Shabtai Adlersberg
Analyst · Jefferies. Samad
Thank you, Niran. Our first quarter 2024 results were highlighted by healthy revenue growth of 1.5% year-over-year, and executing on our strategic plan to evolve the company to become a leader in voice services in the UCaaS and CCaaS markets. We continued the transition of our business to a recurring revenue model and transformation from a network equipment vendor to software and services company. On the other hand, while growing nicely in strategic business lines, such as Microsoft Teams, the customer experience market and conversational AI applications, we saw a continued decline in our legacy gateway networking business in the first quarter '24, similar to trends seen in 2023. As reported by other communication equipment vendors, we believe that the high interest rate environment continues to have an impact on muted business spending, especially when it relates to hydro products. These two factors transition to a recurring business model and larger and earlier than anticipated decline in legacy gateway business of above 25% year-over-year, led to sequential quarterly revenue decline of 5.5%, about 2.5% lower than anticipated earlier in the year. Coming back to discuss the positive developments in the quarter. We enjoyed a very substantial positive cash flow from operations, $15 million, and strength in our live managed services operation in which annual recurring revenue grew 45% in the quarter. We have also enjoyed increased services backlog. These developments in the quarter provides us with a conviction about our growth prospects and puts us solidly on a track to successfully transform efforts to focus on software and services in our markets. In terms of key growth areas, our first quarter, Microsoft and Teams business grew 8% and 9.6%, respectively, year-over-year. Customer Experience business grew 15% year-over-year, and conversational AI bookings grew around 50% year-over-year. Another sign of continued strength in core areas where we focus, is the market increase in our pipeline or created opportunities. For example, within Microsoft ecosystem, which makes up close to 60% of our business, our pipeline reached an all-time record, up over 30% year-over-year and over 20% sequentially. We believe the secular trend of unified communication and customer experience convergence is cementing our already strong competitive moat in UC Voice and driving additional opportunities in customer experience within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. We are now the leading Microsoft Teams phone partner to lead a "Complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center combined offering." A lot of you already know that we are the #1 Microsoft phone partner, enabling a significant share of the current $20 million plus Teams phone, PSTN. What makes it less clear -- I'm sorry. What may be less clear is that Voca CIC, our Teams-based Contact Center as a Service platform is now recognized to be best-in-class. Having recently been awarded the best Microsoft Teams Contact Center solution by CX today based on majority votes of customer experience industry experts. Our unique Teams-based UCCX offering is increasingly getting more market awareness as evidenced by the buzz we receive about our complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center offering at Enterprise Connect in March 2024, one of the largest UCCX industry trade show events. Regarding the weakness in top line in the quarter and why we believe it is short-term in nature, I'd like to know the following. Ongoing software spending due to macro uncertainty and continued elevated interest rates, likely code enterprises and service providers to underspend in the context of annual budget in the early part of the year. The software spending impacted mainly legacy and hardware portions of our business, where sales efficacy products such as gateways declined above 25% year-over-year. We believe that this is a similar phenomenon to what we saw in 2023, in which our first quarter 2023 gateway business was slow out of the gate with stronger spending to come over the course of the year as customers look to put unallocated annual budget to work. As discussed, growth in strategic -- major business such as Microsoft, customer experience, and conversational AI continue to be healthy. We have lived our growth in software and services, the conversational AI-related solution, we grew again above 50% year-over-year, should fully offset declines in legacy pieces of the business starting in 2025. I should point out that 2024 is the year in which we are continuing strong growth in our live miles for Microsoft Teams, which grew around 45% year-over-year in the quarter. In addition, with our new Voca CIC solution, enabling us to be the first in the industry to offer a complete Microsoft Teams calling and contact center combined offering, we're looking to proactively cross-sell our subscription-based Voca CIC Teams certified CCaaS to our already significant Microsoft Teams installed base of customers. The other factor contributing to muted growth at this stage is the shift in our revenue model, which trends increasingly towards recurring revenue in layoff historical CapEx model. This obviously