Commvault Systems Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
April 29, 2025

There are 11 speakers on the call.

Operator

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Commvault Q4 Fiscal Year twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Thank you.

Operator

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Melnick, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good morning, and welcome to our earnings conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements made on today's call will include forward looking statements about Commvault's future expectations, plans and prospects. All such forward looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Please refer to the cautionary language in today's earnings release and Commvault's most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to be materially different from those contemplated in these forward looking statements. Does not assume any obligation to update these statements.

Speaker 1

During this call, Commvault's financial results are presented on a non GAAP basis. A reconciliation between the non GAAP and GAAP measures can be found on our website. Thank you again for joining us. Now I'll turn it over to our CEO, Merchandani, for his opening remarks. Sanjay?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Mike. I apologize if I'm a bit raspy. I'm recovering from flu. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. I'm excited to share the results from another record breaking Q4 and full fiscal year 2025.

Speaker 2

First, let's talk about the quarter. Total revenue increased 23% to $275,000,000 Subscription revenue grew 45% to $173,000,000 Total ARR improved 21% to $930,000,000 And SaaS ARR jumped 68% to $281,000,000 Fiscal year 'twenty five was a pivotal year. We reimagined resiliency for a cloud first world. We doubled down on innovation and execution, and we firmly positioned ourselves as a growth company. We delivered highly differentiated data security and recovery offerings that make customers more resilient, including clean room, active directory, forest level recovery, and cloud rewind.

Speaker 2

We extended our partner ecosystem, including integrations with leading security players like Acante, Dethera, Google Threat Intelligence, Splunk, and Waze. We integrated two acquisitions that expand the breadth and depth of our platform, reaching new cloud buyers and serve new markets, notably with AWS workloads. We reignited growth in our land business, adding nearly 3,000 subscription customers. We drove a double digit improvement in sales productivity, and on a rule of 40 basis, we achieved 41 for the full fiscal year. As we begin fiscal year twenty six, Commvault has never been better positioned to succeed and win.

Speaker 2

Let me talk about our three fundamental growth drivers. First, we expect to benefit from strong secular tailwinds tied to cyber resilience. Second, in a cloud first world, our approach to continuous business is second to none. Third, we're executing both internally and with our growing partner ecosystem. I'll discuss each driver in more detail.

Speaker 2

First, cyber resilience remains a top strategic priority for organizations. Ransomware and sophisticated cyber attacks are increasing in frequency. Cloud environments are more complex, and there are emerging use cases around AI. As such, organizations are increasingly turning to Commvault to keep their business continuous. Some recent notable customer wins include American Tower, Cinemark Holdings, Janice International, McGraw Hill, and Blue Origin, among others.

Speaker 2

Whether it's on prem or in the cloud, Commvault gives customers the flexibility to choose the best resilient solution at the lowest total cost of ownership. For example, this quarter, helped one of Europe's largest financial institutions enhance its resilience while consolidating multiple data centers. By deploying Commvault Hyperscale X, this customer significantly reduced its hardware costs, simplified its day to day operations, and enhance this overall cyber resilience posture. As customers' threats grow and become more sophisticated, we're supporting GDPR and DORA in The EU and Saukey and APRA in Australia. Our ability to support compliance is contributing to strong growth internationally.

Speaker 2

For example, in EMEA, we partnered with Accenture Italia to support a leading Italian banking group with DORA compliance. The same bank transitioned away from two legacy vendors and consolidated on Commvault to enhance its cyber resilience posture. And in APAC, a large global financial services company chose Commvault to protect its AWS workloads using an air gapped immutable copy of its data to support compliance requirements. We also offered this customer a more elegant solution at a lower total cost of ownership than the incumbent provider. Our success extended into highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.

Speaker 2

This was evident in Q4 when we landed one of America's largest financial institutions. We had a number of big wins with banks this quarter, and you'll hear more examples of that throughout my prepared remarks. These strong customer testimonials reflect current tailwinds in the industry and lead us to our second growth driver, our unique approach to continuous business, a state of always on business availability and resilience for the modern enterprise. With continuous business, traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions are no longer enough. Customers require a platform with the breadth and depth that can help them rapidly recover their entire business, data, applications, and infrastructure together.

