eGain - Earnings Call - Q1 2021

Transcript

Speaker 0

Welcome to eGain's first quarter fiscal twenty twenty one financial results conference call. On the call today are eGain's Chief Executive Officer, Ashu Roy and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Smith. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this conference call, management will make certain forward looking statements, which convey management's expectations, beliefs, plans and objectives regarding future financial and operational performance. Forward looking statements are generally preceded by words such as believe, plan, intend, expect, anticipate or similar expressions. Forward looking statements are protected by Safe Harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward looking statements are subject to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Information on various factors that could affect eGain's results are detailed in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EGain is making these statements as of today, 11/10/2020, and assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any of these forward looking statements or information in this conference call. And in addition to GAAP results, we will discuss certain non GAAP financial measures such as non GAAP operating income. Our earnings press release can be found on the news release link on the Investor Relations page at eGain's website at egain.com.

The tables included with the earnings press release include reconciliation of the historical non GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. And lastly, a replay of this conference call will be available at the Investor Relations section of eGain's website. And now with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to eGain's CEO, Ashu Roy.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. We achieved another solid quarter for the company in Q1. Our SaaS revenue grew 29% year over year and at the high end of our guidance. We generated $5,800,000 of operating cash in the quarter, operating margin of 31% and we ended the quarter with a cash balance of $53,000,000 and no debt. The strong financial position gives us increased confidence in continuing to execute to our growth plan despite the COVID uncertainty.

We see fiscal twenty twenty one as an investment year for regain Given the typical nine month enterprise sales cycle, which if anything is being somewhat extended in the current environment, we expect our investments to have a meaningful impact only in fiscal 'twenty two on our top line. Let me share some more details around our investment plans and execution to date. As I have mentioned before, we are focusing our investments under four pillars. First is brand awareness. This fiscal year we have significantly increased our digital marketing programs, participating in virtual events, increasing ad based spend and overall thought leadership activities.

In fact, in Q1, we doubled the number of events and digital marketing activities when compared to the same quarter last year. We are also starting to see some early returns which are good. For example, traffic to our website egain.com more than doubled in Q1 year over year. This is a big jump in brand awareness. Our marketing generated leads were up nearly 90 in The U.

S. In Q1 year over year. Overall worldwide, they grew by 53%. The second pillar in which we're investing is partner enablement. First off, we have expanded our contact center partner teams with more technical and sales resources especially in The U.

S. Our pipeline with Cisco and Avaya growing nicely especially around new logos. Second, we are now building our go to market plans with some of the CRM ecosystem platforms. We have staffed up our business development team now to focus on three of those CRM platforms, Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. We see growing demand from our customers to integrate our customer engagement platform with multiple CRM systems of record in the enterprise because we go over the top and provide one consistent layer of engagement and underneath that across different brands, different business units, typically there are different CRM systems.

So it works well for the client to have one layer of engagement working across these different CRM systems. Third, we are striking new vertical based partnerships starting with financial services. These partnerships will be in the form of jointly developed, jointly branded customer engagement solutions targeting clients in financial services who need turnkey capabilities to implement conversational customer engagement with AI technology. We expect to share more progress on this front next quarter. All these investments are starting to show some results now.

The number of partner driven opportunities in our pipeline at the end of Q1 was up more than 50% year over year for us. So that's good. The third pillar for us is direct sales. Before I share the progress on our investment in sales, let me share some relevant metrics. At the end of Q1, our sales pipeline was up 35% in dollar terms year over year.

New logos now make up nearly two thirds of our sales pipeline compared to about 50% a year ago. And we see new logo opportunities continuing to trend up thanks to the investments we just talked about. This is very exciting because new logo wins are key to our top line growth in the medium term. So now back to our sales investments. We intend to double our sales capacity in fiscal twenty one and we're executing that expansion in two phases.

So in the first phase, we are on track to complete that first phase of direct sales team hiring by the November. We are substantially done with the selections and most of the people have joined, but we expect the remain remaining ones to join by the November. This team once ramped will boost our sales capacity by about 50%. The second half of that we plan to bring the next cohort of sales reps in the March timeframe of this fiscal year. Of course assuming that the markets continue to operate the way they are.

