s anything in terms of a dollar figure that we’re looking at. It’s more of the complexity of the deal.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes, it makes perfect sense. I want to spend a decent amount of time talking about security, but I just I did have a follow-up. On those three of the largest deals in JFrog history, conceptually, does that become like a referenceable customer base? If you’re finding like really, really large customers, their peers find out that they’re using JFrog, is that turning into a sort of those guys sort of voucher JFrog, maybe unlock larger deals or build that large deal pipeline, if you will?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: We certainly believe that. Although we haven’t given the customer names, we certainly talked about the industry. This is the automotive industry. It’s the financials. It’s the healthcare.

And we believe that when you close these type of deals, the magnitude of these deals, especially when you’re bringing security into that deal and a migration, we believe then that creates confidence, not only in our ability to close those deals, but confidence in JFrog to deliver. And many of those industries, I think, will start to look at those customers as a first stage of completion and start to look at opportunities with us with a similar construct.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: And I will get to it, Sanjeet. But we also believe that the partnership with GitHub is something that demonstrates a standard practice, to the extent that we start to see that being deployed much more and talked about much more that as you noted that the large enterprises are going to be working with these two organizations, then perhaps that becomes a standard that other organizations adopt as well.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. It’s a great point, Jeff. So let’s talk about security. I remember when we were doing the IPO back in 2020, we had this like offering around X-ray and Shlomi sort of thing out, it’s like, hey, this is a security capability. I had no idea the scale of the ambition that was to come on the security side.

And now we’re starting to see some traction. So the big reveal in Q4 is there was new disclosures around the security business in which the team unveiled that security represents about 3% of revenue, 5% of ARR, 12% of RPO to sort of level set what offerings are included in the security revenue disclosure and how often do you

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: plan to update this metric? So listen, felt the same way. We thought when we did the IPO and I’ve been here almost six years now at JFrog, so I was part of that IPO with Morgan Stanley, by the way, that led that. X-ray was what we thought a tool that we were creating for developers by developers because the conversation around security was never happening with the developer and the CIO or the CISO. Therefore, we thought,

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: all

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: right, we’ll create the tool and they’ll take X-ray as a security tool. And we’re very naive. This is why we did the acquisition with Veedu. This is why over the last three years we’ve been investing in security. Now, what is included in that?

We have JFrog Advanced Security and we have JFrog Curation. So the disclosures are primarily driven around those two products. But in addition to that, we released run time in the second half of twenty twenty four. That is also included. So those are separate SKUs, separate add ons and it does not include X-ray, just to be clear.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Great. Now I’m sorry, continue please.

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Yes. So in terms of what you talked about in the disclosures, the three disclosures and the reason why we thought this was important to highlight all three. One, we talked about delivering material revenue, and therefore giving the revenue number and the traction that we’ve done in revenue, 3% of revenue, even though we had a delay in the first half of twenty twenty four because of decisions around taking a larger position and a multi year position with JFrog, We still delivered very strong revenue, but we also wanted to highlight the fact that from an ARR perspective, looking forward, we have 5% of our ARR and more importantly, these are multi year commitments to JFrog, twelve percent of our RPO. So this is a commitment that’s being made by very large enterprise customers on a multi year basis to be with JFrog to replace point solutions.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. That was going to be my follow-up question. Can you give us a sense of the types or profile of customers that are taking on the security offerings, advanced security, curation? And who, if anybody, are you displacing?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So we talked about it on the public call. We have nearly two fifty customers today that are on advanced security. So that excludes X-ray customers, advanced security customers. And if you were at swamp up, you saw the list. These are enterprise customers.

Now some of them will take a smaller position with us at at a base package, maybe introductory pricing. And then some we have very, very large commitments to JFrog, as I mentioned, multi year commitments. But the vast majority of these customers are enterprise type customers, which is important. Now who are we displacing? We’re displacing point solutions, what they consider best of breed point solutions.

