Teradata Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 6, 2024

There are 14 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Joel, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Teradata First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer Thank you.

Operator

I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mike Diloretti, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. You may begin your conference.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, and welcome to Teradata's 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. Steve McMillan, Teradata's President and Chief Executive Officer, will lead our call today followed by Claire Bramley, Peradata's Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss our financial results and outlook. Our discussion today includes forecasts and other information that are considered forward looking statements. While these statements reflect our current outlook, they are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risk factors are described in today's earnings release and in our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10 ks and in the Form 10 Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, that is expected to be filed with the SEC within the next few days.

Speaker 1

These forward looking statements are made as of today, and we undertake no duty or obligation to update them. On today's call, we will be discussing certain non GAAP financial measures, which exclude such items as stock based compensation expense and other special items described in our earnings release. We will also discuss other non GAAP items such as free cash flow, constant currency comparisons and 2024 revenue and ARR growth outlook in constant currency. Unless stated otherwise, all numbers and results discussed on today's call are on a non GAAP basis. A reconciliation of non GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our earnings release, which is accessible on the Investor Relations page of our website at investor.

Speaker 1

Teradata.com. A replay of this conference call will be available later today on our website. And now, I will turn the call over to Steve.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Mike, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. Today, I will start with some comments on our quarterly results, recent changes to our leadership team, new growth initiatives and examples of customer success. Claire will conclude with our detailed financial results and an update on our outlook. Total ARR $1,480,000,000 in Q1, down 1% in constant currency. While this is within the constant currency range we provided, we're not satisfied with this result.

Speaker 2

In Q1, Teradata achieved $525,000,000 of cloud ARR, up 36% year over year in constant currency. Teradata started out the year firmly focused on improving execution across the business and taking actions to improve performance and we are continuing our work to drive better execution. When customers move to the cloud with us, they see value and are expanding. Our cloud net expansion rate remains strong at 123% and we continue to see approximately 75% of our cloud customers operating in a hybrid environment. We believe our hybrid multi cloud platform is differentiated and what our customers among the world's largest enterprise companies need in today's dynamic environment.

Speaker 2

As we indicated last quarter, some customer decision making cycles have been elongated. In setting our 2024 outlook, we factored the impact of these longer deal cycles continuing throughout the year. That said, in the Q1, we closed 1 of the large split deals from 2023 and we remain on track to close the majority of them this year as we previously stated. The on prem erosion activity we discussed last quarter occurred in line with expectations. We continue to view the 1st part of 2024 as an outlier and we do expect our total net expansion rate to remain positive for the year.

Speaker 2

In a moment, I'll address more about the customer success actions we have taken that will maintain long term customer relationships. Finally, we generated non GAAP earnings per share of $0.57 at the top end of our quarterly range. While we ended Q1 as we had indicated, this is not the overall growth level we expect going forward and we are acting with urgency to improve our growth trajectory. To that end, we recently appointed Rich Petley as our Chief Revenue Officer. Rich is a standout and experienced sales leader with a proven track record of enterprise sales success, growing customers and pipeline.

Speaker 2

We have been intentional in our talent management planning and 2 years ago we recruited Rich as the Head of Sales of our EMEA region. The growth of that region gave us confidence and expanding his responsibilities last year to include all international sales. Under Rich's leadership, over the past 2 years, these sales organizations have delivered results meaningfully ahead of our overall growth rate. Rich has consistently shown improvements in driving predictability, adoption of partners and growing new logos. He has a deep understanding of our customers, technologies and business and will bring greater discipline and deal management to help Teradata scale our value and drive profitable growth.

Speaker 2

Rich is the right person for the job now and we expect to see a positive impact as he takes over our sales organization. We have also been steadily building out our customer success capabilities and the organization has developed a more disciplined process and more thorough and objective assessment of account health, enabling active engagement to maintain and grow customers. Our customer success team has also instituted AI Innovation Days, where we are bringing together our customers and prospects with our subject matter experts to promote deeper understanding of our AI and data like capabilities, how customers can improve their growth through analytics and realize increased value from the Teradata investments. We're hosting these sessions around the globe and are seeing high interest in engagement from customers. As an example, we recently had over 100 representatives from one of our banking customers participate with us in building their strategy for AI.

Speaker 2

Additionally, we've sharpened our focus on key operational success levers, including driving new logos and improving sales enablement. Through a dedicated cross functional effort of targeted demand generation, we are seeing positive momentum. Over the last few months, we've seen well over 100 new logos added to our pipeline and our teams are focusing on moving these opportunities through the funnel. Ultimately, it's our technology that customers rely on to achieve success. Today, businesses everywhere are exploring how AI can help them be more productive, more innovative and deliver better experiences for their customers and are looking at which technology can best support them.

