NASDAQ:EGHT 8X8 Q3 2024 Earnings Report $1.76 -0.03 (-1.40%) As of 01:54 PM Eastern This is a fair market value price provided by Polygon.io. Learn more. Earnings HistoryForecast 8X8 EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.10Consensus EPS $0.10Beat/MissBeat by +$0.01One Year Ago EPS-$0.118X8 Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$181.01 millionExpected Revenue$183.42 millionBeat/MissMissed by -$2.41 millionYoY Revenue GrowthN/A8X8 Announcement DetailsQuarterQ3 2024Date1/31/2024TimeAfter Market ClosesConference Call DateWednesday, January 31, 2024Conference Call Time5:00PM ETConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptSlide DeckPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)SEC FilingEarnings HistoryCompany ProfileSlide DeckFull Screen Slide DeckPowered by 8X8 Q3 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrJanuary 31, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 14 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to 8x8 Third Quarter 20 24 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to hand the conference over to Kate Patterson. Operator00:00:30You may begin. Speaker 100:00:33Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Today's agenda will include a review of our Q3 results with Samuel Wilson, our Chief Executive Officer and Kevin Krause, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Before we get started, let me remind you that our discussion today includes forward looking statements about future financial performance, including investments in innovation and our focus on profitability and cash flow, as well as statements regarding our business, products and growth strategies. Speaker 100:01:02We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward looking statements as they involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from forward looking statements as described in our risk factors in our report filed with the SEC. Any forward looking statements made on this call and in the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. Certain financial measures that will be discussed on this call, together with year over year comparisons in some cases, were not prepared in accordance with the U. S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. Speaker 100:01:36A reconciliation of those non GAAP measures to the closest comparable GAAP measure is provided in our earnings release and earnings presentation slides, which are available on 8x8's Investor Relations website at investors. 8x8.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sam Wilson. Speaker 200:01:54Thank you, Kate, and thank you to all of our investors, analysts, employees, customers and partners for joining us on our Q3 call. We delivered solid operating results again in the 3rd quarter. Our financial North Star is cash flow from operations per share And our cash flow from operations performance for the quarter was the 2nd highest ever. Cash flow from operations on a trailing 12 month basis is up 55% year over year and We continue to be very mindful of share count. Cash flow was driven by non GAAP operating margins significantly above our guidance range. Speaker 200:02:28Q3 'twenty four marks the anniversary of the official launch of our innovation led strategy to build durable long term growth. Our path to complete transformation is underway from operating losses and negative cash flow to sustain non GAAP profitability and increasing cash generation. From a UCaaS led to a CCaaS led sales motion across our customer base. From 3 individual products to an increasingly integrated portfolio of 8 products with more to come. From selling products to delivering solutions that address urgent business challenges from transactional arm's length customer relationships to being a strategic partner in our customer success from over levered to delevered. Speaker 200:03:15Comprehensive transformations take time and the progress is not always perfectly linear. But I'm impressed by the strides our teams have made over the past year across all three fronts financial, product innovation and go to market. We have been profitable on a non GAAP basis and positive cash flow for 12 consecutive quarters. For perspective, In fiscal 2020, we reported non GAAP operating losses of nearly $61,000,000 and negative cash flow from operations of almost 90 $4,000,000 3 years later, we're on track to deliver non GAAP operating profits of about $92,000,000 in operating cash flow of more than $70,000,000 for fiscal 2024. We said in the Q1 that we would return $250,000,000 to investors by delevering our balance sheet over the 3 years from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026. Speaker 200:04:16Tomorrow, we will officially redeem the remaining $63,000,000 of our 2024 notes using cash on hand. We have already sent the funds to our transfer agent. Since we announced the plan at the beginning of the fiscal year, we have returned to debt holders over $88,000,000 or about 35% of the $250,000,000 plan. We are aggressively delevering on our way to creating a fortress balance sheet. All things being equal, this should drive increased shareholder value as a greater proportion of our enterprise value accrues to our equity holders. Speaker 200:04:52Increasing shareholder value is one cornerstone of our strategy and it is at the heart of our decisions around compensation, operating expenses and M and A. For example, we took steps to increase the ratio of cash compensation versus Equity compensation for many of our employees. While employees see less volatility in their income, we will reduce dilution due to share count issuance over the intermediate term. This is a sharp contrast to some of our peers who have increased their stock based compensation expense as their stock prices have declined. We are harnessing the power of AI to empower our customers to deliver better experiences to their customers. Speaker 200:05:35Our unified platform allows us to capture, analyze and correlate data from customer interactions across the organization. But the platform is not the end game. We are closing the loop, breaking down silos and customer engagement and extending specific contact center tools To everyone in the organization who engages with a customer, today we announced a new product line To deliver cross organization customer engagement, empowering end to end CX orchestration For all customer touch points across the entire organization, the beta program is in progress for qualified 8x8 customers. This is perhaps the most significant new innovation we have introduced in several years and it is a direct result of the increase in our innovation investment. Through a combination of cutting edge AI solutions, platform level contact center components and both native and third party data, We will be able to offer built for purpose experiences for CX professionals outside the contact center. Speaker 200:06:41This initiative further bridges the gap between UC and CC and transforms the availability, utilization and contextualization of interaction data through the entire organization. The resulting customer intelligence provides powerful and predictive insights to enable smarter decisions and positive customer outcomes across many different touch points in an organization. We believe we have a clear lead in delivering built for purpose experiences for CX professionals outside the contact center. In addition to expanding our product portfolio with newly targeted experiences for an expanded set of users, We are changing the entire dialogue with prospects and existing customers. It's no longer only about migrating phone service to the cloud or replacing on prem PBX. Speaker 200:07:34It's about making it easier for all employees to deliver great customer experiences both inside and outside the formal contact center. As important as this initiative is, it is by no means the only area we are driving innovation. Let me call your attention to a press release we issued last week with details on new features and enhancements delivered over the last few months. On the CCaaS side, we have included improved AI based call summaries For improved speech analytics, expanded omni channel capabilities and enhancements to our agent and supervisor workspaces and more. We continue to enhance our UCaaS solutions with value added features like smart summaries and analytics that improve usability, productivity and efficiency. Speaker 200:08:21We also continue to expand our outbound customer engagement capabilities available through our CPaaS solutions, enabling customers to build more effective, Customized outbound campaigns. With just a few new products at general availability, we are already seeing 60% year over year growth in revenue from our new products with quarter on quarter acceleration driven by workforce optimization, Our intelligent customer assistant, digital and voice, payments compliance solutions, all wrapped in add on subscription based services. This is before any benefit from new products spoken about here today, along with several other products in beta. We are delivering intentional innovation that addresses the needs of a well defined target customer. New customers like Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic and the Museum of Science in Boston have chosen 8x8 for capabilities like a broad feature set, configuration simplicity, ease of use reporting and analytics and integration with other workflows. Speaker 200:09:298x8 customers are also continuing to embrace our leading communications and contact center solutions for Microsoft Teams with over 400,000 seats sold today. Customers like Wall Shaw Housing Group in the UK and Teradata are implementing 8x8 solutions to take advantage of our seamless integration with Teams, our global presence and our unified UCaaS and CCaaS capabilities, including AI driven digital self-service. To keep our products future friendly, we are continuing to innovate on Teams and expect to have some very exciting news in the near future. A third area of innovation that I'm really excited about is our CPaaS solutions. Until recently, this part of our business has focused almost exclusively on SMS customers In the Asia Pacific region, we remain a leader, but we believe there is a large and growing opportunity to attract new customers and expand CPaaS adoption with our installed base of UC and CC as we add additional services. Speaker 200:10:36With an extensive roadmap of new solutions like outbound customer engagement and automated employee notification, we are intentional about engineering solutions for specific use cases and wrapping them in a highly automated, easy to transact set of technologies. Like our solution for cross organization engagement, These new CPaaS solutions allow us to partner strategically with our customers, shifting the narrative from price to value. Okay. I would be remiss if I didn't talk about AI. AI permeates our solutions. Speaker 200:11:11It is embedded in our platform, provides transcriptions, analytics and summaries as shared services across UC and CC. It powers our digital interactions where we achieve deflections rates as high as 80%. It is at the heart of our new cross organizational engagement initiative and of course It is a large part of a highly integrated ecosystem. Our approach to AI integration is 2 pronged and is potentially designed to give customers the flexibility to adapt as the market evolves. 1st, we allow customers to reap the benefits of AI for common use cases with native AI powered features built into the platform. Speaker 200:11:512nd, we enable a deep native like integrations with 3rd party AI tools built for needs, including our curated technology partner ecosystem. Some of the advantages to our approach are: We have the data and the platform. We can focus our engineering teams on analytics, integrations and universal use cases such as interaction summarization, which we announced last week. Our customers can adopt AI in their own timeline With the flexibility to choose the best in breed solutions for their needs and we can leverage the massive investments made by the venture Capital community and startups focused on AI based products through our technology ecosystem. Our ecosystem extends across UC, CC and now the cross organizational engagement products to allow for highly differentiated solutions to solve specific customer needs. Speaker 200:12:51Similar to our own innovation Our technology ecosystem aims to transform customer experiences engagement for organizations of all sizes without requiring complex Custom development or exorbitant overhead costs that have traditionally only been feasible for the largest of enterprises. We have focused on depth rather than breadth, offering our customers a carefully curated portfolio of integrations with leading technology providers. We recently expanded our technology partner program with a new exclusive tier, Sell With 8. Sell With 8 allows a select group of technology partners to sell directly with 8x8 to solve customer pain points jointly. For example, AWAKEN Intelligence, An inaugural Sell With A partner offers an integration with the 8x8 contact center that leverages data to provide real time agent guidance and AI supported assistance. Speaker 200:13:51Our foundational partner ecosystem initiative is one of the foundational building blocks in our go to market transformation. When we began the transformation process, I knew that go to market would take the longest and will be the most difficult part of our strategy. Transforming GTM is not about Throwing more money into Google AdWords or increasing sales capacity. We are shifting market perception, developing and empowering channel partners, building pipelines and increasing accountability with experienced leaders and a relentless focus on customer success. It has taken us the better part of the year, but I believe we are now have the right people in the right roles to reaccelerate revenue. Speaker 200:14:35In closing, I want to summarize our journey so far and the early signs of our success. Last quarter, I discussed becoming Speaker 300:14:43a portfolio of product company. Speaker 200:14:45We are still in the early stages of a lengthy but exciting transformation. Our innovation led momentum is also evident in our ex cash ARR, which is up with double digit year over year gains in Q3. The average ARR of our enterprise customers has been steadily increasing as we expanded from 3 individual products to an increasingly integrated portfolio of 8. We also see a steady increase in larger deployments with ARR from customers with more than 250 contact center seats, up more than 50% year over year. We have been working towards this vision for a long time. Speaker 200:15:25We believe we have the ingredients for success. Our product portfolio is compelling. We have a solid financial foundation. We have a seasoned leadership team committed to achieving our objectives and we have amazing talent at every level of the organization. I believe the best is yet to come. Speaker 200:15:46I want to thank our customers, our partners, our investors and our employees for their hard work and continued support. With that, will turn the call over to Kevin. Speaker 400:15:58Thanks, Sam, and good afternoon, everyone. We remain financially disciplined and delivered strong operating income cash flow in the fiscal 2024 Q3 exceeding our guidance range for non GAAP operating margin and exceeding our expectations for cash flow from operations. We have delivered positive non GAAP operating income and cash flow from operations for 12 consecutive quarters. Total revenue for the quarter was $181,000,000 and service revenue was $175,100,000 Service revenue was approximately flat year over year and roughly equal to our guidance midpoint. Other revenue for the quarter was $5,900,000 which was below expectations due to lower one time professional services and product revenue. Speaker 400:16:47Total ARR was $707,000,000 quarter end, up 1% year over year and flat sequentially. Enterprise ARR increased 2% year over year and $2,000,000 sequentially. A significant amount of the total churn occurred within smaller customers, which shows up in the sequential decline in small and mid market business ARR. We have been devoting additional resources to retention of the Fuse Enterprise customers and expect to see an acceleration in upgrades to 8x8, but we probably have at least 1 more