Shabtai Adlersberg
Analyst · Needham
Thank you, Niran. I'm pleased to report second consecutive quarter of top line growth in second quarter and execution of our strategic objectives. Another quarter of making progress towards our long-term transformation to an AI-driven hybrid cloud software and services company. Our second quarter 2025 performance demonstrates our success in navigating a dynamic market environment. While continuing to build on strength in our connectivity franchise, which accounts for above 90% of our revenues, we continue to drive traction in our portfolio of fast growth AI-powered business applications and voice services. Second quarter '25 is the second quarter in a row where we saw stabilization in the connectivity space as compared to the decline we have witnessed during the years 2023 and 2024. Our enterprise UC and CX revenue again accounted for above 90% of revenues in the quarter, highlighted by ongoing strength in Microsoft Teams business, which grew 6.5% year-over-year. Key development in the quarter is the official certification as a Cisco WebEx Cloud Connect enablement provider. With this milestone, we now enable connectivity services of all major UC platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Webex. More on the significance of this development later. In the CX business, we made progress as planned and our healthy pipeline continues to support a positive outlook for the second half and full year 2025. On the conversational AI practice, we are seeing substantial robust demand, which supports our plan for 40% to 50% growth outlook for the segment in 2025. Noteworthy is the success we experienced with the newly launched Meeting Insights On-Prem service, targeting regulated industries and enterprises seeking the utmost level of privacy and security. Overall, services accounted for 53% of revenues and grew 1.9% year-over-year. First half 2025 services invoicing were in line with our budget plans. Based on services bookings and inherent visibility in this line item, we expect second half 2025 services revenue growth to further improve. Within services, our live managed services year-over-year growth remained robust, up 25% year-over-year to end the quarter at $70 million annual recurring revenues. Backlog of live managed services exit second quarter 2025 was $73 million compared to $67 million at the end of the year ago quarter. As previously -- as previewed last quarter, we officially launched our next-generation live platform, a major milestone in our managed services strategy. With the recent addition of Cisco WebEx Calling Certification, the platform now fully integrates our comprehensive set of unified communication and customer success capability. What sets this platform apart is its ability to empower our channel partners, service providers and system integrators to seamlessly layer GenAI-powered business voice application and third-party solution on top of their core connectivity offering. Live platform is a cloud-native, fully automated platform for launching and scaling voice services, especially around Microsoft Teams and Operator Connect deployments. The platform supports also Zoom Phone and Cisco WebEx Calling. It enables zero-touch automation, session border control as a service, routing, billing, reporting and provisioning workflows, all integrated into one system to reduce deployment time and operational complexity. Feedback from partners across all sizes has been overwhelming positive. Since showcasing the platform, we have seen a measurable uptick in our pipeline and a noticeable acceleration in sales cycles, including with several Tier 1 service providers. Amidst the new product momentum, we continue to enhance the value proposition and stickiness of our platform with new innovations. As an example, we are developing a new AI-powered real-time analytics system that offers strategic insights into the CX Business Manager. While it may take time for these Live platform wins to be material revenue contributors, we are super excited about its potential to drive stronger footprint in the market, recurring revenue growth and improve our overall revenue mix. A great example is AT&T North America, one of our earliest live platform partners, which uses our solution to onboard end customers to Microsoft Teams. Our secure and scalable solution has provided AT&T North America with significant operational flexibility and resulted in multimillion dollar of annual recurring revenue over the past few years. On the conversational AI front, we have experienced increased interest all around our activity. Progress has been made in most of the leading product categories such as the Voca Customer Interaction Center for the Microsoft Teams environment, Meeting Insights serving as an enterprise meeting intelligence platform and the newly developed and introduced AI agent technology for voice bots. As a case in point, we recently introduced Meeting Insights On-Prem, extending the Gen AI-enabled meeting productivity and intelligence benefits to regulated and security-sensitive environments and industries. This industry-first solution has already garnered important customer interest as evidenced by a robust pipeline. We expect the number of proof-of-concept opportunities to further scale over the rest of the year. Two weeks ago, we have introduced some Meeting Insights On-Prem internationally in the APAC region. The audience feedback was better than our elevated expectation. Common takeaways from these meetings is that the service is exactly what security-sensitive management and customers such as government banks are looking for, unleashing the power of Gen AI without compromising on security. This viewpoint mirrors customer feedback in Israel, our initial market launched several months ago. Before turning to detailed business line discussion, let's quickly shift to second quarter profitability metrics. On the top line, we performed as planned with revenue growing 1.3% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP gross margin, as Niran mentioned, for the quarter was 64.5%, slightly below our long-term