Cloud Stocks: BlackLine Partners With Google Cloud

Cloud-based financial software provider BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) continues to win several accolades for both its product and overall growth. For the tenth year in a row, it made it to Deloitte’s list of 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America. It was also the leader in Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions. And, to top it all, its recent financial results continued to outpace market expectations.

BlackLine’s Financials

Revenues for the third quarter grew 28% over the year to $74.93 million, ahead of the Street’s estimate of $72.37 million. Net loss was $9.2 million, or $0.17 per share. On an adjusted basis, EPS of $0.12 was significantly better than the market’s forecast of $0.03 and the previous year’s $0.07.

By segment, subscription and support revenues grew 25% to $70.31 million and professional services revenues grew 80% to $4.6 million.

Among other metrics, it added 87 net new customers in the quarter to end with over 2,870 customers and a net user base of 244,515. The dollar-based net revenue retention rate was 109% for the September ended quarter.

For the fourth quarter, BlackLine forecast revenues of $77.3-$78.3 million with a non-GAAP net income of $0.12-$0.13 per share. The market was looking for Q4 revenues of $76.56 million with an EPS of $0.08. BlackLine expects revenues of $286-$287 million for the year with an EPS of $0.36-$0.38. The market was looking for revenues of $282.72 million with an EPS of $0.24 for the year.

BlackLine’s Growing Alliances

As part of BlackLine’s focus on growth through the Cloud, it recently announced a tie-up with Google Cloud. As part of the agreement, BlackLine will leverage the Google Cloud Platform to add cloud-native capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance its financial automation platform with new real-time, intelligent functionality.

BlackLine is working on a cloud-first strategy that will focus on three key areas – maximizing the potential of the BlackLine cloud platform as a real-time, intelligent data platform, leveraging new cloud-native products and services to improve the customer experience and scaling for new and existing customers on a global level.

The tie-up with Google will help BlackLine deliver on these objectives. It expects the tie-up to drive business growth, compliance, and digital transformation initiatives and to ensure that customers can keep their financial data secure, protected, and available using the Google Cloud.

Additionally, to drive market expansion, BlackLine also announced an integration with Workiva, a leading cloud provider of connected reporting and compliance solutions. The platform integration will help joint customers streamline financial close and reporting processes by enabling users to connect and transfer data between the two platforms. The integration will help drive accuracy and transparency in the record-to-report process.

Its stock is trading at $49.71 with a market capitalization of $2.7 billion. It touched a year high of $56.29 in August this year. It has recovered from the low of $34.01 it had fallen to in November last year.

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Sramana Mitra is the founder of One Million by One Million (1M/1M), a global virtual incubator that aims to help one million entrepreneurs ...

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