quarter before this headwind to ARR growth begins to dissipate. Turning to gross margin, operating expenses and operating profit, please remember that all items discussed are non GAAP unless otherwise noted. Speaker 400:17:36Overall, 3rd quarter gross margin was 71.6%, a decrease of 0.5% year over year, primarily due to an increased mix of lower margin SMS usage revenue compared to Q3 2023, which shows up in our service revenue margin. Service revenue gross margin was 74.5%, roughly flat sequentially, but down approximately 1.2 percentage points year over year, driven by pressure on SMS text gross margin. We continuously manage our cost of service revenue and service revenue gross margins to remain healthy in the 74% to 75% range given our mix of subscription and usage revenue. Other revenue gross margin came in at negative 11.9 percent for the quarter compared to negative 1.4% in Q3 2023 on lower professional services deployment revenue, which mainly has a fixed cost base. Turning to operating expenses. Speaker 400:18:37R and D was 14.9 percent of revenue, in line with our 15% target and indicative of the continued investment we are making in product innovation. Sales and marketing expense was 33% of revenue, slightly down from 33.1% in Q2 2024, but well below the 36.3 percent of revenue in Q3 2023. On a dollar basis, sales and marketing was down more than $7,000,000 year over year. The decline reflected the resource realignment we did in Q4 2023 as the first step in our go to market transformation. G and A as a percentage of revenue was 10.3%, down slightly sequentially as incurred seasonally lower employer taxes and benefits costs as more employees hit the maximum contribution levels for FICA and other benefits. Speaker 400:19:29I would like to point out that we took a non cash charge of approximately $11,000,000 on our GAAP financial statements for ceasing the use of office space, primarily in the U. S. And to a much lesser extent internationally, as we continue to support hybrid workforce. Total non GAAP spending as measured by non GAAP cost of goods sold, R and D, sales and marketing and G and A was down approximately $9,300,000 or nearly 6% year over year and reflects our strategic cost realignment actions since the prior fiscal year. The combination of a healthy gross margin, carefully managed operating expenses and one time favorable items that increased operating margin approximately 1 percentage point resulted in non GAAP operating margin of 13.4%, above the high end of our guidance range of 11% to 12%. Speaker 400:20:26Operating profit was $24,300,000 up approximately 32% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA, which is reconciled to our GAAP results in our press release, was $30,700,000 16.9 percent of revenue and up 19% year over year. We have generated over $126,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA over the past 4 quarters. Cash flow from operations was $22,400,000 for the quarter, a near record driven by strong profitability and solid cash collections. Given that cash flow can vary quarter to quarter Due to the timing of interest payments, collections and changes in other balance sheet items, I prefer to look at cash flow from operations on a on a trailing 12 month basis when evaluating our performance. Speaker 400:21:20Over the last four quarters, we have generated approximately $80,000,000 in cash from operations, an increase of 55% compared to the trailing 12 month period ending December 31, 2022. We ended the quarter with approximately $170,000,000 of cash, restricted cash and investments, up over $20,000,000 from the prior quarter. As we have said earlier, our plan is $250,000,000 to our investors from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026 by delevering our balance sheet. Our most recent step in that direction is the $63,000,000 we paid to the loan administrator earlier this week, who will be paying the 2024 debt holders tomorrow to redeem the remaining 2024 notes. As you heard from Sam earlier on this call, this latest payment brings us to 35% completion of our $250,000,000 repayment goal from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026. Speaker 400:22:25As we move into fiscal 2025, we intend to begin repaying the adjustable rate term loan as quickly as possible, which will have a significant and immediate impact on our operating cash flow by reducing our cash interest payments. You can expect us to begin voluntary early repayment of principal immediately after the expiration of the prepayment penalty in August 2024. Before turning to guidance, I want to restate what we are doing to build shareholder value over time. First, we are investing in innovation with a goal to drive long term durable growth. 2nd, we are focused on leading with our contact center solution to our target small and medium enterprise customers. Speaker 400:23:093rd, we are reducing the mix of equity based employee compensation, which will moderate the pace of new share issuances due to employee stock programs over the long term. And 4th, We are retooling our go to market organization under new leadership to focus on revenue growth while maintaining solid non GAAP profitability and cash flow. Increasing cash flow from operations while reducing shareholder dilution over time remains our financial North Star. And our goal remains to generate cash from operations at a compound growth rate of approximately 20% for fiscal years 2024 to 2026. I would like to point out that the significant growth in cash from operations we in fiscal 2024 implies more muted growth rates through fiscal 2026 to arrive at the 20% compounded growth rate goal. Speaker 400:24:07We are very focused on delivering cash flow with reduced dilution over the long term as the best way to build shareholder value over time. Let me walk you through how our strategies to build shareholder value over time drive our operating expense structure. We expect sales and marketing to be in the range of 33% to 34% of revenue for fiscal 2024, down from 36% in fiscal 2023 as we focus our go to market motions on our target SME customers and cross selling into our installed base. I believe this cost envelope can accommodate the aforementioned go to market retooling as well as programs that drive product awareness and investments required to develop our value added reseller channel in North America. We expect R and D as a percent of revenue to remain about 15% as we continue on the path of investment in our customer focused product strategy. Speaker 400:25:09Finally, we expect G and A expenses to remain in the range of 10.5% to 11% of revenue for fiscal 2024. We believe we can achieve leverage from our G and A functions over time as revenue increases and we achieve greater efficiencies through automation. Regarding non GAAP gross margin, we anticipate Q4 twenty twenty four to be in the same range as Q2 and Q3 with the full year in the 72% range. Please note that this metric can be influenced by product mix. Over the past quarter, we have seen longer sales cycles on large deals, greater scrutiny by the customer regarding contract approvals a generally tougher economic environment. Speaker 400:25:56With this context in mind and the operating expense framework described above, We establish outlook ranges for the Q4 and the full year of fiscal 2024 ending March 31, 2024 as follows. For the fiscal Q4, we anticipate service revenue to be in the range of $171,000,000 to $175,000,000 We anticipate total revenue to be in the range of $176,000,000 to $181,000,000 implying other revenue of $5,500,000 at the guidance midpoint. Note that other revenue can vary based upon customer specific deployment schedules and hardware shipments. So there could be some movement in the Q4 2024 other revenue as a result of these dynamics. We are targeting an operating margin of approximately 10%. Speaker 400:26:50As a reminder, our spending increases in calendar Q1, which is our fiscal 4th quarter as Social Security taxes and other employee benefits such as the 401 match restart in January. We expect cash flow from operations to decline sequentially as our cash expenses increase seasonally in fiscal Q4, as I just mentioned, plus we expect to make other planned operating cash payments such as higher debt interest and indirect taxes. We anticipate interest expense of approximately $9,000,000 and cash interest payments of approximately $11,000,000 Cash interest payments in Q4 will include the semi annual payments on our 20242028 convertible notes as well as quarterly interest payments on the variable rate term loan. We are currently anticipating that the rate on the term loan remains approximately 12% or SOFR plus 6.6%. We estimate a fully diluted share count of approximately 126,000,000 shares for fiscal Q4. Speaker 400:28:02Given the 4th quarter guidance ranges above, fiscal 2024 ending March 31, 2024 is expected to be as follows. We anticipate service revenue to be in the range of $699,000,000 to $703,000,000 We anticipate total revenue to be in the range $725,300,000 to $730,300,000 We continue to focus on delivering a solid operating margin anticipate achieving between 12.5% 13% for the year versus the 8.4% achieved 2023. We expect cash flow from operations to exceed $70,000,000 as Sam stated in his remarks. Again, note that cash flow from operations is impacted by timing differences in collections, debt interest and other payables. We anticipate debt interest expense and cash paid for debt interest of $35,000,000 to $36,000,000 Again, noting that our term loan is subject to monthly interest rate adjustments. Speaker 400:29:10We estimate an average fully diluted share count of approximately 123,000,000 shares for fiscal 2024. In closing, I believe that our Continued focus on profitability while maintaining our targeted investments in innovation plus our go to market retooling is the correct strategy for us at this time. This strategy will enable a return to revenue growth while we also return value to our investors initially by reducing our debt. Our goal is to show improving revenue trends in fiscal 2025. I would like to thank the entire 8x8 team for working together to deliver this quarter's solid results. Speaker 400:29:55Operator, we are ready for questions. Operator00:29:58Thank Our first question comes from the line of Matt Van Bylite with BTIG. Your line is open. Speaker 500:30:26Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So Sam, you mentioned continued focus on being a contact center focused company and starting to see some really good traction there. So maybe just walk us through how the go to market process has evolved there. Are you looking to land with new contact center opportunities? Speaker 500:30:48Are you finding that a lot more of these deals tend to be a sort of combination replacement come in and sort of build a whole new stack? Speaker 200:30:57Yes. So, first off, thank you for the question. It's definitely the latter part of what you said. We do see that the on prem to cloud transition and digital transformation are frequently linked. As CMOs and CROs and CEOs want to transition their business in this new digital age, They realize that their communication system becomes a core bottleneck and they have to move it into the cloud. Speaker 200:31:22And then the fact that we are on a single form handling UCCC and now closing the loop with things in the middle on a single data platform makes it really attractive for those kinds of things. So when I talk about transitioning the GTM and this is not going to be a straight line, But really it's about the fact that we need to get out of starting with a UC only sale, we need to lead with contact center. Menurgy has done some great research saying that 2 thirds of the buying decision when you're buying these products together is driven by the contact center choice, number 1. Number 2 is obviously when we sell multiple products, the retention rates, the ARPUs, all those things are better. And it's really about becoming that portfolio of products company. Speaker 200:32:09And we now I used to say we went from 2 products to 8 products. And with today's announcement around You guys loosely referred to as informal contact center. I don't really like that name because it's a little different than that. We now sell effectively 9 products. And so that's where we need to lead. Speaker 200:32:26We need to lead by coming into a business, figuring out where they're at in that digital transformation, what their business problems are and selling them a package of products that specifically solve their business needs. Speaker 500:32:40And maybe just Follow-up there on the customer engagement product you announced today. Who are the core users that you're envisioning seeing this? Is this more of an outbound sales type of motion or is it truly that sort of customer success type of realm? Curious on how you're doing it and sort of what the crux of coming up with this product was, how much was existing customers sort of using the product in unintended ways that opened up your eyes to this? Speaker 200:33:12Okay. So we started about a year, year and a half ago. I think we've envisioned about and a half ago and started actually coding with a significant number of scrum teams a year ago. The core user is Specific users inside of a business whose job title is generally not contact center agents. So let's say IT help desk, billing department or billing support department, field service workers, healthcare workers, these kinds of things. Speaker 200:33:43And what's interesting is frequently this problem is solved with a ring group. They use a UC solution and they'll do a ring group and 10 people's phone ring simultaneously and whoever picks up, picks up. The problem with that and this was the feedback we got from customers is the problem with that is can't really use an ecosystem It's not really designed to have bots in front of it and handovers, etcetera. Can't get analytics, can't get AI technologies, can't get a bunch of things that are contact center functions in this hybrid type of use case. And so it's very targeted on specific use cases where there's a desire to have like high octane UC mixed with high octane CC in a specific use case. Speaker 200:34:30And so, and we've seen some players in the market that have done bits and pieces of it, but there's no player in the market that can span that full range. Can do everything from UC, this new cross organizational engagement product and the regular contact center, Full featured high performance product design for that. And so the last part of your question is, the idea look, the analysts, You guys, the industry analysts have talked about this informal contact center. That's maybe where the idea started. We talked a lot To our customers, we researched a lot with our customers to really figure out the exact specific use cases and then we went and built the product And it's going to beta now. Speaker 500:35:17All right, great. Thank you. Speaker 200:35:18Thanks, Matt. Operator00:35:20Thank you. Please standby for our next questioner. Our next question comes from the line of Citi with Mizuho. Your line is open. Speaker 300:35:38Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask, I know at the macro environment, it's tough. Some of the peer some of your peers talked about weakness in Small Business and even Consumer vertical. I'm wondering, I know you talked about some churn and fuse side, but what are you seeing in terms of macro and different verticals? Speaker 400:36:01Yes. So this is Kevin. We do see some down sell pressure on some renewals right now, as customers maybe need fewer seats and so forth. So we are seeing some of that. And I did mention in my remarks that we did see some of that in the smaller to into the mid market business areas, which affected our ARR growth rates there. Speaker 300:36:32Great. And then a follow-up, you talked about the fuse headwinds would dissipate Maybe by this quarter, fiscal Q4. And Sam, you talked about this innovation led growth. Certainly, your Last one year, we have done a lot of products, now 2 to 8 products. So how should we think about the growth? Speaker 300:36:55I know this year was almost like 2% decline, but is this like the Q4 is sort of a bottom and then we should start Any kind of trend directionally would be helpful. Operator00:37:21You're muted speakers. We can hear you now. Speaker 200:37:29Okay, sorry. So Citi, you're