AudioCodes - Q4 2023
February 6, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the AudioCodes' fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions after the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during this conference, please press star zero on your phone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Roger Chuchen, Investor Relations. You may begin, Roger.
Roger Chuchen (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, operator. Hosting the call today are Shabtai Adlersberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Niran Baruch, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that the information provided during this call may contain forward-looking statements relating to AudioCodes' business outlook, future economic performance, product introductions, plans, and objectives related thereto, and statements concerning assumptions made or expectations as to any future events, conditions, performance, or other matters are forward-looking statements as the term is defined under U.S. Federal Securities law. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated in such statements.
These risks, uncertainties, and factors include, but are not limited to, the effect of global economic conditions in general and conditions in AudioCodes' industry and target markets, in particular, shifts in supply and demand, market acceptance of new products, and the demand for existing products, the impact of competitive products and pricing on AudioCodes and its customers, products, and markets, timely product and technology development, upgrades, and the ability to manage changes in market conditions as needed, possible need for additional financing, the ability to satisfy covenants in the company's loan agreements, possible disruptions from the pandemic on our business and results of operations.
The effects of the current terrorist attacks by Hamas and the war and hostilities between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah, as well as the possibility that this could develop into a broader regional conflict involving Israel with other parties, may affect our operations and may limit our ability to produce and sell our solutions. Any disruptions in our operations by the obligations of our personnel to perform military service as a result of current or future military actions involving Israel and other factors detailed in AudioCodes' filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. AudioCodes assumes no obligation to update this information. In addition, during the call, AudioCodes will refer to non-GAAP net income and net income per share.
AudioCodes has provided a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP net income and income per share to net income and net income per share, according to GAAP, in the press release that is posted on its website. Before I turn the call over to management, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and archived webcast will be made available on the Investor Relations section of the company's website at the conclusion of the call. With all that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Shabtai. Shabtai, please go ahead.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Thank you, Roger. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. I would like to welcome all to our fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call. With me this morning is Niran Baruch, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Finance of AudioCodes. Niran will start off by presenting a financial overview of the quarter. I will then review the business highlights and summary for the quarter and discuss trends and developments in our business and industry. We will then turn it into the Q&A session. Niran?
Niran Baruch (VP of Finance and CFO)
Thank you, Shabtai, and hello, everyone. Before I start my formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that in conjunction with our earnings release this morning, we will post shortly on our investor relations website an earnings supplemental deck. On today's call, we will be referring to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. The earnings press release that we issued earlier this morning contains a reconciliation of the supplemental non-GAAP financial information that I will be discussing on this call. We will be comparing our fourth quarter 2023 results to the prior quarter, as we believe it provides a better gauge of our financial performance. Revenues for the fourth quarter were $63.6 million, an increase of 3.2% over the $61.6 million reported in the third quarter of the current year.
Full-year 2023 revenues were $244.4 million, a decrease of 11.2% over the $275.1 million reported in 2022. Services revenues for the fourth quarter were $30.9 million, accounted for 48.6% of total revenues. On an annual basis, services revenues were $120.4 million, an increase of 8.7% over the $110.8 million reported in 2022. The amount of deferred revenues as of December 31st, 2023, was $82.8 million, compared to $77.8 million as of September 30, 2023. Revenues by geographical region for the quarter were split as follows: North America, 44%; EMEA, 37%; Asia Pacific, 14%; and Central and Latin America, 5%.
Our top 15 customers represented an aggregate of 61% of our revenues in the fourth quarter, of which 46% was attributed to our nine largest distributors. GAAP results are as follows: Gross margin for the quarter was 66.7%, compared to 66.5% in Q3 2023. Operating income for the fourth quarter was $7.2 million, or 11.4% of revenues, compared to $5.8 million, or 9.4% of revenues in Q3 2023. Full year 2023 operating income was $13.4 million, compared to operating income of $31.3 million in 2022. Net income for the quarter was $3.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, compared to $4.3 million or $0.14 per diluted shares for Q3 2023.