target range of 65% to 68% and compares to 65.8% in the year ago quarter. Our second quarter non-GAAP gross margin absorbed roughly about $1 million of tariff-related cost headwinds. We continue to expect close to $4 million of tariff-related costs burden for the full year. Assuming tariff rates for the various countries settle shortly, which we hope will happen in the summer, we will be working to reduce the heat in the first quarter of 2025. Additionally, we incurred several hundred of those headwinds from a weaker U.S. dollar against the euro in the second quarter. Second quarter non-GAAP operating expenses rose to $35 million, up from $32.5 million in the year ago period. The higher expenses are primarily attributable to higher investments in marketing and sales resources as part of our conversational AI investment. In terms of headcount, we ended the quarter with 963 employees, roughly flat from the prior quarter and compared to 940 in the year ago period. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $5.2 million. We continue to generate healthy amount of cash flow with net cash from operating activity at $7.7 million for the quarter. This robust cash flow generation provides strong backing to our ability to keep investing and expanding our business moving forward. As to the guidance, as mentioned in our previous quarter's discussion, we will postpone issuing a financial outlook until we have better and clear understanding of the resolution regarding tariff rates. The key takeaways from these financial results at the bottom is that our business remains solid and is on an upward trajectory. It is several years now that we experienced nice growth in our highly profitable connectivity segment, particularly in the UCaaS and CX market. In parallel, we are successfully expanding our promising voice-centric AI and Gen AI-powered business applications. As to the general market, despite the presumably recent volatile business landscape stemming from the tariff challenges, we have not observed any shift in customer purchasing behavior. The pipeline for opportunities remains strong as we approach the latter part of 2025. Now to the Microsoft business. Market surveys and partner inputs continue to support the growth story for Teams Phone where adoption in the market continues well at over 20% annual growth. Teams Phone usage is also strongly supported by Microsoft's efforts to drive Copilot as a central capable chatbot for Teams Phone meetings and calls. Key to continued Teams phone growth is facilitating connectivity for large enterprises and network. In this regard, with Microsoft Operator Connect getting more mature and growing in addition to the already successful direct route connectivity, this provides further stimulus to Teams phone growth. All this points to a strong market today and for coming years and further supports business expansion and dominance in this connectivity area. Our Microsoft business grew 6.5% year-over-year, fueled by ongoing strength for our connectivity business coupled with increasing attach rate of Voca CIC, our Team Certified CCaaS and our conversational AI business application services. Key to our success is our Live Managed services with annual recurring revenues reaching $70 million exit second quarter, representing approximately 25% growth year-over-year. Booking of new large multimillion contract value opportunities increased about 6% in second quarter, and new opportunities total created value grew more than 10% in the quarter. Noteworthy to our growth story is the latest certification of Live platform for Microsoft Operator Connect for partners in EMEA and soon to be certified in the U.S. To put some color on the progress made in the second quarter, here are some examples of wins in the quarter. We enjoyed much success in the U.S. higher education vertical in which we have secured several multimillion key wins and contracts in the sector. One example is our win with a large state university valued at more than $2 million total contract value, of which about $800,000 came from a 36-month contract of LivePro Teams Managed Services and related professional services. Second example is the large follow-on order we recently closed amounting to over $1.5 million total contract value from a private university in the Midwest. We had won the initial deal in second half 2024 as part of its initial phase of UCCX modernization. And given the successful completion of the first phase, the university decided to standardize on AudioCodes services for all of its campuses. Our success can be explained by having the industry most complete portfolio and best-in-class UCCX capability, strong track record of delivering customer satisfaction and referenceable list of marquee clients. We have built much credibility in the sector, and we are now getting inbound leads from other prospective university customers looking to modernize their UCCX. Further on the success in the UCaaS area, I'll talk about 2 other entities. First, AT&T. AT&T is our largest partner channel for Microsoft Teams in the U.S. Second quarter was very successful. Invoicing and booking grew above 10% in the quarter sequentially with new logos turning into the quarter. While traditional managed services business continued to grow, second quarter was a pleasant surprise in terms of rising number of PSTN shutdown projects in various U.S. states and working on PoPs replacements. This trend should support further continued revenue growth in coming years. And then to our new activity with Cisco in the UCaaS market, we announced our certifications for WebEx Connect in June 2025. During the second quarter, we have seen initial pipeline built with service providers in EMEA with opportunities created representing potential of new multimillion dollars. We intend to increase marketing and sales efforts in the WebEx calling space in coming years. Turning to CX. We have made progress as planned in the quarter, and our healthy pipeline continues to support positive outlook for the second half of the full year. We've been growing -- We have seen growing customer and partner interest