Commvault Systems - Earnings Call - Q4 2025

Executive Summary

• CVLT delivered a clean beat: revenue $275.0M (+23% y/y) vs S&P Global consensus $262.4M*, and non-GAAP diluted EPS $1.03 vs $0.93*; subscription revenue grew 45% y/y to $173.2M.
• KPIs accelerated: Total ARR hit $930.1M (+21% y/y), Subscription ARR $780.1M (+31% y/y), and SaaS ARR $281.0M (+68% y/y); gross margin improved to 83.1% and non-GAAP EBIT margin to 21.5%.
• FY26 initial guide implies durable growth: revenue $1.13–$1.14B (~+14% y/y), non-GAAP op margin ~21%, FCF $210–$215M; Q1 FY26 revenue guided to $266–$270M with non-GAAP op margin ~21%.
• Catalysts: hypergrowth in SaaS, deeper hyperscaler/partner traction (marketplace transactions +50% q/q, +250% y/y), growing cross-sell of cyber offerings (Active Directory, Cleanroom, Cloud Rewind, Clumio Backtrack).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• “Record-breaking” quarter and year; subscription up 45% y/y, Total ARR +21% to $930M; SaaS ARR +68% to $281M.
• Strong demand/land-and-expand: 700 new subscription customers in Q4; SaaS NDR 127% driven by upsell/cross-sell; double-digit improvement in sales productivity.
• Ecosystem momentum: hyperscaler marketplace transactions +50% q/q and +250% y/y; record partner contribution to land business (Hitachi, Pure, HPE, Kyndryl).

What Went Wrong

• Margin trade-off from growth investments and SaaS mix; management guiding flat non-GAAP op margin ~21% despite topline strength (prior comments emphasize “balanced” growth vs margin).
• Near-term acquisition dilution: Clumio integration cited as dilutive to margins for a few quarters (1–2 pts discussed previously), and ~100 bps revenue contribution embedded in FY26 outlook (not broken out going forward).
• Legacy lines continued to drift: perpetual license revenue -2% y/y; customer support -1% y/y, underscoring mix shift dependency on subscription/SaaS.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Commvault Q4 Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Melnyk, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Mike Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)

Good morning, and welcome to our Earnings Conference Call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements made on today's call will include forward-looking statements about Commvault's future expectations, plans, and prospects. All such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Please refer to the cautionary language in today's earnings release and Commvault's most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to be materially different from those contemplated in these forward-looking statements. Commvault does not assume any obligation to update these statements. During this call, Commvault's financial results are presented on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation between the non-GAAP and GAAP measures can be found on our website. Thank you again for joining us. Now I'll turn it over to our CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, for his opening remarks. Sanjay?

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Thanks, Mike. I apologize if I'm a bit raspy. I'm recovering from flu. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. I'm excited to share the results from another record-breaking Q4 and full fiscal year 2025. First, let's talk about the quarter. Total revenue increased 23% to $275 million. Subscription revenue grew 45% to $173 million. Total ARR improved 21% to $930 million, and SaaS ARR jumped 68% to $281 million. Fiscal year 2025 was a pivotal year. We reimagined resiliency for a cloud-first world. We doubled down on innovation and execution, and we firmly positioned ourselves as a growth company. We delivered highly differentiated data security and recovery offerings that make customers more resilient, including Cleanroom, Active Directory Forest Level Recovery, and Cloud Rewind. We extended our partner ecosystem, including integrations with leading security players like Acante, Dasera, Google Threat Intelligence, Splunk, and Wiz.

We integrated two acquisitions that expand the breadth and depth of our platform, reaching new cloud buyers and serve new markets, notably with AWS workloads. We reignited growth in our LAN business, adding nearly 3,000 subscription customers. We drove a double-digit improvement in sales productivity, and on a Rule of 40 basis, we achieved 41% for the full fiscal year. As we begin fiscal year 2026, Commvault has never been better positioned to succeed and win. Let me talk about our three fundamental growth drivers. First, we expect to benefit from strong secular tailwinds tied to cyber resilience. Second, in a cloud-first world, our approach to continuous business is second to none. Third, we're executing both internally and with our growing partner ecosystem. I'll discuss each driver in more detail. First, cyber resilience remains a top strategic priority for organizations. Ransomware and sophisticated cyber attacks are increasing in frequency.