Speaker 2

That's what Commvault's offerings uniquely provide. Let's look at a few examples, starting with Active Directory. Often called the backbone of enterprise ID, it's estimated that Active Directory and Enter ID manage authentication for more than 600,000,000 users worldwide, and controlled access to critical business systems, protecting everything from workstation logins to physical building access. If Active Directory goes offline, business operations can grant to halt. It's no surprise that bad actors make Active Directory a primary target in nine out of 10 cyber attacks.

Speaker 2

Enter Commvault. Commvault recently introduced Active Directory forest level recovery, automating rapid recovery of everything from users, groups, and permissions to domain controllers across the organization. What could take days to recover now takes a fraction of the time. In q four, Active Directory was one of the company's fastest growing SaaS offerings. A second example of how we're enabling continuous business is Cloud Rewind.

Speaker 2

After cyber attack, one of the most complex, costly, and time consuming steps in the recovery process is rebuilding cloud native applications that power and run their data. This can take weeks, a luxury our customers do not have. Combo Cloud Rewind enables customers to rapidly rebuild their applications in the infrastructure and configurations that power them, so they can get back to business. And as more organizations embrace AI, they need to be able to recover AI data at a moment's notice. This brings me to a third example of how we're enabling continuous business.

Speaker 2

Many companies store massive AI data repositories on Amazon s three. If that data is corrupted or lost, our Commvault Plume offerings like Backtrack can help customers rapidly recover these massive datasets with billions of objects fast. In fact, according to our research, Plumio's serverless orchestration engine can scale to hundreds of petabytes and restore data at 10 times the speed of other solutions. The need for this technology has never been greater. For example, Atlassian, the software company, chose Clumio to help protect dozens of petabytes of Amazon S3 data and billions of objects across numerous geographies.

Speaker 2

Qumu's massively scalable solution significantly reduced backup and restore times and helped cut costs by more than 50%. This showcases Qumu's enterprise grade data protection at cloud scale where traditional solutions simply can't compete. The three offerings I just discussed, Active Directory, Cloud Rewind, and Tumi Backtrack, are pivotal to enabling continuous business. And when it comes to addressing key customer pain points, they're even better together. This brings us to our third major growth driver for fiscal year 'twenty six, executing internally and with our partner ecosystem.

Speaker 2

We drove record levels of inflow, improved growth rates, and increased rep productivity while growing our sales force. Building on that momentum, in Q4, we saw record contributions from partners to our land business. I'll share just a few examples. Partnering with Hitachi and Pure, we displaced two incumbent providers to help a Fortune 500 global finance firm standardize its platform and enhance its cyber resilience with strict time to recovery SLAs. Our ability to secure the entire data estate at scale was key to this win.

Speaker 2

Next, with HPE, we enabled a large European bank to enhance its cyber resilience posture and supported the DORA compliance deadlines. And partnering with Kedro, we displaced the incumbent to help a large UK bank modernize its cloud footprint and support its DORA compliance. Our ability to protect most applications with a single solution, address and test security concerns with Commvault Cleanroom, and provide the fastest time to recovery with key competitive differentiators. We also doubled down on our relationships with leading hyperscalers, supporting our customers as they accelerate the move to the cloud. This fueled additional growth as our marketplace transactions grew nearly 50% quarter on quarter and over 250% year on year.

Speaker 2

Building on the momentum in fiscal year 'twenty five, we plan to continue investing in cloud and data security integrations across our partner ecosystem. In closing, as we head into fiscal year 'twenty six, we believe the opportunity before us is compelling. And as we grow and expand our portfolio with the higher growth adjacent markets like data security and cloud security, we are attracting new buyers and significantly increasing our total addressable market. We now estimate this opportunity to be approximately $24,000,000,000 While we continue to monitor the macro environment, our business remains strong, our team is executing, and we're winning new customers. We're confident in our outlook and excited about the future as the most innovative cyber resilience platform in the industry.