Many of these companies are private companies, Mend, Aqua, Snyk, Veracode, Black Duck, those are to name a few. But typically what happens and what you’ve seen is a long commitment to replace those point solutions over multiple years. So they may choose to replace one to two of those point solutions in year one, but ultimately the goal is to use JFrog, the advanced security platform to replace all of those point solutions.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: In terms of the scale of the ambition, how much do you think how much of ARR do you think the security portfolio can represent on a sort of three to five year window?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So the intention is to continue to report on an annual basis more on the revenue side, not necessarily on the ARR. But today, as I mentioned, we have two fifty customers that are in advanced security. We have over 7,000 customers, so 7,300 customers. And we know that the vast majority of those customers already have security in their tech stack. So we know there’s a budget for them.

Half of those customers today are using X-ray. So we have what we believe a very long runway in terms of penetration of at least half of those customers today that we know today are using JFrog for X-ray for some bit of the security and will go and penetrate those customers first.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. That’s a great way to frame it. Let’s talk about the go to market motion behind the security sale, which is always sort of complex. What is the process that the sales team is executing on to drive more of that security sales attached? It’s probably linked to the sales cycle because the deals are becoming more strategic.

On the other side of that, what kind of uplift on deal sizes are you seeing when security is included?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So when we guide the team and our sales team and we build the targets, we look at it in a three tier process. First are those customers that we have today that are using Advanced Security and we can add incremental seats to that subscription. So we monetize based on the developer seats, so contributing developer. So we have, as I mentioned, two fifty customers. Some of those are at minimum packages, others have taken a long commitment, but we have an opportunity to expand those customers.

That’s number one. Number two are those customers that are currently using X-ray. So we have thousands of customers today that are using X-ray and this creates a pipeline of opportunity for us and for our sales team to go and start the discussion around advanced security. Number three would be as a renewal happens in a lower subscription. So security is only offered in our Enterprise X and E plus subscription.

So as a lower subscription is renewing, there’s an opportunity to discuss not only an upsell to a higher subscription, but also bringing security into that discussion as well. And then lastly, on a magnitude of order very low, is new customers that are coming in. There are some customers that come specifically for security and we have the discussion, you are required to have Artifactory with our advanced security. And those customers that are coming in at a higher subscription level, then we’ll open the discussion around security as well. So if you’re coming in as a new customer to JFrog in enterprise or e plus we’ll open the discussion around security as well.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: And if I could just add to that, to what Ed had alluded to there Sanjeet is that fact that I think that yourself and what other investors may start seeing. And I think this is going to be unique to how we have structured our go to market, which is the playbook is still being written. We have a handful of deals that we’ve won today, but you’re starting to see in the large global enterprises, the CIO and CECL budgets becoming one. And in some cases, the CIO is now the boss of the CECL. And why is that important?

I think that’s important in the fact that JFrog and our named account executive will always have that relationship with the CIO and will always be that face to that company. We use a strategy of security overlay when we’re bringing into security sale. I think there’s been a misconception that at some point we’re going to have to ramp a huge security sales force in order to move the needle here. And I think that actually the industry is shifting in a way that’s actually favorable to how we’ve implemented our go to market strategy.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: That’s a great point. It’s always, always I think that you’re right. So as the current concern is that if you’re going into security, different buyer, different decision maker, how do you get the right skill sets in the sales force? And if you see a merging of the CIO and the CSO, it makes that ability. That’s a great point.

Let’s talk a little bit about runtime security. That’s the newest addition to the security lineup. Why does it make sense for JFrog to enter the real time vulnerability detection market coming from the DevSecOps world? And what’s the strategy to drive adoption for JFrog at runtime?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: I’ll start, Jeff, and if you have something to add there. So first off, this was something that came to us by our customers. So our customers had asked us. They said at the end of the day, you own the asset. The binary is owned by JFrog.