Speaker 2

Teradata is well positioned to help companies bridge the gap between the possible and the actual with respect to AI, but impactful results are only possible through the ability to manage analytics and models at massive scale. At Teradata, this is a core strength and we believe our technology is fundamental to what companies need today and we'll continue to innovate here. For example, a global investment bank that has been a customer for years tells us that Teradata is a business critical system running many of the most important and complex workloads in wealth management and corporate finance. We've earned their trust, our hybrid capabilities and our AI analytics roadmap enable us to continue to build for the future together. We've architected our technology to grow and expand as and when customers need.

Speaker 2

When a leading European telco adopted a cloud first direction, this customer is able to easily migrate their on prem environment to Teradata on Azure. We help them harmonize digital customer interaction data so they could execute high quality customer experiences. Following the successful cloud migration, the customer expanded and is now leveraging ClearScape analytics to perform exploratory AI use cases. Our U. S.

Speaker 2

Healthcare company was a decade long on prem customer and became an early adopter of Teradata on Azure to deliver digital health solutions to its clinicians and patients. Their Python AI models run-in database using ClearScape analytics to identify risk and predict patient population for remote patient monitoring. As a result, that customer has seen a 5 20% increase in patient engagement, aligned into care programs and leading to better health outcomes. These are just a few examples of customers improving their business with our foundational Teradata technology. We remain committed to investing in innovation that broadens our ability to drive value for our customers and for us.

Speaker 2

An example from the Q1 is with a major financial institution that operates in over 30 countries. We selected Vantage Cloud for the fastest, least risk and lowest cost transition to the cloud as well as our hybrid capabilities that support the regulatory compliance needs. They value Clearscape analytics, our query grid functionality and our ability to accelerate their analytics and data mesh goals. We recently held a briefing with C level execs and we walked away excited about our roadmap and are looking forward to partnering with us to deliver on their highest priority business outcomes, leveraging ClearScape's ability to scale their AI needs. We recently made announcements that strengthen our foundation for Trusted AI, including AI Unlimited, our on demand and cloud native AI and ML engines that we announced in Q4.

Speaker 2

This technology is moving into public preview in both AWS and Microsoft marketplaces. AI Unlimited is designed to enable developers, data scientists and engineers to seamlessly explore data, conduct experiments and operationalize AI use cases without risk to mission critical production environments. Along with AI Unlimited, we announced support for OpenTable formats, Apache Iceberg and Linux Foundation Delta Lake as we work to deliver the most open and connected ecosystem for trusted AI. We see OTF as the next round of industry disruption, this time at the storage layer. Companies are looking at OTF to allow them to store all their data in a single location at the lowest possible cost and apply the best engine for the job to the data.

Speaker 2

We believe we have the best platform with Vantage Cloud Lite and AI Unlimited. Our strength is in high performance with optimized and parallel processing of shared data and we believe we are offering customers unparalleled choice and data management. With this announcement, we are confident that we offer the most open and connected ecosystem for OTF integration. From the private preview usage, we are already seeing AI Unlimited adding value. And one example, a major airline is exploring how AI Unlimited coupled with ClearScape analytics enhances the robustness and predictive power of their models.

Speaker 2

And another, a major healthcare provider is leveraging AI Unlimited to experiment with different datasets in order to gain a better understanding of customer behavior and quality of experience. Because the AI Unlimited is on demand, users can freely experiment and explore new use cases without affecting their production systems and that sets up the opportunity for new workloads on Vantage Cloud. These announcements highlight our commitment to a fully open and connected approach that allows enterprises to employ modern data strategies to execute trusted AI at scale. Our technology leadership also continues to be acknowledged in the market. Forrester recently named as the leader in its report on Enterprise Data Fabric.

Speaker 2

The report notes that Teradata excels in data fabric and highlights our superior roadmap, which focuses on AI and large language models. It additionally acknowledges our strong partnership ecosystem that supports large complex fabric deployments. Forrester also noted how Clearscape Analytics help a customer achieve an impressive ROI of nearly 2 50 percent and a new total economic impact study, Forrester found that Clearscape Analytics has enabled the organization to increase data scientist productivity and time to market as it builds ML models, thereby quickly activating, scaling and driving results from trusted AI. We're also pleased that Teradata was named Tech Partner of the Year by FICO. Recognizing that our joint customers can quickly operationalize analytic models, including for AI, FICO also noted our jointly designed banking fraud solution that focuses on real time payments to help stop the rise in payment fraud.