Speaker 2

I want to thank our entire team for their dedication and hard work. Our people are the driving force behind everything we do. And if the energy and enthusiasm I witnessed Phil's kickoff a few weeks ago is any indication, we are ready to deliver for our customers and partners again in fiscal year 'twenty six. Now, I'll turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jen Dorico, to discuss our results. Jen?

Speaker 3

Thanks, Sanjay. As Sanjay noted, Q4 was another excellent quarter, driven by strong performance across geographic regions, increased contributions from our new offerings, elevated new customer growth and healthy renewal and expansion activity within our installed base. I'm proud to say that our platform and our message are resonating with customers and our team is executing against a growing market opportunity. I want to thank all the Vaulters that contributed to the best fiscal year that Commvault has ever seen. Now I'll discuss our Q4 results and operating metrics, followed by a discussion of guidance for Q1 and fiscal twenty twenty six.

Speaker 3

Please note that all growth rates are compared on a year over year basis unless otherwise specified. Total ARR increased by 21% to $930,000,000 on a reported basis. For a like for like comparison of FX adjusted ARR to prior quarters, please refer to Page 27 of the Q4 earnings presentation. Subscription ARR grew 31% to $780,000,000 including a substantial 68% increase in SaaS ARR, totaling $281,000,000 Subscription ARR now constitutes 84% of total ARR compared to seventy seven percent one year ago. We consider subscription ARR to be the best indicator of the company's growth profile, as it adjusts for the lower growth of our perpetual license and customer support businesses.

Speaker 3

Now I'll discuss Q4 revenue trends. Total revenue increased 23% to $275,000,000 driven by a robust 45 increase in subscription revenue. The growth in subscription revenue was driven by momentum across our SaaS platform, healthy growth in our software land business and expansion with existing customers. Revenue from term software transactions over $100,000 increased by 38%, benefiting equally from an improvement in volume and average transaction size. This included more than a dozen transactions over $1,000,000 Many of these transactions carried multi year terms as customers view Commvault as the strategic partner of choice to help them address their evolving cyber resilience needs.

Speaker 3

This presents an exciting opportunity for us to grow and expand with them as their needs evolve. For example, we landed one of the world's largest consumer product companies that was using a costly patchwork of competitive offerings. Commvault centralized its numerous heterogeneous workloads, enhanced its data security and lowered its costs across multiple clouds, factories and data centers. Our growth this quarter wasn't limited to large deals. Q4 was also the best volume quarter of the year for term software transactions under $100,000 and we added 700 new subscription customers, surpassing 12,000 worldwide.

Speaker 3

Existing customer expansion remained healthy, with Q4 SaaS net dollar retention rate steady at 127%, driven by both upsell and cross sell. SaaS ARR saw notable growth from new products, particularly Active Directory, Clean Room and ThreatScan. For example, we secured a 7 figure multiyear renewal with an existing Commvault customer that recognize the value and innovation that we deliver. This Fortune 500 clean energy production company expanded existing workloads, including Air Gap Protect, VMs, M365 and Active Directory. In addition, to help mitigate the impact of cyber incidents and support continuous business operations, the company added numerous cyber offerings, including Risk Analysis, Threat Scan and Clean Room.

Speaker 3

This customer is an example of why we are winning in the market and how we plan to build on this momentum in FY 'twenty '6. '1 of our strategic priorities for FY 'twenty '6 is to drive increased multi product adoption of our SaaS offerings. Today, approximately 30% of SaaS customers utilize multiple offerings. As we have shared in the past, there is significant potential to drive this percentage higher over time by monetizing our cyber offerings like Active Directory, ThreatScan and Clean Room, as well as our enhanced AWS offerings like Clumio Backtrack. Today, approximately 30% of SaaS customers utilize multiple offerings.

Speaker 3

As we have shared in the past, there is significant potential to drive this percentage higher over time by monetizing our cyber offerings like Active Directory, ThreatScan and Cleanroom, as well as our enhanced AWS offerings like Clumio Backtrack. Now I'll discuss our consistent profitability and free cash flow, which demonstrates our commitment to a responsible growth philosophy. Fiscal Q4 gross margins were 83.1%, reflecting a strong mix of term software sales combined with a continued focus on driving optimization in our SaaS margins. Going forward, we continue to expect total gross margins to be in the low 80% range over time as SaaS becomes the larger mix of the overall business. Operating expenses of $168,000,000 represented 61% of total revenue compared to 62% in the prior year.