Cloud environments are more complex, and there are emerging use cases around AI. As such, organizations are increasingly turning to Commvault to keep their business continuous. Some recent notable customer wins include American Tower, Cinemark Holdings, Janus International, McGraw Hill, and Blue Origin, among others. Whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, Commvault gives customers the flexibility to choose the best resilience solution at the lowest total cost of ownership. For example, this quarter we helped one of Europe's largest financial institutions enhance its resilience while consolidating multiple data centers. By deploying Commvault HyperScale X, this customer significantly reduced its hardware costs, simplified its day-to-day operations, and enhanced its overall cyber resilience posture. As customers' threats grow and become more sophisticated, we're supporting GDPR and DORA in the EU, and SOC 2 and APRA in Australia. Our ability to support compliance is contributing to strong growth internationally.

For example, in EMEA, we partnered with Accenture Italia to support a leading Italian banking group with DORA compliance. The same bank transitioned away from two legacy vendors and consolidated on Commvault to enhance its cyber resilience posture. In APAC, a large global financial services company chose Commvault to protect its AWS workloads using an air-gapped immutable copy of its data to support compliance requirements. We also offered this customer a more elegant solution at a lower total cost of ownership than the incumbent provider. Our success extended into highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. This was evident in Q4 when we landed one of America's largest financial institutions. We had a number of big wins with banks this quarter, and you'll hear more examples of that throughout my prepared remarks.

These strong customer testimonials reflect current tailwinds in the industry and lead us to our second growth driver: our unique approach to continuous business, a state of always-on business availability and resilience for the modern enterprise. With continuous business, traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions are no longer enough. Customers require a platform with the breadth and depth that can help them rapidly recover their entire business, data, applications, and infrastructure together. That's what Commvault's offerings uniquely provide. Let's look at a few examples, starting with Active Directory. Often called the backbone of enterprise ID, it's estimated that Active Directory and Entra ID manage authentication for more than 600 million users worldwide and control access to critical business systems, protecting everything from workstation logins to physical building access. If Active Directory goes offline, business operations can grind to a halt.

It's no surprise that bad actors make Active Directory a primary target in nine out of 10 cyber attacks. Enter Commvault. Commvault recently introduced Active Directory Forest Level Recovery, automating rapid recovery of everything from users, groups, and permissions to domain controllers across the organization. What could take days to recover now takes a fraction of the time. In Q4, Active Directory was one of the company's fastest-growing SaaS offerings. A second example of how we're enabling continuous business is Cloud Rewind. After a cyber attack, one of the most complex, costly, and time-consuming steps in the recovery process is rebuilding cloud-native applications that power and run their data. This can take weeks, a luxury our customers do not have. Commvault Cloud Rewind enables customers to rapidly rebuild their applications and the infrastructure and configurations that power them so they can get back to business.

As more organizations embrace AI, they need to be able to recover AI data at a moment's notice. This brings me to a third example of how we're enabling continuous business. Many companies store massive AI data repositories on Amazon S3. If that data is corrupted or lost, our Commvault Clumio offerings, like Backtrack, can help customers rapidly recover these massive data sets with billions of objects fast. In fact, according to our research, Clumio's serverless orchestration engine can scale to hundreds of petabytes and restore data at 10x the speed of other solutions. The need for this technology has never been greater. For example, Atlassian, the software company, chose Clumio to help protect dozens of petabytes of Amazon S3 data and billions of objects across numerous geographies. Clumio's massively scalable solution significantly reduced backup and restore times and helped cut costs by more than 50%.

This showcases Clumio's enterprise-grade data protection at cloud scale, where traditional solutions simply can't compete. The three offerings I just discussed, Active Directory, Cloud Rewind, and Clumio Backtrack, are pivotal to enabling continuous business. When it comes to addressing key customer pain points, they're even better together. This brings us to our third major growth driver for fiscal year 2026: executing internally and with our partner ecosystem. We drove record levels of inflow, improved growth rates, and increased rep productivity while growing our sales force. Building on that momentum, in Q4, we saw record contributions from partners to our LAN business. I'll share just a few examples. Partnering with Hitachi and Pure, we displaced two incumbent providers to help a Fortune 500 global finance firm standardize its platform and enhance its cyber resilience with strict time-to-recovery SLAs.