in Live CX, which is an important part of the Live platform and targets application areas such as: one, the migration of contact centers to cloud and providing SIP connectivity for CCaaS; second, click-to-call application as a replacement for traditional 1800 service for contact centers; and third, Voice AI Connect and LiveHub providing connectivity for cognitive services. In second quarter, we signed a Tier 1 system integrator for Live CX and Voice AI Connect that will service connectivity backbone in support of new customers. We have another Tier 1 prospects in the pipeline. Signing up more Tier 1 system integrators is an important initiative as it effectively scales our addressable market. These partners target midsized CX customers that are historically not targeted by our direct sales team. Now to conversational AI or CAI. Let's talk about highlights of what happened in the second quarter. As contemplated earlier in the year, we saw strong demand and opportunity wins, supporting our 40% to 50% segment growth outlook for '25. We have experienced increased activity across all of our business lines. Progress has been made in our leading product categories such as the Voca CIC for the Microsoft Teams environment. Then we saw success in the meeting intelligence platform space with 2 leading solutions. One, the first one, Meeting Insight, an enterprise SaaS application, which targets enterprise-wide deployments and has demonstrated growth of above 200% year-over-year in terms of number of accounts and proof of concepts and use of GenAI for meeting summarization and inference. Second, we recently introduced Meeting Insight On-Prem or Mia OP, extending the GenAI-enabled meeting productivity and intelligence benefits to regulated industries and security-sensitive environments. This industry-first solution provides AI-enabled meeting summarization and intelligence and is completely detached from the cloud and/or the Internet. Now let's talk about Voca CIC. In the second quarter, Voca CIC continued its strong momentum with booking growing by 150% compared to the same period last year. We also established a robust pipeline of opportunities for the latter part of the year. Voca CIC benefits from the increased attach rate through its involvement in Teams Phone migration project that AudioCodes has, especially within the higher education sector, as noted earlier. Revenue growth in second quarter '25 remains strong, bringing us closer to our goal of surpassing 50% year-over-year growth. Highlighting our achievements, CX Today publication recently recognized us with the Best Customer Experience Deployment award for the successful contact center migration at the University of Central Florida, one of the largest public universities in the United States. This project includes -- included merging over 40 help desks in a single centralized contact center serving 70,000 students. Furthermore, we secured second place in the Best CX Partnership category for our work with AT&T on the Voca CIC partnership, which delivered a market-oriented integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution for Microsoft Teams. Moving on to Meeting Insights. Meeting Insights cloud Edition maintained strong momentum this quarter with continued growth in new customer acquisition and key metrics such as the number of meetings and unique active users reaching record levels. On the product development side, customer feedback has been positive regarding the launch of our mobile app, which brings our generative AI transcription and summary features to in-person meetings anywhere, not only in company facilities. Additionally, we have developed custom Gen AI-based templates and prompts and are now working on workflow solutions designed for specific industries. Moving on to Mia OP. Turning now to the solution that's going to be deployed on-premise since its launch a few months ago in the Israeli market, we have observed strong interest from customers across multiple sectors, including defense, government, health care and media. Meeting Insights On-Prem uses Gen AI on a local service in order to assist our organization in regulated security-sensitive industries by automatically producing secure, accurate and efficient meeting recaps without the use of cloud or Internet services. Meeting Insights appears to be a key beneficiary of the cloud repatriation trend. With rapid adoption of Generative AI, customers now recognize that certain workloads are better suited for on-premise environments due to the factors such as high cloud costs, latency issues and security demands. Launched earlier this year, we have already close to 10 customers in production and more than 20 proof-of-concept projects, all arising from word-of-mouth recommendations. The solution has already been demonstrated lately outside of Israel and has garnered much interest. In the past week, Mia OP has been reviewed and received positive feedback from leading industry analysts who work to expand market reach and awareness to more markets, including the U.S. in coming months. So to wrap up my presentation, in second quarter '25, we continue to make solid progress in our long-term transformation on a hybrid cloud and voice services business application company. We delivered against our strategic objective in that, one, we had second consecutive quarter of top line growth. We made the necessary R&D and sales and marketing investment, particularly in our conversational AI activities that have fueled our robust pipeline of opportunities in the second half of the year. And third, we executed well to our playbook of leveraging our strong connectivity installed base in driving successful cross-sell of value-added services. We are operating from a position of strength, supported by a fortress balance sheet, a dominant connectivity franchise and a growing conversational AI segment that enhance enterprise intelligence and productivity. We believe these factors position us well to navigate the potential into following years. And with that, I've completed my presentation. I'd like to hand over the session to our host. Thank you.