Speaker 3

Q4 operating expenses included previously disclosed growth driving investments and higher commission and bonuses on record sales results. Non GAAP EBIT grew 31% to $59,000,000 with margins up 130 basis points year over year to 21.5%. Non GAAP EBIT benefited from strong flow through of revenue outperformance, which was driven by the continued hyper growth of our SaaS platform and a record quarter for term software transactions. Now moving to some key balance sheet and cash flow metrics. We ended the quarter with no debt and $3.00 $2,000,000 in cash.

Speaker 3

Q4 free cash flow of $76,000,000 and full year free cash flow of $2.00 $4,000,000 came in at the high end of our guidance. The biggest drivers of free cash flow are deferred revenue from SaaS contracts and the strength of our term software business, which typically includes upfront payments on multiyear contracts. For the fiscal year ending 03/31/2025, we repurchased $165,000,000 of stock, representing 81% of free cash flow, again, exceeding our guidance to return at least 75%. Now I'll discuss our outlook for Q1 and fiscal year twenty twenty six. I'm extremely proud of what we accomplished in fiscal year twenty twenty five.

Speaker 3

The rate of innovation at Commvault is impressive and the breadth and depth of our platform is unmatched. As Sanjay said earlier, our innovations allow us to address new use cases, new buying personas and significantly expand our total addressable market, which we now estimate to be over $24,000,000,000 We're excited about this larger, higher growth market opportunity and confident in our team's ability to execute. At the same time, we're closely monitoring the macro environment and potential changes in demand trends. For fiscal Q1 twenty twenty six, we expect subscription revenue, which includes both the software portion of term based licenses and SaaS to be in the range of $166,000,000 to $170,000,000 This represents 35% year over year growth at the midpoint. We expect total revenue to be in the range of $266,000,000 to $270,000,000 with growth of 19% at the midpoint.

Speaker 3

At these revenue levels, we expect Q1 consolidated gross margins to be in the range of 81% to 82%. We expect Q1 non GAAP EBIT margins of approximately 21%. Our projected diluted share count for fiscal Q1 is approximately 45,000,000 shares. Now I'm happy to share our initial FY 'twenty six outlook. We expect fiscal year 'twenty six total ARR growth of 16% to 17% year over year.

Speaker 3

This will be driven by subscription ARR, which we expect to increase in the range of 22 to 23% year over year. Beginning in FY 'twenty six, we will report ARR on both a reported and an FX adjusted basis using rates as of 03/31/2025. For a historical comparison, please refer to page 27 of our Q4 earnings presentation, which includes FY 'twenty five ARR rebased using these same rates. From a full year fiscal 'twenty six revenue perspective, we expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $727,000,000 to $732,000,000 growing 24% at the midpoint with strong contribution from both term software licenses and SaaS. We expect total revenue of $1,130,000,000 to $1,140,000,000 an increase of 14% at the midpoint.

Speaker 3

Moving to our full year fiscal 'twenty six margin, EBIT and cash flow outlook. We expect gross margins to be 81% to 82%. This range reflects continued growth in our SaaS platform, which carries a different gross margin profile than software. We expect non GAAP EBIT margins to be approximately 21%. Non GAAP EBIT margins include our continued investments around additional growth driving initiatives.

Speaker 3

We are projecting full year free cash flow of $210,000,000 to $215,000,000 This guidance reflects our transition to a cash taxpayer following the full utilization of our tax carryforward credits in fiscal twenty twenty five. From a capital allocation standpoint, our three core priorities remain unchanged: strategic M and A, share repurchases and reinvestment in the business. As we shared last quarter, the mix across these pillars may shift based on the opportunities we see in the market. In closing, the investments we made in FY '20 '20 '5 have positioned us well to capture a significantly larger market opportunity in FY twenty twenty six and beyond. While we remain mindful of the broader macro environment, we're confident in our trajectory.