You’re securing the software supply chain. The real the point of when you’re bearing fruit is in production. And the traceability to go from production back to the point of building within the software supply chain is needed. As much as you can secure software supply chain, there are times when you may have a vulnerability or some type of security breach that gets through into production. And because we own the asset, we want to have the end to end to be able to trace that back.

And that’s being asked by our customers. So that was important and this is why we addressed it. And we saw that there’s an opportunity, to want to address the pain. But number two, we don’t want to leave necessarily money on the table. So what did we what is the intention here?

It’s similar to what we do with our advanced security. It will be a separate SKU. We will charge for it and we charge for it based on the developer number of seats, contributing developer.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Yes. No, I think Ed covered it. I think it just completes the circle for us and it emphasizes how important metadata is from run time to the introduction or genesis of that code. So the metadata and having that traceability when things do go sideways is really what’s critical there.

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: And I’m going to just add one more thing that I forgot to add. Now as much as we want to address the pain of the customer and we believe that this is the right thing to do, I don’t know at this point yet is it going to contribute like we saw in terms of advanced security and curation. And that’s still to be determined, it’s still too soon. And we don’t believe at this point that it’s going to be a huge driver of revenue growth.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Right. And I think Sanjeet, as you know, I mean, right, getting someone to open up their production environment is an act of God sometimes.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes,

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: totally. There are people with agents out there and we have things to offer such as the metadata and they have things to offer such as agents. So maybe there’s things that we can work on with different partnerships within the industry. And

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: definitely if you look at the advanced security part of the portfolio, I mean, that’s definitely a more mature established set of capabilities that buyers are well aware of and makes sense for the classic JFrog user community. Jeff, you mentioned you called out the GitHub partnership. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What exactly does a GitHub partnership entail? And how has it impacted the business thus far?

And what lies ahead in terms of the partnership coming into 2025?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: I’ll start. Okay. So first off, this was brought to us again by a pain from the customer. And so we’re solving a pain for the customer. They came to JFrog, they came to GitHub and they said, listen, at the end of the day, the two of you don’t talk.

So it solved two problems for us. Number one, it it clearly defined the swim lanes, source code and binary, best of breed. 70 plus percent of our customers, we know are using GitHub. Okay. So that’s first.

And now it’s a clear delineation between the two. Whereas maybe previously people had questioned, is there overlap? Do we do the same thing? Now it’s clearly defined who is managing source code and who is managing the binary. Number two is, this is a co marketing, co engineering agreement.

Now what’s important about this is also CEO to CEO led. So Shlomi, our CEO, and and Thomas, the CEO of GitHub. In fact, the reason Shalomi is not here today is because we have our LEAP event. He’s in New York together with Thomas. They’re presenting today, and then moving to Germany, flying to Germany to present to our top 50 customers around our roadmap and the code development that we’re doing together with GitHub.

So clearly, there’s value here that is being created between the two companies for our customers and we believe that this will create opportunity from a security perspective. Curation can be used in order from a co pilot perspective to minimize what comes into your organization, but also now you have the traceability as a single pane of glass going from your binaries back to your source code with clear single pane of glass, easy traceability. And what will come out, in this roadmap discussion is really around remediation. And that’s the next step. So an important partnership together with GitHub, The question I’m sure is going to be asked, when do we get to a co sell?

So I will answer the co sell because that’s always a question that we get asked. Obviously, at some point, we would love to have the opportunity to tap into Microsoft with the tens of thousands of sales reps that they have. But that’s a different discussion. That’s a discussion with Microsoft. We’re working together with GitHub.

