Rackspace Technology, Inc. (RXT) Q4 2025 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Rackspace Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sagar Hebbar, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Rackspace Technologies Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Sagar Hebbar, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Gajen Kandiah, our Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Marino, our Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, certain comments we make on this call will be forward-looking. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ. A discussion of these risks and uncertainties is included in our SEC filings. Rackspace Technology assumes no obligation to update the information presented on the call, except as required by law. Our presentation includes certain non-GAAP financial measures and adjustments to these measures, which we believe provide useful information to our investors. In accordance with SEC rules, we have provided a reconciliation of these measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures in the earnings press release and presentation, both of which are available on our Investor Relations website. I will now turn the call over to Gajen for an update on the business.

Thank you, Sagar. I want to start by framing clearly where we are going as a company and why. Since I joined 5 months ago, we have sharpened our strategy in response to a clear shift in the market. Organizations now expect AI to deliver returns on their investment. As a result, they are moving beyond isolated AI experiments to operating AI at scale inside core enterprise systems. AI is infusing every workload and as it becomes embedded in customer data, financial systems and regulated processes, where it runs starts to matter. Whether across edge, core, private cloud, public cloud or sovereign environments, those choices directly impact performance, cost and compliance. Managing those environments as one coordinated system is critical, especially in regulated industries where lapses can cause service disruption, regulatory exposure and escalating costs. The market is also entering what many are calling a private cloud renaissance. As AI moves into data-sensitive and regulated workloads, enterprises are recognizing that not all of it belongs in a pure public cloud model. Demand for governed, private and hybrid architectures with greater control over performance, cost and data residency is accelerating. Put simply, Rackspace is the infrastructure and operations backbone for enterprise AI, the layer that makes AI governable, scalable and real inside the environments that matter most. These are the environments Rackspace knows inside out. For 25 years, we have operated the compute, security and operations layer across private cloud, public cloud and edge in regulated industries where governance, sovereignty and uptime are nonnegotiable. Executing on this requires the right leadership. Since joining, I have made changes to our executive team, bringing in leaders with deep operational and delivery expertise. This was intentional. The opportunity in front of us is not primarily a strategy challenge. It is an execution challenge. I'm confident we now have the team to deliver it. But as AI increasingly operates inside live workflows, the opportunity extends beyond infrastructure. Enterprises do not want to stitch together hyperscalers, global system integrators, AI vendors and platform providers. That model is fragmented and complex with responsibility spread across too many parties. What they want is a platform engineering partner, one that deploys engineers directly into the environment, works on the platforms where AI actually runs and stays accountable from the initial use case definition all the way through to production operations on governed infrastructure, not just uptime and outcomes. Our partnerships are central to this model, and they reflect a deliberate shift in how we think about delivery. Rather than building a traditional services organization, we are building a platform engineering capability. In practice, that means we put our engineers directly inside the customer environment, getting AI into production alongside them, and then we run it for them day-to-day. Our forward-deployed engineers work directly inside customer environments on platforms like Palantir's Foundry and AIP, helping enterprises shape their AI road map, prioritize highest value use cases and then deploy and run those workloads on governed infrastructure. As a strategic partner to Palantir, that includes data readiness, hosting and ongoing managed operations. We have 30 Palantir-trained platform engineers today and plan to scale to over 250 in the next 12 months. The early pipeline activity reinforces the model. We have a strong and rapidly growing joint pipeline of Palantir-related opportunities, initial AIP boot camps in progress and a growing number of data migration opportunities in flight. And we are excited about what that means for our partnership and for the customers we serve together. Looking ahead to 2026, we see AI emerging as an important growth vector, not as a stand-alone product and not as a traditional services practice. As mentioned earlier, we are building a platform engineering model, forward-deployed engineers fluent in the platforms where enterprise AI actually runs, helping customers move from complexity to outcomes. At the center of that model is our private cloud infrastructure, the governed sovereign foundation purpose-built for regulated data-sensitive workloads. Our public cloud capabilities extend that reach across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, giving customers a consistent operating model wherever their workloads run. Together, they form the platform on which our ecosystem is built. The ecosystem is constructed through a curated set of anchor partnerships. VMware powers the control plane, unifying compute, storage, networking and security with native AI workload support and sovereign data residency controls built in. Rubrik anchors the cyber resilience layer, enabling rapid threat detection, data protection and workload recovery through Rackspace Cyber Recovery Cloud, nonnegotiable in the regulated environments we serve. Palantir brings the data and AI platform layer where use cases are defined, prioritized and deployed in production by our