Speaker 2

I'm also proud of Teradata being named by Episphere as one of the world's most ethical companies for the 15th year in a row. This designation is important as it recognizes our dedication to ethical business practices and all aspects of our operations. Our technology is well positioned to benefit from the big secular growth drivers in enterprise data and analytics, AI and machine learning, cloud adoption, real time streaming and embedded analytics and data governance and security at scale. Over time, we firmly believe in our ability to expand customer base in the cloud to migrate non cloud customers and to attract new logos. In the near term, we expect cloud ARR and total ARR growth to reaccelerate as we progress through this year.

Speaker 2

As Claire will describe in more detail, our growth outlook for 2024 remains within the ranges we provided. Importantly, as shareholders expect, we are focused not only on the top line, but also on profitability, protecting and growing our free cash flow and on return of capital. Will continue to invest their technology differentiation and we are equally committed to achieving our margin, free cash flow and capital return targets. I will now turn the call over to Claire.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone. In the Q1, cloud AOR growth remains healthy at 36% year over year in constant currency, supported by a cloud net expansion rate of 123%. Even though Q1 is traditionally our lowest growth quarter, the sequential growth for migration and expansion activity was slightly below expectations. As we expected in the Q1, we had a sequential decline of total ARR, driven by specific on prem erosions. The total ARR decreased by $76,000,000 on a constant currency basis, within the range we provided in February of 4% to 5%.

Speaker 3

The impact from currency was 1 percentage point. Let me now share more details on our quarterly financial results starting with revenue. 1st quarter recurring revenue was $388,000,000 flat as reported and 1% growth year over year in constant currency. We saw strong growth in cloud revenue offset by headwinds from upfront revenue, the anticipated on prem erosions and currency. Net upfront revenue was a positive $22,000,000 in the quarter versus $34,000,000 in Q1 of last year, driving a 3 point headwind year over year.

Speaker 3

Repairing revenue as a percentage of total revenue was 83%. 1st quarter total revenue was $465,000,000 down 2% year over year as reported and down 1% in constant currency. The year over year change is primarily due lower perpetual and consulting revenue. Moving to profitability and free cash flow. We were pleased with our profitability.

Speaker 3

Total gross margin was $289,000,000 in the quarter. Operating profit was $89,000,000 and operating margin was 19.1%. Both gross margin and operating margin were impacted by a higher percentage of public cloud revenue, offset in part by continued expansion in our cloud margin rate. Non GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.57 at the top end of our outlook range. We generated $21,000,000 of free cash flow in the quarter, which is lower on a year over year basis by $84,000,000 Approximately $20,000,000 is due to lower net income and approximately $30,000,000 from working capital dynamics with the remaining change largely due to lower billing.

Speaker 3

None of these impacts the full year outlook and therefore we are still on track to land within our 2024 free cash flow range. In the Q1, we repurchased approximately $124,000,000 of stock or 3,200,000 shares. We remain committed to returning at least 75% of free cash flow to shareholders in the form of share repurchases. Moving to our full year 2024 outlook. As a reminder, our outlook ranges are in constant currency for the ARR and revenue metrics.

Speaker 3

We are retaining the ranges provided in February, but we currently expect to come in at the low end of the ranges, driven by lower total ARR expansion as on prem customers continue to migrate to the cloud. However, as it relates to cloud ARR, we remain confident in the midpoint of our range due to the strong pipeline of customers planning to migrate and expand with us in the cloud. Please refer to our Q1 earnings presentation on our Investor Relations website for a complete list of the 2024 outlook ranges previously provided. We anticipate acceleration of cloud and total ARR dollar growth throughout the year. We expect the 4th quarter to be the strongest quarter and deliver 50% or more of the growth, in line with historical seasonality.

Speaker 3

We anticipate total ARR to be relatively flat from Q1 to Q2. Some updated modeling assumptions for 2024 include: using the end of April currency rate, we anticipate year over year headwinds of approximately 230 basis points on revenue, which is an incremental 100 basis points compared to the January rate, 130 basis points on total ARR and 170 basis points on cloud ARR. Weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 98,500,000, other expense of approximately $50,000,000 We continue to project our non GAAP tax rate of approximately 24.2%. Regarding our outlook for the Q2 of 2024, we anticipate non GAAP diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.46 to $0.50 We project the non GAAP tax rate to be approximately 24% and the weighted average shares outstanding of 98,000,000 We remain highly focused on profitability and free cash flow growth. As we look to 2025 and beyond, we have multiple levels available, including top line growth, gross margin expansion, operating expense optimization and further working capital improvements to increase free cash flow generation.