And we believe as we create value, there might be an opportunity to do a co sell with Microsoft. But who knows when that will happen. But we’re optimistic at some point we could see a co sell.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: But irrespective of a co sell Sanjeet, I think as you and I have talked and I’ve talked with investors, given that 70% of our customers are already using GitHub for their source code, the opportunity is really, as Ed talked about, the security solution. And there was an opportunity in Q4 that had impact from the GitHub and JFrog partnership. And what Ed and I are looking to do as we move through 2025 is hopefully as some of these deals close be able to highlight that this deal was in fact driven by or had influence from the GitHub JFrog partnership on the security side. So and as Ed talked about, I think curation is becoming very important because of the license function with Copilot and what could happen there with misuse of license with the integration of Copilot. So I think that as Ed noted, this partnership is more of a CEO to CEO partnership at this time.

And there’s more to come on the engineering front.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. That’s exciting. Let’s stay on the thread of partnerships for a couple of minutes. Let’s talk about AWS. You signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS.

Promises to help customers migrate workloads to the cloud and leverage its marketplace for seamless procurement. Can you elaborate on the ways that you think this partnership can translate to even better growth for JFrog?

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Yes. Let me talk about that real quickly, Sanjeet. We had a partnership obviously with all the cloud providers in their cloud marketplace. That was kind of our initial channel business that has been quite successful for us, quite successful in negotiating some of these large deals we closed in 2024. Thus, we’ve become a more important partner to AWS, being our largest cloud partner as it stands today.

And we moved up tier into a new level. I would point to you that others have had made press releases about this similar type of agreement within the infrastructure market. But what this does is it allows us to work with AWS in targeting co customers where they’re now willing to commit some resources. And some of those resources are going to be in the form of discounts given the size of commitment to the cloud that a customer makes on a migration process. So it helps us in the fact that co customers, we can certainly target them with AWS now.

But again, it doesn’t change our philosophy that it will be the customer’s decision as when they are ready to migrate.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Let’s continue to stay on the partnership theme. I want to talk about JFrog ML because you guys made a recent announcement with Hugging Face. But before we get there, kind of a similar question on runtime security. Why was it important for JFrog to enter the MLOps market where you’re providing like model evaluation, model serving, experiment tracking capabilities. Why enter this part of the market?

And then can talk about how and maybe you can give your perspective on the release announced partnership with Hugging Face.

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So I’ll start with the why. And why would we do this? So we are we learned that many of our customers today are using Artifactory to store their large language models. And why? Because it’s a binary.

A model is a container. It’s a binary. And who is the the leader in terms of the binary management and storage? It’s it’s JFrog. So that was what we learned.

Then what we saw was an opportunity to partner with companies like Hugging Face and SageMaker to bring from open source repositories, into JFrog and connect, to our platform. So that was what we did, in, I believe, the first half of twenty twenty four announcing that. Now we saw an opportunity to also have discussions with the training of the models and going through the software supply chain and delivering those models as they you learn and experiment and put those into production. This is where the discussion with Quoc came into the fold. Number one is, we looked at it, we saw that this is a new budgetary line item.

We think that there’s huge potential and we wanted to get in front of that wave quickly. We also know that valuations at the time were high, but could spike. We paid $230,000,000 for that acquisition at the end of Q2, beginning of Q3. Today, many of these companies are demanding $1,000,000,000 So we wanted to get in front of that. That was the why of why we did that.

And we think that this has an opportunity to be the next vertical of growth for JFrog. Okay. So from that perspective, it made a lot of sense for us to do it.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: And it seems like wherever binaries are being created, that’s where JFrog wants to be and have a voice in that market. Really interesting.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: I jokingly say, Sanjeet, that we’ve all talked about shift left in various aspects. This is the shift left of machines. Yes, understood.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes, making machine learning and AI kind of a software delivery type process. Now that makes kind of sense. Let’s spend a couple of minutes about the cloud business and just sort of mark to market on the state of the cloud business. Cloud revenue reached $168,000,000 accounting for 39% of total revenue. As you mentioned, Ed, it grew 41% year over year.