asking the right question. It's one I ask of myself and the management team every day. Are we at the bottom? When are we going to see the growth? Speaker 200:37:38We definitely see and I sort of hate using this term, but I don't have the right term to use. We see green shoots when I talked about, for example, new products growth being up 60% year over year. That gives me a sense that we're seeing product market fit on that innovation and we're seeing acceleration on a quarter on quarter basis terms of bookings and the forward looking indicators around the new products. So I think we're sort of seeing the positive green shoots. When the number will be big enough to really drive up that year over year growth rate, as you know in these business models, we need a couple of quarters to stack on top of each other to really get those numbers to kick in. Speaker 200:38:13And so, I'm not yet ready to call the exact date and time of the bottom. It definitely feels like it's close, closest in the recent past, now, next week, I don't know. But I'll tell you what I'm really happy about and you mentioned it is the innovation, right? Those new products, the fact that we're seeing acceleration, we're seeing customer demands, just going to take a little while for it to get to be a big enough number and to continue to drive up a higher retention rate. Great. Speaker 400:38:43Thank you. Speaker 200:38:44Thank you, Citi. Operator00:38:46Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Your line is open. Speaker 600:39:01Hey, Kevin and Sam. This is Damon Coughlin on for Ryan McWilliams. Thanks for taking my question. How did contact center agent hiring and call volumes In fiscal 3Q compared to last year's fiscal 3Q, were there any differences particularly for any verticals, Any particular strength or weaknesses? Speaker 200:39:22Can I ask you a spike in because you're asking me like literally how many phone calls were received by contact centers in the 3rd quarter? Speaker 600:39:29Yes, like I say usage or and then and in general, like seasonal hiring that typically Would call up for, I say, open enrollment or Yes. Okay. Speaker 200:39:43So as you know, we have we offer our customers in the contact center capabilities, the ability to surge seats for kind of holidays or Easter or whatever, whatever campaigns they're running, political campaigns, those kinds of things. I would say we saw a little less than usual. I mean, In these contracted business models, you see a little bit of this lag, right? And so contracts come up and they may have done a layoff previously, etcetera. It's also hard for us because we are seeing increased sales of larger contact centers. Speaker 200:40:15As I mentioned, in my script, we've seen a 50% increase in the contact centers over 2 50 seats. So it's a bit of a moving thing because we are selling more new customers contact center. We are selling more seats in contact center. We're selling more stuff in contact center. And at the same time, we do see some and Kevin mentioned this, some of the economic pressures around, We probably saw a little less surge seats that I would have expected, maybe I was a little overly optimistic, those kinds of things. Speaker 200:40:47And I think it's been mentioned earlier, but I think out of every segment, I mean the retail vertical, probably Maybe the squishiest, maybe that some travel leisure type stuff. It's hard. I mean, we basically have no customer greater than 0.5%. So We have a lot of different verticals represented. And so it's I don't know, it's kind of my sense. Speaker 600:41:11Perfect. Thank you. And then did the CPaaS business in Southeast Asia continue to show stability like it did in 2Q, and then maybe like what assumptions are factored into the guide for 4Q for this business? Speaker 400:41:26So the CPaaS business performed as we expected it. And yes, it showed stability for the quarter. So that's good news. I want to point out though that seasonally, we have seasonal variability in that business as certain promotions get done over the holiday period and so forth. In the Q4 guide, there's some downward trend as normal as we enter like the Lunar New Year period and Other Ramadan. Speaker 400:41:56Ramadan, yes, and other periods. So that's factored into our guide. Operator00:42:00All right. Now, look, Speaker 200:42:01you mentioned the CPaaS business, so to consider this a lay up to sort of do that CEO thing and deviate a little bit. But we've got some great new products coming out on the CPaaS side. There are some pre configured bundles for specific use cases that you'll see us start pushing into our installed base and our contact center customers. Stay tuned before the end of the quarter. So, the reason I brought this up is I'm sort of warning the audience that in the future it's going to get a little messier because we're Starting to view our CPaaS business not as a separate entity inside of 8x8, but it's all started to become blurred, right? Speaker 200:42:37You've got UC, CC and CPaaS is how we traditionally think about it. But now we have low end UC, we have Cross organizational customer engagement, we have UC and then we have CPaaS riding on top of all of it. So it's becoming a bit of a mix. And it's really all being driven on effectively one platform as we bring it all together. So you get economies of scale and engineering capacity and CICD, continuous innovation, continuous deployment and all those things are starting to spin in the right direction. Speaker 700:43:12Got it. Perfect. Thanks guys. Speaker 400:43:14Thank you. Thank you. Operator00:43:16Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Funk with Bank of America. Your line is open. Speaker 700:43:29Yes. So thank you for the question and thank you for the color on the call and the focus on profitability. I wanted to dig in though some more into the revenue. You lowered the guide for the year, trying to dissect the piece part here rather than reading the tea leaves, right? I'm sure you have an internal forecast for net new, for NRR and then for SKUs customer contraction. Speaker 700:43:58So maybe help us with more precision with our own modeling by pointing out which piece of that fell short or is falling short Relative to the prior expectation. And then final piece related, I think Fuze was about $130,000,000 in revenue. You said that's been off, but should stabilize in a quarter or 2. Can you provide us the current revenue number for the Fuze customers so we can figure out that attrition rate And the potential stabilization point. Speaker 400:44:30Okay. Thanks, Michael. So on the revenue for you're asking about Q4, Right. So I talked about headwind in CPaaS due to the holidays coming up. In terms of Fuze, We do see what we're doing internally as a company, which is a great thing, it's actually we're migrating them over to the 8x8 platform. Speaker 400:44:52As we do that, we are seeing some down sell, you would call it, as those customers right size their needs for us. So there is a bit of erosion there and that's what I was referring to as headwind in the prepared remarks. But Doing that and doing that early and proactively helps us retain those customers and that's what we believe. So That's a good thing for us because they'll stick with us. Speaker 200:45:18Okay. And I want to address the second part of your question. Look, I can't give you a number on Exactfuse anymore Because we've migrated, we've upgraded, see maybe do it. We've upgraded hundreds of customers between the platform, we've cross sold, we've done a lot of things now And we don't really break them out separately internally anymore. We view all of our metrics internal are a combined company. Speaker 200:45:40And it's just Sort of hard to do with that. It's easier for us when we manage everything to do it that way, and so that's the way we do it. I just don't have the number to really give you effectively in front of me. I will tell you though, what we do see is the core business is vibrant. We do expect in the next couple of quarters, we start to see improving growth trends and a resumption of growth in fiscal 2025. Speaker 200:46:02It's something one of those quarters, we'll definitely I think we'll see a resumption of growth. And you're going to ask me like why do I have confidence in that and it's going to come back to new products, right? If we can get that 60% number that's accelerating to keep kind of bumping along and keep going As we add more new products and as we retool the go to market force around that product portfolio, I really do think the math will work itself out show that resumption of growth. And in the meantime, we paid off $63,000,000 in debt out of cash flow yesterday. Well, we wired the money yesterday. Speaker 200:46:31I think we're paying it off officially tomorrow. Speaker 700:46:33Love the delevering. Just to make sure I understand, you came in, in line, with the revenue forecast for this quarter and then lowered the full year, so it's supposedly lowered 4Q. Are you saying that that reduction is entirely due to CPaaS and There wasn't an undershooting on net new NRR No, Speaker 200:46:56no, we're not saying that. To be clear, look, CPaaS is going to be a little bit below what we maybe had expected 90 days ago. And that's driven by the fact that we are seeing some of the customers a little, What's the right word? More reluctant to run marketing campaigns during the Lunar New Year and Ramadan. That's what they're forecasting to us right now. Speaker 200:47:15And also we are seeing a little bit more, I don't know what the right word is, pressure or whatever. But as these contracts come due, we have customers that say, hey, look, I don't need 100 seats anymore, I need 92 seats. Speaker 400:47:28The other thing I'd like to add also and this is important in terms of total revenue. We're seeing a trend toward more softphone usage and less hardware. So if you look at our other revenue, It's a component obviously of the total. That has a bit of pressure as the customers are focused Speaker 200:47:45And it's dropped. I mean to be fair, Kevin, it's dropped a heck of a lot more than anything Speaker 400:47:50Yes. So that's baked in there as well. Speaker 700:47:54Okay. It's all very helpful. I'll just say it more precise than my own modeling guide. That's all I'm trying to do. I know reluctance to provide too much detail secret sauce from the metrics, but the more we add up, the better we can forecast and Speaker 200:48:06Michael, it's completely fair. It's not that it's just we don't I mean, I don't like 2 years ago, it was easy to track Fuze as a separate thing because we just bought them. But 2 years in, We have hundreds of customers that have upgraded, the billing systems are merged. There's all kinds of things happening. It's just no longer that easy Unless I stick a team of people going line by line and it's just kind of not worth doing that. Speaker 200:48:30I got my team is doing other things right now. Speaker 700:48:33No, of course. Thank you guys for the questions. Speaker 400:48:36Thank you. Thank you. Operator00:48:38Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Speaker 800:48:51Great, thanks. I just wanted to go into you have a lot of initiatives on kind of selling customers initially, But this what are kind of the initiatives or sales motions you guys are having to kind of add some of these additional solutions to existing customers? And then maybe piggybacking on that, you guys have talked a little bit about the fuse upgrades that are happening. But Is there like an end of life date? Like is there any point where we should kind of consider that the Fuze platform will all be kind of transitioned or upgraded to kind of the exCast platform? Speaker 800:49:28Thanks. Speaker 200:49:29Okay. So Marshall, really fair question. I'm Marshall, Meta, completely fair question. So let me dig this in reverse order. On the Fuze end of life, there's not a set end of life date. Speaker 200:49:40We're busy moving 100 of customers over right now, a lot of them are in flight. We've got kind of the top 400. They're a little bit more special. We're taking care of them. And so there's not a defined date. Speaker 200:49:52And we also with the top 400 customers, we're really doing it in conjunction with them. So I don't want to use that EOL term because that has a tendency that has unintended consequences for us. So it's really we work with them on that migration. The first part of your question is to me a really insightful question, which is around how do we have to change our motions as a company. As a company, historically, we've been kind of sell most of the wallet share on the first deal and that's kind of it, maybe a few add on seats here or there as you add employees or those kinds of things. Speaker 200:50:26That's really changing. And so if you look at how we've evolved, For example, I don't well, we know the exact number. We probably doubled the number of CSMs we have at the company over the last year. And that's really allowing us to then further expand. We've really restructured how we do some of our account management and some of those things around making sure that we can land and then further expand those customers. Speaker 200:50:51I think what's interesting is a lot of the technologies, SecurePay or Workforce Management or Intelligent Customer Assistant are generally not sold on the initial transaction. Most of the time the initial transaction is typically UC and CC only. And then over the next 3, 6, 12, 18 months, there's further add ons that are done. I recently hired, and it's in the press release, Mike McCarron from Gladly, and he and I worked together at MobileIron. He's just a phenomenal executive. Speaker 200:51:22But he's really coming in to help us further expand our motions around that land and expand and further add on sales. And then the other thing we're doing and this is great for me. I don't know if you guys are excited as I get it about this stuff, but We've got product led growth now. So if you go into our product today, our contact center product, we can do things like and I know all you people have been around for a while, they're going to say, oh my God, this existed 20 years, yes, we're there now, we've got up, which is we can do admin notifications, we can do PLG product led growth directly in the platform where people can sign up for feature functionality, automatically add it to their invoice and drive further add on sales. And so those are all things that we've developed under the notion of innovation and retooling over the last year. Operator00:52:11Perfect. Thanks. Thanks, Meta. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Nicholas with B. Operator00:52:26Riley. Your line is open. Speaker 900:52:30Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to check-in, I mean, so congrats on paying back the $63,000,000 of debt. You're still going to have north of 100,000,000 Of cash on the balance sheet, I know that there's going to be some additional pay downs in the higher interest term loan at least later this year after the repayment penalty is gone. But I would think that now with company's balance sheet much better profitability on the upswing that there's also potential opportunities for the company to do like a refi, is that something that you're actively exploring or is that what's the company doing in terms of looking to potentially reduce debt costs outside of repayments? Speaker 400:53:15So absolutely, great question, Josh. We do have the opportunity to look at refinancing that Term loan debt and we are. So more to come on that later. We'll see the timing on that. We also have an opportunity potentially to look at potentially opportunistic buybacks In the future, no commitment on that yet, but that's an opportunity for us as well. Speaker 400:53:42We're generating plenty of cash flow and we have options. Speaker 200:53:46So I'll make the pitch like our leverage ratios have dropped in half basically over the last year, if you look at some sort of adjusted EBITDA to net debt kind of ratios. So any commercial bankers out there call me because we've already got people at our front door. So more can come to the table at any moment. Speaker 400:54:03We'll take them. I'll call me directly. But no, it's nice to be in the position we're in now because we're As a credit risk per se, we're way better now than we've been for quite some time. So it's a good position for us to be in. Speaker 900:54:21Good to hear and hopefully there's some news over the next few months potentially. And then just looking here, so the company's operating margin The Q3 came in materially better than the guide by 140 bps or so. I know there's some Taxes and employee stock costs and whatnot that are going to be starting up this year with the new calendar year that are going to pressure operating margins in the beginning of the quarter. Could you give a little bit more detail on just like the 300 or so bps sequential decline and like how would we kind of break out that attribution given that gross margins are kind of going to be Flat and service revenue at least is only down like a couple of $1,000,000 I think sequentially. Speaker 400:55:08Yes. Good question. So just to point out, as I mentioned in my We had some one time goodness in Q3 that helped us about a point, A couple of things there. So normalized is more like 200 or so basis points down 2.40 percent or whatever to the 10%. So a couple of things that go on in our fiscal Q4, which is January through March, We have the reset of the Social Security taxes, the FICA and the 401 match in the company. Speaker 400:55:46So that's a few $1,000,000 right there. And that really impacts us that's really most of the change from Quarter over quarter perspective, say, in the $5,000,000 or so range, that's really driving it. Speaker 900:56:02Got it. It's just those 2 items, and I would that those would kind of be alleviated as you move through the calendar year, right? Speaker 400:56:10They do. They dissipate throughout the year. However, historically what we've done as a company is in our fiscal Q2 is when we have the annual pay increases so forth. So there's a few things that move up and down throughout the quarter throughout the year. Speaker 200:56:27Yes. Speaker 900:56:28Got it. Thanks. Speaker 200:56:30No problem. Operator00:56:39Our next question comes from the line of Peter Levin with Evercore. Your line is open. Speaker 1000:56:44Great. Thanks guys for taking my questions, squeezing me in here. Maybe just to piggyback off and the last one is, you've talked about obviously repaying the convert, Cleaning up the balance sheet, but if you think about your strategy to innovation led growth, how do you manage Cash from the balance sheet versus innovation versus what your competitors are doing in the CCaaS market, given it is lot more competitive today than it was 12 months ago. How do you balance that all? Speaker 200:57:16It's a great question. So I think I'm going to take you back to Q1 when we talked about what our sort of our fiscal plan for the next 3 years was. We talked about Increasing cash flow and delevering the balance sheet. So step 1 would be generating enough cash To pay down the debt, delever the balance sheet and put all this garbage behind us from the past would be step 1. Step 2 is Be an innovation led company, so we want to spend between 10% 16% any given quarter on R and D that further continues to then drive an efficient sales and marketing motion. Speaker 200:57:55We're a software company and we should be judged by our software first and foremost. And so that will be second. And then third, which is more of a swing factor is how much do we spend in sales and marketing and those kinds of things. And we're we need to get that sales and marketing engine a lot more efficient. Now there's a lot of overlap between R and D and sales and marketing. Speaker 200:58:13If you build a product that everybody wants, it's easier to sell. And if you build a product that has PLG built in, product led growth built in, They can be more efficient to sell. And so it's a little bit of the innovation we're going through. What I've said in the past and as you think forward, At the levels we're at, at the cash flow levels we're at, we should pretty easily make our $250,000,000 number that we promised to return to investors. So after that, we're more focused on spending for reacceleration of growth, for resumption of growth. Speaker 1000:58:46We haven't talked about Lisa. I know she's Been on board now for a couple of months, but maybe talk about how she's thinking or how you guys are thinking about go to market channel versus direct, obviously the announcements you made today. But Curious if what she's made and what she's changing and kind of what you have in the pipeline with her if you can share with us? Speaker 200:59:08So if there was ever a softball, I mean, I'm absolutely amazed watching Lisa in action. It is phenomenal to watch a world class sales executive who really knows what she is doing, execute her plan. And I think she has a fantastic vision. Provision is about a balanced go to market strategy with not balanced in every region. So for example, in Australia, New Zealand, we're focused mainly on value resellers, those kinds of things. Speaker 200:59:37But more balanced strategy in the U. S. And more appropriate strategy in the U. S. And other things. Speaker 200:59:44Number 2 is, she's very focused on the sales process and solution selling and running a correct sales process and focusing on business outcomes versus do you need dial tone or are you making the move from on prem to cloud, those kinds of things. And then lastly, She's tough. She has a high level of accountability and I'm sure there's already been some notes written, but she has a level of accountability and high expectations that she expects of the GTM engine and She asserts that accountability across the board. And so it's just absolutely phenomenal watching her in action. Speaker 401:00:21And I think also that with Bruno's on board, he's even newer than Lisa and we see as our new CMO and they work hand in glove better than any of the previous combination CRO, CMOs I've seen at 8 bytes. So it's a fantastic thing to see and they're completely aligned On a whole variety of topics in terms of the quality of lead gen, the conversion rates, all these operational things that are going on that just trying to improve everything from soup to nuts. So it's great to see. Speaker 1001:00:58If I could squeeze one more. Sam, I don't want to paint you in a corner or hold you accountable for this metric, but you did say 250 contacts and receipts up, I think, 50%. We do hear a lot from your competitors that are starting on the lower end of the market scaling up, investing a ton to kind of build up that functionality. But can you maybe just Give us an idea of how many customers that represents or percentage of your base of contact center customers that are 250 north of that? Speaker 201:01:26I actually don't know the exact number off the top of my head. It is not an insignificant amount of number. It's not a vanity metric. And to be clear, our products, we've got customers that are next to thousands of seats of contact center running concurrently. The reason the marketing team pulled together the metric for me was because we have this reputation of, oh my gosh, it's 8x8, it only works on 12 contact center agents or 8 contact center agents. Speaker 201:01:52It's just BS. It's marketing FUD. It's what competitors like to do all the time is run around and make a story instead of delivering value added to the customers. And so we've seen a significant growth in larger contact center deals that we're And we see it in the pipeline every day. And so I'm sorry, I can't give you a number. Speaker 201:02:12I'll see if I can scrounge it up by next call. Speaker 1001:02:16Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Speaker 201:02:18Thank you. Operator01:02:20Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Catharine Trebnick with Rosenblatt. Your line is open. Speaker 1101:02:33Thanks for taking my question. Hey, Sam, let's go back to your press release today. You talk about these non agents that you're targeting. Do you have a total address market for that and a growth projection? And then the follow on question is, it seems like this is a Very different sales than you currently have. Speaker 1101:02:52So what type of sales motions are going to put into play to make this happen? Thank you. Speaker 201:03:00Okay. So I'm going to take these in reverse order. So you talked about sales motions for I don't think they're different from the new sales motions we're developing. Yes, it'd be different from the old sales motions that we had. But I think in the new sales motions where we're solution selling and a rep and a GTM team shows up and really dives into what the customers' needs are. Speaker 201:03:18We're going to find service workers or healthcare workers or billing people or accounts people are sitting inside sales reps or any of those kind of things in every company and get them the right solutions for that Okay, Billy. It's a great question on TAM. Let me dig. I know Gartner has done some work on this as Metergi and some of the others. I mean, I'm presuming it's a multi $1,000,000,000 TAM because they talk a lot about the quote informal contact center. Speaker 201:03:47I really despise that term because it implies that it's like an informal agent. But a lot the most use cases we see are where the worker needs contact center like functionality, but in fact is not an agent. It's not their day to day job to sit at a terminal waiting for the next case to be delivered or to make outbound phone calls, but instead they have some other job, nurse, plumber, whatever the case may be, but they're on call, they need to deal with emergency situations, those kinds of things. And so it's Operator01:04:20a specific Speaker 201:04:20use case. Speaker 1101:04:21So I guess I understand the non agent part. I mean, would this also fall in with the light contact That everybody is bouncing around as a new name calling them light also. Speaker 201:04:32Yes, yes. But I mean, what is that? What's a light contact center? It's like The problem is like informal contact center, light contact center are to me terrible names because it's like light beer. Is it a beer or is it water? Speaker 201:04:46I mean, it's like neither. And so it's, I don't know, I really think and that's why we put up the press release today to start The dialogue of what really the category should be as we go into these products. And look, I know some of our competitors have some products In this area and I think this product is more analogous to them. They call their products contact center, 99% of the time I laugh. They're not contact center products. Speaker 1101:05:15Yes. And then what do you have for like you said it was in beta. So at what point do you think it will go GA and then what percent of revenue do you think you'll be able to drive in the next 12 to 15 months from this, because this actually could be 1 year better growth shoot. Speaker 201:05:36Yes, exactly, right. It's like like I said, so it's a great question. Look, if you look at supervisor workspace, I think we kept it in beta for 9 months. And if you look at intelligent customer sales and digital, I think it was in beta for less than 3 months. I suspect this one may be in beta a little longer, so I would lean maybe towards that 9 month number, but it's purely a guess on my part. Speaker 201:05:56And I'd like to see this as 10% of revenue as quickly as possible. I think it is absolutely a new product line extension for us as a company. Speaker 1101:06:06All right. Thank you. Operator01:06:17Our next question comes from the line of William Power with Baird. Your line is open. Speaker 201:06:24Hi, this is Yannis Samolis on Speaker 1201:06:26for Willpower. Thanks for taking the question. So it's clear that operating cash flow has been a focus and it's nicely over the past few years. But looking forward, you talked about more muted revenue growth. Speaker 201:06:39Can you talk about some of Speaker 1201:06:40the other levers that you still can pull to help reach that 20% annual growth target, so more on the margin side, maybe more working capital improvements. Can you just help unpack that a little bit? Speaker 401:06:51So yes, on the 3 year CAGR that we gave, right, we're starting from just to reset, starting from the end of We're expecting we just grew cash flow from up 55% on a trailing 12 month basis. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we would expect a bit more muted in 2025 fiscal and then going up there in 2026. In terms of levers, look, our product mix, we've had we sustained or we've been able to sustained really very good underlying service margins right now. We've got a lower margin business in Southeast Asia. But as that market expands into other parts of the world, maybe we could see an uptick in that part of the usage business that we have. Speaker 401:07:42But we're always looking at Cost of goods sold, getting better rates on our telephony, for example. So we're able to maintain pretty healthy gross margins in the face of whatever price pressures may exist at the low end of the market, for example. So we're always looking at that. Sam mentioned earlier about sales and marketing and getting efficiencies out of the group. It's not we want to get more with the same as an example there. Speaker 401:08:13So I think with the go to market retooling that we have going on in the company, We can get more from the same. That's what we really need a better operational efficiency out of sales and marketing. So those are the kinds of things that we're really focused on to maintain a decent level of profitability and cash flow. Speaker 201:08:33And look, I mean, I think we're generating enough cash flow, more than enough cash So right now, so for me, it's all about scale now. It's about resuming growth and getting back on that growth curve. So that's where the focus of the company is, etcetera. Could we pull levers that we need to? Sure. Speaker 201:08:46But really the focus on the company from here is getting that growth rate higher. Got it. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you. Thank you. Operator01:08:57Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Coons with Needham and Company. Your line is open. Speaker 1301:09:12Thanks for the question. Thanks for squeezing me in. A quick housekeeping item on RPO and any puts or takes there in that metric, All right. And then see it in the slide deck. Speaker 401:09:23Yes. No, so $765,000,000 RPO is where we have at the end of the 3rd quarter. I wouldn't say any necessarily big commentary on puts and takes there. It's up on a year over year basis. I know that's slightly down sequentially, but up on a year over year basis. Speaker 1001:09:44Okay. That's Speaker 1301:09:44fair. And Sam, as you're thinking about as you think about your seat count and maybe this is kind of the old way of looking at it, but I'm an old guy. As you think about your growth coming from CC and CPaaS and pressure on UCaaS and you obviously got some down selling going on with Fuze, churn, Pricing probably pressuring UC. So look at the pressure on the UC market is what I'm saying, the seats. How would you kind of allocate down selling pricing and kind of general customer churn as pressuring your UC seats? Speaker 1301:10:21Thank you. Speaker 201:10:23So in general, customer churn will be the bottom and down selling and price pressure, it's sometimes hard for me to tell the difference. I mean, I can sort of calculate it out. I would say probably This is pure gutting on my part is that down selling number 1 and price pressure on the low end number 2 and then The last one. And then we've got some new things coming out hopefully in the near future to really start to address the pricing environment. As you know, we do a lot of work around teams. Speaker 201:10:58And so I think we've got some really interesting things for maybe that could get us more traction in that lower end market really efficiently. Speaker 1301:11:07Great. Good to hear about that. Look forward to hearing about it. Thanks for questions. Operator01:11:11Thank you. Thanks Ryan. Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the call back over to Kate Patterson for closing remarks. Speaker 101:11:23Thank you all. Thanks for staying on the line. I know we ran a little bit over. So I'll look forward to talking with you this afternoon or later tomorrow orRead morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference Call8X8 Q3 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsSlide DeckPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) 8X8 Earnings Headlines8x8: Remains Cheaply Valued As Fundamentals ImproveMay 1, 2025 | seekingalpha.com8x8 Unveils New Innovations to Boost Customer, Employee Engagement Across its CX PlatformApril 29, 2025 | tmcnet.comFeds Just Admitted It—They Can Take Your CashThe Government Just Said Your Money Isn't Yours That's right—According to the DOJ, YOUR hard-earned money isn't legally yours. Now, think your savings are safe? Think again.May 6, 2025 | Priority Gold (Ad)Rosenblatt Securities Cuts 8X8 (NASDAQ:EGHT) Price Target to $2.70April 27, 2025 | americanbankingnews.comBrokerages Set 8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) Price Target at $2.74April 26, 2025 | americanbankingnews.com8X8's (EGHT) Sell (D-) Rating Reaffirmed at Weiss RatingsApril 26, 2025 | americanbankingnews.comSee More 8X8 Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like 8X8? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on 8X8 and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About 8X88X8 (NASDAQ:EGHT) engages in the provision of enterprise communication solutions. It offers solutions to the business services, education, financial services, government, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. 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There are 14 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to 8x8 Third Quarter 20 24 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to hand the conference over to Kate Patterson. Operator00:00:30You may begin. Speaker 100:00:33Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Today's agenda will include a review of our Q3 results with Samuel Wilson, our Chief Executive Officer and Kevin Krause, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Before we get started, let me remind you that our discussion today includes forward looking statements about future financial performance, including investments in innovation and our focus on profitability and cash flow, as well as statements regarding our business, products and growth strategies. Speaker 100:01:02We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward looking statements as they involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from forward looking statements as described in our risk factors in our report filed with the SEC. Any forward looking statements made on this call and in the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. Certain financial measures that will be discussed on this call, together with year over year comparisons in some cases, were not prepared in accordance with the U. S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. Speaker 100:01:36A reconciliation of those non GAAP measures to the closest comparable GAAP measure is provided in our earnings release and earnings presentation slides, which are available on 8x8's Investor Relations website at investors. 8x8.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sam Wilson. Speaker 200:01:54Thank you, Kate, and thank you to all of our investors, analysts, employees, customers and partners for joining us on our Q3 call. We delivered solid operating results again in the 3rd quarter. Our financial North Star is cash flow from operations per share And our cash flow from operations performance for the quarter was the 2nd highest ever. Cash flow from operations on a trailing 12 month basis is up 55% year over year and We continue to be very mindful of share count. Cash flow was driven by non GAAP operating margins significantly above our guidance range. Speaker 200:02:28Q3 'twenty four marks the anniversary of the official launch of our innovation led strategy to build durable long term growth. Our path to complete transformation is underway from operating losses and negative cash flow to sustain non GAAP profitability and increasing cash generation. From a UCaaS led to a CCaaS led sales motion across our customer base. From 3 individual products to an increasingly integrated portfolio of 8 products with more to come. From selling products to delivering solutions that address urgent business challenges from transactional arm's length customer relationships to being a strategic partner in our customer success from over levered to delevered. Speaker 200:03:15Comprehensive transformations take time and the progress is not always perfectly linear. But I'm impressed by the strides our teams have made over the past year across all three fronts financial, product innovation and go to market. We have been profitable on a non GAAP basis and positive cash flow for 12 consecutive quarters. For perspective, In fiscal 2020, we reported non GAAP operating losses of nearly $61,000,000 and negative cash flow from operations of almost 90 $4,000,000 3 years later, we're on track to deliver non GAAP operating profits of about $92,000,000 in operating cash flow of more than $70,000,000 for fiscal 2024. We said in the Q1 that we would return $250,000,000 to investors by delevering our balance sheet over the 3 years from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026. Speaker 200:04:16Tomorrow, we will officially redeem the remaining $63,000,000 of our 2024 notes using cash on hand. We have already sent the funds to our transfer agent. Since we announced the plan at the beginning of the fiscal year, we have returned to debt holders over $88,000,000 or about 35% of the $250,000,000 plan. We are aggressively delevering on our way to creating a fortress balance sheet. All things being equal, this should drive increased shareholder value as a greater proportion of our enterprise value accrues to our equity holders. Speaker 200:04:52Increasing shareholder value is one cornerstone of our strategy and it is at the heart of our decisions around compensation, operating expenses and M and A. For example, we took steps to increase the ratio of cash compensation versus Equity compensation for many of our employees. While employees see less volatility in their income, we will reduce dilution due to share count issuance over the intermediate term. This is a sharp contrast to some of our peers who have increased their stock based compensation expense as their stock prices have declined. We are harnessing the power of AI to empower our customers to deliver better experiences to their customers. Speaker 200:05:35Our unified platform allows us to capture, analyze and correlate data from customer interactions across the organization. But the platform is not the end game. We are closing the loop, breaking down silos and customer engagement and extending specific contact center tools To everyone in the organization who engages with a customer, today we announced a new product line To deliver cross organization customer engagement, empowering end to end CX orchestration For all customer touch points across the entire organization, the beta program is in progress for qualified 8x8 customers. This is perhaps the most significant new innovation we have introduced in several years and it is a direct result of the increase in our innovation investment. Through a combination of cutting edge AI solutions, platform level contact center components and both native and third party data, We will be able to offer built for purpose experiences for CX professionals outside the contact center. Speaker 200:06:41This initiative further bridges the gap between UC and CC and transforms the availability, utilization and contextualization of interaction data through the entire organization. The resulting customer intelligence provides powerful and predictive insights to enable smarter decisions and positive customer outcomes across many different touch points in an organization. We believe we have a clear lead in delivering built for purpose experiences for CX professionals outside the contact center. In addition to expanding our product portfolio with newly targeted experiences for an expanded set of users, We are changing the entire dialogue with prospects and existing customers. It's no longer only about migrating phone service to the cloud or replacing on prem PBX. Speaker 200:07:34It's about making it easier for all employees to deliver great customer experiences both inside and outside the formal contact center. As important as this initiative is, it is by no means the only area we are driving innovation. Let me call your attention to a press release we issued last week with details on new features and enhancements delivered over the last few months. On the CCaaS side, we have included improved AI based call summaries For improved speech analytics, expanded omni channel capabilities and enhancements to our agent and supervisor workspaces and more. We continue to enhance our UCaaS solutions with value added features like smart summaries and analytics that improve usability, productivity and efficiency. Speaker 200:08:21We also continue to expand our outbound customer engagement capabilities available through our CPaaS solutions, enabling customers to build more effective, Customized outbound campaigns. With just a few new products at general availability, we are already seeing 60% year over year growth in revenue from our new products with quarter on quarter acceleration driven by workforce optimization, Our intelligent customer assistant, digital and voice, payments compliance solutions, all wrapped in add on subscription based services. This is before any benefit from new products spoken about here today, along with several other products in beta. We are delivering intentional innovation that addresses the needs of a well defined target customer. New customers like Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic and the Museum of Science in Boston have chosen 8x8 for capabilities like a broad feature set, configuration simplicity, ease of use reporting and analytics and integration with other workflows. Speaker 200:09:298x8 customers are also continuing to embrace our leading communications and contact center solutions for Microsoft Teams with over 400,000 seats sold today. Customers like Wall Shaw Housing Group in the UK and Teradata are implementing 8x8 solutions to take advantage of our seamless integration with Teams, our global presence and our unified UCaaS and CCaaS capabilities, including AI driven digital self-service. To keep our products future friendly, we are continuing to innovate on Teams and expect to have some very exciting news in the near future. A third area of innovation that I'm really excited about is our CPaaS solutions. Until recently, this part of our business has focused almost exclusively on SMS customers In the Asia Pacific region, we remain a leader, but we believe there is a large and growing opportunity to attract new customers and expand CPaaS adoption with our installed base of UC and CC as we add additional services. Speaker 200:10:36With an extensive roadmap of new solutions like outbound customer engagement and automated employee notification, we are intentional about engineering solutions for specific use cases and wrapping them in a highly automated, easy to transact set of technologies. Like our solution for cross organization engagement, These new CPaaS solutions allow us to partner strategically with our customers, shifting the narrative from price to value. Okay. I would be remiss if I didn't talk about AI. AI permeates our solutions. Speaker 200:11:11It is embedded in our platform, provides transcriptions, analytics and summaries as shared services across UC and CC. It powers our digital interactions where we achieve deflections rates as high as 80%. It is at the heart of our new cross organizational engagement initiative and of course It is a large part of a highly integrated ecosystem. Our approach to AI integration is 2 pronged and is potentially designed to give customers the flexibility to adapt as the market evolves. 1st, we allow customers to reap the benefits of AI for common use cases with native AI powered features built into the platform. Speaker 200:11:512nd, we enable a deep native like integrations with 3rd party AI tools built for needs, including our curated technology partner ecosystem. Some of the advantages to our approach are: We have the data and the platform. We can focus our engineering teams on analytics, integrations and universal use cases such as interaction summarization, which we announced last week. Our customers can adopt AI in their own timeline With the flexibility to choose the best in breed solutions for their needs and we can leverage the massive investments made by the venture Capital community and startups focused on AI based products through our technology ecosystem. Our ecosystem extends across UC, CC and now the cross organizational engagement products to allow for highly differentiated solutions to solve specific customer needs. Speaker 200:12:51Similar to our own innovation Our technology ecosystem aims to transform customer experiences engagement for organizations of all sizes without requiring complex Custom development or exorbitant overhead costs that have traditionally only been feasible for the largest of enterprises. We have focused on depth rather than breadth, offering our customers a carefully curated portfolio of integrations with leading technology providers. We recently expanded our technology partner program with a new exclusive tier, Sell With 8. Sell With 8 allows a select group of technology partners to sell directly with 8x8 to solve customer pain points jointly. For example, AWAKEN Intelligence, An inaugural Sell With A partner offers an integration with the 8x8 contact center that leverages data to provide real time agent guidance and AI supported assistance. Speaker 200:13:51Our foundational partner ecosystem initiative is one of the foundational building blocks in our go to market transformation. When we began the transformation process, I knew that go to market would take the longest and will be the most difficult part of our strategy. Transforming GTM is not about Throwing more money into Google AdWords or increasing sales capacity. We are shifting market perception, developing and empowering channel partners, building pipelines and increasing accountability with experienced leaders and a relentless focus on customer success. It has taken us the better part of the year, but I believe we are now have the right people in the right roles to reaccelerate revenue. Speaker 200:14:35In closing, I want to summarize our journey so far and the early signs of our success. Last quarter, I discussed becoming Speaker 300:14:43a portfolio of product company. Speaker 200:14:45We are still in the early stages of a lengthy but exciting transformation. Our innovation led momentum is also evident in our ex cash ARR, which is up with double digit year over year gains in Q3. The average ARR of our enterprise customers has been steadily increasing as we expanded from 3 individual products to an increasingly integrated portfolio of 8. We also see a steady increase in larger deployments with ARR from customers with more than 250 contact center seats, up more than 50% year over year. We have been working towards this vision for a long time. Speaker 200:15:25We believe we have the ingredients for success. Our product portfolio is compelling. We have a solid financial foundation. We have a seasoned leadership team committed to achieving our objectives and we have amazing talent at every level of the organization. I believe the best is yet to come. Speaker 200:15:46I want to thank our customers, our partners, our investors and our employees for their hard work and continued support. With that, will turn the call over to Kevin. Speaker 400:15:58Thanks, Sam, and good afternoon, everyone. We remain financially disciplined and delivered strong operating income cash flow in the fiscal 2024 Q3 exceeding our guidance range for non GAAP operating margin and exceeding our expectations for cash flow from operations. We have delivered positive non GAAP operating income and cash flow from operations for 12 consecutive quarters. Total revenue for the quarter was $181,000,000 and service revenue was $175,100,000 Service revenue was approximately flat year over year and roughly equal to our guidance midpoint. Other revenue for the quarter was $5,900,000 which was below expectations due to lower one time professional services and product revenue. Speaker 400:16:47Total ARR was $707,000,000 quarter end, up 1% year over year and flat sequentially. Enterprise ARR increased 2% year over year and $2,000,000 sequentially. A significant amount of the total churn occurred within smaller