Speaker 3

Our initial FY twenty twenty six guidance shows we are on pace to exceed our $1,000,000,000 total ARR and $330,000,000 SaaS ARR targets ahead of schedule. To build on this momentum, we plan to continue to invest with focus and pace as we scale our leadership in cyber resilience. Now, I will turn it back to the operator to open the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To rejoin your question, simply press star one again. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. And your first question comes from the line of Eric Heath with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Operator

Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Hey, good morning, Sanjay, Jen. Just wanted to

Speaker 2

ask

Speaker 4

you just talk about what you're hearing talking to customers, how they're thinking about the macro at this point in the month of April, how they're thinking about cyber resilience, and if there's any changes to sales cycles at this point or close rates in the last few weeks. And then lastly, Jen, just how you're thinking about these factors when you're thinking about building the guidance for fiscal 'twenty six.

Speaker 5

Sure. Hey, Eric. So obviously we've been spending a lot of time looking and hearing and checking on what we should be assuming as part of our fiscal year 'twenty six plan. At this point, the best indicators are conversations with customers and partners. And everything we're hearing so far is that cyber resilience continues to be a priority, and we don't see anything dramatically different from our assumptions going into Q1.

Speaker 5

Now, again, it's what we know and what we're close to. Having said that, we do have some very clear outcomes from the COVID period when we had supply chain issues, and so we've done things like we don't sell hardware, so we don't have any direct dependency on hardware, but customers obviously do sometimes with their installing our software or we give them optionality with SaaS. So netted out, I'd say it's a wait and watch, but at this point, no significant change between Q4 and Q1. Jen, do you want to add anything?

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure. And so in terms of how we thought about guidance, the first thing I would just say to you is our philosophy is consistent with historical. And I think overall what you're hearing in our guidance is a balance between being prudent, but also understanding there's a true need for our cyber resilience products and our own internal execution. And so as Sanjay said, we have constant conversations with partners and suppliers, and at this point, I think it's a balance and we're feeling confident about the guidance that we've set out.

Speaker 4

That's great. And Jen, if I could just ask on the operating margin guidance, about flat year over year, again, for the second year. Understand the momentum in the business and the reason to invest, but just a little bit more clarity on how you're thinking about the growth versus margin trade off, where the investments are, and just maybe some of the I would have thought we'd see some expansion kind of rolling off the Clumio acquisition last year that had some headwinds. Thanks.

Speaker 3

So first of all, I would say we're really pleased with our FY '25 performance. We hit rule of 41 for the year, rule of 45 for the quarter. As we think about next year, right, all of the same things we've seen around the secular tailwinds, our own internal execution,

Speaker 6

the amount

Speaker 3

of buying decisions that continue in the market lead us to want to continue to invest behind that opportunity. And so we're balancing those two things. And so ultimately, I would say to you is we're continuing to invest behind the opportunity while also being thoughtful around our overall profitability.

Speaker 5

And you know, SaaS as a business is growing that has a different margin profile. So when all things considered, you know, we think it's a pretty good plan.

Speaker 2

Demi, we'll take the next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Yes. Thanks. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the solid fiscal year and results. A couple of questions, if I can, real quick. In terms of Clumio, I think last quarter you had alluded to that being roughly about a $24,000,000 contribution in this last quarter.

Speaker 6

I'm curious if you could maybe help us appreciate how much Clumio has provided this last quarter and kind of the momentum you're seeing there as you integrate that acquisition and really drive that business?

Speaker 3

So first, I'll tell you is we're really excited. We continue to be very excited about Clumio in terms of what it does in terms of expanding to additional customers and market segments. Going forward, we shared with you the Clumio business last quarter to give you complexion. Going forward, because we've integrated it fully into the platform, I won't be sharing specific guidance. What I can tell you is as we think about next year's guidance, there's about 100 bps in the number on total revenue.

Speaker 5

Aaron, Sanjay here. Just on the product, Plumio brings us some very unique capabilities with our ability to handle extremely large data sets on S3 and AWS. Our ability to literally backtrack to previous version in fraction of the time and even capability that nobody has in the business. This bodes very well for large data sets and AI type applications, data lakes. So we're really excited about it.