Our ability to secure the entire data estate at scale was key to this win. Next, with HPE, we enabled a large European bank to enhance its cyber resilience posture and support its DORA compliance deadlines. Partnering with Kyndryl, we displaced the incumbent to help a large U.K. bank modernize its cloud footprint and support its DORA compliance. Our ability to protect most applications with a single solution, address and test security concerns with Commvault Cleanroom, and provide the fastest time-to-recovery were key competitive differentiators. We also doubled down on our relationships with leading hyperscalers, supporting our customers as they accelerate the move to the cloud. This fueled additional growth as our marketplace transactions grew nearly 50% quarter-on-quarter and over 250% year-on-year. Building on the momentum in fiscal year 2025, we plan to continue investing in cloud and data security integrations across our partner ecosystem.

In closing, as we head into fiscal year 2026, we believe the opportunity before us is compelling. As we grow and expand our portfolio with the higher growth-adjacent markets like data security and cloud security, we are attracting new buyers and significantly increasing our total addressable market. We now estimate this opportunity to be approximately $24 billion. While we continue to monitor the macro environment, our business remains strong, our team is executing, and we are winning new customers. We are confident in our outlook and excited about the future as the most innovative cyber resilience platform in the industry. I want to thank our entire team for their dedication and hard work. Our people are the driving force behind everything we do.

If the energy and enthusiasm I witnessed at our sales kickoff a few weeks ago is any indication, we are ready to deliver for our customers and partners again in fiscal year 2026. Now, I'll turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jen DiRico, to discuss our results. Jen?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Thanks, Sanjay. As Sanjay noted, Q4 was another excellent quarter driven by strong performance across geographic regions, increased contributions from our new offerings, elevated new customer growth, and healthy renewal and expansion activity within our installed base. I'm proud to say that our platform and our message are resonating with customers, and our team is executing against a growing market opportunity. I want to thank all the Vaulters that contributed to the best fiscal year that Commvault has ever seen.

Now I'll discuss our Q4 results and operating metrics, followed by a discussion of guidance for Q1 and fiscal 2026. Please note that all growth rates are compared on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise specified. Total ARR increased by 21% to $930 million on a reported basis. For a like-for-like comparison of FX-adjusted ARR to prior quarters, please refer to page 27 of the Q4 earnings presentation. Subscription ARR grew 31% to $780 million, including a substantial 68% increase in SaaS ARR, totaling $281 million. Subscription ARR now constitutes 84% of total ARR compared to 77% one year ago. We consider subscription ARR to be the best indicator of the company's growth profile, as it adjusts for the lower growth of our perpetual license and customer support businesses. Now I'll discuss Q4 revenue trends. Total revenue increased 23% to $275 million, driven by a robust 45% increase in subscription revenue.

The growth in subscription revenue was driven by momentum across our SaaS platform, healthy growth in our software LAN business, and expansion with existing customers. Revenue from term software transactions over $100,000 increased by 38%, benefiting equally from an improvement in volume and average transaction size. This included more than a dozen transactions over $1 million. Many of these transactions carried multi-year terms, as customers view Commvault as the strategic partner of choice to help them address their evolving cyber resilience needs. This presents an exciting opportunity for us to grow and expand with them as their needs evolve. For example, we recently landed one of the world's largest consumer product companies that was using a costly patchwork of competitive offerings. Commvault centralized its numerous heterogeneous workloads, enhanced its data security, and lowered its costs across multiple clouds, factories, and data centers.

