Ashu Roy
Analyst · Needham and Company
Thank you, Charles and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today. So looking at our results in summary, total revenue for the third quarter increased 17% year-over-year to $18 million. For the first nine months total revenue increased 26% year-over-year to $51.4 million. Cloud subscription revenue for the quarter was up 35% over the prior year and up 47% for the first nine months compared to the prior year period. Total gross bookings for the quarter was $11.7 million and for the first nine months, the total gross bookings were $37.1 million. And we also reiterated our guidance for fiscal 2014. Now let’s talk more about the quarter. Notable new logos in the quarter included a global telco, a top 10 electronics manufacturer, a large U.S-based BPO and a Global 100 multinational bank. However, I want to point out that several significant deals we expected to close in the third quarter slipped into the fourth. In April, we ended up closing four of those slipped deals; each deal was roughly in the $0.5 million booking range. And two of those deals were through partners, two were direct. So for us accurately forecasting these deals continues to be an area of focus, as we have mentioned before many of these deals have two partners were we are a component of larger project. While we have improved our ability to control and forecast these deals, but we still need to do a better job. Now let’s look at partnership and channels, it’s exciting to see significant deal closure in this front. First with Cisco and its partners, we closed our first seven figure deal through Cisco in the quarter. We also closed two other sizeable fixed bigger deals through Cisco, one was a new win and the other was an expansion, plus we continue to see a steady stream of entry level views with all in the large Global 1000 accounts through Cisco. This customer acquisition engine in our target market is beginning to work. As our Cisco channel pipeline grows and matures, we are confident that we’ll be able to better manage the pipeline and forecast these larger deals. We also see competitively that the Cisco Plus eGain proposition is working very well against players like i3 in the multi-channel contracts to market, in fact one of the larger deals we closed in April with Cisco was a significant IT knock off in the U.S. Lastly on the Cisco front, we are very excited that starting this week, our eGain cloud solution is now available through the Cisco SolutionsPlus channel. You have heard us say this before, both the Cisco and eGain fees have been jumping at this base for sometime. But now we believe that this cloud proposition available through the Cisco channel will benefit us significantly in 2015. Turning to some of the non-Cisco partners particularly BPO partners, last quarter we talked briefly about these BPO partnerships and how the BPO market and specifically within that the customer management market is changing from a pure cost base model to more value based and transformational proposition. According to Gartner, the adoption rate and growth momentum experienced in non-voice multi-channel services, such as web chat, email, SMS, self-service and social PRM services are set to tilt the balance in favor of non-voice based services by 2016. So there is an inflexion point in this market and we think we have the ability and the access to these partners where we can start to enable them to deliver those value-based propositions that they need to go out with beyond pure voice. In the third quarter, we closed a large six figure cloud-based deal through IBM BPO which is now we named Concentrix with the global electronics manufacturer the one that I have mentioned earlier. Overall, we see increasing interest and pipeline activities within our partner network and we are continuing to invest to maximize this channel. Now let’s turn to our sales organization, we have made some key additions and changes. So we promoted A J Berkeley to run our North America sales team. AJ has been running our Cisco channel partnership for the last couple of years. He is an accomplished sales and marketing executive who started his career with HP and eventually led billion dollar Plus business at HP. After that he is on worldwide sales force and was the CEO of start-ups and a publicly traded company in the networking space. At eGain he has done a tremendous job developing our Cisco go-to-market and partnership. And so we are very excited that he is now taking on this U.S. sales leadership role and focus on both the direct as well as the partner enabled opportunities. To replace AJ in his current role, we have added talent, Vickie McGovern a contact center industry veteran from Nike and prior to that at Cisco and Avaya has joined us to replace AJ in his role. She brings a wealth of experience in contacts at Cisco and its partner ecosystems. So we’re very excited about her joining on the Board as well. And finally, we had last quarter talk about the fact that we had promoted Andrew McDonald to run EMEA sales. He is settling it quite nicely and building his team with experienced sales professionals and management folks from the contact center and BPO markets. Overall, I’m feeling quite good about all these changes and I feel that this team now has the – both the ability and the ammunition to go out and develop our sales pipeline in a way that we can better forecast and grow our top-line. Moving on to the product side, with our recent product release which was winter 2014 something that we are now doing every three months these product releases, with the recent update we have expanded our API capabilities significantly, particularly in the area of knowledge management. So that our partners and customers can build unique solutions on top of our platform. One example of such a customer who has done incredibly [indiscernible] is LexisNexis, they are one of our customers who have built not just a strong multi-channel customer engagement capability on top of eGain, but also developed new product shareholder about how LexisNexis is leveraging the eGain platform. And that will be an exciting discussion. On top of that, we are focusing on lot of our product investment to make our platform more manageable and serviceable for large scale deployments, particularly through partners as we are seeing more and more partner interest and we are enabling more of these partners to implement and support our platform, it’s critical that we make sure that our product is easy to manage and build on and support for these partners. So that is an area of investment for us and we expect to see more of improvements and innovation coming out in that area in the near future. If you look at the landscape and step back from our product to look at where we are in the market, we see strong demand for the two areas that we have been focused on for quite sometime, which is the multi-channel area which is now being called the omni-channel area, essentially all the digital channels in addition to voice, as well as knowledge. So, these two have been – the two big product pillars for us. What we are seeing is emerging and interestingly quite unique set of demands on the analytic side where we find clients looking for end-to-end customer journey analytics, so that they can better understand where the risk of attrition is, where the opportunities for upsell and cross-sell are, and how to improve conversion and how to increase customer loyalty as well as customer ease through these journeys. And eGain is in a unique position to have both accesses to a tremendous amount of those channel data, as well as the knowledge that underpins those interaction. So we are adding to our focus on the analytic side as you all probably aware of, we introduced our integrated analytic capability last year and we have continued to improve that to the point where are increasingly closing the gap with the niche analytic vendors in the market. And now we believe that there is an opportunity for us to leverage our Cisco partnership and go out to extend the analytic data sources, we include the voice channel, not just the multi-channel, digital channel that we have had in the past. So that’s an area that we believe is going to present new opportunities not just the ability to collaborate through these channels, not just the fact that the knowledge underpinning those interactions is powerful, consistent and easy. But also the analytics on top of these to make sure that there is a close loop of improvement in terms of the engagement of clients through that multi-channel journey. To conclude, we are excited about the markets and within that the strength of our platform, especially as we continue to improve our reach in the market through direct and partner investments. And we are very excited about the changes we have made on the sales team side and we believe that this will help us better address our short-term challenges. And the three areas that we are focused on in this sales refinement effort and the expansion effort is to improve our forecasting, even as we are looking at partner led deals more and more. To make sure that we are continuing to invest and expand in our strategic client, so that the expansion with that really becomes the big price and it is not over looked with our customers. And finally, to enable our partners better and better not just through training, but also through product improvements. So given the three areas of focus, we feel that we have put in a good team with strengthened leadership and we look forward to sharing with you the update as we see that over the next few quarters. So with that, let me turn over to Eric Smit, our Chief Financial Officer for more financial outlook.