Speaker 5

We put a considerable amount of focus on it for the new fiscal year, And it's, you know, we think it's going to be a big differentiator. Of course, we're not calling out numbers specifically around doing it because it's part of our go to market and part of our overall offer.

Speaker 6

Yeah, fair enough. And then as a real quick follow-up, Jen, you talked about obviously the cross sell, upsell opportunity. I think the 30% number is consistent with what we saw, I think last quarter, maybe the last couple of quarters. I'm curious if you could help us appreciate the context of how much your SaaS portfolio has expanded. And maybe in that definition of like how do you define success?

Speaker 6

Like 30% goes to 50%? Or how are you thinking about that cross sell opportunity within that SaaS customer base as you look out through the course of this next year?

Speaker 3

Yes, it's a great question. And I would say in the first of we're really continue to be proud of the fact that our SaaS net dollar retention remains at 127%. As I've shared and consistent with prior quarters, that mix is largely two thirds upsell, one third cross sell. We continue to see the continued adoption of newer offerings as well as our cyber offerings, things like Aircraft Protect, Active Directory, Clean Room, Threat Scan, they made up 25 of our net new ARR this past quarter. And so while the mix is similar to prior quarters, I would say the number, the absolute number of multi product customers is materially up.

Speaker 3

And you heard my prepared remarks a couple of great examples of customers that are taking on more than one product. And so ultimately, I think we're really pleased You heard this be a strategic priority without giving any sort of guidance. I think if you look at other peers in the industry where we show over time two, three, four products, I mean, that's what we're looking to see over time. Yes.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Param Singh with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Yeah. Hi, and thank you for taking my question.

Speaker 8

Really wanted to get a sense of, you know, what are you seeing in the competitive landscape? How that's changed after, you know, the close of the acquisition of Veritas by Cohesity? And you also mentioned that some of the other vendors such as Rubrik tend to be more stronger in cybersecurity, how are you addressing that? Would love to understand that. Thank you.

Speaker 5

Sure. Our strategy has been about resilience. We've been on the journey of helping our customers be more resilient, which if you double click is giving them a strong ability to recover in the face of either a cyber attack or any other type of situation. We're very focused on that. And we choose our battles carefully.

Speaker 5

We are and we believe with the best, our technology with Commvault Cloud in a hybrid world is the broadest capability there is. So customers work with us and we shared a lot of new customers, large customers that have adopted the platform to make them more resilient. Now, the overall on premise market that some of the competitors you mentioned play in is flat to very low single digit. If you look at our growth, be it on revenue or ARR, it's healthy double digit, and that means we're taking share.

Speaker 8

Sanjay, if I may follow-up on that. You know, one of the earlier questions was about the investments you're making organically, right? So I wanted to understand what type of workloads or capabilities do you want to focus on in the next year to three years that you feel are largely untapped at this point.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so if

Speaker 5

you look at where we think that the way we've been sharing our platform, one is about anything to help customers with, it's not so much workload, but capabilities to help customers recover. So things like clean room, our ability to help them recover with Active Directory forest level, which is really good technology, right? It's very needed. If you look at what we're doing with Clumio and the Clumio capabilities, it's about scale and the ability to scale out hundreds of petabytes of data in minutes and hours versus what would take unpredictable amounts of time if customers need to roll back something. If you look at our Rewind technology that we acquired through Opranics, which allows you to sort of rebuild at the click of a button, and literally I mean, click of a button, entire cloud native applications, configurations, the infrastructure that's needed to support it, and the data, of course, we're changing the game.

Speaker 5

We're changing what protection means and what resilience means. Now with that, we're obviously enhancing emerging workloads, be there stuff that supports AI, be it things like vector databases, whether it's more cloud capabilities. So we continue to enhance the workloads, but really what we're really enhancing is our ability to make customers more resilient in the face of something that brings their business down.

Speaker 8

Great, and just one last one, if I could squeeze that in. Sanjay, want to really get your view on this whole idea that backup vendors could be the source of truth into LLMs and feed into it. Some of your competitors have talked about it, I want to get your sense, do you think that's realistic or is that something that Commvault might want to get into over the next year or so?