The decrease was driven by $1.4 million in exchange rate differences expenses related to the revaluation of assets and liabilities denominated in non-dollar currencies, compared to $767,000 in exchange rate differences income in the previous quarter. This shift in exchange rate differences resulted in a $0.07 negative impact on GAAP earnings per diluted share quarter over quarter. Full year, 2023 net income was $8.8 million, or $0.28 per diluted share, compared to $28.5 million, or $0.88 per diluted share in 2022. Non-GAAP results are as follows: Non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 67.6%, compared to 67.3% in Q3 2023.
Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $10.7 million or 16.9% of revenues, compared to $9.6 million or 15.5% of revenues in Q3 2023. Full year 2023 non-GAAP operating income was $28.9 million, compared to operating income of $47.2 million in 2022. Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $8.9 million or $0.28 per diluted share, compared to $8.3 million or $0.25 per diluted share in Q3 2023. Full year 2023 non-GAAP net income was $25 million or $0.77 per diluted share, compared to $45 million or $0.35 per diluted share in 2022. At the end of December 2023, cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits, marketable securities, and financial investments totaled $106.7 million.
Net cash provided by operating activities was $9.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2023, and $14.9 million for the year 2023. Days sales outstanding as of December 31st, 2023, were 98 days. In December 2023, we received court approval in Israel to purchase up to an aggregate amount of $20 million of additional ordinary shares. The court approval also permits us to declare a dividend of any part of this amount. The approval is valid through June 18, 2024. Earlier this morning, we also declared a cash dividend of $0.18 per share. The aggregate amount of the dividend is approximately $5.5 million. The dividend will be paid on March 6, 2024, to all of our shareholders of record at the close of trading on February 20, 2024.
During the quarter, we acquired 595,000 of our ordinary shares for a total consideration of approximately $6.3 million. As of December 31st, 2023, we had $19.2 million available under the approval of the repurchase of shares and/or declaration of cash dividends. Our guidance for the full year of 2024 is as follows: We expect revenues in the range of $252 million-$267 million, and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $1.00-$1.15. I will now turn the call back over to Shabtai.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Thank you, Niran. We are pleased to cap off 2023 with a solid fourth quarter results and with healthy growth in the strategic areas of our business, namely UCaaS and customer experience. At the same time, we've seen important accelerated development and nice rise in opportunities relating to conversational AI, which grew more than 50% year-over-year, and it's quickly becoming a new growth engine for success in the areas of Microsoft Teams and CCaaS. Altogether, when we combine the progress in our operation in the UCaaS, customer experience, and conversational AI segments, it is clear that our focus on the enterprise space, where business reached a level of 90% of company revenues for the quarter and the full year, starts to bear fruit and drive continued business expansion in the enterprise space going forward.
With continued focus in 2023 on shifting our business model into subscription and recurring sales, and the shift to higher margin cloud software solutions and services, we are making significant progress in our transformation to become a software and services company. As in previous years, services revenue evolved to contribute about 50% of our business. We have built, throughout the past four years, a profitable managed services business, exiting 2023 with 50% growth year-over-year, enriching a level of $48 million annual recurring revenues for our Live business. We expect continued Live business growth in 2024, which currently is planned to grow on the order of another 40%.
As a result, we've made significant progress in our strategic initiative to increase our software and service revenue mix to nearly 70% in 2023, up from 60% in 2022. Shifting our focus in 2023 to AI-first, voice-related software and application, and more so for 2024, we're now adding a new strong leg in form of software-as-a-service solution in the conversational AI space, which should further drive expansion for our business and profits in coming years. To recap on our success in the past 15 years, we've built a very strong voice mode position in the industry. Our partnership with leading application vendors such as Microsoft in the UCaaS space and Genesys in the customer experience market, is a testament to our success.
