Earnings Labs

Open Text Corporation (OTEX)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, Jul 27, 2016

$22.56

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the OpenText Corporation Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2016 Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Greg Secord, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Greg Secord - Vice President-Investor Relations

Operator

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to today's call. With me today is OpenText's, CEO and CTO, Mark J. Barrenechea; our CFO, John Doolittle and our President, Steve Murphy. As with our previous calls, we'll read prepared remarks followed by a question-and-answer session. The call will last approximately an hour with a replay available shortly thereafter. I'd like to take a moment and direct investors to the Investor Relations section of our website, where we posted PowerPoints that will be referred to during the call, including our quarterly supplemental update on the financial results and an update to the strategy presentation from our May 12 Investor Day. I encourage all of our investors to download both presentations. As with previous quarters, we have updated a summary table, highlighting OpenText's historical trended financial metrics, both PowerPoints and our trended financial spreadsheet are downloadable from the front page of our IR section of our website. And with that, I'll proceed to the reading of our Safe Harbor statement. Please note that during the course of this conference call, we may make statements relating to the future performance of OpenText that contain forward-looking information. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment, actual results could differ materially from a conclusion, forecast or a projection in the forward-looking statements made today. Certain material factors and assumptions were applied in drawing any such conclusion while making a forecast or projection, as reflected in the forward looking information. Additional information about the material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from a conclusion, forecast, or projection in the forward-looking information and the material factors or assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion while making a forecast or projection as reflected in the forward-looking information, as well as…

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

Hey, thanks, John. So let me get into my intro. It's been seven months since I joined OpenText and I'm pleased to say that the organization is exactly what I'd expected. We're a business with a world-class product offering and a high integrity group of folks. We're passionate about making our customers extremely successful. I was brought in to focus on driving efficient operations and to help grow our revenue, while improving margin and cash flow. There is opportunity of balanced cost discipline with driving sustainable organic growth initiatives. My mission hasn't changed. I'm pleased with our progress. Let me talk a little bit about Q4 and our fiscal year overview. I'd like to take a quick look at the quarter performance. We had a strong Q4 for our customer support and cloud businesses. MCV is showing improvement and we see growth in the cloud in both North America and Europe, where large deals are becoming more prevalent. We've achieved stability in the field with key leaders in place across the board. This includes senior leaders in place for professional services, customer support, license sales and cloud. We have a structure and a leadership team that is stable and scaling well. At a time when the software industry is changing rapidly and we are acquisitive, this stability is of great value. Let me share some quick stats for the quarter. We had 10 on-premise license deals greater than $1 million. The geographic split of total revenue was Americas 58%, EMEA 33% and Asia Pac 9%. On-premise customer successes in the quarter include Nevada State Controller's Office, Schwan Cosmetics, Kamehameha Schools, eMeter Corporation, APA Group, State of Iowa, KUKA Manufacturing. In terms of industry breakdown, financial, services, technology, and public sector industries saw the most demand. Let me give you some…

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. The first question today is from Paul Steep of Scotia Capital. Please go ahead.

Paul Steep - Scotia Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Great, thanks. Mark, maybe you could talk just a little bit about analytics and what you've seen over the past year and where you're at now in terms of the number of deals that have analytics into them and the uptake within the base. And maybe that is a prerequisite to Magellan or not a prerequisite. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Sure. Let me just start with – we're obviously very pleased with our Actuate acquisition. And it met its business plan for fiscal 2016. It onboarded extremely well and we met our financial goals for the year. One of its key differentiators is its embeddability. We won some fantastic business throughout the year. And you also saw how quickly we were able to integrate Actuate into Release 16, which we presented at Enterprise World in November and presented it again just a couple of weeks ago in Nashville. So embeddability is really key for us. And look, it's going to be a key differentiator and one of the catalysts for Release 16. On the basis of that, the next version of Actuate will keep all its embeddability, its reporting, its visualization. But by opening it up to Apache Spark and open algorithms as well as bringing together all our other engines into this platform, we think it will be another key differentiator for us.

Paul Steep - Scotia Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Great, that helps. One final one to clarify is Cloud 16. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you've seen in terms of the base and migration and the willingness of clients to shift over there? Thanks. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah, I would maybe say two things and look for comments from Steve as well. I'd say, firstly, we have great new capability. In the U.S., our new Healthcare Direct protocol, we're seeing an uptick in interest because of that new protocol. MCV – excuse me, Managed Services is just so pivotal for us. We have our VAN. We have our on-demand messaging network. These are transactional networks. They're important. But on top of that is vertical apps like ANX, Healthcare Direct, but Managed Services. And by the end of this quarter, we'll have over 1,100 customers again who have outsourced their environments to OpenText. And 1,100 enterprise customers, marquee customers, that's getting some real critical mass to it. Steve, I don't know if there's anything you'd like to add to that.

