Ashu Roy
Analyst · ROTH Capital. Please go ahead
Thank you, Jim. And good afternoon, everyone. We finished the year strong. And overall, we are very pleased with our progress this year. Both our top and bottom line results were ahead of our guidance and Street consensus. So our total revenue for the year grew 17% year-over-year to $92 million, and we generated good cash flow from operations for the year of over $8 million. That was a good way to end the fiscal year for us. Looking at the last quarter, let me share some notable new wins. The first one is a -- it's a top 10 airline in the world, and they selected eGain knowledge as their centralized platform to empower agents across their global contact centers. This is Phase 1. In the second phase, they'll use the same knowledge assets to drive better customer self-service. Interestingly, we are partnering with Deloitte to deliver this solution to the airline client. The next one is a leading U.S.-based provider of health and benefit plans. Their challenge was similar. They were struggling with knowledge silos, and it was showing up in long customer calls and repeat contacts. So again, our Knowledge Hub solution is what they went with. The third one is the Department of Taxation for a state government in the U.S. They selected eGain for knowledge as well as the omnichannel adviser desktop capabilities. And in this case, our FedRAMP authorization was a significant factor in their selection. The last one I want to bring out is one of the clients we won, which is a European-based and leading vehicle leasing companies, one of the biggest vehicle leasing companies in the world. They plan to deploy the eGain Knowledge Hub as a central platform across 29 countries in 19 different languages. So the power of centralization, where there is a need for multilingual and appropriate regulatory personalization. That's something which was very important for them. Those are really good wins, excited about those new plans and more. In terms of customer expansion in the quarter, one of the notable ones was, again, a federal agency who is an existing customer, who they have upgraded to the FedRAMP version of the eGain knowledge solution. Looking back at the fiscal year, I just want to observe that at the start of the year, we mentioned we were making a depth to scale our sales capacity, and that's something we continue to do through the year. And by the end of the year, so over the year, we ended up increasing our sales capacity by over 50%, and that steady investment increase also then ramped up improvement in our bookings and our pipeline build. So just a few metrics to share to show our progress over the whole year. These metrics are tricky for quarterly makeup because they can vary. But over the year, you can see the difference of something I'm sharing at this time. Our new logo-based ARR for fiscal '22 was up 45% year-over-year. In terms of pipeline, the RFP volume from prospects went up by over 50% year-over-year in fiscal '22 compared to fiscal '21. And then we ended the year with our RPO, or remaining performance obligation, at over $100 million, which is again up over 50% year-over-year. These are some relevant metrics. Of course, we look at these, and they tend to be a little volatile. But over the year, the progress is evident. Looking at the market, we continue to see the big opportunity in knowledge management and overall customer engagement powered by knowledge. Even with the economic slowdown, leaning into this market with the current level of sales investment we have built up to is a good path. We believe in a tough market, customers will continue to invest in agent experience and also in self-service automation. Further, our top two verticals, that is financial services and insurance being one and government now being the second biggest. Together, these two comprise over half of our business now. These two verticals, we believe, should not get too negatively impact in the market slowdown. Of course, there'll be some impact. So we do anticipate decision-making slowdown. That's natural. So we feel it's prudent for us to plan conservatively while maintaining current levels of sales investment. In fiscal '23, we intend to focus on driving sales productivity as we take a balanced view of growth and profits in the current plan. On the product front, a couple of interesting things in the quarter. We recently announced our eGain Knowledge Connector for Microsoft SharePoint. As you all know, probably, SharePoint is the leading content management tool out there now. And what we are seeing is increasingly, our clients want to modernize their knowledge management, but at the same time, they also want to federate all their legacy content from multiple SharePoint depositories. Just to give you an example, one of the clients we recently won, not in the last quarter, but a couple of quarters before that, and we are deploying and going live with the solution, they have over 60, 6-0, SharePoint repositories in their enterprise that they want to find a rate into. And yes, they'll have a small bit of curated knowledge and intelligence in the eGain knowledge platform, but still the vast majority of legacy content continues to sit in these SharePoint depositories. So we believe this is a good opportunity for us to layer on our modern knowledge hub alongside the SharePoint installed base in the end approach. And then yesterday, we announced our connector to IBM Watson. This leverages our Bring Your Own Bot or BYOB architecture. We are seeing that businesses have built many bots and continue to build their specialized bots using technologies like IBM Watson, and now they want to leverage that specialized bot investment in combination with a modern knowledge platform like ours to deliver better service. So these connectors make it easy for them to do so. Looking ahead, we see businesses continuing to invest in digital transformation. So demand for our solutions, I believe, is still strong and will get stronger while accommodating for the economic slowdown, which is a cycle. So a couple of things I want to highlight. One was, beginning of the year, I think we had mentioned this, a partner had published an annual research paper early 2022, calendar 2022, which brought out the technologies that are important for enterprises looking to improve customer service. And then number one technology recommendation at that time to these customer service leaders for the year was to invest in knowledge management tools. So now you fast forward that, and in July, so a couple of months ago, they published another Gartner estimate. We have talked about the hype cycle of different technologies, which they publish every year and refresh every year. And in that, the penetration of knowledge management technology for customer service, they're rated at still under 20%. Like I said it was anywhere between 5% and 20%, so definitely under 20%, and the fact that there's a big market ahead of us. At the same time, we assess that the value of this technology is high for enterprises. And their assessment on that -- in that document, which we completely agree with, is that the 3 reasons knowledge is seeing a resurgence of interest in the enterprise. The first two are more demand-oriented. The third one is more capabilities of technology and solutions. The first thing is just the proliferation of number of customer contact points. That's driving a lot of inconsistency and customer saturation in service. The second is the world of hybrid work and high levels of employee attrition. That's highlighting the need for better knowledge and guidance tools for these frontline agents. And then the third bit, which is the supply side, their assessment, and we are part of that solution, is that new knowledge and AI technologies are making it possible to deliver these better solutions and show the value of knowledge and guidance using AI and knowledge technologies. These solution stories and client successes at scale, that's creating a virtuous dynamic in the market. So with our leading solutions in the space and our client successes, we believe we are well positioned to capture market share with our scale and sales capacity. Before I hand over to Eric, a couple of comments. First, a plug for our annual customer conference. After a two-year gap, we are very excited to announce eGain Solve '22. This is our annual customer conference. We will be holding it on October 11 and 12 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. This time around, we have a record number of customer speakers, so we're very excited about it. We've been missing it for two years. And we'll also be announcing some exciting capabilities on the conference. In addition, several leading partners, including Deloitte, will be showcasing value-added solutions alongside our proposition. In conclusion, I just want to wrap up with a couple of summary thoughts. The first thing is the market need for our solutions continues to be strong and relevant, and we are more excited than ever. Second, given the economic environment, we are adopting a prudent stance, and so we're focusing on productivity of our sales team in fiscal '23 and not necessarily increasing -- further increasing our investments on the sales capacity side until we see the productivity showing up, which we expect. And then lastly, our product strategy overall remains unchanged as we continue to build out our platform and grow our partner ecosystem, connectors, APIs and developer support. So with that, I'll ask Eric Smit, our Chief Financial Officer, to add more color around our financial operations. Eric?