Solid success has been focused in the past on voice network infrastructure, and we became top connectivity player in both the gateway space and the enterprise SBC market. We are now shifting our focus towards AI-first business voice application for the UCaaS and CCaaS markets, which represent both huge opportunity in terms of tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of seats to serve. Combining our assets and capabilities in the areas of telephony, voice networking, and infrastructure with the new emerging conversational AI solution, we believe we are creating a rather unique position in the industry, which we believe would be hard to compete with and/or replicate by competitors. In 2023, we have already seen good signs of growing fast in this new space, which should further pave the future for business expansion.
Another key accomplishment in 2023 relates to our growth in the customer experience market. We are now investing in two key areas. First one is taking advantage of our strong offering of voice infrastructure for the customer experience, networks, and deployed solutions. We saw much success working with leading CX vendors in helping to transform legacy on-prem solution, which are gradually becoming less efficient and progressing to new, evolving, cloud-based, modern CCaaS solutions. In this space, we saw much success in our Live CX services and enjoyed growth of about 20% year-over-year for the full year. Secondly, we saw huge success related to the penetration of the customer experience market, winning new opportunities with our Voca CIC product, our new leading initiative for AI-first, Azure-native CCaaS solution for the Microsoft Teams environment.
We saw initial large wins with enterprise customers in North America, among them, with one of the largest universities in the U.S., and the second one, Fortune 500 global manufacturer. In both cases, Voca CIC solution has displaced an incumbent Teams-certified CCaaS vendor, which serve both as proof points that Voca CIC is ready for prime time. We expect this initiative to further increase thicker market penetration in 2024 and beyond. All in all, we ended fourth quarter in the CX area with record business level of over 40% year-over-year and close to 20% for the full year. Exiting 2023, customer experience revenue now represents more than 20% of our business going forward.
As such, we have high confidence in the customer experience segment, emerging a second major growth pillar for our business, in addition to our Microsoft Teams UC voice success. Now to UC. Within enterprise, our UCaaS business continued to perform well. Business in the Microsoft UC grew 5% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Full year, Microsoft UC business increased 7%. Microsoft Teams business grew 10% year-over-year for the quarter and 13% for the full year. At the end of 2023, Teams business is now more than 95% of the Microsoft business. Skype for Business revenue continued to decline in the fourth quarter by... With related revenue declining above 40%. For the full year, they declined approximately $8 million or 55%.
So exiting 2023, Skype for Business business declined to less than $1 million in Q4, which means that Skype for Business revenue will no longer weigh on the Microsoft business going forward, and thus we should see the full impact of Teams growth in terms of expansion. On the services side, we continue to experience continuous strong momentum for AudioCodes' Live managed services business, mainly in the Microsoft Teams environment, with annual recurring revenue growing 50% year-over-year, ending the quarter at $48 million, consistent with our expectations. On the SBC product line front, we enjoyed a very strong fourth quarter, ending above $35 million of revenue. For the full year, we ended the year with revenue of close to $130 million.
In December 2023, research firm Omdia ranked AudioCodes as the market leader for enterprise SBCs for the third quarter of 2023, with a worldwide revenue share of 23.2% in its enterprise SBC and Voice over IP Gateway Market Tracker. Our Mediant SBC line is key in winning Microsoft Teams direct business. Again, getting back to where I stopped. Our Mediant SBC line is key in winning Microsoft Teams direct route business and for connectivity in more market areas such as Zoom Phone, Genesys Cloud CX, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and other leading UCaaS and CCaaS solutions. While growing nicely on the enterprise space, we have witnessed rather soft business in the service provider space. During the fourth quarter, business in this space declined above 50% year-over-year and over 40% for the full year.