customers, which shows up in the sequential decline in small and mid market business ARR. We have been devoting additional resources to retention of the Fuse Enterprise customers and expect to see an acceleration in upgrades to 8x8, but we probably have at least 1 more quarter before this headwind to ARR growth begins to dissipate. Turning to gross margin, operating expenses and operating profit, please remember that all items discussed are non GAAP unless otherwise noted. Speaker 400:17:36Overall, 3rd quarter gross margin was 71.6%, a decrease of 0.5% year over year, primarily due to an increased mix of lower margin SMS usage revenue compared to Q3 2023, which shows up in our service revenue margin. Service revenue gross margin was 74.5%, roughly flat sequentially, but down approximately 1.2 percentage points year over year, driven by pressure on SMS text gross margin. We continuously manage our cost of service revenue and service revenue gross margins to remain healthy in the 74% to 75% range given our mix of subscription and usage revenue. Other revenue gross margin came in at negative 11.9 percent for the quarter compared to negative 1.4% in Q3 2023 on lower professional services deployment revenue, which mainly has a fixed cost base. Turning to operating expenses. Speaker 400:18:37R and D was 14.9 percent of revenue, in line with our 15% target and indicative of the continued investment we are making in product innovation. Sales and marketing expense was 33% of revenue, slightly down from 33.1% in Q2 2024, but well below the 36.3 percent of revenue in Q3 2023. On a dollar basis, sales and marketing was down more than $7,000,000 year over year. The decline reflected the resource realignment we did in Q4 2023 as the first step in our go to market transformation. G and A as a percentage of revenue was 10.3%, down slightly sequentially as incurred seasonally lower employer taxes and benefits costs as more employees hit the maximum contribution levels for FICA and other benefits. Speaker 400:19:29I would like to point out that we took a non cash charge of approximately $11,000,000 on our GAAP financial statements for ceasing the use of office space, primarily in the U. S. And to a much lesser extent internationally, as we continue to support hybrid workforce. Total non GAAP spending as measured by non GAAP cost of goods sold, R and D, sales and marketing and G and A was down approximately $9,300,000 or nearly 6% year over year and reflects our strategic cost realignment actions since the prior fiscal year. The combination of a healthy gross margin, carefully managed operating expenses and one time favorable items that increased operating margin approximately 1 percentage point resulted in non GAAP operating margin of 13.4%, above the high end of our guidance range of 11% to 12%. Speaker 400:20:26Operating profit was $24,300,000 up approximately 32% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA, which is reconciled to our GAAP results in our press release, was $30,700,000 16.9 percent of revenue and up 19% year over year. We have generated over $126,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA over the past 4 quarters. Cash flow from operations was $22,400,000 for the quarter, a near record driven by strong profitability and solid cash collections. Given that cash flow can vary quarter to quarter Due to the timing of interest payments, collections and changes in other balance sheet items, I prefer to look at cash flow from operations on a on a trailing 12 month basis when evaluating our performance. Speaker 400:21:20Over the last four quarters, we have generated approximately $80,000,000 in cash from operations, an increase of 55% compared to the trailing 12 month period ending December 31, 2022. We ended the quarter with approximately $170,000,000 of cash, restricted cash and investments, up over $20,000,000 from the prior quarter. As we have said earlier, our plan is $250,000,000 to our investors from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026 by delevering our balance sheet. Our most recent step in that direction is the $63,000,000 we paid to the loan administrator earlier this week, who will be paying the 2024 debt holders tomorrow to redeem the remaining 2024 notes. As you heard from Sam earlier on this call, this latest payment brings us to 35% completion of our $250,000,000 repayment goal from fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2026. Speaker 400:22:25As we move into fiscal 2025, we intend to begin repaying the adjustable rate term loan as quickly as possible, which will have a significant and immediate impact on our operating cash flow by reducing our cash interest payments. You can expect us to begin voluntary early repayment of principal immediately after the expiration of the prepayment penalty in August 2024. Before turning to guidance, I want to restate what we are doing to build shareholder value over time. First, we are investing in innovation with a goal to drive long term durable growth. 2nd, we are focused on leading with our contact center solution to our target small and medium enterprise customers. Speaker 400:23:093rd, we are reducing the mix of equity based employee compensation, which will moderate the pace of new share issuances due to employee stock programs over the long term. And 4th, We are retooling our go to market organization under new leadership to focus on revenue growth while maintaining solid non GAAP profitability and cash flow. Increasing cash flow from operations while reducing shareholder dilution over time remains our financial North Star. And our goal remains to generate cash from operations at a compound growth rate of approximately 20% for fiscal years 2024 to 2026. I would like to point out that the significant growth in cash from operations we in fiscal 2024 implies more muted growth rates through fiscal 2026 to arrive at the 20% compounded growth rate goal. Speaker 400:24:07We are very focused on delivering cash flow with reduced dilution over the long term as the best way to build shareholder value over time. Let me walk you through how our strategies to build shareholder value over time drive our operating expense structure. We expect sales and marketing to be in the range of 33% to 34% of revenue for fiscal 2024, down from 36% in fiscal 2023 as we focus our go to market motions on our target SME customers and cross selling into our installed base. I believe this cost envelope can accommodate the aforementioned go to market retooling as well as programs that drive product awareness and investments required to develop our value added reseller channel in North America. We expect R and D as a percent of revenue to remain about 15% as we continue on the path of investment in our customer focused product strategy. Speaker 400:25:09Finally, we expect G and A expenses to remain in the range of 10.5% to 11% of revenue for fiscal 2024. We believe we can achieve leverage from our G and A functions over time as revenue increases and we achieve greater efficiencies through automation. Regarding non GAAP gross margin, we anticipate Q4 twenty twenty four to be in the same range as Q2 and Q3 with the full year in the 72% range. Please note that this metric can be influenced by product mix. Over the past quarter, we have seen longer sales cycles on large deals, greater scrutiny by the customer regarding contract approvals a generally tougher economic environment. Speaker 400:25:56With this context in mind and the operating expense framework described above, We establish outlook ranges for the Q4 and the full year of fiscal 2024 ending March 31, 2024 as follows. For the fiscal Q4, we anticipate service revenue to be in the range of $171,000,000 to $175,000,000 We anticipate total revenue to be in the range of $176,000,000 to $181,000,000 implying other revenue of $5,500,000 at the guidance midpoint. Note that other revenue can vary based upon customer specific deployment schedules and hardware shipments. So there could be some movement in the Q4 2024 other revenue as a result of these dynamics. We are targeting an operating margin of approximately 10%. Speaker 400:26:50As a reminder, our spending increases in calendar Q1, which is our fiscal 4th quarter as Social Security taxes and other employee benefits such as the 401 match restart in January. We expect cash flow from operations to decline sequentially as our cash expenses increase seasonally in fiscal Q4, as I just mentioned, plus we expect to make other planned operating cash payments such as higher debt interest and indirect taxes. We anticipate interest expense of approximately $9,000,000 and cash interest payments of approximately $11,000,000 Cash interest payments in Q4 will include the semi annual payments on our 20242028 convertible notes as well as quarterly interest payments on the variable rate term loan. We are currently anticipating that the rate on the term loan remains approximately 12% or SOFR plus 6.6%. We estimate a fully diluted share count of approximately 126,000,000 shares for fiscal Q4. Speaker 400:28:02Given the 4th quarter guidance ranges above, fiscal 2024 ending March 31, 2024 is expected to be as follows. We anticipate service revenue to be in the range of $699,000,000 to $703,000,000 We anticipate total revenue to be in the range $725,300,000 to $730,300,000 We continue to focus on delivering a solid operating margin anticipate achieving between 12.5% 13% for the year versus the 8.4% achieved 2023. We expect cash flow from operations to exceed $70,000,000 as Sam stated in his remarks. Again, note that cash flow from operations is impacted by timing differences in collections, debt interest and other payables. We anticipate debt interest expense and cash paid for debt interest of $35,000,000 to $36,000,000 Again, noting that our term loan is subject to monthly interest rate adjustments. Speaker 400:29:10We estimate an average fully diluted share count of approximately 123,000,000 shares for fiscal 2024. In closing, I believe that our Continued focus on profitability while maintaining our targeted investments in innovation plus our go to market retooling is the correct strategy for us at this time. This strategy will enable a return to revenue growth while we also return value to our investors initially by reducing our debt. Our goal is to show improving revenue trends in fiscal 2025. I would like to thank the entire 8x8 team for working together to deliver this quarter's solid results. Speaker 400:29:55Operator, we are ready for questions. Operator00:29:58Thank Our first question comes from the line of Matt Van Bylite with BTIG. Your line is open. Speaker 500:30:26Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So Sam, you mentioned continued focus on being a contact center focused company and starting to see some really good traction there. So maybe just walk us through how the go to market process has evolved there. Are you looking to land with new contact center opportunities? Speaker 500:30:48Are you finding that a lot more of these deals tend to be a sort of combination replacement come in and sort of build a whole new stack? Speaker 200:30:57Yes. So, first off, thank you for the question. It's definitely the latter part of what you said. We do see that the on prem to cloud transition and digital transformation are frequently linked. As CMOs and CROs and CEOs want to transition their business in this new digital age, They realize that their communication system becomes a core bottleneck and they have to move it into the cloud. Speaker 200:31:22And then the fact that we are on a single form handling UCCC and now closing the loop with things in the middle on a single data platform makes it really attractive for those kinds of things. So when I talk about transitioning the GTM and this is not going to be a straight line, But really it's about the fact that we need to get out of starting with a UC only sale, we need to lead with contact center. Menurgy has done some great research saying that 2 thirds of the buying decision when you're buying these products together is driven by the contact center choice, number 1. Number 2 is obviously when we sell multiple products, the retention rates, the ARPUs, all those things are better. And it's really about becoming that portfolio of products company. Speaker 200:32:09And we now I used to say we went from 2 products to 8 products. And with today's announcement around You guys loosely referred to as informal contact center. I don't really like that name because it's a little different than that. We now sell effectively 9 products. And so that's where we need to lead. Speaker 200:32:26We need to lead by coming into a business, figuring out where they're at in that digital transformation, what their business problems are and selling them a package of products that specifically solve their business needs. Speaker 500:32:40And maybe just Follow-up there on the customer engagement product you announced today. Who are the core users that you're envisioning seeing this? Is this more of an outbound sales type of motion or is it truly that sort of customer success type of realm? Curious on how you're doing it and sort of what the crux of coming up with this product was, how much was existing customers sort of using the product in unintended ways that opened up your eyes to this? Speaker 200:33:12Okay. So we started about a year, year and a half ago. I think we've envisioned about and a half ago and started actually coding with a significant number of scrum teams a year ago. The core user is Specific users inside of a business whose job title is generally not contact center agents. So let's say IT help desk, billing department or billing support department, field service workers, healthcare workers, these kinds of things. Speaker 200:33:43And what's interesting is frequently this problem is solved with a ring group. They use a UC solution and they'll do a ring group and 10 people's phone ring simultaneously and whoever picks up, picks up. The problem with that and this was the feedback we got from customers is the problem with that is can't really use an ecosystem It's not really designed to have bots in front of it and handovers, etcetera. Can't get analytics, can't get AI technologies, can't get a bunch of things that are contact center functions in this hybrid type of use case. And so it's very targeted on specific use cases where there's a desire to have like high octane UC mixed with high octane CC in a specific use case. Speaker 200:34:30And so, and we've seen some players in the market that have done bits and pieces of it, but there's no player in the market that can span that full range. Can do everything from UC, this new cross organizational engagement product and the regular contact center, Full featured high performance product design for that. And so the last part of your question is, the idea look, the analysts, You guys, the industry analysts have talked about this informal contact center. That's maybe where the idea started. We talked a lot To our customers, we researched a lot with our customers to really figure out the exact specific use cases and then we went and built the product And it's going to beta now. Speaker 500:35:17All right, great. Thank you. Speaker 200:35:18Thanks, Matt. Operator00:35:20Thank you. Please standby for our next questioner. Our next question comes from the line of Citi with Mizuho. Your line is open. Speaker 300:35:38Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask, I know at the macro environment, it's tough. Some of the peer some of your peers talked about weakness in Small Business and even Consumer vertical. I'm wondering, I know you talked about some churn and fuse side, but what are you seeing in terms of macro and different verticals? Speaker 400:36:01Yes. So this is Kevin. We do see some down sell pressure on some renewals right now, as customers maybe need fewer seats and so forth. So we are seeing some of that. And I did mention in my remarks that we did see some of that in the smaller to into the mid market business areas, which affected our ARR growth rates there. Speaker 300:36:32Great. And then a follow-up, you talked about the fuse headwinds would dissipate Maybe by this quarter, fiscal Q4. And Sam, you talked about this innovation led growth. Certainly, your Last one year, we have done a lot of products, now 2 to 8 products. So how should we think about the growth? Speaker 300:36:55I know