Decompose the growth that you saw last year from migrations, the month to month customer base, new logos and organic expansions. What were sort of the trend lines if we kind of decompose that growth that we’ve seen in recent quarters?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Listen, the primary growth driver here is coming from the migration. The migration from self hosted instance to cloud will generate anywhere from 20% to 80% uplift. And that’s step one, is moving that customer from self hosted to a cloud subscription. Now there’s opportunity, of course, down the road to continue to grow as workloads grow and usage goes above commit. Today, that’s not necessarily the case, but this is step one.

But we and we believe as we continue on this focus of migration, we’re positioning ourselves well for when budgets start to open up and companies are allowed to spend more than just at the minimum commits. The second step would be around expansion of those customers. So in magnitude of order then we see the expansion. So as workloads are growing and commitments become larger, we see expansion in that. Monthly customers are becoming less relevant.

So we’ve taken proactive steps as part of our strategy to move many of those monthly customers to annual customers to kind of minimize the variability that we see on a month to month and quarter to quarter basis. So that percentage of revenue that’s coming from our monthly customers that do not have commitments with JFrog has declined, again in 2024 and I would expect that to be the case in 2025. We are cloud first strategy. So most of our customers today are now landing in the cloud and that would be the last that we would see in terms of driving growth in the cloud is coming from those new customers.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: And Sanjeet, maybe just a simple way that I talk to investors about that is that obviously our cloud NDR is higher than the corporate and you can kind of do the math. And you can make an assumption of what percentage of that is from migration And what’s really left then is a fairly strong renewal growth rate that you can imply.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Great. Just as a follow-up to the point that you just made around the 20% to 80% uplift, What drives that 20% to 80%? What are some of the factors that are allowing customers to spend more with JFrog?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Yes. So when you migrate from self hosted to cloud, you’re obviously taking more with JFrog because of we’re now managing the cloud for you. But typically, what we see with that range from 20% to 80%, it’s the size of the workload that they’re moving from their self hosted instance to the cloud. Additionally, they may have multiple servers. So we monetize and self hosted on servers and utilization across those servers may not always be at 100%.

But when you have a global organization that’s using across multiple territories and regions, geographies, we typically see a higher migration uplift on those.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: And think about it like this, Sanjay. If I’m to Ed’s point, if I’m running a server and self hosted at 20% and crank it to 80%, JFrog sees nothing. But if I move to the cloud, that entire monetization is captured immediately.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Yes. That’s a great point. And then probably a key factor when we think about growth going forward. Let’s talk about the theme about moving upmarket. I would say the vast majority of my coverage in the last two years has talked about this.

They see the enterprise opportunity, frankly, because that’s where the enterprise is still under penetrated in cloud. So I want to talk a little about JFrog’s own journey there. How do you balance the increasing focus on large enterprise customers while maintaining a healthy mix of these smaller tech startup customers. In a sense, you want to have exposure to them because they tell you where the puck is going. So that gives you that signal back into your product engineering group.

So the move up market and then while trying to keep a pulse on where the puck is going, how does the team think through that?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So we are founded off of a developer selling directly to the developer on an inbound. So we have the team, we have the know how to do that and we continue to operate with an inbound motion and teams that are focused on driving that inbound motion. So the investment over the last three years plus that you talk about and the theme that you were discussing around the go to market has been made over the last three years and the focus has really been around the investment from those activities. But the fact of the matter is we had to learn and we’re continuing to learn. The impact of that was definitely seen in the second half of twenty twenty four where we landed many of these large deals.