Speaker 3

We continue to invest in areas that will drive long term growth, including AI, demand creation and brand perception. We are still on the path to achieve the 2025 goals of at least $1,000,000,000 in cloud ARR and operating margin in the low 20% range and free cash flow of at least $450,000,000 However, we expect it will take slightly longer to achieve our 2025 total ARR and revenue growth metrics. We continue to operate in this growing market with differentiated product capabilities and strong customer loyalty, and therefore remain optimistic about the profitable growth opportunities ahead. Thank you very much for your time today. Let's please open the call for questions.

Operator

The first question is from the line of Eric Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Speaker 4

Amazing guys. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Steve, maybe if we start with you, can you just expand a bit on the broader kind of deal in demand landscape? Clearly, you mentioned closing one of the slipped deals, but you're now guiding to the lower end of your ranges for total ARR and cloud total ARR for the full year. So are decision making cycles any longer than 3 months ago?

Speaker 4

Kind of what are you hearing from customers? Are there any new holdups? So I'd just love to hear what you're seeing kind of boots on the ground maybe how that behavior has kind of continued into April? And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks, Eric, for the question. We're still seeing a very positive demand environment across the full year. We did refer to some deal elongation in last quarter's earnings call and that's been factored into our full year guide and that hasn't really changed. As data, analytics and AI becomes a strategic decision point within our customers, we see that more people getting involved in those decision making journeys inside our customer base, but that has been factored into our full year guidance.

Speaker 2

Although Q1 was slightly below expectation, we are confident in the midpoint of our outlook from a cloud perspective, because it really is supported by the pipeline that we have and the strong interest that we have in our cloud platform.

Speaker 4

All right. Thank you very much for that color. And then, Claire, maybe just turning to maybe to ask a similar question just on the cloud ARR side. I think last quarter, we talked about slight sequential expansion in cloud ARR dollars, obviously down about $3,000,000 sequentially. So can you just maybe dig in a little bit more specifically into some of the headwinds that you faced in the quarter?

Speaker 4

What were kind of the main factor or factors for why that metric kind of slightly under performed? And then obviously keeping the full year cloud ARR midpoint unchanged, what kind of changes as we go into 2Q and 3Q and 4Q? Would just love if you could unpackage that for me.

Speaker 5

Thanks so much.

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks, Eric. So to your point, we anticipate slight growth in constant currency is what we are expecting kind of the low single digits and mid single digits as we came into Q1. We did actually see a negative impact from currency of about $5,000,000 in the quarter on our cloud ARR as our mix with regards to our international business continues to grow. So we did see that low single digit growth in constant currency to your point then net of currency on a reported basis it was a slight decline.

Speaker 3

It's a slightly below a few $1,000,000 below what we were expecting coming in. And given that Q1 is always anticipated to be our lowest growth quarter, we don't believe that that will materially impact our overall ability to hit the midpoint of the guide. And as Steve mentioned, we have a strong pipeline to support that. So that's what enables us to be able to keep that midpoint. We always anticipate an acceleration of that growth.

Speaker 3

So we see that. We expect acceleration in Q2, Q3, Q4, with Q4 remaining our biggest growth quarter in line with our historical seasonality and approximately 50% is what we've seen in Q4 historically. So we're anticipating the same in 2024.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Speaker 6

Yes. Thank you so much. I was wondering maybe, Claire, just to go down this point again on public cloud, there are sequential trends. Obviously, FX, you called out as an impact. But I think in your prepared statements, you also said sequential growth from migration expansion activity was slightly below expectations.

Speaker 6

Now when I look at sort of your comments around confidence and reacceleration, you do point to migration and expansion. So could you maybe just give us some sense of what's driving that confidence that that pipeline that you see you will be able to convert and that there won't be more kind of maybe hesitancy or pause with spending in that area? Why should we feel more comfortable about the conversion of that pipeline as we go through the course of the year?

Speaker 2

Hey, Wamsi, it's Steve. Thanks for the question. I'll take it and then hand to Claire if you get any other color to add. I think if we take a step back, it's important to recognize that in 2023, we grew our cloud ARR faster than the broader market and our 2024 outlook says that we're going to do the same. So we have great confidence in our business and our ability to grow cloud.

Speaker 2

Couple of things that lead us to that conclusion. One is that once customers are in the cloud with us, they tend to expand with Teradata once they've migrated And then we're going to get the base of that cloud business growing over time and that's going to be a more substantial impact to our overall growth rate. The other thing is we've got a great migration pipeline in terms of major enterprises migrating to the cloud with us. There's still a great recognition that we are the best path to the cloud for our customers for the least cost, least risk, quickest path. So that if they want to take advantage of these new AI ML capabilities in the cloud, we're definitely the best way to do that.