In terms of geographic focus, two thirds of our sales capacity expansion that we are targeting is in The U. S. And the rest is in Europe. As a side note, we are very pleased Todd and I with the sales talent we are attracting now. The excitement around our market opportunity, our product leadership, growth ambition, it's all fueling this talent that we are able to attract.

The fourth pillar is continued commitment to our customer success. We see big opportunity in our installed base and it continues to grow. Appliance are looking at us as an enterprise wide system of engagement across brands, across customer segments, connecting back into systems of record and communication. And more and more of our clients are now taking advantage of our innovation in thirty days program to try out our new capabilities. At the same time, given our current size and relatively small SaaS customer base of roughly 150 clients, we are susceptible to the law of small numbers.

In Q1 we had a couple of out of band one attrition and one termination which clients those put together will negatively impact our quarterly SaaS revenue by $750,000 quarterly in Q2. One of the clients decided to implement an on premise solution in their private cloud and the other consolidated our capabilities that we were offering onto a larger CRM platform. While these two put together were significant in dollar terms, we do see them as somewhat isolated incidents. This sort of volatility in a relatively concentrated client base that we have makes the need for expanding our new logos even more urgent. And here we have good news to report.

In Q1, we doubled the pace of our new logo wins year over year and we see this trend continuing in Q2, thanks to our growing pipeline and increase in new logo percentage in our pipeline. Based on new logo wins we have already had until now in Q2, we believe that we will again double our new win logo count in Q2 year over year and we expect that this momentum will continue. So this is very exciting. Equally exciting is the fact that the quality of new logos are really impressive for us. In Q1, for example, we were selected by a global automotive brand to modernize their digital customer engagement capability.

Another one was a leading U. S.-based hospital system where we were selected as one of the providers in their large contact center modernization program. And a final mention for another new logo which is a multinational manufacturer based in The U. S, a household name where we just got into the program where they are looking to execute digital transformation. These new clients, all of them, start relatively small and they scale the investment based on success.

As we build our sales momentum with new logos, we are confident that we will translate them into success at scale just like we did with a US based health insurance client we won late last year. Started with a pilot opportunity and since then, that client has standardized on our platform for the enterprise wide knowledge powered engagement. And now it's a 7 figure ARR account for us. So these new logos are a key indicator of our and leading obviously of our top line growth. Turning to products and trends, we announced our eGain messaging hub in Q1 and it has been very well received.

Our ability to deliver a one stop solution to connect, solve and optimize for messaging based engagement is unique. Unlike other solutions, we are allowing businesses to bring their own bot, their own messaging channels if they have their own private implementations, their own desktop if they already have an existing desktop for advisers. And they don't need all of that, they don't need to bring all of it, we offer all of them together but it's an open platform. This sort of convenience that combines comprehensive capability with openness is unique. In fact, the auto major I referred to as a new logo win, they were particularly impressed with our open and comprehensive messaging hub as they selected us as a partner.

And just this morning we launched another exciting new capability, eGain Smart IVR. What we are offering here is simple and radical. Simple because a business can modernize their existing IVR estate without throwing away their existing technology investments. Radical because they can deliver digital service through IVR to all smartphone users with virtual assistance and AI guidance in a matter of days without huge upfront investment. As contact centers get digitalized, IVR is a huge pain point for our clients.

They don't have an easy way to bring their existing IVR estate into their digital transformation plan. And with eGain Smart IVR, they can do just that. In fact, we have a US based retailer who is now implementing the Smart IVR solution from us, and they'll be going live with it later this month just in time for their holiday season. Very exciting. Looking at the market, the need to automate customer engagement continues to grow, especially with the COVID effect on contactless commerce and remote work.

We are thrilled with our new logo momentum in Q1 and we are confident that we can sustain it moving forward. Now that we see our sales investment showing early results in brand awareness, pipeline health and new logo wins, we are increasingly comfortable in our ability to effectively execute ambitious and accelerated growth plans and this is a good place for our team to be. With that, I'll ask Eric Smith, our Chief Financial Officer to add more color around financial operations. Eric?

Speaker 2

Great. Thanks, Ashu. Thanks very much and thanks everybody for joining us today. As Ashu noted, we are pleased to report another strong quarter, which included solid SaaS revenue growth year over year along with solid bottom line results and strong cash flow from operations. As I've noted on prior calls, we believe the combination of SaaS revenue and professional services revenue or what we call our SaaS business revenue is a useful measure to value our business on a forward looking basis and is one that I'll highlight on this call.