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

I would just add that at this point we have hundreds of customers that are either live or going live on Release 16.

Paul Steep - Scotia Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks, guys. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Thanks, Paul. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah, thanks, Paul.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Steven Li of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Steven Li - Raymond James Ltd.

Analyst

Thank you. And just a couple of questions for me. John, I thought with the exit from Luxembourg, your adjusted tax rate was going up. How are you bringing it back down and are there any cash outflow implications as you consolidate your IP into Canada? John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yeah, thanks, Steven. There are nominal cash outflows as we consolidate, so it's a very small amount of cash outflow. And as I mentioned in my remarks, we're bringing the IP back into Canada at fair market value with a tax base that's equal to fair market value. And that's essentially the way we're going to lower our tax rate to 15%.

Steven Li - Raymond James Ltd.

Analyst

Okay. And Mark, maybe a couple of questions for you on the macro. In Europe, was there any impact from Brexit on deal closures at the end of the quarter? And do you expect any impact in Q1? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah. Steve, thanks for the question. The answer is very simple. We had little to no effect on Brexit. It's less than 5% of our revenues. UK is less than 5% of our revenues. We moved our operations, our EMEA ops out of the UK into Germany a few years ago and we just haven't seen any effect. And we think in a lot of ways, it's either going to be neutral to us. It actually might be a slight positive because people need to buy more software for governance. So the net effect to us are going to be neutral to maybe slightly positive. Now, a more global statement as we look into 2017 is FX volatility is going to remain out there, for sure. You do have the Brexit. For us, we see it again to be neutral to maybe a slight benefit. Who knows where the U.S. election is going to go. You continue to have some Russian risk, I think, and some risk around terrorism, kind of all in in global risk. It remains a volatile world. And we've taken our strategy with M&A to be able to grow our business both from M&A as well as organic growth. And I think we're in a pretty good position if global risk increases.

Steven Li - Raymond James Ltd.

Analyst

Great. And the last one for me, Mark. The license revenues was quite weak in the Americas for Q4. Was there a specific region and any changes you've made? Thanks. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Steve, any comments on that?

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

Yeah, so we have made some leadership changes. And we've got a new head of license sales for North America. (43:48) is very happy with the skills he brings and his background as far as different places he's sold. I think that we will see – based on my observation of John (43:58) and his team, we will see steady improvement in license sales in North America.

Steven Li - Raymond James Ltd.

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

You bet.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Paul Treiber of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Paul Treiber - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

Thanks very much. I was just hoping, could you comment and perhaps clarify some of the growth or the growth rates of MCV in 2016? I think you mentioned it was 6%. It does look like it was below the target that you gave out last year. Are those two numbers the right numbers to compare like from the apples-to-apples point of view? And then how should we think about the variance between the two? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: So we ended the year at $211 million for MCV. And John, what's the growth rate for the year? I can't find it quickly year-over-year. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: 5%. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah, 5%. So $211 million is the right number. And we're expecting much stronger growth in fiscal 2017. And you are correct, we put out a larger target for us in MCV. And it was our first year in doing that. And there were some uncertainty in that. And yes, you're correct, we missed the number though we still grew year-over-year. And I'd expect it to grow faster as we get into 2017. At the same time, our hybrid strategy is we're allowing customers to kind of choose where they want to place the workload. So we're sort of agnostic as to what revenue line a customer workload falls on. And our goal is to, as we increase those recurring revenues, to expand our margin as we did. So yes, we came in under our aspirations for 2016 on MCV. The number was $211 million and I'd expect it to grow faster in 2017.

Paul Treiber - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

Thank you for explaining that. How should we think about your bullishness for 2017? What are the signs that you're seeing that lead you to be bullish? And then maybe could you just elaborate on the reasons for the shortfall in 2016. Is it product-related timing? Anything would be helpful there. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah. So I go back to we're going to see approximately $300 million of revenues onboarded from acquisitions. And when we look at our product roadmap of Release 16, the default product fully shipping, EP1 opening up new ecosystem partners and Magellan in the second half of the year; the product lineup keeps getting stronger. And we expect to continue to make acquisitions in 2017. And when I look at the shortfall in Q4, really what's top of mind is a few pennies though they're important in Q4, which was primarily the EPS missed related to professional services, which I believe we have under control for Q1.