forward-deployed engineers. These are our anchor partners today, and we will add to this ecosystem deliberately as the modern AI stack continues to evolve. We meet our customers where they are. Through a modular approach, customers can leverage their existing investments and adopt what they need without ripping and replacing what is already working. This creates a self-reinforcing model. A stronger ecosystem drives deeper engagement, deeper engagement drives incremental infrastructure demand across both private and public cloud, and reliable operations build the trust that extends relationships over time. Rackspace is the infrastructure and operations backbone for enterprise AI, and we are building the ecosystem around that foundation so our customers can focus on what matters most, outcomes. The foundation is already shaping our financial trajectory. Our 2026 outlook reflects the inflection point taking hold. We expect private cloud revenue to grow 6% at the midpoint year-over-year, the first sustained growth in many years, anchored by large multiyear enterprise engagements. For public cloud, we expect revenue decline to approximately 6% year-over-year at the midpoint, primarily due to the planned transition of a large government contract as we exit lower-margin work. Excluding the contract, public cloud services revenue will grow in the mid- to high teens. This growth reflects continued expansion in high-margin managed offerings even as we proactively reduce exposure to lower-margin infrastructure resale engagements. As we pivot towards larger multiyear enterprise engagements and layer in scaling AI services, quarterly revenue timing will increasingly be influenced by migration milestones and deployment schedules. As a result, beginning in 2026, we will move to an annual guidance framework. We believe emphasizing full year growth, margin expansion and execution provides a clear measure of progress than quarter-to-quarter variability driven by implementation timing. We will continue to provide quarterly color on key drivers, including segment trends, margin trajectory and major ramps such as health care deployment moving into Q2 to ensure investors maintain full visibility into the underlying momentum. Now turning over to our fourth quarter and full year results. We exceeded guidance across most metrics for the quarter. At a segment level, however, private cloud revenue was below our guided range due to a recently signed health care contract ramping more slowly than initially expected. Note, this was offset by outperformance in public cloud across both infrastructure and services. Operating profit for the company remained strong at $41 million and adjusted EBITDA came in at $81 million. For the full year, we delivered stable performance, improved bookings quality and continued progress towards a more platform-led durable growth profile. I'm pleased with our overall execution in fiscal 2025, highlighted by continued revenue stabilization in private cloud and growth in public cloud services. With that, let me turn to segment performance, beginning with private cloud. Private cloud continues to serve as a foundational profit engine for Rackspace. In the fourth quarter, revenue came in at $241 million, below our guided range due to a newly closed health care deal ramping more slowly than initially expected. The deal is fully executed and is expected to begin ramping in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting additional client governance and oversight given its size and complexity. For the full year, private cloud revenue totaled $990 million, down 6% year-over-year compared to prior years of double-digit decline. Early pipeline activity remains encouraging with double-digit opportunities currently in flight and initial use cases typically representing 7-figure engagements. Importantly, each use case serves as a tip of the spear. Our platform engineers work with customers to define the right starting point, scoped, high value and achievable, and from there, each deployment drives incremental infrastructure consumption across private, public or hybrid environments. The engineering relationship and the infrastructure relationship grow together. During the quarter, we closed several high-quality private cloud deals that reinforce our strength in regulated data-intensive environments such as financial services and health care. One notable engagement in Q4 was a multiyear agreement with a top European retail and commercial bank. Rackspace is managing transformational migration, software-defined data center capabilities and managed services with a clear path to expand into cyber recovery, public cloud, AI and digital banking opportunities over time. In addition, we secured multiple transformation-focused wins across infrastructure and platform modernization. These included winning a mission-critical workload for a global online trading and financial services platform by modernizing hundreds of bare-metal servers into a virtualized software-defined infrastructure environment, improving resilience, scalability and operational efficiency while mitigating churn risk. We also entered into a new agreement with a fast-growing AI-enabled digital platform to host and manage its next-generation human-in-the-loop architecture designed to scale intelligent real-time engagement across a large user base. These wins share a common theme. Customers are choosing Rackspace to modernize and operate mission-critical workloads where reliability, security and compliance are nonnegotiable and where application-led services drive long-term strategic value. From a product perspective, private cloud continued to expand its platform capabilities. We introduced support for the latest release of Oracle PeopleTools, enhancing usability, embedded analytics and life cycle management for enterprise ERP environments. These improvements help customers drive higher productivity, stronger system governance and better decision-making in complex business systems. We also launched RackConnect Global Internet on Partner Fabric, extending Rackspace's network edge to partner ecosystems. This offering provides high-performance, resilient Internet connectivity with predictable costs and enterprise-grade routing, enabling customers to deploy and manage modern, hybrid and sovereign cloud architectures with confidence. Private cloud remained central to our strategy in 2025 with sustained