Shabtai Adlersberg
Analyst · Barclays
Thank you, Niran. I'm pleased to report successful execution against our strategic priorities in the quarter as we continue our journey to transform the company to a UCaaS and CCaaS cloud software and services company. We performed as expected on our key business operations related to VoIP networking and connectivity, and we're able to make substantial progress on our efforts to advance our main growth engine, the conversational AI business. In our key business area, third quarter Microsoft business grew 8% sequentially, highlighted by steady growth in North America and in the DACH region. Microsoft Teams business in the third quarter was up 9.2% sequentially. Our services business kept evolving in the third quarter. Third quarter services revenue grew 6.4% year-over-year and accounted for 54% of revenues, the highest on record for us. Fueling the strength of our services revenue stream is our primary growth engine were live managed services and conversational AI. Specifically, Live Teams business grew 21% year-over-year and accounted for 44% of total Microsoft business compared to just 37% a year ago. Also, our success in building live managed services and recurring revenue stream has translated to strong year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth of 40%, ending third quarter at $60 million annual recurring revenue, up from $48 million exiting 2023. This success is owed to the trust we have built throughout the years with partners and enterprise customers in the voice services space. There's no better proof than our long-term standing multiyear partnership with AT&T in North America, leveraging our expertise in providing secure voice connectivity to help their business customers onboard to Microsoft Teams. This fruitful partnership has contributed multimillion of annual recurring revenues over the last several years. And then, underscoring growth in our live business is the growth of backlog of the contracts signed. We ended third quarter '24 with a live and managed services backlog at $67 million as compared to just $27 million in the year ago quarter. This represents close to 150 year-over-year growth, which bodes well for a strong stream of revenues in coming years. As such, once we combine the growth in backlog of live services with the reported recognized revenue for the third quarter, we get a very positive result for the quarter and outlook going forward. On conversational AI, third quarter dollar value of contracts signed increased roughly 50% versus the year ago period. Speaking of conversational AI, strong operational momentum continues, driven by long-term tailwind of infusing AI into UC and CX workflows in customers' growing demand to drive ongoing productivity gains. Accordingly, we have seen significant pickup in pipeline activities across our entire conversational AI suite, including Voca CIC, our AI-first CX solution for Microsoft Teams, SaaS recording solutions such as Meeting Insights and interaction recording and Voice AI Connect. Just as we did in 2023, we are investing in 2024 in this new growth engine for us. This year, revenue will grow above 30%, 40% and will cross for the first time the $10 million level. As we are in an investment mode in this conversational AI business, we are incurring losses in that specific line, about $9 million in 2023 and around the same figure in 2024. Glad to say that the investments are already showing good potential and results and substantial growth of number of business voice projects and application for the UCaaS and CCaaS markets emerge. Overall, we delivered on our business priorities in the quarter with the strength in our live business reinforcing the healthy overall pipeline for our major practice such as Microsoft Business, CX and conversational AI. We believe that this bodes well for seeing improved top line growth performance as we head into 2025 and beyond. Let me discuss some of the notable wins in the quarter. The first one relates to a multinational bank that had both our connectivity gear over the last several years to deliver UC and CX to their over 30 country operations. Operating with a tight budget, and managing complex IT infrastructure, coupled with the need to meet service level expectations, the company preferred to move with us to shared subscription service model in lay of capital spending. We are one of the many RFP respondent issued 12 months ago. Among these were some of -- several of the world's largest global system integrators. I won't mention names. We won mainly due to our longstanding relationship and goodwill built with the customer as well as the trust in the quality of our solutions. The master contract signed with total contract value in the low seven figures range over multiple years for voice infrastructure management. This win demonstrates our success in transitioning from point product solution player to a trusted vendor of mission-critical services on the UCCX connectivity and leveraging that to successfully cross-sell our conversational AI portfolio. In another opportunity, we signed a 36-month contract with a multinational industrial equipment dealer, providing Live Pro managed gateway and device as a service in North America and U.K. as initial phase of a broader multi-core global Teams voice rollout. Third win, we signed a contract with the foreign government, putting Voca CIC to be in the pole position to be the de-facto Teams-based CCaaS platform as the legacy CX contracts of various government agencies came up for renewal. These examples are a testimonial to the success of our land and expand strategy, where we follow suit on our connectivity services business with our new growing portfolio of business voice application powered by Gen AI and AI capabilities. The potential for upselling the same account has big potential for further business growth. Before turning to detailed business line discussion, let's quickly shift to the third quarter profitability metrics. Our non-GAAP gross margin in the quarter came at 65.6%, within the 65% to 68% long-term range planned for the business and compared to last quarter levels of 65.8%. Third quarter non-GAAP OpEx was $32.5 million, in line with second quarter levels and higher than our initial budget planning for the year. Key factor in maintaining a larger budget relates to the initial success we enjoy in our evolving conversational AI business and the need to support larger investment and growing number of projects in this space. On top of our current conversational AI activity, which I'll cover in the following, we intend to announce two new solutions in coming weeks and months. Regarding headcount, we ended the second quarter with headcount of 935 full-time employees, down from 940 employees in the second quarter and compared to 938 employees in the third quarter of 2023. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA of $7.9 million or 13.1% margin compares to last quarter levels of $8.3 million or 13.8%. Again, all as a result of higher investment in growing our conversational AI business, which should present nice return on investment already in 2025. Net cash provided by operating activities was $7.9 million, which alludes to our healthy nature of the business. Now to our Microsoft business. Our third quarter Microsoft business grew 8% sequentially, highlighted by steady growth in North America and the DACH region. In terms of our strategic business line, Microsoft Teams business in the third quarter was up 9.2% sequentially, well in line with our planning. Recurring Teams Live business grew 21.4% year-over-year, accounting now to 45% of the Teams business compared to just 37% in the year ago quarter. Live managed services and recurring revenue stream has translated to strong year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth of 40%, ending third quarter at $60 million ARR, up from $48 million exiting 2023. At the same time, CapEx-based Teams business was down 12.7% in the quarter, accounting now for 56% of Teams business, again, as compared to over 63% in the year ago quarter. So, with the continued focus on Live Teams recurring business and declining CapEx Teams business, we expect to see a return to growth of double-digit Microsoft business in coming years. Importantly, our pipeline of creators opportunity remains robust, up 12% sequentially and 90% year-over-year, which bodes well for continued growth in this Microsoft ecosystem. With just over 20 million Teams Phone PSTN users, a fraction of over 320 million Teams monthly active users today, we believe there is long runway for Teams voice adoption in our Live business ahead of us. What could further spur adoption of Teams Phone in coming years is the recent incorporation of Microsoft Copilot and Gen AI features supporting Microsoft Teams Phone system and as a result, a rising demand for the live business. Another important trend in the UCaaS market and in the Microsoft Teams Phone space is the emerging search for a business voice application that may provide added value. These applications include, among others, contact center applications, recording applications, analytics application and CRM integration, all representing upsell opportunities for us. According to a study published by research firm, the demand for value-added services is bound to grow substantially in coming years, which will further support our land and expand strategy for the Microsoft Teams segment. Now moving to CX. Third quarter 2024 CX business grew 4.4%, helped by continued steady growth in North America and ongoing strength in Live CX. In terms of booking for Live CX, we grew above 100% from 2022 to 2023, and now we expect to grow another 30% to 40% in '24 compared to '23. The strong momentum in Live CX is driven by a secular trend of large enterprises embarking on their cloud migration journey. Given the complexity associated with migrating from legacy system and the mission-critical nature of the contact center infrastructure, these enterprises are increasingly turning to trust managed service provider like AudioCodes to support them in this endeavor. Historically, a large majority of our Live CX contract wins arose from direct sales contribution. We have been working diligently to develop this channel to help us better scale in Live CX. I'm glad to report that these efforts are paying off. For example, over the past several years, we have been working closely with a partner in the CALA region on multiple projects totaling over $1 million in contract signing. We're now in a process to add additional partners in the near future. Now to conversational AI. Conversational AI third quarter dollar value of contract signings increased roughly 50% versus the year ago period. The strong operational momentum is attributable to the long-term tailwind of infusing AI into UCCX workflows and customers' rising demand to drive ongoing productivity gains as enterprises increasingly look to do more with the finite amount of resources. As disclosed last quarter, we expect conversational AI to be our second major long-term growth pillar, meriting the disproportionate amount of R&D resources we are now investing into this business line. Let me walk you through some highlights of the individual business line with conversational AI portfolio. First, to Voca CIC, representing this -- the fruits of this R&D investment is Voca CIC, our AI-first TIM-certified contact center platform, leveraging our Teams voice dominance in the UC world, amidst the secular trend of UCCX convergence. Just to give you some idea about the growth we are experiencing, when looking at the combined revenue for the first three quarters in the year, we grew above 50% in 2024 compared to 2023, growing substantially in number of bookings. With regards to our activities in the Voca CIC activity in the third quarter, we won a contract with a government office in West Europe, replacing an on-prem leading legacy on-prem vendor. Voca CIC was selected as the go-to CCaaS solution for the entire group of the government offices of the country. Following the onboarding of University of Central Florida, the second largest university in the U.S., in 2023, we continue to show good momentum in the education North America space with six universities signed in total, out of which four signed during 2024 so far. So, we see some -- a very nice growing pipeline. We see growth of north of 130% year-over-year in the number of created opportunities, and we saw close to 200 growth in pipeline total dollar amount. With the release of the callback capability for that product, Voca CIC have reached full feature parity with virtually any fully fledged contact center solution that is centered around voice. We believe that with the feature parity around voice, combined with our capability in the conversational AI and omnichannel situation, that place us in the leading pack of the Team CCaaS space in the Microsoft environment. Moving on to Meeting Insights. We have now a mature and stable product. The product has been launched in March of this year. We have deployed the product in seven countries so far and now adding in the fourth quarter, another three countries. Sales operations are already active in Israel, U.S. and U.K., and we have launched Mia in Europe in September of this year with four countries: Germany, France, Italy and Netherlands. In October, we launched support for Zoom meetings in addition to the support for the Microsoft Teams meetings. We intend to make the application UCaaS agnostic and support all of the major UCaaS applications, including Cisco Webex and Google Meet Now. More than -- we have now in the -- running more than 100 proof-of-concepts about a third already paying customers and planning to onboard a few more accounts in fourth quarter '24. Just to give you some highlights in the third quarter, we grew -- in terms of number of meetings, we grew 50% sequentially. So that represents huge growth, mainly due to the fact that we're using generative AI in a major way to provide value to our customers. Same with active users, we have grown substantially in number of users, more than 40% among others. So, to wrap up my presentation, we have made good progress in the quarter on our long-term objective to transform into a cloud software and services company with increasing mix of recurring revenues through fostering growth of our two primary engines, our Live family of managed services and conversational AI. With the progress we are making in increasing our recurring revenues and with Live nearing half of Microsoft Teams bookings, we believe we have laid the foundation to support sustainable and healthy top line and margin expansion over the long-term. I'll turn the call now back to the operator. Thank you.