Paul Treiber - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. Just lastly, just looking at the target model for 2017, the margin model; you mentioned that acquisitions would take time to ramp up to your margin model. How do we think about organic investments in 2017? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Well, I'll start on the product side and Stephen can talk about the field side. The organic investments again are – we are accelerating our capabilities through an enhancement pack series as, quite candidly, our competitors falter a bit in the marketplace. So EP1 is a very important release for us to support sales force, to support success factors, open up government opportunities for new regulations. And EP2 will support Magellan. So that's a pretty good investment for us as we accelerate those enhancement packs, accelerate those capabilities as our competitors falter a bit in the market. Steve, do you want to talk about some of the field investments for a minute?

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

Yeah. So we discuss organic growth in the low single digits. And we have staffed up with account executives, salespeople and the solution consultants, field engineers that support them to the point where as of now, early in the year, we are fully staffed to meet what we've guided to, which is organic growth in the low single digits. And that's been a concerted and steady effort over the last six or seven months as far as bringing in high-quality salespeople and making sure that we retain our high-quality salespeople. We've also invested in top executive talent. And at this point, all of our senior leadership positions in the field are filled with experienced people who know what they're doing.

Paul Treiber - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

All right, thank you. I'll pass the line. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Sure.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Stephanie Price of CIBC World Markets. Please go ahead.

Stephanie Price - CIBC World Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Good evening. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Hi, Stephanie. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Hi, Stephanie.

Stephanie Price - CIBC World Markets, Inc.

Analyst

So you touched on the competitive landscape in an earlier question. Could you just walk through what you're seeing there and where OpenText is gaining traction? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah, sure thing. So look, there was a critical mass moment in ERP when the market really considered just a handful of providers because they could – this is software and service. You're here to automate. And a handful of ERP providers was able to automate campaign to cash. And the market rallied around that because they could fully automate a seminal process. Engagement to insight is that process for EIM. And I think as we bring onboard Recommind, as we bring onboard the HP Inc. assets and add Magellan. There I can't see another company in the marketplace that can provide this flow. I ultimately believe that our ultimate competition is IBM. From IBM Watson – from Watson to FileNet, Sterling Commerce, their Tivoli for business process management. So when we look at the point providers, from the usual suspects of Documentum, Kofax, SharePoint, Box, Adobe, Pegasystems, they're starting to continue to get more and more niched features, while we keep expanding capabilities to engagement insights. The HP Inc., assets really strengthen that engagement piece. That whole box of discovery we filled force with Digest (50:59) and now we've really solidified with Recommind and then insight on our next version with Magellan.

Stephanie Price - CIBC World Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, thanks. And then, on Magellan, can you give us an idea of the scope of the offering and what features it's going to focus on? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah. I would point to two large improvements while maintaining our strength around visualization reporting and embeddability. New capability, one, is Apache Spark, opening up the platform to bring in the Spark engine that will allow for ETL, data integration, a recommendation engine, as well as real-time streaming and thousands of open algorithms. IBM Watson is closed. You don't own the IP when you create an algorithm and you're using proprietary tools to do all the AI, machine learning and algorithmic work. By bringing in Spark, it's all going to be open and we'll be able to leverage thousands of algorithms. I'd say the second big capability is we're going to bring together all our existing engines on to the platform. Voice, natural language processing, image processing, and making those engines integrated and available under the actuate engines.

Stephanie Price - CIBC World Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thank you very much. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Thanks, Stephanie. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Thanks, Stephanie.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Eyal Ofir of Dundee Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions. First one is, just can you guys provide us with the contribution or revenue contribution from the acquired assets in the quarter? John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: As I said in my script, I'm not going to give you the exact number. It was nominal both from a revenue point of view and an earnings point of view.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. And in terms of thinking about the integration, Mark, maybe talk a bit more on the strategic side. Obviously, the HP assets is a more of a carve-out. So how do you look at integrating those assets? Are they more complicated to integrate? And how has the first tranche gone so far? Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Yeah. So let me go through them one by one. So we have the CEM assets from HP Inc., such as TeamSite, MediaManager, Optimost and a few others. And quite candidly, we like asset deals. It's the ability for us to, to some degree, pick the assets and liabilities that we're interested in. And it's usually the hardest of the work for an acquirer and it's the hardest work because you can unlock the most value. So we actually like these difficult situations because we can unlock the most value. So TeamSite, in particular, is a market leader for engagement, website development, electronic form, the beginning of the whole process. So it's integrated extremely well into the business. And this will be a strong quarter for them. We have not yet closed on the CCM Assets from HP and it's probably the larger and the stronger of the two. But we expect to close on it very, very soon. And once we're – probably at our next Investor Conference or next call, we'll give an update on the CCM Assets. ANXe, strong recurring revenues. They were a partner of ours before the acquisition. And as Steve commented in his script, an incredibly strong team, strong recurring revenues. And then, I think as we noted when we originally announced it, they were at a relatively high EBITDA already. So they're onboarded to our model right away. And so we're quite pleased with that. And Recommind is going to turn out to be just incredibly strategic asset for us. It's a box we haven't been strong in. And it's a very timely acquisition as well. I noted two recent wins. It's now closed. And we'll get it on our operating model. And they were a privately-held business. We'll get them on to our operating model in two quarters to three quarters. But strategically, it's incredible value.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. Great. And before I pass the line, just one more question. On Release 16, have you noticed any difference in the sales cycle? Obviously, it's a potentially bigger ticket sale item and clients could also look at other vertical applications alongside it so...