customer engagement and steady execution across key programs. While these engagements typically carry longer deployment cycles, they provide greater revenue visibility, higher lifetime value and more durable recurring revenue streams. As we move through 2026, our focus is on accelerating our growth vectors as customers migrate into their future state environments. As these programs mature, we expect improved revenue predictability and expanding operating leverage over time. Now turning to public cloud. In the fourth quarter, revenue totaled $442 million, exceeding our guided range. This performance was driven by strength across both services and infrastructure resale. Services revenue grew 28% year-over-year, reflecting continued momentum in higher-value engagements. For the full year, public cloud revenue reached $1.7 billion, with services revenue growing 6%. These results reflect continued progress in executing our services-led strategy centered on operating, securing and modernizing complex cloud environments. Our increasing focus on enterprise customers reduces exposure to long-tail churn and positions us with larger enterprise-grade transformation engagements where we see stronger retention, deeper wallet share and more durable revenue streams. During the quarter, we secured a broad set of public cloud wins that reinforce Rackspace's role as a trusted partner for running large-scale customer-facing platforms. In the Americas, we helped a major digital media and advertising consumer-facing company transform its AI-powered services, serving hundreds of millions of users by building production-grade framework that speeds deployment of machine learning models and ensures reliability and governance. We also advanced AI solutions for a global aviation services provider, enabling real-time access to operational data, improving response times and driving measurable efficiency gains across regulated environments. In EMEA, we were selected as a strategic cloud managed services partner for a leading European bank, providing round-the-clock monitoring, security and optimization for core banking systems. For one of the largest diversified businesses in the Middle East across multiple industries, we are partnering on a comprehensive enterprise data platform modernization program that provides visibility across their diverse investment portfolio, enabling faster time to insight for better investment decisions. These wins highlight Rackspace's unique strength in regulated and data-intensive industries and our ability to deploy AI solutions at scale while ensuring reliability, compliance and operational excellence. We also continue to expand our public cloud product portfolio in Q4 with offerings designed to simplify adoption and accelerate time to value. We launched Rackspace Managed Cloud Database Operations, providing fully managed, secure and compliant database services across hyperscale environments. We also introduced streamlined deployment options for enterprise software and AI-enabled managed services. Together, these enhancements help customers adopt, scale and manage cloud and AI services more effectively as their environments grow. Across public cloud, AI is moving from experimentation to production. Customers increasingly rely on Rackspace to operationalize AI with governance, security and managed services, areas where execution, trust and reliability matter most. Our partnership with Palantir is a proof point of the platform engineering model in action. Forward-deployed engineers embedded with customers working on foundry and AIP shaping use cases building towards production. This is how enterprises deploy AI into live workflows in weeks rather than months, with governance built in from day 1. It is not managed services in the traditional sense. It is a new delivery architecture. That means engineers embedded in the customer environment, AI in production in weeks and Rackspace running it reliably from day 1. In summary, 2025 marked a year of meaningful structural improvement for our public cloud business. We drove stronger customer retention, executed targeted operational initiatives that supported margin expansion and delivered solid performance across the portfolio. As we enter 2026, we see AI evolving into a tangible growth driver with encouraging pipeline conversion trends and measurable delivery efficiency gains. Our focus remains on higher-value managed services, including AIOps, site reliability engineering, governance, modernization and cost optimization. As AI workloads expand, customers increasingly need support orchestrating across edge, core and cloud environments while balancing accelerated compute demand with governance and cost discipline. Rackspace enters 2026 with a clear identity and the team to execute on it. The work of the last 5 months has not just been about strategy. It has been about building the right leadership, sharpening our focus and making deliberate choices about where we compete and how we win. Those choices are now made and the team to deliver them is in place. The market is moving in our direction. Enterprises are realizing that operationalizing AI at scale inside regulated data-sensitive environments requires more than technology. It requires a partner with deep infrastructure expertise, governance discipline and operational accountability, a partner who can help them shape the journey, not just run the infrastructure underneath it. That is Rackspace. We are building a platform-engineering model, forward-deployed engineers embedded in the customer environments, working on the platforms where enterprise AI actually runs, helping customers define where to start, how to scale and how to operate with confidence. That capability sits on a foundation that took 25 years to build, governed private cloud infrastructure operating across regulated industries where uptime and sovereignty are nonnegotiable. Platform engineering, forward-deployed execution and governed infrastructure in one accountable relationship. We don't advise on the journey, we build it and run it. That is what makes Rackspace different. That is the layer that makes enterprise AI governable, scalable and real. We will execute with precision, earn trust at every step and deliver durable growth. I'm confident in this team, this model and this moment for our company. With that, I will turn it over to Mark for our financial results and outlook.