But the focus in 2024 strategically was around landing these large customers, in particular penetrating and security multi year deals, but it doesn’t mean that we’re ignoring the mid and the SMB. We have the know how to do that and we continue to invest in those areas, but where we see the money right now is with these large strategic deals and those customers that are interested in investing in software infrastructure and modernization of those software infrastructure.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Yes. And we’re putting money to work in 2025 for future opportunities. This is not a 2025 type of opportunity. But I think as you noted Sanjeet, what we would like to see is maybe it’s through the GitHub relationship, maybe it’s some other methodology, maybe it’s somewhere down the road we come out with a lack of a better name, a Artifactory light to start that engagement with the customer earlier on than saying, hey, we understand here’s JFrog, it’s probably overkill for you today, go to Sonotype, go to another competitor, when you get to the big boy status, you’ll come to JFrog. I think that we would like to start that engagement a little bit earlier down the stream.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Makes sense. It actually leads into my next question around investments and margins, actual CFO questions now. So there was a significant amount of operating margin expansion in calendar twenty twenty three over 1,000 basis points, more modest expansion in 2024, and the initial outlook calls for generally flat margins in 2025 as you drive investments in your go to market organization. Can you talk to the early success you’re seeing from these investments and the confidence that it gives you to continuing along this investment path?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: So we’re seeing a lot of momentum right now in security and we also see ML, we made a pretty bold move in terms of the acquisition in the second half of twenty twenty four. We do not want to slow that down. And that’s part of the reason why you see in terms of the investments that are being made that we called out specifically in 2025 is to maintain that motion and that momentum. Now the investment in security has been made over the last three years and you saw the results three years ago where we were essentially flat and now we’re starting to see the margin expansion. We will invest in ML.

That’s part of what we want to do and we believe that that’s going to be a significant growth driver for JFrog in the future. Now the other thing to point out is that, the guide is conservative. And if we overachieve on the top line, my expectation is that that would trickle down to the bottom line. Part of the DNA of who we are, we’re very efficient. We’re from an operational perspective, we manage the business quite tight and making sure that we deliver profitable growth.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: And I would just note to Ed’s point, it’s conservative is what I say. I mean, look, I can’t come to you Sanjeet and say we’ve been conservative on the top line, but hey, let’s let it roll on the EBIT margin line, right? I think you’ve also seen it over the last few years that not all our ambitions in spending initiatives may become to fruition in a year. And to Ed’s point, I’ve been using a great new operating metric called incremental operating margin. And that’s essentially to Ed’s comment that dollars over the guidance that we provide should in fact see a higher contribution down to the EBIT1.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Let’s wrap up on kind of the long term model. Kind of Analyst Day, well more than I think it was 2023, where you laid out some initial targets around $800,000,000 in the revenue, 80% gross margins, 21% to 23% operating margins, 26% to 29% free cash flow margins. If you look at where we stand today, on a lot of these metrics, you’re kind of right there. How relevant is the long term model as you stand today, both on like the revenue side as well as the sort of, on profitability and free cash flow side of the equation?

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: Yes. I’ll try and wrap it quick because I know we’re up against time and there’s a lot to unpack here. But the bottom line is this. I look at it from two perspectives. What have we done since we delivered the long term model?

And as you just rolled through, we’re on track. Revenue, we’re on track in terms of our growth. Operating margins, we’re on track. Gross margin, we’re on track. Free cash flow, we almost hit for the full year the number.

So when I look at this, I feel confident that we’re on track. Now going forward, there is a lot of uncertainty, obviously in 2025 and the visibility that we have is really in the first half. We’ll see what ends up happening in 2025. That’s out of our control. What’s in our control is how we spend, when we spend, what we deliver in terms of our operating margin and our free cash flow margin.

We’ll see. We’ll come back in the second half of twenty twenty five and see if it’s still relevant or not and we’ll provide updates.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Yes. I think we’re looking to hopefully provide an update in the second half Sanjeet. And at that point, we’ll obviously only have a small delta in terms of what’s left for that. And we’ll have to see where things shake out for this year at that time.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Host, Morgan Stanley: Great. With that, we’re out of time. Thank you so much, Jeff and Ed, for giving an update on the JFrog story. We really appreciate it.

Jeff Schreiner, VP of IR, JFrog: Thank you

Ed Gudscheid, Chief Financial Officer, JFrog: for having us.

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