Speaker 5

We only tend to mention something when we have capability to support it. That's the truth. Directionally, I would say that we, as in Commvault, have been a very good source of the truth. And to do that, you have to be application aware. So even in historical on premise applications, which are tightly coupled and engineered, bringing back the application to the way it was when there was an error or a failure has always been where we shine.

Speaker 5

Now with AI apps, the providence of the applications and the componentry of that is very important. In fact, I would go as far as saying it's more important because of the way these apps are built and used. So I'm not getting ahead of myself, to say that we could have a very good role to play in something like that is fair.

Speaker 2

Thank you for sharing your insights Andre, appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with D. A. Davidson. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. On the ARR guide, could you just give us some parameters, I guess, around expected net new ARR in Q1 or just seasonality we should be in mind of for the year and Q3 Q2, Q3 were your strongest years last year? Just how should that low $150 ish million of net new ARR fall throughout the year?

Speaker 3

Yes, I think what you can expect to see is typical seasonality of what we saw in FY25. I think the baseline of 30,000,000 to $35,000,000 on a quarterly basis is still the right way to think about the business, especially given the strength that we saw in particular in Q3 this past quarter.

Speaker 9

Got it. And then I just want to drill down maybe, I know it was already asked about the guide and what it implies from a macro standpoint. Just maybe to be clear, you talked about record sales productivity and improvements year over year in Q4, etcetera. What does the guide imply from a sales productivity, close rate, etcetera, standpoint? Does it imply things are flat with last year or further improvements building on last year?

Speaker 3

Yes, Rudy, I would just go back to my comments around we're being prudent about the background about the macro, but also understanding we have a great opportunity in front of us. And so what I would say is we're not assuming massive gains in productivity, but we're quite confident in the durability of our model over the long term.

Speaker 9

Got it. Great. Thank you. And congrats again on the quarter.

Speaker 3

Thanks again, Rudy.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Speaker 10

Hey, guys. Appreciate the questions here. Can you just walk us through the growth on the international arena this year between EMEA and APAC? And more specifically, how you're thinking about durability of growth and really answering why won't some of the DORA tailwinds that you guys even talked about in your prepared remarks start to subsidize throughout the year, just given that implementation date back in January?

Speaker 3

Yeah, thanks. I would say to you that our overall from a guidance perspective, we're expecting balanced growth where we already thought. This past quarter, we saw balanced growth across our regions, right? And overall, EMEA actually had a really strong quarter without giving you too much detail on that. Ultimately, would say to you, as we think about next year, overall, we're incorporating what we know about the macro also been quite confident in our pipelines after we talk to customers and partners.

Speaker 5

Hey, Jim, also on the regulatory stuff, it's not a one and done. These things are constantly evolving depending on the size of the institution, depending on the branches, depending it's not one and done. So it's a process that goes over time.

Speaker 10

Got it. And Sanjay, you had talked about this, and actually you as well, Jen, driving greater stickiness. So how are we supposed to think about the packaging or perhaps bundling that you could see particularly on cloud or SaaS side versus having customers purchase individual SKUs moving forward?

Speaker 5

Yeah, that's a great question. Let me take the second half of the question first. There'll always be specific workloads that customers need to protect. So that will never go away. So I'm an Oracle shop, tomorrow I buy a company that has SAP, I need to incorporate SAP into the same single pane of glass, same policy.

Speaker 5

So that

Speaker 2

will continue. Where we have spent a

Speaker 5

lot of our time, effort, and in turn the way create IP is around resilience. Now resilience isn't a simple thing. Resilience means different things to different companies. And we're working with this concept of a minimum viable company where what does it take to come back to life in a minimum capacity? Let's say your data center gets messed up or you get cyber attack or whatever the cause is,

Speaker 2

what is your predictable way?