Our growth this quarter was not limited to large deals. Q4 was also the best volume quarter of the year for term software transactions under $100,000, and we added 700 new subscription customers, surpassing 12,000 worldwide. Existing customer expansion remained healthy, with Q4 SaaS net dollar retention rate steady at 127%, driven by both upsell and cross-sell. SaaS ARR saw notable growth from new products, particularly Active Directory, Cleanroom, and Threat Scan. For example, we secured a seven-figure multi-year renewal with an existing Commvault customer that recognized the value and innovation that we deliver. This Fortune 500 clean energy production company expanded existing workloads, including Air Gap Protect, VMs, M365, and Active Directory. In addition, to help mitigate the impact of cyber incidents and support continuous business operations, the company added numerous cyber offerings, including risk analysis, Threat Scan, and Cleanroom.

This customer is an example of why we are winning in the market and how we plan to build on this momentum in FY2026. One of our strategic priorities for FY2026 is to drive increased multi-product adoption of our SaaS offerings. Today, approximately 30% of SaaS customers utilize multiple offerings. As we have shared in the past, there is significant potential to drive this percentage higher over time by monetizing our cyber offerings like Active Directory, Threat Scan, and Cleanroom, as well as our enhanced AWS offerings like Clumio Backtrack.

Now I'll discuss our consistent profitability and free cash flow, which demonstrates our commitment to a responsible growth philosophy. Fiscal Q4 gross margins were 83.1%, reflecting a strong mix of term software sales combined with a continued focus on driving optimization in our SaaS margins. Going forward, we continue to expect total gross margins to be in the low 80% range over time as SaaS becomes a larger mix of the overall business. Operating expenses of $168 million represented 61% of total revenue, compared to 62% in the prior year. Q4 operating expenses included previously disclosed growth-driving investments and higher commission and bonuses on record sales results. Non-GAAP EBIT grew 31% to $59 million, with margins up 130 basis points year-over-year to 21.5%.

Non-GAAP EBIT benefited from strong flow-through of revenue outperformance, which was driven by the continued hypergrowth of our SaaS platform and a record quarter for term software transactions. Now moving to some key balance sheet and cash flow metrics. We ended the quarter with no debt and $302 million in cash. Q4 free cash flow of $76 million and full-year free cash flow of $204 million came in at the high end of our guidance. The biggest drivers of free cash flow are deferred revenue from SaaS contracts and the strength of our term software business, which typically includes upfront payments on multi-year contracts. For the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2025, we repurchased $165 million of stock, representing 81% of free cash flow, again exceeding our guidance to return at least 75%. Now I'll discuss our outlook for Q1 and fiscal year 2026.

I'm extremely proud of what we accomplished in fiscal year 2025. The rate of innovation at Commvault is impressive, and the breadth and depth of our platform is unmatched. As Sanjay said earlier, our innovations allow us to address new use cases, new buying personas, and significantly expand our total addressable market, which we now estimate to be over $24 billion. We're excited about this larger, higher-growth market opportunity and confident in our team's ability to execute. At the same time, we're closely monitoring the macro environment and potential changes in demand trends. For fiscal Q1 2026, we expect subscription revenue, which includes both the software portion of term-based licenses and SaaS, to be in the range of $166 million-$170 million. This represents 35% year-over-year growth at the midpoint.

We expect total revenue to be in the range of $266 million-$270 million, with growth of 19% at the midpoint. At these revenue levels, we expect Q1 consolidated gross margins to be in the range of 81%-82%. We expect Q1 non-GAAP EBIT margins of approximately 21%. Our projected diluted share count for fiscal Q1 is approximately 45 million shares. Now I'm happy to share our initial FY2026 outlook. We expect fiscal year 2026 total ARR growth of 16%-17% year-over-year. This will be driven by subscription ARR, which we expect to increase in the range of 22%-23% year-over-year. Beginning in FY2026, we will report ARR on both a reported and an FX-adjusted basis using rates as of March 31st, 2025. For a historical comparison, please refer to page 27 of our Q4 earnings presentation, which includes FY2025 ARR rebased using these same rates.

From a full-year fiscal 2026 revenue perspective, we expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $727 million-$732 million, growing 24% at the midpoint with strong contribution from both term software licenses and SaaS. We expect total revenue of $1.13 billion-$1.14 billion, an increase of 14% at the midpoint. Moving to our full-year fiscal 2026 margin, EBIT, and cash flow outlook. We expect gross margins to be 81%-82%. This range reflects continued growth in our SaaS platform, which carries a different gross margin profile than software. We expect non-GAAP EBIT margins to be approximately 21%. Non-GAAP EBIT margins include our continued investments around additional growth-driving initiatives. We are projecting full-year free cash flow of $210 million-$215 million. This guidance reflects our transition to a cash taxpayer following the full utilization of our tax carryforward credits in fiscal 2025.