Thanks, Gajen. Three things stand out in the quarter. First, we beat revenue guidance, driven by public cloud outperformance. Second, non-GAAP operating profit came in at $41 million, above the high end of our range with margins up 120 basis points sequentially. Third, we ended the year with $397 million in total liquidity and $60 million in cash flow from operations for the quarter, a strong foundation heading into 2026. In the fourth quarter, total company GAAP revenue was $683 million, non-GAAP gross profit margin was 18.1% of GAAP revenue, down 180 basis points sequentially, driven by lower revenue in private cloud and higher mix of public cloud infrastructure. For the full year 2025, non-GAAP gross profit margin was 19.4%, down 120 basis points year-over-year. This was, again, a result of a year-over-year decline in private cloud revenue. Non-GAAP operating profit was $41 million, while non-GAAP operating profit margin was 6% of GAAP revenue, an increase of 120 basis points sequentially. For the full year 2025, non-GAAP operating profit margin was 4.7%, up 80 basis points versus prior year, driven by lower OpEx as we continue to optimize costs across the company. Non-GAAP loss per share was $0.01, beating our guided range of a $0.03 to $0.05 loss per share. Cash flow from operations was $60 million and free cash flow was $56 million in the fourth quarter. For the full year, cash flow from operations was $151 million and free cash flow was $91 million. We ended the year with $106 million in cash on hand and $397 million in total liquidity. Turning to our segment results. For the private cloud segment, GAAP revenue for the fourth quarter was $241 million, below our guided range due to a recently signed health care contract ramping more slowly than initially expected. Private cloud non-GAAP gross margin was 35.7%, down 240 basis points sequentially due to lower revenue and less fixed cost absorption. Non-GAAP segment operating margin at 26.1% was down 80 basis points sequentially. In our public cloud segment, GAAP revenue was $442 million, above our guided range, primarily driven by both cloud infrastructure volumes and services revenue. Non-GAAP gross margin was 8.5%, down 70 basis points sequentially, driven by a higher mix of infrastructure revenue. Non-GAAP segment operating margin was 4.5%, up 120 basis points sequentially due to improved operational efficiencies. Turning to guidance. As Gajen mentioned, beginning in 2026, we are shifting to an annual guidance framework. Quarter-to-quarter results are increasingly influenced by the timing of large deals, making short-term forecast less predictive of our long-term trajectory. Focusing on annual guidance aligns our external communication with how we run the business, prioritizing full year growth, margin expansion and operational execution over short-term variability. While we are moving to an annual guidance framework, we are committed to providing regular substantive updates on the drivers behind the numbers each quarter. We expect full year GAAP revenue to be $2.6 billion to $2.7 billion, down 1% year-over-year at the midpoint. From a segment perspective, we expect private cloud revenue of $1.025 billion to $1.075 billion, up 6% year-over-year at the midpoint and public cloud revenue of $1.575 billion to $1.625 billion, down 6% year-over-year at the midpoint. In private cloud, we expect growth to be balanced across the year as large health care and other regulated deployments move into production. The revenue cadence reflects migration complexity and implementation timing, not demand softness. In public cloud, we expect services revenue to grow mid- to high teens year-over-year, excluding the planned transition of a low-margin large-government contract, reflecting continued momentum in higher-margin managed offerings. Total non-GAAP operating profit is expected to be $160 million to $170 million, representing growth of 31% at the midpoint, driven by higher revenue and strong cost management. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $305 million to $315 million, up 12% at the midpoint, and non-GAAP loss is expected to be from $0.15 to $0.20 per share. Our non-GAAP tax rate is expected to be 26%, while non-GAAP other expenses will be in the $220 million to $230 million range. Non-GAAP share count is expected to be between 250 million and 260 million shares. Free cash flow is expected to be between $90 million to $110 million. With that, I will now turn it back over to Gajen for final remarks.

Before I wrap up, thank you to our customers, partners and all Rackers. In my first full quarter here, I have seen a company built on trust with our people, customers and partners. Our strengths are clear, a culture focused on customer outcomes, a portfolio designed for regulated environments and significant growth potential in health care, sovereign and AI. As AI and complex workloads move into production, our role is to help clients orchestrate critical systems across private, public, edge and sovereign clouds, turning data into outcomes with reliability, security and precision. That is how we earn and keep trust. With that, I will turn the call back over to Sagar.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. If you have any questions, please e-mail us at ir@rackspace.com. We look forward to engaging with the sell-side and investor community in the coming weeks as we continue to articulate our strategic road map and financial priorities. Have a great rest of your day.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.