Speaker 2

I think that's building our pipeline in terms of our overall pipeline and execution. As Claire pointed out, Q4 is always our seasonally our largest quarter. We always tend to do more than 50% of our business in that Q4, but we're seeing a good pipeline as we move into the second half of the year and a good market environment to execute in.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate the comments. In your prepared remarks, you also noted, you've seen well over 100 new logos added to your pipeline. Can you give us some sense of sort of where you're seeing this traction?

Speaker 6

Should we expect continued traction of net new logos?

Speaker 5

And in

Speaker 6

the in sort of your bridge to getting to the billion, dollars is now the new logo part any more important or any more larger size than what you had anticipated previously? Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

Yes, we continue to win new logos in the quarter and it was really great to see our demand generation activities put over 100 new logos added into the pipeline in the last few months. Wamsi, we're not seeing any change in shape to those new logos. They tend to be small to start with and they grow over time. If we dig into that a little bit, we've seen some great traction in our international business via partners and we think there's a lot of lessons that we can learn there in terms of bringing that to global sales motions and using partner relationships in the Americas as an example to drive more new logos as we move forward. I think that the new logo pipeline with offers like AI Unlimited, which we referred to on the prepared remarks, give us an ability to interact with a new set of buying and a new set of users for the Teradata platform.

Speaker 2

I think being integrated, being one of the only ISVs with query engine being natively integrated into the Microsoft Fabric offering is going to be really exciting in terms of generating new logos. From a materiality perspective though, it's our business from a cloud perspective in 2024 is still going to be driven by expansions and migration activity.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim. Your line is now open.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks. Hi, Claire. I want to ask about your guidance, which implies that you need to add about $200,000,000 of a cloud ARR in about 3 quarters. And as you and Steve just mentioned, that's mostly in the second half and in Q4.

Speaker 7

And so I was hoping you could comment in terms of expansion versus migration. So on the expansion side, are you expecting an acceleration in expansion rates maybe or maybe any pricing benefits as contracts renew? And then on the migration side, should we essentially assume that subscription ARR will then be flat at best this year and then become a material contributor to cloud growth perhaps starting next year?

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks for the question, Howard. So just to confirm, we're not modeling an acceleration in our net expansion rate. We saw good net expansion rate again this quarter of 123 percent. We continue to model approximately 120% as we model out to get to the mid point of our 2024 guide and also as we model out to get to the $1,000,000,000 in 2025.

Speaker 3

The rest we then would expect to come from migration. And as we mentioned in our prepared remarks, we are seeing a really strong pipeline and even increasing pipeline of the number of large existing enterprise customers that want to migrate with us to the cloud. So that's why we feel comfortable about those assumptions. We're not anticipating an acceleration. To your point with regards to subscription, with regards to subscription, once you take into account, obviously, the impact of migrations from subscription to the cloud.

Speaker 3

We still anticipate expansions to be positive. So we still expect growth in the low single digits with regards to subscriptions, but once you've taken out the impact of migration.

Speaker 7

Okay. Thanks for that color. And I just have a quick follow-up either for you or for Steve. I wanted to ask about the strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. Are there any changes in terms of the economic terms of that agreement worth calling out that would impact either revenue or gross margins?

Speaker 7

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks, Howard. Yes, we're really happy with our relationship with AWS. It continues to go from strength to strength and it's built really upon that growing cloud business in the AWS environment. One of the things that we have always discussed is that as we continue to scale up and scale out our cloud business, it will give us the opportunity to have better strategic relationships and strategic agreements with the hyperscalers and this AWS agreement is one of those.

Speaker 2

And we see it as another element in terms of how we continue to expand our cloud margins going forward.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Speaker 8

Yes, thank you. I do have two questions. First one is that Claire, can you give a little bit more detail on why migration expansion activity was slightly below

Speaker 3

expectations? Yes, certainly. So yes, as I mentioned, we weren't expecting a significant growth in Q1. It was slightly below our expectations by a few $1,000,000 and that was kind of split equally between migrations expansions. As you can see, we do continue to see a strong net expansion rate.

Speaker 3

So that doesn't cause us any concern and it's not anything that is we believe is going to be an issue as we accelerate our growth throughout the year. So just a couple a few deals here and there that potentially could have we were expecting potentially to close in Q1, but no issues from an overall outlook standpoint and no changes with regards to competitive environment or anything. So just kind of the usual puts and takes as we would see in the quarter driving a few $1,000,000 lower in Q1 compared to expectations.