With economic slowdown across the board in 2023, the effect of growing inflation, coupled with high interest rates, has affected materially sales of hardware-related products, which in return had had an impact on sales of equipment gear provided to service providers worldwide. It is important to understand that, though, it is the longer-term plans, and definitely with the shift we are making towards more software and services, this decline was anticipated to occur over the period of the next 3-5 years. Due to the accelerated economic slowdown in early 2023, we saw acceleration of this trend, and thus have seen major impacts already in 2023, which should have occurred anyway in coming years.
As such, we believe that the pressure and impact on our growth from the decline in the service provider space early 2023, will be substantially relieved in 2024 and beyond. While visibility in this segment remains limited, revenues did stabilize sequentially in the quarter, which may point to a better 2024. On the operation side, I'm glad to report solid progress in non-GAAP gross margin, which has recovered from early, first quarter with 62.1% in 2023, to reach in fourth quarter, 67.6%. Coupled with disciplined expense management, non-GAAP operating margin has also improved dramatically from 4.9 earlier in the year to reach 16.9% in the quarter, which is in the range we defined for our long-term financial model.
This continued focus on shifting our business model into subscription and recurring sales and shift to higher margin cloud software solutions, we expect operating margin to keep inching forward in coming years. On the cash flow side, we have witnessed a very successful quarter. Operating cash flow grew to $9.3 million this quarter and $14.9 million for the full year. Regarding headcount, all in all, we are fully disciplined in hiring, mainly in our networking business. However, we are adding select position in the growing areas of customer experience and conversational AI. We ended the fourth quarter with 950 employees, compared to 938 employees in the previous quarter.
As for the guidance that Niran provided earlier, we are initiating 2024 revenue guidance of $252 million-$267 million for the full year. We anticipate mid-range revenue growth of about 6% compared to 2023. Non-GAAP EPS guidance of $1-$1.15, that's anticipating mid-range earning growth of about 40%. The top-line outlook builds in continued conservative enterprise spending environment and assumes modest growth in networking and high double-digit % growth in conversational AI, backed by ongoing healthy pipeline funnel. As to key wins in the quarter, we've signed a 36-month Live contract with one of the world's largest PBX companies, enabling the vendor to use AudioCodes as a de facto solution when provisioning its end customers with Microsoft Teams voice.
We have signed a 36-month contract with one of the largest U.S. universities, providing Voca CIC, Azure-native Teams-certified contact center solution and SmartTAP Compliance Recording as competitive displacement of a Teams CCaaS incumbent. We also signed a 60-month contract with Fortune 500 global manufacturer, providing Voca CIC, Azure-native Teams-certified contact center solution and SmartTAP Compliance Recording. It's competitive. Again, it's a competitive displacement of a Teams CCaaS incumbent. To wrap up my introduction, we had solid fourth quarter and strengths across the board in strategic areas of our business, having navigated well in an ongoing difficult market conditions. We are gaining market share against our primary competitors, having scored multiple landmark deals in both the UC and the CX space, which serves as validation of the successful execution of our land and expand strategy.
This factor, coupled with core business leading indicators such as pipeline remaining robust, gives us conviction that we have the right strategy in place and on the right path to execute on our commitment of returning to revenue growth and driving operating margin improvement in 2024. With increased focus and investments in technologies and services for the UCaaS, customer experience, and conversational AI markets, backed by strong Live booking, mainly in the Teams Live CX and Voca CIC, we believe we are on the right path to execute on our plan to achieve revenue growth and drive improved profitability in 2024. And with that, I've concluded my introduction. I would like to move over the call to the operator.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much. We will now be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star two, if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For anyone using speaker equipment, it might be necessary to pick up your handset before you press the keys. Please hold a moment while we poll for questions. Thank you. Your first question is coming from Ryan McWilliams of Barclays. Ryan, your line is live.
Eamon Coughlin (VP of Software Equity Research)
Hey, guys. This is Eamon Coughlin on for Ryan McWilliams. Thanks for taking the question. How does your pipeline visibility now compare to what it was in 3Q? Were there any green shoots that you could point to for improving demand trends leaving the quarter?