From a capital allocation standpoint, our three core priorities remain unchanged: strategic M&A, share repurchases, and reinvestment in the business. As we shared last quarter, the mix across these pillars may shift based on the opportunities we see in the market. In closing, the investments we made in FY2025 have positioned us well to capture a significantly larger market opportunity in FY2026 and beyond. While we remain mindful of the broader macro environment, we're confident in our trajectory. Our initial FY2026 guidance shows we are on pace to exceed our $1 billion total ARR and $330 million SaaS ARR targets ahead of schedule. To build on this momentum, we plan to continue to invest with focus and pace as we scale our leadership in cyber resilience. Now I will turn it back to the operator to open the line for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. To withdraw your question, simply press star one again. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Again, press star one to join the queue. Your first question comes from the line of Eric Heath with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Eric Heath (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, good morning, Sanjay and Jen. I just wanted to ask about the macro.

Can you just talk about what you're hearing talking to customers, how they're thinking about the macro at this point in the month of April, how they're thinking about cyber resilience, and if there's any changes to sales cycles at this point or close rates in the last few weeks? Lastly, Jen, just how you're thinking about these factors when you're thinking about building the guidance for fiscal 2026.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Sure. Hey, Eric. Obviously, we've been spending a lot of time looking and hearing and checking on what we should be assuming as part of our fiscal year 2026 plan. At this point, the best indicators are conversations with customers and partners. Everything we're hearing so far is that cyber resilience continues to be a priority, and we don't see anything dramatically different from our assumptions going into Q1.

Now, again, it's what we know and what we're close to. Having said that, we do have some very clear outcomes from the COVID period when we had supply chain issues. We have done things like we do not sell hardware, so we do not have any direct dependency on hardware, but customers obviously do sometimes if they are installing our software, or we give them optionality with SaaS. To net it out, I'd say it's a wait and watch, but at this point, no significant change between Q4 and Q1. Jen, do you want to add anything?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah, sure. In terms of how we thought about guidance, the first thing I would just say to you is our philosophy is consistent with historical.

I think overall, what you're hearing in our guidance is a balance between being prudent, but also understanding there's a true need for our cyber resilience products and our own internal execution. As Sanjay said, we have constant conversations with partners and suppliers. At this point, I think it's a balance, and we're feeling confident about the guidance that we've set out.

Eric Heath (Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. Jen, if I could just ask on the operating margin guidance, it's about flat year-over-year, again, for the second year. I understand the momentum in the business and the reason to invest, but just a little bit more clarity on how you're thinking about the growth versus margin trade-off, where the investments are, and just maybe some of the I would have thought we'd see some expansion kind of rolling off the Clumio acquisition last year. They had some headwinds.

Thanks.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

First of all, I would say we're really pleased with our FY2025 performance. We hit a rule of 41 for the year, a Rule of 45 for the quarter. As we think about next year, right, all of the same things we've seen around the secular tailwinds, our own internal execution, the amount of buying decisions that continue in the market lead us to want to continue to invest behind that opportunity. We are balancing those two things. Ultimately, what I would say to you is we're continuing to invest behind the opportunity while also being thoughtful around our overall profitability.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

SaaS as a business is growing that has a different margin profile. When all things are considered, we think it's a pretty good plan.

Mike Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)

Demi, we'll take the next question, please.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director)

Yeah, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the solid fiscal year and the results. A couple of questions, if I can, real quick. In terms of Clumio, I think last quarter you had alluded to that being roughly about a $24 million contribution in this last quarter. I'm curious if you could maybe help us appreciate how much Clumio has provided this last quarter and kind of the momentum you're seeing there as you integrate that acquisition and really drive that business.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

First, I'll tell you this. We're really excited. We continue to be very excited about Clumio in terms of what it does in terms of expanding to additional customers and market segments. Going forward, we shared with you the Clumio business last quarter to give you a complexion.