Speaker 8

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. And then sticking with you, Claire, you mentioned multiple levers give you confidence in continuing to drive free cash flow growth into calendar 2025. You listed 4 levers. Which of those 4 levers do you have greatest confidence in actually being the biggest driver, that being the top line growth, gross margin expansion, operating expense optimization or working capital improvements?

Speaker 3

Yes. No, actually, we're kind of expecting in terms of my confidence, I'm confident across all of those drivers. To your point, I mentioned 4, 2 of them linked to how we can improve our operating margins. And so as I mentioned with regard to 2025, I have very good confidence to get to increase our operating margins and be in the low 20% range. And that is driven by cloud margin expansion that we continue to see as we increase our scale and size Within cloud, we continue to see that margin expansion.

Speaker 3

So that gives me good confidence with that. We have great track record with regards to optimizing OpEx, especially as we grow. We the top line growth is going to be driven by the continued growth we see in cloud, which gives me confidence in that. And then with regards to working capital dynamics, we have a very strong cash conversion cycle. I still see a small opportunity with regards to improving, for example, our DSOs.

Speaker 3

They're kind of in the low 60 days range. I think we can still get a few days improvement over time in our DSOs as well. So I would say the biggest drivers do come from the operating margin expansions and top line growth, but also have great confidence across all of those drivers.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Speaker 9

Hi. This is Sheldon McManes on for Raimo. Thanks for taking our question. I first wanted to ask about some of your newer announcements, AI Unlimited, OpenTable format support, the expanded AWS partnership. Are any of these impacts embedded in the reacceleration in guidance?

Speaker 9

Or is it more what you're seeing in your existing pipeline for existing workloads that's giving you confidence?

Speaker 2

Yes. Thank you for the questions. Yes, I was super excited about our announcements around AI Unlimited and support for OpenTable formats. We really believe that it's a differentiated capability in the industry, support in both iceberg and Delta Lake formats from an open table format. Perspective, AI Unlimited is certainly a facility that's going to enable us to attract new workloads into the Teradata ecosystem and new users into the Teradata ecosystem.

Speaker 2

In terms of creating an impact or a meaningful impact to our total ARR and total cloud ARR, We see these as fueling the pipeline and acting as a catalyst for us so that we can discuss with those customers and move into Vantage Cloud offers that we have and accelerate that overall expansion of Vantage cloud environment for existing customers, but also when those new logos. And as was pointed out, we had over 100 new logos added to the pipeline in the last few months. It's the strength of our technology and the strength of our roadmap that's enabling us to have those conversations and put across our uniquely differentiated value proposition. So really excited about the technology landscape that we have and the offers that we've made available over the last couple of months.

Speaker 9

Great. Thank you. And then quick follow-up. Did the headwinds from the couple of large on prem erosions fully play out in Q1? Or is there still some impact expected to fall in Q2?

Speaker 9

And is that expected is that why ARR is expected to be relatively flat quarter over quarter in Q2?

Speaker 2

Yes. So from a total ARR perspective for Q1, we executed pretty much as we expected from an overall ARR and what we saw in terms of our customer base. We will see some impacts in Q2. As we noted in last quarter's call, it's pretty consistent. There's been no change in the last 90 days in terms of the overall landscape.

Speaker 2

And we still have good faith in terms of our full year guide.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Chirag Ved with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

Speaker 10

Hi, thanks for taking the question and good to hear from you. So as we continue through the initial stages of this AI cycle, many companies today want to start incorporating new JET AI capabilities. But we've heard that many of these companies don't have the modernized data stack required to support AI implementation today. I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether there was some level of data quality issue in the market overall, how companies were making inroads on addressing this and whether you view these market dynamics as a tailwind for Teradata looking ahead? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks for the question. So I think the way that we see the AI marketplace playing out is that organizations that have a modern data stack and can leverage their enterprise data warehouse, which is where the most trusted data from an enterprise exists, but also combine that with data that is in a lake construct and also a lake house construct. That is really going to be the winning formula for data platforms going forward. And it certainly underpins our technology strategy in terms of having a data platform with the broadest choice of deployment options.

Speaker 2

The other really important thing is in those analytics environments to be able to deploy those advanced analytic AI and Gen AI models at scale very efficiently without letting costs run out of control. That is something and that financial governance is something that Teradata is very accustomed to. Our platform has unique differentiated capabilities in terms of moving some of these most complex models into production at scale. Some examples of that from the prepared remarks, we're really looking at health care organizations that were at a massive scale improving patient outcomes by running multiple models against all of the patients that they have in their ecosystem. And to do that effectively, they have to combine data from multiple sources to enable them to do that.