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Ryan, this is Shabtai. I'm sorry, you know, it was hard to hear you. Can you please repeat the question?
Eamon Coughlin (VP of Software Equity Research)
It's just a question on your pipeline visibility, how that compares now to the end of 3Q at the last earnings call, and just if you were seeing any green shoots leaving the quarter.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Yeah, well, largely, I would say that there's no much difference. Although I must point out that usually fourth quarter is the strongest quarter in the year. I think that in 2023, that phenomena has kind of, you know, been emphasized because budgets were less used earlier in the year due to the slowdown and delay of projects. So I think we enjoyed a strong fourth quarter. I therefore expect that, you know, first quarter will be just like in many previous years, will be probably down, like, 2%-3%, but all in all, the pipeline looks good. We have, I didn't mention that, but we had a very high score of bookings done in 2023 compared to 2022. So all in all, we believe we're fairly effective.
I would also add, you know, one more point, which I've not mentioned in my introduction, that we do intend to add, in the first half of 2023, new software as a service additions, new, cloud multitenant solution for, recording services in the form of compliance recording and meeting space. And we believe that our, Live platform will become substantially, more competitive. We do not see any close competitors, though, with such capabilities. So all in all, we believe that pipeline and visibility for 2024 should be good.
Eamon Coughlin (VP of Software Equity Research)
Got it. Thank you. And then how did CCaaS demand fare in the quarter, and are you seeing increased attention for buyers on Voice AI? Thanks.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Yes, definitely. Actually, we do see a rise in number of opportunities in the CCaaS space for our Voca CIC product. We actually, as I've mentioned, won two large deals, one that's close to $1 million, one that's, you know, above $500,000 in North America. We have a range of more opportunity coming up. Also, we plan on an analyst day in about a month from today, or six weeks from today, dedicated primarily to Voca CIC. And, obviously, we'll present that at Enterprise Connect in March. So a lot of activity in the CX space.
Eamon Coughlin (VP of Software Equity Research)
Got it. Thanks, Shabtai. I'll go back in the queue.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Thank you, Ryan.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much. Our next question is coming from Greg Burns of Sidoti & Company. Greg, your line is live.
Greg Burns (Senior Analyst)
Morning. The growth rates from Microsoft have slowed a little bit from where they were maybe a year ago. Can you just talk about what's driving that? Is it mix with Live gaining greater traction, or is it macro? Because it seems like in the CX market, you're still posting solid growth there, a little stronger than what you're seeing on the UCaaS side of the business. Thank you.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Right. Yeah, I think your observation was, is correct. Well, I think that the moderated growth results partly as, as we all know, from the slowdown in global economics, so projects have been pushed, et cetera. However, in our specific business in the space relates directly to the success of what we call Microsoft Teams Phone, which is the connection of the enterprises to the public network. Now, we believe that up to now, there was limited benefit from adding the phone functionality over other functionalities of Microsoft Teams, such as chat, presence, you know, conferences, et cetera. We do believe that, you know, in 2023, we started to see the impact of conversational AI on the use of Teams Phone, right?
We have seen, obviously, generative AI technology being put to work. All our solutions, including Meeting Insights, is making use of generative AI, which in order to provide benefit in the Microsoft Phone space, you really need to have a phone, a Teams Phone license. Similar, you know, the introduction of Microsoft of Copilot and Teams Premium, and you can see a lot of more applications. So once there will be new business voice application that will provide value on top of the Teams Phone license, we will start to see increase in our business.
We believe that we've already seen sense for it at the end of 2023, and we believe that going forward with the I would say emerging adoption of Meeting Insights, recording of meetings, you know, Copilot, we will see definitely a rise. So we believe that's kind of a valley in 2023, but we should see and expect to see growth coming back in 2024 and beyond.