Going forward, because we've integrated it fully into the platform, I won't be sharing specific guidance. What I can tell you is as we think about next year's guidance, there's about 100 basis points in the number on total revenue.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

And Aaron, Sanjay here. Just on the product, Clumio brings us some very unique capabilities with our ability to handle extremely large datasets on S3 and AWS, our ability to literally backtrack to previous version in a fraction of the time, and even capability that nobody has in the business. This bodes very well for large datasets and AI-type applications, data lakes. We are really excited about it. We've put a considerable amount of focus on it for the new fiscal year, and we think it's going to be a big differentiator.

Now, of course, we're not calling out numbers specifically around Clumio because it's part of our go-to-market and part of our overall offer.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director)

Yeah. Fair enough. As a real quick follow-up, Jen, you talked about, obviously, the cross-sell upsell opportunity. I think the 30% number is consistent with what we saw, I think, last quarter, maybe the last couple of quarters. I'm curious if you could help us appreciate the context of how much your SaaS portfolio has expanded. Maybe in that definition of how do you define success? 30% goes to 50%? Or how are you thinking about that cross-sell opportunity within that SaaS customer base as you look out through the course of this next year?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say, first of all, we continue to be proud of the fact that our SaaS net dollar retention remains at 127%.

As I've shared and consistent with prior quarters, that mix is largely two-thirds upsell, one-third cross-sell. We continue to see the continued adoption of newer offerings, as well as our cyber offerings, things like Air Gap Protect, Active Directory, Cleanroom, Threat Scan. They made up 25% of our net new ARR this past quarter. While the mix is similar to prior quarters, I would say the absolute number of multi-product customers is materially up. You heard my prepared remarks, a couple of great examples of customers that are taking on more than one product. Ultimately, I think we're really pleased. You heard this be a strategic priority without giving any sort of guidance. I think if you look at other peers in the industry where we show over time two, three, four products, I mean, that's what we're looking to see over time.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director)

Yep. Thank you.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Thanks.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Param Singh with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Param Singh (Senior Analyst)

Yeah. Hi, and thank you for taking my question. Really wanted to get a sense of what do you think in the competitive landscape, how's that changed after the close of the acquisition of Veritas by Cohesity? And you also mentioned that some of the other vendors, such as Rubrik, are going to be more stronger in cybersecurity. How are you addressing that? Would love to understand that. Thank you.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Sure. Our strategy has been about resilience. We've been on the journey of helping our customers be more resilient, which, if you double-click, is giving them a strong ability to recover in the face of either a cyber attack or any other type of situation. We're very focused on that. We choose our battles carefully.

We want to go, we are, we believe with the best. Our technology with Commvault Cloud in a hybrid world is the broadest capability there is. Customers work with us, and we shared a lot of new customers, large customers that have adopted the platform to make them more resilient. Now, the overall on-premise market that some of the competitors you mentioned play in is flat to very low single digit. If you look at our growth, be it on revenue or ARR, it's healthy double digits. That means we're taking share.

Param Singh (Senior Analyst)

Right. Sanjay, if I may follow up on that. One of the earlier questions was about the investments you're making organically, right? I wanted to understand what type of workloads or capabilities you want to focus on in the next year to three years that you feel are largely untapped at this point.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Yeah.

If you look at sort of where we think that the way we've been sharing our platform, one is about anything to help customers with, it's not so much workload, but capabilities to help customers recover. Things like Cleanroom, our ability to help them recover with Active Directory Forest Level Recovery, which is really good technology, right? Very needed. If you look at what we're doing with Clumio and the Clumio capabilities, it's about scale and the ability to scale out hundreds of petabytes of data in minutes and hours versus what would take unpredictable amounts of time if customers need to roll back something.

If you look at our Rewind technology that we acquired through Appranix, which allows you to sort of rebuild at the click of a button, and literally, I mean, click of a button, entire cloud-native applications, configurations, the infrastructure that's needed to support it, and the data, of course, we're changing the game. We're changing what protection means and what resilience means. Now, with that, we're obviously enhancing emerging workloads, be there stuff that supports AI, be it things like vector databases, whether it's more cloud capabilities. We continue to enhance the workloads, but really what we're really enhancing is our ability to make customers more resilient in the face of something that brings their business down. Great. If one last one, if I could squeeze that in.