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

Yeah, hey. Steve Murphy here. So what we have noticed is that – and I can reflect on a couple of the sales cycles. I was very, very involved with Q4. The deal size increases, and there's a degree of integration across all the different modules. For instance, when we sell ECM, Release 16 has a degree of integration with business process management in something like case management, entity modeling that expands the deal size. And I think that is probably the single biggest difference. And someone asked earlier about the competitive landscape. That's where we're different unlike a Documentum, or another company, this is a narrow focus. We've gotten engagement to insight. And with Release 16, a customer might be in the sales cycle for content management and finally they want to buy something else, because of the degree to which Release 16 integrates all of the capabilities we have.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. So that could also mean that the sales cycle is a bit longer, then, right (56:50). Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: No, I have not observed that to be the case.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. Okay. That's great. And then, just finally, on the PS, I think – I don't know if it was John or Mark made the comment. I think the margin profile was a bit lower this quarter. And you said you're already on track for fiscal Q1. I just wanted to confirm that that is the case that PS margins are back up.

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

Yeah. We said that the plan is on track. And a quarter ago, we guided for two quarters to three quarters to get back to our target margin range of 20% and the plan is on track. So we're a quarter into that. Probably another quarter or two quarters to get to our target margin range. Any additional comments? John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: No, I agree with that, Steve.

Eyal Ofir - Dundee Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay, great. Thank you. I'll pass the line.

Stephen Murphy - President

Analyst

You bet.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Blair Abernethy of Industrial Alliance Securities. Please go ahead.

Blair H. Abernethy - Industrial Alliance Securities

Analyst

Yeah. Thank you. Following on the last question, if we can talk a little bit about the sales and marketing margins. If I look at your fiscal 2016 to 2017 model, you've raised the range – the target model range in 2017 versus what you were going in at 2016. What's changing there? John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: You're talking about the sales and marketing in costs, Blair?

Blair H. Abernethy - Industrial Alliance Securities

Analyst

Yes. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yeah. I think Steve hit the nail on the head when he said that he's built up the sales team over the last couple of quarters. And whereas we entered 2016 with a smaller sales force, we built up the sales force heading into fiscal 2017 and it's reflected in the sales and marketing margin.

Blair H. Abernethy - Industrial Alliance Securities

Analyst

Okay. Okay. And just on the Recommind acquisition, where will you be allocating revenue? What revenue line should we expect to be impacted by the Recommind? And if you can do the same for the – even though the second tranche of the HP assets hasn't closed, just wondering what's going into – what I would term as on-premise versus what's going into cloud? John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yes. So, on Recommind it will be cloud and on the HP deals, I think it will be reflective of our... Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: It's sort of a normal mix. Yeah, it's sort of a normal distribution. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yeah. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: And Recommind will be majorly cloud. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yeah.

Blair H. Abernethy - Industrial Alliance Securities

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thanks, guys. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Yeah. Thanks, Blair.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the time allocated for questions on today's call. I would like to turn it back over to Mr. Barrenechea for closing remarks. Mark J. Barrenechea - Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer: Very good. Thank you and thank you for joining us today. Just a summary of our key messages. Fiscal 2017 will be a year led by M&A growth. We expect approximately $300 million in revenue growth from these acquisitions. All revenue lines should grow double-digit as well as double-digit adjusted operating income growth and as well as the benefits of our recentralization of IP back into Canada. With that, I'd like to thank you for your time and I couldn't be more excited about fiscal 2017. Thank you for the call. John Marshall Doolittle - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.