Speaker 5

What is your predictable resilience to come back to life in a minimum way? Now, some of that is process, some of that skills, some of that is technology. And we're working with partners to help customers think through this and build this out. So then when you look at products like Air Gap Protect and Clean Room and AD Force Level Recovery and other workloads that we back up, all of this falls into the construct of resilience. And customers tend to then think about, and will continue hopefully to think about, resilience as the outcome and what do we need to do to make that happen.

Speaker 5

And then you'll see that the stacking of what we're bringing to market makes a lot of sense and the packaging around that makes a lot of sense. Hence Jen's comments about being able to cross sell other abilities. And we distinguish between SaaS and software. So you could be a software customer and still avail of our SaaS capabilities,

Speaker 2

depending on what it is. Hopefully, added some color.

Speaker 5

Got it. Thanks. Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Jen, you mentioned earlier the on SaaS NRR that the mix between upsell and cross sell. Do we expect the mix to shift more to cross sell in FY twenty six given your pace of product innovation? And what I'm getting at is when I correct me if I'm wrong, when I think about your product set, in terms of like a layered cake approach, have what I call backing up cloud native workloads, M365, Salesforce VM, then you have more security specific modules, threat wise and the like.

Speaker 7

I don't know if AirDapRetech or Cleanum Recovery fits in that bucket or the cloud native bucket, but perhaps both. And then Sanjay also mentioned that the newer modules, that active directory, which you guys have emphasized a lot, Cloud Rewind, Clumio. Can you kind

Speaker 2

of give us a sense

Speaker 7

of where are you on? I don't know those are the right three buckets, but in terms of a layered take approach, should that drive more of a shift to cross sell them instead of upsell this year? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes, it's a great question. Well, I won't guide any specific mix. We do expect expansion in our multi product adoption over time because it is a strategic focus for us. And you're absolutely right as you think about the cyber products, Clean Room, Air Gap Protect, ThreatScan, Cloud Rewind, Clumio, all active directory, all important products as we think about the expansion and the overall cross sell motion.

Speaker 7

Okay, got it. Thanks. As a follow-up and I'll keep this one a little shorter. So similar question on term subscription side, how much of that strength is driven by improvement or perhaps stability in gross retention and renewal timing as compared to new term subscription licenses? And how much is the hybrid approach, the Commvault Cloud hybrid approach driving cross sell of Hyper Scale?

Speaker 7

Like, is it really the hybrid rather approach or is it just existing customers buying more, expanding more, but not necessarily hybrid?

Speaker 3

Yeah. So first I will start with you. The software term license portion this quarter was particularly strong, not only in land, but also in the renewal and expansion. And so to your point, we absolutely see that customers come to Pumble because we can not only protect their on premise workloads quite well, they can grow with us as they add more platforms in the cloud, etc. And so I don't know, Sanjay, if you want to add anything to that?

Speaker 5

The hybrid, what we bring to customers with our true hybrid multi cloud approach is what separates us from the pack. Our singular cloud platform, a combo cloud, you don't need to worry about having an Airgas copy if you're an on premise HyperScale customer. It just happens for you. You can choose the cloud you want, and we'll make the rest of it happen. Active Directory, it's completely transparent as the service runs.

Speaker 5

So we have been able to bridge that experience for our customers, regardless whether they dock with us with a Hyperscale X starting point

Speaker 2

or they come in from

Speaker 5

the cloud and then realize that, hey, it's easy enough for me to have a single pane of glass for my on premise workloads. So we have cases of both, and as our product capabilities that we've shared a little bit about today already evolved and have evolved, customers see this as the value proposition. And artificial, I've said this for years, artificial separation between a cloud or a SaaS based capability and an on premise capability is giving customers choices that they don't need to make or giving them things to do that they don't need. So we try and abstract that away give you a unified approach. We're very unique in that.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks so much.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Thanks for the question.

Operator

Seeing no further questions at this time, that does conclude our question and answer session. I will turn the call back over to Mike Melnick for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thanks for joining the call this morning. For those of you who are in San Francisco, we encourage you to stop by the North Hall RSA and visit our experience booth,

Speaker 2

5678.

Speaker 1

We made some exciting announcements around this event and reach out with

Speaker 2

any questions after that. Thanks so much.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

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Earnings Conference Call
Commvault Systems Q4 2025
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