Param Singh (Senior Analyst)

Sanjay, I want to really get your view on this whole idea that backup vendors could be the source of truth into LLMs and feed into it. Some of your competitors have talked about it. I wanted to get your sense. Do you think that's realistic, or is that something that Commvault might want to get into over the next year or so?

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

We only tend to mention something when we have capabilities to support it. That's the truth. Directionally, I would say that we, as in Commvault, have been a very good source of the truth. To do that, you have to be application aware. Okay?

Even in historical applications, on-premise applications, which are tightly coupled and engineered, bringing back state, bringing back what happened, bringing back the application to the way it was when there was an error or a failure has always been where we shine. Now, with AI apps, the provenance of the applications and the componentry of that becomes very important. In fact, I would go as far as saying it's more important because of the way these apps are built and used. I'm not getting ahead of myself, but to say that we could have a very good role to play in something like that is fair.

Param Singh (Senior Analyst)

Thank you for sharing your insights, Sanjay. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.

Rudy Kessinger (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys.

On the ARR guide, could you just give us some parameters, I guess, around expected net new ARR in Q1 or just seasonality we should be in mind for the year and Q2, Q3, where your strongest year was last year? Just how should that low $150-ish million of net new ARR fall throughout the year?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah. I think what you can expect to see is typical seasonality of what we saw in FY2025. I think the baseline of $30 million-$35 million on a quarterly basis is still the right way to think about the business, especially given the strengths that we saw in particular in Q3 this past quarter.

Rudy Kessinger (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. I just want to drill down maybe I know it was already asked about the guide and what it implies from a macro standpoint.

Just maybe to be clear, you talked about record sales productivity and improvements year-to-year in Q4, etc. What does the guide imply from a sales productivity, close rate, etc. standpoint? Does it imply things are flat with last year or further improvements building on last year?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah, Rudy, I would just say I'd go back to my comments around we're being prudent about the macro, but also understanding we have a great opportunity in front of us. What I would say is we're not assuming massive gains in productivity, but we're quite confident in the durability of our model over the long term.

Rudy Kessinger (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Great. Thank you. Congrats again on the quarter.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Thanks again, Rudy.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

James Fish (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. Appreciate the questions here.

Can you just walk us through the growth on the international arena this year between EMEA and APAC, and more specifically, how you're thinking about durability of growth and really answering why won't some of the DORA-tailwinds that you guys even talked about in your prepared remarks start to subsidize throughout the year, just given that implementation date back in January?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah, thanks. I would say to you that overall, from a guidance perspective, we're expecting balanced growth where we already thought. This past quarter, we saw balanced growth across our regions, right? Overall, EMEA actually had a really strong quarter without giving you too much detail on that. Ultimately, I would say to you, as we think about next year, overall, we're incorporating what we know about the macro and also feeling quite confident in our pipelines after we talk to customers and partners.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Hey, Jim.

Also on the regulatory stuff, it's not a one-and-done. These things are constantly evolving depending on the size of the institution, depending on the branches, depending on—it's not one-and-done. It's a process that goes over time.

James Fish (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Sanjay, you had kind of talked about this, and actually, you as well, Jen, driving greater stickiness. How are we supposed to think about the packaging or perhaps bundling that you could see, particularly on the cloud or SaaS side, versus having customers purchase individual SKUs moving forward?

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Yeah. That's a great question. Let me take the second half of the question first. There will always be specific workloads that customers need to protect. That will never go away. I'm an Oracle shop. Tomorrow, I buy a company that has SAP. I need to incorporate SAP into the same single pane of glass, same policy.

That will continue. Where we have spent a lot of our time, effort, and in turn, the way we create IP is around resilience. Now, resilience is not a simple thing. Resilience means different things to different companies. We are working with this concept of a minimum viable company where, what does it take to come back to life in a minimum capacity? Let's say your data center gets messed up, or you get cyber attacked, or whatever the cause is. What is your predictable way? What is your predictable resilience to come back to life in a minimum way? Some of that is process. Some of that is skill. Some of that is technology. We are working with partners to help customers think through this and build this out.