impacts our near-term revenue growth and create headwinds. I should mention though that this is -- that this shift is clearly accretive to our long-term top line growth. Shifting gears to services, services revenue overall accounted for 52.5% of revenues, and grew 2% year-over-year on top of strong services revenue generation in the year ago period. Importantly, our professional services bookings remained strong and up 24% year-over-year, which potential reacceleration of services growth over the balance of the year. What has fueled our ongoing momentum in services is headlined by our live subscription business, which ended the first quarter at $53 million annual recurring revenue, putting us on track to achieve our guidance for the year of $64 million to $70 million exiting 2024. Another positive development on the live services front is the emergence of new live CX services for the past 2, 3 cores. This new area of activity for us in the CX market seems to represent growing potential to the continued shift of enterprises to CCaaS in the CX industry. Other positive developments in the quarter were continued strength in our SBC product line, which grew 15% year-over-year, and where we kept our top leading position with more than 25% market share in enterprise space. Most notably, growth came mainly from increasing our SBC managed services, which should further cement our strength in this market. And then we saw very nice progress in the conversation AI business. Live bookings grew above 50%. And basically, we see that growth in the future. Reference profitability metrics. Our first quarter 2024 non-GAAP EPS was $0.17, which was below our internal budget, primarily on lower revenues. Our non-GAAP gross margin in the quarter was -- came at 65.2% and lower than the 65% to 68% long-term range, and compared to 67.6% in the fourth quarter of '23 and 62.1% in first quarter of '23. The sequential margin decline is primarily attributable to less favorable product mix. First quarter non-GAAP OpEx was $32.9 million, in line with our planning and expectations. Net cash provided by operating activities was $15 million. We ended the quarter with headcount of 959 employees, up from 950 employees in the fourth quarter, and compares to 978 employees in the first quarter '23. We expect our headcount figures to come down from current levels. So, our second phase, of course, reduction initiative takes effect in second and third quarter '24. Now, to budget streaming. Let me discuss steps we have already initiated and are taking as part of our long-term commitment to drive significant margin expansion and operating leverage. In the first quarter of '24, operating expenses were in line with the original budget for the year, anticipating now further industry muted business spending in 2024 and continued transition in our revenue model from CapEx into a recurring business model. We took budget cut steps to adjust our operational expenses to lower forecast -- lower forecast of revenues in 2024. We have recently initiated the second phase of the cost reduction measures that we previously communicated a few quarters ago. This current phase, CapEx headcount regeneration of more than 6%, primarily related to R&D functions dedicated to legacy areas such as gateways and multi-service business routers. Once fully implemented, which is expected to occur by mid-third quarter 2024, this program is expected to yield $1.5 million of quarterly run rate savings or $6 million annually. This action does not impact R&D spending on core strategic areas of our business such as Microsoft Teams, CX, and conversational AI, which continue to be robust. In fact, while reducing position in legacy-related R&D, we kept hiring and growing our R&D, product management, marketing, and sales resources in our live and conversational AI operations. On the guidance front, as Niran suggested, in view of the continued decline in our legacy gateway revenue and market outline -- outlook, I'm sorry, for the rest of 2024 in our market segments, we are updating our 2024 guidance as earlier stated by Niran. We believe that the continued shift to software and services, coupled with cost-cutting measures we took already in first quarter '24 should allow us to continue to expand our margins and grow earnings by about 15% compared to 2023. The top line outlook assumes continued success in our UCaaS, CCaaS, and conversational AI operations, in line with the growth that we have demonstrated already throughout the whole 2023 and during the first quarter of 2024. In terms of our key business line, I'll touch a few areas. Microsoft, as discussed previously, Microsoft business increased 8% year-over-year in the first quarter. Microsoft Teams business grew higher, reaching 9.6% growth year-over-year. CCaaS for business continued to decline close to 20% to a rather very low level of about 1 million in core. As such, solutions for Microsoft Teams consist now 97% of Microsoft quarterly revenue. Exit first quarter '24, live for Teams annual recurring revenues reached a level of $53 million, in line with our plans. We are thus confident that we are on track to achieve our standard goal of achieving live annual recurring revenue of 64 million to 70 million for the whole