this year was almost like 2% decline, but is this like the Q4 is sort of a bottom and then we should start Any kind of trend directionally would be helpful. Operator00:37:21You're muted speakers. We can hear you now. Speaker 200:37:29Okay, sorry. So Citi, you're asking the right question. It's one I ask of myself and the management team every day. Are we at the bottom? When are we going to see the growth? Speaker 200:37:38We definitely see and I sort of hate using this term, but I don't have the right term to use. We see green shoots when I talked about, for example, new products growth being up 60% year over year. That gives me a sense that we're seeing product market fit on that innovation and we're seeing acceleration on a quarter on quarter basis terms of bookings and the forward looking indicators around the new products. So I think we're sort of seeing the positive green shoots. When the number will be big enough to really drive up that year over year growth rate, as you know in these business models, we need a couple of quarters to stack on top of each other to really get those numbers to kick in. Speaker 200:38:13And so, I'm not yet ready to call the exact date and time of the bottom. It definitely feels like it's close, closest in the recent past, now, next week, I don't know. But I'll tell you what I'm really happy about and you mentioned it is the innovation, right? Those new products, the fact that we're seeing acceleration, we're seeing customer demands, just going to take a little while for it to get to be a big enough number and to continue to drive up a higher retention rate. Great. Speaker 400:38:43Thank you. Speaker 200:38:44Thank you, Citi. Operator00:38:46Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Your line is open. Speaker 600:39:01Hey, Kevin and Sam. This is Damon Coughlin on for Ryan McWilliams. Thanks for taking my question. How did contact center agent hiring and call volumes In fiscal 3Q compared to last year's fiscal 3Q, were there any differences particularly for any verticals, Any particular strength or weaknesses? Speaker 200:39:22Can I ask you a spike in because you're asking me like literally how many phone calls were received by contact centers in the 3rd quarter? Speaker 600:39:29Yes, like I say usage or and then and in general, like seasonal hiring that typically Would call up for, I say, open enrollment or Yes. Okay. Speaker 200:39:43So as you know, we have we offer our customers in the contact center capabilities, the ability to surge seats for kind of holidays or Easter or whatever, whatever campaigns they're running, political campaigns, those kinds of things. I would say we saw a little less than usual. I mean, In these contracted business models, you see a little bit of this lag, right? And so contracts come up and they may have done a layoff previously, etcetera. It's also hard for us because we are seeing increased sales of larger contact centers. Speaker 200:40:15As I mentioned, in my script, we've seen a 50% increase in the contact centers over 2 50 seats. So it's a bit of a moving thing because we are selling more new customers contact center. We are selling more seats in contact center. We're selling more stuff in contact center. And at the same time, we do see some and Kevin mentioned this, some of the economic pressures around, We probably saw a little less surge seats that I would have expected, maybe I was a little overly optimistic, those kinds of things. Speaker 200:40:47And I think it's been mentioned earlier, but I think out of every segment, I mean the retail vertical, probably Maybe the squishiest, maybe that some travel leisure type stuff. It's hard. I mean, we basically have no customer greater than 0.5%. So We have a lot of different verticals represented. And so it's I don't know, it's kind of my sense. Speaker 600:41:11Perfect. Thank you. And then did the CPaaS business in Southeast Asia continue to show stability like it did in 2Q, and then maybe like what assumptions are factored into the guide for 4Q for this business? Speaker 400:41:26So the CPaaS business performed as we expected it. And yes, it showed stability for the quarter. So that's good news. I want to point out though that seasonally, we have seasonal variability in that business as certain promotions get done over the holiday period and so forth. In the Q4 guide, there's some downward trend as normal as we enter like the Lunar New Year period and Other Ramadan. Speaker 400:41:56Ramadan, yes, and other periods. So that's factored into our guide. Operator00:42:00All right. Now, look, Speaker 200:42:01you mentioned the CPaaS business, so to consider this a lay up to sort of do that CEO thing and deviate a little bit. But we've got some great new products coming out on the CPaaS side. There are some pre configured bundles for specific use cases that you'll see us start pushing into our installed base and our contact center customers. Stay tuned before the end of the quarter. So, the reason I brought this up is I'm sort of warning the audience that in the future it's going to get a little messier because we're Starting to view our CPaaS business not as a separate entity inside of 8x8, but it's all started to become blurred, right? Speaker 200:42:37You've got UC, CC and CPaaS is how we traditionally think about it. But now we have low end UC, we have Cross organizational customer engagement, we have UC and then we have CPaaS riding on top of all of it. So it's becoming a bit of a mix. And it's really all being driven on effectively one platform as we bring it all together. So you get economies of scale and engineering capacity and CICD, continuous innovation, continuous deployment and all those things are starting to spin in the right direction. Speaker 700:43:12Got it. Perfect. Thanks guys. Speaker 400:43:14Thank you. Thank you. Operator00:43:16Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Funk with Bank of America. Your line is open. Speaker 700:43:29Yes. So thank you for the question and thank you for the color on the call and the focus on profitability. I wanted to dig in though some more into the revenue. You lowered the guide for the year, trying to dissect the piece part here rather than reading the tea leaves, right? I'm sure you have an internal forecast for net new, for NRR and then for SKUs customer contraction. Speaker 700:43:58So maybe help us with more precision with our own modeling by pointing out which piece of that fell short or is falling short Relative to the prior expectation. And then final piece related, I think Fuze was about $130,000,000 in revenue. You said that's been off, but should stabilize in a quarter or 2. Can you provide us the current revenue number for the Fuze customers so we can figure out that attrition rate And the potential stabilization point. Speaker 400:44:30Okay. Thanks, Michael. So on the revenue for you're asking about Q4, Right. So I talked about headwind in CPaaS due to the holidays coming up. In terms of Fuze, We do see what we're doing internally as a company, which is a great thing, it's actually we're migrating them over to the 8x8 platform. Speaker 400:44:52As we do that, we are seeing some down sell, you would call it, as those customers right size their needs for us. So there is a bit of erosion there and that's what I was referring to as headwind in the prepared remarks. But Doing that and doing that early and proactively helps us retain those customers and that's what we believe. So That's a good thing for us because they'll stick with us. Speaker 200:45:18Okay. And I want to address the second part of your question. Look, I can't give you a number on Exactfuse anymore Because we've migrated, we've upgraded, see maybe do it. We've upgraded hundreds of customers between the platform, we've cross sold, we've done a lot of things now And we don't really break them out separately internally anymore. We view all of our metrics internal are a combined company. Speaker 200:45:40And it's just Sort of hard to do with that. It's easier for us when we manage everything to do it that way, and so that's the way we do it. I just don't have the number to really give you effectively in front of me. I will tell you though, what we do see is the core business is vibrant. We do expect in the next couple of quarters, we start to see improving growth trends and a resumption of growth in fiscal 2025. Speaker 200:46:02It's something one of those quarters, we'll definitely I think we'll see a resumption of growth. And you're going to ask me like why do I have confidence in that and it's going to come back to new products, right? If we can get that 60% number that's accelerating to keep kind of bumping along and keep going As we add more new products and as we retool the go to market force around that product portfolio, I really do think the math will work itself out show that resumption of growth. And in the meantime, we paid off $63,000,000 in debt out of cash flow yesterday. Well, we wired the money yesterday. Speaker 200:46:31I think we're paying it off officially tomorrow. Speaker 700:46:33Love the delevering. Just to make sure I understand, you came in, in line, with the revenue forecast for this quarter and then lowered the full year, so it's supposedly lowered 4Q. Are you saying that that reduction is entirely due to CPaaS and There wasn't an undershooting on net new NRR No, Speaker 200:46:56no, we're not saying that. To be clear, look, CPaaS is going to be a little bit below what we maybe had expected 90 days ago. And that's driven by the fact that we are seeing some of the customers a little, What's the right word? More reluctant to run marketing campaigns during the Lunar New Year and Ramadan. That's what they're forecasting to us right now. Speaker 200:47:15And also we are seeing a little bit more, I don't know what the right word is, pressure or whatever. But as these contracts come due, we have customers that say, hey, look, I don't need 100 seats anymore, I need 92 seats. Speaker 400:47:28The other thing I'd like to add also and this is important in terms of total revenue. We're seeing a trend toward more softphone usage and less hardware. So if you look at our other revenue, It's a component obviously of the total. That has a bit of pressure as the customers are focused Speaker 200:47:45And it's dropped. I mean to be fair, Kevin, it's dropped a heck of a lot more than anything Speaker 400:47:50Yes. So that's baked in there as well. Speaker 700:47:54Okay. It's all very helpful. I'll just say it more precise than my own modeling guide. That's all I'm trying to do. I know reluctance to provide too much detail secret sauce from the metrics, but the more we add up, the better we can forecast and Speaker 200:48:06Michael, it's completely fair. It's not that it's just we don't I mean, I don't like 2 years ago, it was easy to track Fuze as a separate thing because we just bought them. But 2 years in, We have hundreds of customers that have upgraded, the billing systems are merged. There's all kinds of things happening. It's just no longer that easy Unless I stick a team of people going line by line and it's just kind of not worth doing that. Speaker 200:48:30I got my team is doing other things right now. Speaker 700:48:33No, of course. Thank you guys for the questions. Speaker 400:48:36Thank you. Thank you. Operator00:48:38Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Speaker 800:48:51Great, thanks. I just wanted to go into you have a lot of initiatives on kind of selling customers initially, But this what are kind of the initiatives or sales motions you guys are having to kind of add some of these additional solutions to existing customers? And then maybe piggybacking on that, you guys have talked a little bit about the fuse upgrades that are happening. But Is there like an end of life date? Like is there any point where we should kind of consider that the Fuze platform will all be kind of transitioned or upgraded to kind of the exCast platform? Speaker 800:49:28Thanks. Speaker 200:49:29Okay. So Marshall, really fair question. I'm Marshall, Meta, completely fair question. So let me dig this in reverse order. On the Fuze end of life, there's not a set end of life date. Speaker 200:49:40We're busy moving 100 of customers over right now, a lot of them are in flight. We've got kind of the top 400. They're a little bit more special. We're taking care of them. And so there's not a defined date. Speaker 200:49:52And we also with the top 400 customers, we're really doing it in conjunction with them. So I don't want to use that EOL term because that has a tendency that has unintended consequences for us. So it's really we work with them on that migration. The first part of your question is to me a really insightful question, which is around how do we have to change our motions as a company. As a company, historically, we've been kind of sell most of the wallet share on the first deal and that's kind of it, maybe a few add on seats here or there as you add employees or those kinds of things. Speaker 200:50:26That's really changing. And so if you look at how we've evolved, For example, I don't well, we know the exact number. We probably doubled the number of CSMs we have at the company over the last year. And that's really allowing us to then further expand. We've really restructured how we do some of our account management and some of those things around making sure that we can land and then further expand those customers. Speaker 200:50:51I think what's interesting is a lot of the technologies, SecurePay or Workforce Management or Intelligent Customer Assistant are generally not sold on the initial transaction. Most of the time the initial transaction is typically UC and CC only. And then over the next 3, 6, 12, 18 months, there's further add ons that are done. I recently hired, and it's in the press release, Mike McCarron from Gladly, and he and I worked together at MobileIron. He's just a phenomenal executive. Speaker 200:51:22But he's really coming in to help us further expand our motions around that land and expand and further add on sales. And then the other thing we're doing and this is great for me. I don't know if you guys are excited as I get it about this stuff, but We've got product led growth now. So if you go into our product today, our contact center product, we can do things like and I know all you people have been around for a while, they're going to say, oh my God, this existed 20 years, yes, we're there now, we've got up, which is we can do admin notifications, we can do PLG product led growth directly in the platform where people can sign up for feature functionality, automatically add it to their invoice and drive further add on sales. And so those are all things that we've developed under the notion of innovation and retooling over the last year. Operator00:52:11Perfect. Thanks. Thanks, Meta. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Nicholas with B. Operator00:52:26Riley. Your line is open. Speaker 900:52:30Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to check-in, I mean, so congrats on paying back the $63,000,000 of debt. You're still going to have north of 100,000,000 Of cash on the balance sheet, I know that there's going to be some additional pay downs in the higher interest term loan at least later this year after the repayment penalty is gone. But I would think that now with company's balance sheet much better profitability on the upswing that there's also potential opportunities for the company to do like a refi, is that something that you're actively exploring or is that what's the company doing in terms of looking to potentially reduce debt costs outside of repayments? Speaker 400:53:15So absolutely, great question, Josh. We do have the opportunity to look at refinancing that Term loan debt and we are. So more to come on that later. We'll see the timing on that. We also have an opportunity potentially to look at potentially opportunistic buybacks In the future, no commitment on that yet, but that's an opportunity for us as well. Speaker 400:53:42We're generating plenty of cash flow and we have options. Speaker 200:53:46So I'll make the pitch like our leverage ratios have dropped in half basically over the last year, if you look at some sort of adjusted EBITDA to net debt kind of ratios. So any commercial bankers out there call me because we've already got people at our front door. So more can come to the table at any moment. Speaker 400:54:03We'll take them. I'll call me directly. But no, it's nice to be in the position we're in now because we're As a credit risk per se, we're way better now than we've been for quite some time. So it's a good position for us to be in. Speaker 900:54:21Good to hear and hopefully there's some news over the next few months potentially. And then just looking here, so the company's operating margin The Q3 came in materially better than the guide by 140 bps or so. I know there's some Taxes and employee stock costs and whatnot that are going to be starting up this year with the new calendar year that are going to pressure operating margins in the beginning of the quarter. Could you give a little bit more detail on just like the 300 or so bps sequential decline and like how would we kind of break out that attribution given that gross margins are kind of going to be Flat and service revenue at least is only down like a couple of $1,000,000 I think sequentially. Speaker 400:55:08Yes. Good question. So just to point out, as I mentioned in my We had some one time goodness in Q3 that helped us about a point, A couple of things there. So normalized is more like 200 or so basis points down 2.40 percent or whatever to the 10%. So a couple of things that go on in our fiscal Q4, which is January through March, We have the reset of the Social Security taxes, the FICA and the 401 match in the company. Speaker 400:55:46So that's a few $1,000,000 right there. And that really impacts us that's really most of the change from Quarter over quarter perspective, say, in the $5,000,000 or so range, that's really driving it. Speaker 900:56:02Got it. It's just those 2 items, and I would that those would kind of be alleviated as you move through the calendar year, right? Speaker 400:56:10They do. They dissipate throughout the year. However, historically what we've done as a company is in our fiscal Q2 is when we have the annual pay increases so forth. So there's a few things that move up and down throughout the quarter throughout the year. Speaker 200:56:27Yes. Speaker 900:56:28Got it. Thanks. Speaker 200:56:30No problem. Operator00:56:39Our next question comes from the line of Peter Levin with Evercore. Your line is open. Speaker 1000:56:44Great. Thanks guys for taking my questions, squeezing me in here. Maybe just to piggyback off and the last one is, you've talked about obviously repaying the convert, Cleaning up the balance sheet, but if you think about your strategy to innovation led growth, how do you manage Cash from the balance sheet versus innovation versus what your competitors are doing in the CCaaS market, given it is lot more competitive today than it was 12 months ago. How do you balance that all? Speaker 200:57:16It's a great question. So I think I'm going to take you back to Q1 when we talked about what our sort of our fiscal plan for the next 3 years was. We talked about Increasing cash flow and delevering the balance sheet. So step 1 would be generating enough cash To pay down the debt, delever the balance sheet and put all this garbage behind us from the past would be step 1. Step 2 is Be an innovation led company, so we want to spend between 10% 16% any given quarter on R and D that further continues to then drive an efficient sales and marketing motion. Speaker 200:57:55We're a software company and we should be judged by our software first and foremost. And so that will be second. And then third, which is more of a swing factor is how much do we spend in sales and marketing and those kinds of things. And we're we need to get that sales and marketing engine a lot more efficient. Now there's a lot of overlap between R and D and sales and marketing. Speaker 200:58:13If you build a product that everybody wants, it's easier to sell. And if you build a product that has PLG built in, product led growth built in, They can be more efficient to sell. And so it's a little bit of the innovation we're going through. What I've said in the past and as you think forward, At the levels we're at, at the cash flow levels we're at, we should pretty easily make our $250,000,000 number that we promised to return to investors. So after that, we're more focused on spending for reacceleration of growth, for resumption of growth. Speaker 1000:58:46We haven't talked about Lisa. I know she's Been on board now for a couple of months, but maybe talk about how she's thinking or how you guys are thinking about go to market channel versus direct, obviously the announcements you made today. But Curious if what she's made and what she's changing and kind of what you have in the pipeline with her if you can share with us? Speaker 200:59:08So if there was ever a softball, I mean, I'm absolutely amazed watching Lisa in action. It is phenomenal to watch a world class sales executive who really knows what she is doing, execute her plan. And I think she has a fantastic vision. Provision is about a balanced go to market strategy with not balanced in every region. So for example, in Australia, New Zealand, we're focused mainly on value resellers, those kinds of things. Speaker 200:59:37But more balanced strategy in the U. S. And more appropriate strategy in the U. S. And other things. Speaker 200:59:44Number 2 is, she's very focused on the sales process and solution selling and running a correct sales process and focusing on business outcomes versus do you need dial tone or are you making the move from on prem to cloud, those kinds of things. And then lastly, She's tough. She has a high level of accountability and I'm sure there's already been some notes written, but she has a level of accountability and high expectations that she expects of the GTM engine and She asserts that accountability across the board. And so it's just absolutely phenomenal watching her in action. Speaker 401:00:21And I think also that with Bruno's on board, he's even newer than Lisa and we see as our new CMO and they work hand in glove better than any of the previous combination CRO, CMOs I've seen at 8 bytes. So it's a fantastic thing to see and they're completely aligned On a whole variety of topics in terms of the quality of lead gen, the conversion rates, all these operational things that are going on that just trying to improve everything from soup to nuts. So it's great to see. Speaker 1001:00:58If I could squeeze one more. Sam, I don't want to paint you in a corner or hold you accountable for this metric, but you did say 250 contacts and receipts up, I think, 50%. We do hear a lot from your competitors that are starting on the lower end of the market scaling up, investing a ton to kind of build up that functionality. But can you maybe just Give us an idea of how many customers that represents or percentage of your base of contact center customers that are 250 north of that? Speaker 201:01:26I actually don't know the exact number off the top of my head. It is not an insignificant amount of number. It's not a vanity metric. And to be clear, our products, we've got customers that are next to thousands of seats of contact center running concurrently. The reason the marketing team pulled together the metric for me was because we have this reputation of, oh my gosh, it's 8x8, it only works on 12 contact center agents or 8 contact center agents. Speaker 201:01:52It's just BS. It's marketing FUD. It's what competitors like to do all the time is run around and make a story instead of delivering value added to the customers. And so we've seen a significant growth in larger contact center deals that we're And we see it in the pipeline every day. And so I'm sorry, I can't give you a number. Speaker 201:02:12I'll see if I can scrounge it up by next call. Speaker 1001:02:16Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Speaker 201:02:18Thank you. Operator01:02:20Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Catharine Trebnick with Rosenblatt. Your line is open. Speaker 1101:02:33Thanks for taking my question. Hey, Sam, let's go back to your press release today. You talk about these non agents that you're targeting. Do you have a total address market for that and a growth projection? And then the follow on question is, it seems like this is a Very different sales than you currently have. Speaker 1101:02:52So what type of sales motions are going to put into play to make this happen? Thank you. Speaker 201:03:00Okay. So I'm going to take these in reverse order. So you talked about sales motions for I don't think they're different from the new sales motions we're developing. Yes, it'd be different from the old sales motions that we had. But I think in the new sales motions where we're solution selling and a rep and a GTM team shows up and really dives into what the customers' needs are. Speaker 201:03:18We're going to find service workers or healthcare workers or billing people or accounts people are sitting inside sales reps or any of those kind of things in every company and get them the right solutions for that Okay, Billy. It's a great question on TAM. Let me dig. I know Gartner has done some work on this as Metergi and some of the others. I mean, I'm presuming it's a multi $1,000,000,000 TAM because they talk a lot about the quote informal contact center. Speaker 201:03:47I really despise that term because it implies that it's like an informal agent. But a lot the most use cases we see are where the worker needs contact center like functionality, but in fact is not an agent. It's not their day to day job to sit at a terminal waiting for the next case to be delivered or to make outbound phone calls, but instead they have some other job, nurse, plumber, whatever the case may be, but they're on call, they need to deal with emergency situations, those kinds of things. And so it's Operator01:04:20a specific Speaker 201:04:20use case. Speaker 1101:04:21So I guess I understand the non agent part. I mean, would this also fall in with the light contact That everybody is bouncing around as a new name calling them light also. Speaker 201:04:32Yes, yes. But I mean, what is that? What's a light contact center? It's like The problem is like informal contact center, light contact center are to me terrible names because it's like light beer. Is it a beer or is it water? Speaker 201:04:46I mean, it's like neither. And so it's, I don't know, I really think and that's why we put up the press release today to start The dialogue of what really the category should be as we go into these products. And look, I know some of our competitors have some products In this area and I think this product is more analogous to them. They call their products contact center, 99% of the time I laugh. They're not contact center products. Speaker 1101:05:15Yes. And then what do you have for like you said it was in beta. So at what point do you think it will go GA and then what percent of revenue do you think you'll be able to drive in the next 12 to 15 months from this, because this actually could be 1 year better growth shoot. Speaker 201:05:36Yes, exactly, right. It's like like I said, so it's a great question. Look, if you look at supervisor workspace, I think we kept it in beta for 9 months. And if you look at intelligent customer sales and digital, I think it was in beta for less than 3 months. I suspect this one may be in beta a little longer, so I would lean maybe towards that 9 month number, but it's purely a guess on my part. Speaker 201:05:56And I'd like to see this as 10% of revenue as quickly as possible. I think it is absolutely a new product line extension for us as a company. Speaker 1101:06:06All right. Thank you. Operator01:06:17Our next question comes from the line of William Power with Baird. Your line is open. Speaker 201:06:24Hi, this is Yannis Samolis on Speaker 1201:06:26for Willpower. Thanks for taking the question. So it's clear that operating cash flow has been a focus and it's nicely over the past few years. But looking forward, you talked about more muted revenue growth. Speaker 201:06:39Can you talk about some of Speaker 1201:06:40the other levers that you still can pull to help reach that 20% annual growth target, so more on the margin side, maybe more working capital improvements. Can you just help unpack that a little bit? Speaker 401:06:51So yes, on the 3 year CAGR that we gave, right, we're starting from just to reset, starting from the end of We're expecting we just grew cash flow from up 55% on a trailing 12 month basis. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we would expect a bit more muted in 2025 fiscal and then going up there in 2026. In terms of levers, look, our product mix, we've had we sustained or we've been able to sustained really very good underlying service margins right now. We've got a lower margin business in Southeast Asia. But as that market expands into other parts of the world, maybe we could see an uptick in that part of the usage business that we have. Speaker 401:07:42But we're always looking at Cost of goods sold, getting better rates on our telephony, for example. So we're able to maintain pretty healthy gross margins in the face of whatever price pressures may exist at the low end of the market, for example. So we're always looking at that. Sam mentioned earlier about sales and marketing and getting efficiencies out of the group. It's not we want to get more with the same as an example there. Speaker 401:08:13So I think with the go to market retooling that we have going on in the company, We can get more from the same. That's what we really need a better operational efficiency out of sales and marketing. So those are the kinds of things that we're really focused on to maintain a decent level of profitability and cash flow. Speaker 201:08:33And look, I mean, I think we're generating enough cash flow, more than enough cash So right now, so for me, it's all about scale now. It's about resuming growth and getting back on that growth curve. So that's where the focus of the company is, etcetera. Could we pull levers that we need to? Sure. Speaker 201:08:46But really the focus on the company from here is getting that growth rate higher. Got it. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you. Thank you. Operator01:08:57Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Coons with Needham and Company. Your line is open. Speaker 1301:09:12Thanks for the question. Thanks for squeezing me in. A quick housekeeping item on RPO and any puts or takes there in that metric, All right. And then see it in the slide deck. Speaker 401:09:23Yes. No, so $765,000,000 RPO is where we have at the end of the 3rd quarter. I wouldn't say any necessarily big commentary on puts and takes there. It's up on a year over year basis. I know that's slightly down sequentially, but up on a year over year basis. Speaker 1001:09:44Okay. That's Speaker 1301:09:44fair. And Sam, as you're thinking about as you think about your seat count and maybe this is kind of the old way of looking at it, but I'm an old guy. As you think about your growth coming from CC and CPaaS and pressure on UCaaS and you obviously got some down selling going on with Fuze, churn, Pricing probably pressuring UC. So look at the pressure on the UC market is what I'm saying, the seats. How would you kind of allocate down selling pricing and kind of general customer churn as pressuring your UC seats? Speaker 1301:10:21Thank you. Speaker 201:10:23So in general, customer churn will be the bottom and down selling and price pressure, it's sometimes hard for me to tell the difference. I mean, I can sort of calculate it out. I would say probably This is pure gutting on my part is that down selling number 1 and price pressure on the low end number 2 and then The last one. And then we've got some new things coming out hopefully in the near future to really start to address the pricing environment. As you know, we do a lot of work around teams. Speaker 201:10:58And so I think we've got some really interesting things for maybe that could get us more traction in that lower end market really efficiently. Speaker 1301:11:07Great. Good to hear about that. Look forward to hearing about it. Thanks for questions. Operator01:11:11Thank you. Thanks Ryan. Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the call back over to Kate Patterson for closing remarks. Speaker 101:11:23Thank you all. Thanks for staying on the line. I know we ran a little bit over. So I'll look forward to talking with you this afternoon or later tomorrow orRead morePowered by