Speaker 2

And then just from a governance and data governance perspective, that's something that Teradata has always been strong in with our added capabilities looking at data lineage and trust in the data that we have inside an organization. It really does enable Teradata to be a trusted AI solution for our customers. And that's getting some great traction in terms of the discussions that we're having across all industries just now actually. So really well placed from a technology perspective. I think to the points that you brought up, I think that's what customers are looking for from a solution and it's what Teradata can deliver today.

Speaker 10

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from Tyler Radke with Citi. Your line is now

Speaker 5

open. Hi, good afternoon. This is Yitrin calling in for Tyler. Thanks for taking the questions here. We have a lot of questions around ARR already, so I'm not going to go there.

Speaker 5

My question is around on track erosion. Good to hear that the erosion was as expected and you view it as an outlier for this year. But for investors, they're trying to seek some comfort in this one time event. Could you provide some of the actions that you've taken and what was already accounted for on this erosion?

Speaker 2

Yes, thanks for the question. As we look at the erosions for full year, we don't see any changes to our outlook today versus 90 days ago and that is all factored into our outlook for the year. As we take a step back, we absolutely run the most complex and mission critical workloads for the world's largest enterprises. And we do have a very detailed understanding of what's going on inside those customers. We created a customer success function a few years ago and they have a really disciplined approach to assess account health, what's going on inside the customer or level of engagement.

Speaker 2

We have telemetry now in terms of understanding what's going on for the environment, how we're engaging partners inside that organization. So we really do have a great 360 degree view of the customer and what's happening. And so we do see 2024 as being an outlier to a renewal rate and we anticipate that to improve into 2025 and we've got a handle on all of the levers to do that.

Speaker 5

Got it. That makes sense. I have a follow-up for Clay around your confidence on the renewal for like the back half of the year, specifically excluding some of the split deals for 2023, how does that dual age renewal looks like versus the same time from a year ago? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. So as Steve just mentioned, we are seeing a strong traction with regards to the transparency and visibility that we have with renewals. We especially with regards to our cloud business, you can see we mentioned that in Q1 we were pleased with the renewals that we saw and we're expecting that to continue throughout the year. And net expansion rate remains strong 123%. So that also gives us a good indication as we're moving out of the year.

Speaker 3

And we're modeling, as I mentioned, kind of in the approximate 120% range, which factors in obviously all of our assumptions from a renewal standpoint. So I don't think we're seeing any significant changes or and I think we're modeling fairly conservatively from a cloud ARR standpoint considering that we're currently running at 123% and we're modeling 120%. So happy with that and that kind of gives us that confidence in the midpoint for the range for the full year.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from Bo Erskine with TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Speaker 11

Great. Thanks guys. This is Cole on for Derek. Steve, I want to talk about sales execution and just see if there's any changes that Rich is making to kind of drive better rep execution and make sure the deals get across the finish line as we move towards the second half of the year and don't see a repeat of last year?

Speaker 2

Yes. So thanks for that and thanks for bringing up Rich. We were delighted to appoint Rich Petley as our CRO. He joined Teradata over 2 years ago to lead our EMEA region. Given the growth that we've had in EMEA and the success he had in EMEA, we actually promoted them to run all of international sales.

Speaker 2

And during that time, he's delivered results meaningfully ahead of all of our overall growth rate as a company over the last 2 years. Rich, as a sales executive brings a super disciplined approach to deal management. He has demonstrated success in terms of driving predictability in the business. But not only that, in terms of executing in marketplace, his adoption of partners, the growth in new logos, the execution of expansions and migrations inside this region has been fantastic. We're looking forward to bringing that capability to the entirety of our global sales execution.

Speaker 2

He really does know our business, knows our technology, knows our people and we're delighted to have him in this role.

Speaker 11

Great. Thanks for the color. And then just one follow-up. On the OpenTable format on Iceberg, that's good to see. You guys anticipate any headwind on storage revenue from that?

Speaker 2

Yes, I think what we see is there's going to be a requirement to utilize and deploy lots of different storage technologies and storage capabilities. So for certain workloads OpenTable format is going to be absolutely the right choice and for certain workloads high performance storage built right into the Teradata platform is going to be the right choice. We see the capability of opening up and supporting open table format gives us the ability to access and utilize even more data than we could previously. And that will drive a source of expansion for us as we move forward as we increase the utilization of the Teradata platform to create massively more amounts of data inside our customer ecosystem. I was talking to one of the banks up in Canada a couple of weeks ago and they have an order of magnitude more data stored in native objects to work than they do and say they're structured enterprise data warehouse.

Speaker 2

By combining the power of Teradata and the query engine that we have in Teradata to look at these open table format data stores and native object stores, it's going to massively increase the ability for our customers to get insights from the data no matter where it is. So we see it as something that's going to expand our total addressable market and something that we can leverage to grow our overall cloud and ARR in total.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Oliver Kuykenden with Citizens JMP. Your line is now open.