When you look at products like Air Gap Protect and Cleanroom and AD forest level recovery and other workloads that we back up, all of this falls into the construct of resilience. Customers tend to then think about, and will continue hopefully to think about, resilience as the outcome and what do we need to do to make that happen. You will see that the stacking of what we are bringing to market makes a lot of sense, and the packaging around that makes a lot of sense. Hence, Jen's comments about being able to cross-sell other abilities. We do not distinguish between SaaS and software. You could be a software customer and still avail of our SaaS capabilities, depending on what it is. Hopefully, that added some color.

James Fish (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Thanks.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Howard Ma (Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Jen, you mentioned earlier on SaaS NRR, the mix between upsell and cross-sell. Do we expect the mix to shift more to cross-sell in FY2026, given your pace of product innovation? What I'm getting at is, correct me if I'm wrong, but when I think about your product set, in terms of a layered cake approach, you have what I call backing up cloud-native workloads, M365, Salesforce, VMs, and then you have more security-specific modules, ThreatWise and the like. I don't know if Air Gap Protect, Cleanroom Recovery fit in that bucket or the cloud-native bucket, but perhaps both.

Sanjay also mentioned that the newer modules at Active Directory, which you guys have emphasized a lot, the Cloud Rewind, Clumio. Can you kind of give us a sense of where are you on? I do not know if those are the right three buckets, but in terms of a layered cake approach, should that drive more of a shift to cross-sell then instead of upsell this year? Thank you.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah. It is a great question. I will not guide any specific mix. We do expect expansion in our multi-product adoption over time because it is a strategic focus for us. You are absolutely right as you think about the cyber products, Cleanroom, Air Gap Protect, ThreatScan, Cloud Rewind, Clumio, all Active Directory, all important products as we think about the expansion and the overall cross-sell motion.

Howard Ma (Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Got it. Thanks.

As a follow-up, and I'll keep this one a little shorter, so similar question on the term subscription side. How much of that strength is driven by improvement or perhaps stability in gross retention and renewal timing as compared to new term subscription licenses? And how much is the hybrid approach, the Commvault Cloud hybrid approach driving cross-sell of HyperScale X? Is it really the hybrid rather approach, or is it just existing customers buying more, expanding more, but not necessarily hybrid?

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Yeah. First, I will start with you. The software term license portion this quarter was particularly strong, not only in land, but also in the renewal and expansion. To your point, we absolutely see that customers come to Commvault because we can not only protect their on-premise workloads quite well, they can grow with us as they add more platforms in the cloud, etc.

I don't know, Sanjay, if you want to add anything to that.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

The hybrid, what we bring to customers with our true hybrid multi-cloud approach is what separates us from the pack. Our singular cloud platform, Commvault Cloud, you don't need to worry about having an Air Gap copy if you're an on-premise HyperScale X customer. It just happens for you. You can choose the cloud you want, and we'll make the rest of it happen. Active Directory, it's completely transparent as the service runs. We have been able to bridge that experience for our customers, regardless whether they dock with us with a HyperScale X starting point, or they come in from the cloud and then realize that, hey, it's easy enough for me to have a single pane of glass for my on-premise workloads. We have cases of both.

As our product capabilities that we've shared a little bit about today already evolve and have evolved, customers see this as the value proposition. I have said this for years. Artificial separation between a cloud or a SaaS-based capability and an on-premise capability is giving customers choices that they do not need to make or giving them things to do that they do not need to. We try and abstract that away and give you a unified approach. We are very unique in that.

Howard Ma (Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks so much.

Sanjay Mirchandani (President and CEO)

Thank you.

Jen DiRico (CFO)

Thanks for the question.

Operator (participant)

Seeing no further questions at this time, that does conclude our question and answer session. I will turn the call back over to Mike Melnyk for closing remarks.

Mike Melnyk (Head of Investor Relations)

Thanks for joining the call this morning.

For those of you who are in San Francisco, we encourage you to stop by the North Hall at RSA and visit our experience booth, 5678. We made some exciting announcements around this event, and reach out with any questions after that. Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.