Greg Burns (Senior Analyst)
Okay, so what are the penetration rates of voice licensing in the Teams environment now? Is it still less than 15% or 10%?
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Yeah, well, the last numbers that, you know, I remember being quoted were that, around July of 2023, I believe, the number that was quoted was about 17 or 18 million, you know, Teams Phone breakouts. That's just... As I mentioned, 17 or 18 million. The runway is obviously substantially larger, right? You know, Microsoft 365 paid licenses are close to 400 million. Teams as a whole, you know, without the phone is, is, nowadays quoted to be at least 80 million. So there's huge, huge runway expected. So again, when there will be more applications that, drive value on top of the Teams Phone license, I think you'll see, you know, increase in number of, seats, using Teams Phone.
Greg Burns (Senior Analyst)
Okay. Niran, the cash conversion for this year, do you expect it to be stronger than what it has been the last two years?
Niran Baruch (VP of Finance and CFO)
Yes. You saw the operating cash flow at the fourth quarter, which was, like, close to $10 million, an improvement from previous few quarters, and we believe the operating cash flow for 2024 will be better than in 2023.
Greg Burns (Senior Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Ryan Koontz of Needham & Company. Ryan, your line is live.
Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)
Thanks for the question, and, you know, nice, nice quarter on the margins, particularly there. Really great to see that. I hope we could circle back to contact center and your CX there. You talk about a really nice inflection to 40% growth. Can we drill in there? And, you know, what's behind that? Is it product improvements? Is it, you know, focused on go-to-market? Is it, you know, some of your key partners seeing an inflection on sales growth? Any of those would be helpful. And just a quick follow-up, can you clarify what those wins were again? The audio was breaking up a little bit on the, I think, the two CX wins you mentioned. Thank you.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Right. Thank you, Ryan. So on the CX space, as I've mentioned, there are two key activities. One, which is, you know, supporting in deployment of voice networks. As you know, the world of contact center is moving from on-prem to cloud. There's a need to basically shift from the old networks to new networks, which are, you know, global in nature, different architecture. So we are providing usually SBC gear and managed services and more components in order to enable the transition from on-prem to CCaaS. The large growth in CCaaS, in CX, I'm sorry, is related to participating in several such large deployments of large CX vendors.
So take a leader in CX who now wins against an incumbent that's kind of legacy and less powerful. When you move from an old you know supplier architecture that's on-prem to a new cloud-based vendor, there's a whole huge network. You're talking about hundreds of locations around the world. And in order to achieve that with high quality, you know, high security and efficiency, you know, our SBCs and managed services like CX come into play. So that explains, you know, the success we enjoy. The trend of moving from on-prem to cloud continues. I believe that we will continue to win such projects.
As to the two wins that I've mentioned, so the first one was, you know, a very large university in the U.S., who used our Voca CIC in our compliance recording, you know, to replace, you know, incumbent solution at that time. That specific transaction was close to $1 million in booking. Second one, with a large, you know, manufacturer who, you know, one of the S&P 500 companies, who, again, chose to use our Voca CIC and replace an incumbent certified solution in the Microsoft Teams space.
Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)
All right, great! Thanks. This is somewhat helpful. I'm going to ask, I guess prem to cloud is not really a new trend, it's been going on for many years, so any commentary on why you're specifically seeing this inflection for, of growth for AudioCodes in terms of your, your efforts in that market, which has been humming along pretty healthy for years?
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Yeah, it, it's definitely a healthy market, and we actually seen, you know, expansion in that segment. Actually, you know, we just discussed, you know, prospects for the first quarter of 2024. It seems that, you know, it continues. I, I believe that with, probably with, you know, more maturity and reliability of contact center operation from the cloud, that may become an incentive for end users to move. Also, I would add that usually, we're talking about contracts that last several years, and usually when such a contract is coming to an end, this is the time when transition from on-prem to cloud will occur. So that is an ongoing process, and as the world of CCaaS matures and becoming more successful, we believe that we'll see more projects like this.
Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)
Great. That's, that's real helpful. Just a quick follow-up. You haven't talked about Zoom Phone in a while. Any quick commentary on Zoom in terms of, their, their progress and with their, with their phone product and your selling opportunity? Or are you seeing much traction with Live there?
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Well, we do continue to work with Zoom. We had enjoyed, you know, a few opportunities, but at this stage, I would not say that we believe Zoom will become a growth engine for us in the UCaaS space.
Ryan Koontz (Managing Director and Research Analyst)
Sure. All right, I'll pass it on. Thank you. Thank you.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Sure.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Samad Samana from Jefferies. Samad, your line is live.
Billy Fitzsimmons (VP of Equity Research)
Hey, guys, this is Billy Fitzsimmons, on for Samad. Maybe backing up and taking a higher level view here, can you guys remind us what you're seeing on the macro front? How did things like lead times and close rates evolve over the course of 2023, and did they get better or worse in the fourth quarter? Any customer verticals looking particularly strong or weak at this point? Then I want to double-click on what's kind of assumed on macro in terms of the 2024 guide.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Right. Actually, it's a great question for CEOs and CFOs. You know, 2024 is still, you know, kind of foggy. We have not seen any, any dramatic change from the end of, 2023. We've seen, you know, good pipeline. As I've mentioned before, Q4 was strong, but it's a, you know, the last quarter in a year, so that's kind of expected. So no change. At this stage, it's hard to make a call as to, you know, whether 2024 will be, substantially better or better than 2023.
But all in all, I think, you know, for us as a company, you know, while we have put aside the whole issue of service providers, which has impacted our operations early 2023, we're glad to focus on contact center, which is growing, conversational AI, which is very fast-growing these days, other opportunities, and also, UCaaS, which again, we believe that conversational AI will contribute to the growth of our business. So all in all, we believe enterprise space will be good and, no other indication at this stage.
Billy Fitzsimmons (VP of Equity Research)
Got it. And then it's probably still early, but on the strong conversational AI bookings demand, can you relay some of the initial feedback you're seeing and hearing from customers? Any color on the initial wins, and how should we think about the materialization of that offering on the revenue line going forward?
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Right. So we do focus. Again, I mean, we live in a world where on one end, there are, you know, some very strong, big, you know, technology providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS on one end, so lots of technology out there in the cloud. On the other end, you have every company, every successful enterprise company, you know, adopting fast, you know, AI to improve its, you know, operation productivity. So in the middle, you need solutions that will tunnel the AI gear to those end users. Usually, that's done by applications such as, you know, you can take Copilot, you can take Salesforce, you can take other you know Google application. But then there are, you know, specific implementation, which required a combination of a lot of those technologies.
So I'll give you an example. We have implemented a very important solution for an emergency service that needs to pick up calls in real time, you know, record them, transcribe them, derive insights from them, and act upon, apply automation on top of it, and display it, and send alerts. So you're basically talking here about a new breed of applications that will be AI-first enabled, and which combine a lot of areas, including telephony, networking, and cognitive services. And this is where we shine when we bring a combination of all of these technologies that we have developed around the years, right?
There's another, you know, these days with hostility everywhere in the world, there's a need, increased need to understand, you know, what's being said, where, for what purpose, and act upon it. That is a rising application in many areas, and that is something that has budgets for. So those are the type of solutions that we see currently.
Billy Fitzsimmons (VP of Equity Research)
Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Sure.
Operator (participant)
We appear to have reached the end of our question and answer session. I will now hand back over to Shabtai for any closing comments.
Shabtai Adlersberg (President and CEO)
Okay. Thank you, operator. I would like to thank everyone who attended our conference call today. On the heels of recovering our business in the second half of 2023, we have high confidence in our ability to successfully expand our business in 2024 and following years. We look forward to your participation in our next quarterly conference call. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much, everyone. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.