year. Live Managed Services for Teams represent now nearly 45% of Microsoft Teams business compared to just 25% in the year ago quarter. And thus, we believe that the impact of the shift to recurring revenue model should ease in coming quarters. We have also enjoyed growth in total contract value of live services, which grew above 45% year-over-year. From a geo perspective, EMEA bookings registered modest growth for the first time in multiple course, while North America experienced steady growth. Given the robust growth in our pipeline or greater opportunities, we remain optimistic about the long-term growth potential for our Microsoft business. In addition to the multiyear opportunity of Teams fund connectivity, we can see clear sense of growing potential for a new source of revenue based on voice-related business application. Among this, they include components such as Voca CIC as a contact center solution for the Teams environment, SmartTAP 360 is a compliance recording solution for the Teams environment, and Meeting Insights as a central hub solution for capturing and sharing meeting information across the organization. Moving to CX and conversational AI. First quarter contact center business grew 15% year-over-year, led by North America and the Asia Pacific regions. Conversational AI, as I've mentioned before, conversational AI bookings grew over 50% year-over-year. Voice services for enterprise CCaaS deployments continue to be the center of our activity. With the integration of our live platform into these opportunities, we see a steady rise of revenues associated with our Live CX activity. We now see strength in the CX CAI on all fronts, emanating from sales of our solution in support of enterprise customers and leading vendors of customer experience platform and cross-sell for our own AI first local contact center platform to the Teams phone installed base. Staying on the topic of Voca CIC, over the past 12 months, we have significantly set up our product development resources and investment into the Teams contact center solution, highlighted by a recent addition of the omnichannel capabilities. We are thrilled that the industry analysts in markets alike are starting to notice, as evidenced by us having recently been awarded by CX today, the best Microsoft Teams Contact Center Solution based on the evaluation of 16 top industry experts. While still a small portion, still a small percentage of our overall business, we expect Voca CIC to be a major growth catalyst growth pillar for CX and overall long-term future, arising from both direct revenue contribution and pull-through of the rest of the conversation AI business lines, such as SmartTAP compliance recording and consumerization. Now, let's quickly go through highlights of other conversational AI business segments. First, on Meeting Insights. Just to remind us all, Meeting Insights of forms is an enterprise-grade Software-as-a-Service solution that enables our organization to capture, analyze and share business meeting information across the company. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and conversational AI technologies for recording from scribing, indexing and analysis, making it easy to search and retrieve information from past meetings. With Meeting Insights, users can quickly find and review key points and decisions from previous meetings or improving collaboration and decision-making across the organization. In the first quarter of 2024, we have achieved a key development milestone where the solution was upgraded to become a cloud-based true SaaS solution, providing multi-tenant service to enterprises. Road map for the solution in 2024 includes, among others, additions of automation capabilities, more languages, European languages, enhanced mobile operation and expanding the function of Meeting Insights to more UCaaS solutions. As for sales, we have seen nice growth in new accounts in the U.K. and U.S. adopting the tool for their ongoing duly operations. On SmartTAP, in second quarter 2024, we plan to launch SmartTAP as a SaaS solution for enterprises, a panel that will expand our go-to-market opportunities, enabling service providers and reserves to offer their own branded recording services or by other codes. This new platform shares the same infrastructure as Meeting Insights, and we have plans to unify the services in 2024, given growing synergies between these two business lines. To wrap up our discussion, relying on the nice progress we see in our strategic clients around Microsoft Teams, CX, and conversational AI. And despite the slower than expected start through the year due to legacy decline, we had strong conviction about our long-term business fundamentals and have made significant progress in our transformation to a software and services company with strong profitability. This optimism is supported by record pipeline of credit opportunities in the first quarter of 2024, particularly in the Microsoft contact center environments. Growing momentum of Voca CIC is a major long-term growth driver for the company and ongoing strong annual recurring revenue growth with the live managed services for the company. And with that, I've concluded my section of the call, and I'd like to move the call to the operator.