Speaker 12

Great. I'm on for Pat. So I just wanted to touch on one of the customer examples you gave. You noted a major financial institution that selected Vantage Cloud. I'm wondering, is that a new logo or an existing customer migration?

Speaker 12

And then were they considering competitors heavily? Like what were the main selling points in that deal competitively?

Speaker 2

That was an existing customers migrating to the cloud with us. And it was a competitive situation where they did choose Vantage Cloud as their solution. And the reason that they did it was because they saw the migration of the Teradata environment would be least cost, least risk and the lowest complexity from a migration perspective. They also saw that the real value of ClearScape analytics and our query grid functionality, which are truly differentiated compared to the competition. We also used that to actually do some briefings with their executive team in terms of the value that the Teradata platform can bring to their business.

Speaker 2

We took a number of different use cases from across banks in the world to bring the very best Deteradata to them and our understanding of the industry combined with our technology

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC. Your line is now open.

Speaker 13

Hey, guys. This is Simran on for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking our question. Just one for me. I just wanted to double click on 20 25 total ARR and revenue targets being pushed out.

Speaker 13

Do you still expect to achieve these targets in the back half of 2025 or could they be delayed further out? And what are the assumptions that are embedded in these targets? And then on achieving $1,000,000,000 in cloud ARR, what are you seeing in 2024 and beyond that gives you the confidence to achieve this target on time? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. Thank you. I'll start with the second part of your question and then I'll go back to the first part. So with regards to the $1,000,000,000 in cloud ARR, what we've done there is assumed, as I mentioned, a net expansion rate of approximately 120 percent that rolls forward from 2024 into 2025. I know we're running slightly above that, but we think it's prudent to assume approximately 120%, especially as we move out to 2025.

Speaker 3

I think given that and the fact that we have a strong pipeline in 2024 and also pipeline going into 2025, a strong migration, gives us that confidence to be able to deliver the $1,000,000,000 in terms of cloud ARR. With regards to our total ARR, as I mentioned in 2024 and we're kind of expecting a similar trend in 2025, we're seeing like total ARR growth slightly lower and at the low end of our 2024 guidance and we expect this trend to continue out. And the main driver for that is because of the stronger and larger migrations from existing on prem customers. So with that, we're kind of seeing maybe lower on prem expansion activity. But we know that over the longer term, so as you get out from 2025 and into 26, given that net expansion rate as we migrate those on prem customers to the cloud that continues to give us much more growth opportunity, but looking further out into the future.

Speaker 3

So we'll see that additional expansion coming from those migrations in 2024 and 2025 as we progress out and exit 2025 into 2026. I think the other factor to remember when you're thinking about our overall total growth rate as you look out into the future is the fact that we've always said that as cloud becomes at scale and becomes more than a 50% of our total ARR, which we expect as we exit 2025. That is going to help our growth rates accelerate and increase as we look for 2026 and beyond. So that still applies. And so we're looking forward to seeing that total growth uplift from 2026 and beyond.

Speaker 13

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Steve McMillan for his final remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much, operator, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We're looking ahead with confidence as we build on our healthy cloud growth rate and expand our customer base in the cloud. We absolutely believe we've got a differentiated position with our enterprise scale platform for trusted AI and as the conversation rotates to data and analytics and also about AI, we have the right solution for our customers. We're going to build on that reputation of driving value for our customers as we accelerate cloud and total ARR growth throughout the year. Thank you very much for joining us today.

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Key Takeaways

  • Teradata reported a slight decline in total ARR (down 1% in constant currency) while cloud ARR grew 36% year-over-year with a net expansion rate of 123%, and delivered non-GAAP EPS of $0.57 at the top end of guidance.
  • Management acknowledged elongated deal cycles and expected on-premise contract erosions as Q1 outliers, but affirmed a positive total net expansion rate for the full year.
  • A new Chief Revenue Officer, Rich Petley, was appointed to drive sales discipline and predictability, complemented by enhanced customer success programs like AI Innovation Days and rigorous account health assessments.
  • Teradata unveiled AI Unlimited (cloud-native AI/ML engines) and support for OpenTable formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake), reinforced by strategic partnerships (e.g., AWS) and industry accolades from Forrester and FICO.
  • The company maintained 2024 outlook at the low end of previous ranges, expects ARR growth to accelerate into Q4, and remains on track for 2025 goals of $1 billion cloud ARR, low-20% operating margin, and $450 million free cash flow.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Teradata Q1 2024
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