Looking at our financial highlights for the first quarter, SaaS revenue was up 29% year over year. Our non GAAP gross margins were 76% for the quarter, a 600 basis point improvement year over year. Non GAAP net income was $2,500,000 or $08 per share and cash provided by operations was $3,700,000 or an operating cash flow margin of 30%. Looking at the quarterly results in more detail, SaaS and professional services revenue was up 23% and comprised 91% of total revenue. For the first quarter, our SaaS revenue was $16,000,000 up 29% year over year.

Legacy revenue was $1,800,000 down 44% from a year ago driven by the continued migration of our remaining legacy customers to the cloud and the sun setting of our legacy non cloud offering. Professional services revenue was $1,300,000 for the quarter, down 19% from the first quarter last year and accounted for 7% of total revenue. Our continued product innovation is driving increased efficiencies on our service delivery driving the PS numbers down somewhat. And as a result, we have been able to redeploy key PS resources to assist in the winning of the new logos that Ashu talked about. Now looking at our non GAAP gross profits and gross margins, gross profit for the first quarter was $14,500,000 or a gross margin of 76%, up from the gross profit of $12,000,000 or a gross margin of 70% a year ago.

This was driven by a solid improvement in our subscription gross margin, which was 82%, up from 76% in the first quarter last year. Professional services gross margin was a negative 1% compared to 5% in the first quarter last year. Now turning to operations, non GAAP operating costs for the first quarter came in at $11,700,000 compared to CAD10.4 million in the year ago quarter. The increase was primarily driven by our investment in sales and marketing, which was up 20% year over year and accounted for 29% of revenue, up from 27% in the year ago quarter. As Ashu stated, we have made good progress in expanding our sales and marketing efforts and expect this level of spend to increase sequentially as many of the new hires joined towards the end of the quarter.

Our non GAAP operating income in the first quarter was $2,800,000 or an operating margin of 15% compared to an operating margin of 9% in the year ago quarter. Looking at net income, non GAAP net income for the first quarter was $2,500,000 or $08 per share. This compares to non GAAP net income of $1,700,000 or $06 per share on a basic basis and $05 per share on a diluted basis in the year ago quarter. GAAP net income for the first quarter was $2,000,000 or $07 per basic share and $06 per diluted share compared to GAAP net income of 1,200,000.0 or $04 per basic and diluted share in the year ago quarter. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows, I'm pleased to report we believe our balance sheet has never been stronger with our cash flow from operations of 5,700,000.0 a 108% increase over the prior year quarter.

We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $53,100,000 compared to $46,600,000 at 06/30/2020. Now on to our financial outlook and guidance. With the tremendous customer engagement opportunity in front of us, along with the strength of the balance sheet, our plan is to continue to invest in sales and marketing to capitalize on this opportunity. As Ashu indicated, we are encouraged by the early positive signs from this increased investment to date. And given the length of the enterprise sales cycle and the pattern of new logos starting small and expanding, we expect the increased investments in sales and marketing to further accelerate our growth in fiscal twenty twenty two.

To illustrate this point, the average ARR for new logos signed in Q1 came in at around $115,000 whereas if you look at the existing SaaS customers, the average ARR is north of $300,000 So with our continued focus on customer success, we believe these new logos present a significant opportunity for expansion as Ashu indicated on some of the recent successes that we've experienced. Now finally, before getting into the actual guidance numbers, a few additional comments. So just to reiterate the point that Ashu made, during the quarter we had two reductions, one a reduction and the other a termination that Ashu referenced, which would impact our Q2 revenue by about $750,000 reduction from Q1. And the other point I wanted to mention, as discussed before, as a result of certain customer contract changes which included the increase in their minimum payments or minimum commitments, we are not expecting the approximately $150,000 increase in seasonal business when you look back to Q2 a year ago. And finally, as noted on our last call, given the continued level of uncertainty in the current business environment, we have elected to continue to only provide quarterly guidance for now, but we'll revisit this as the year progresses.

So for the fiscal twenty twenty one second quarter ended 12/31/2020, we expect SaaS revenue of between $15,200,000 to $15,600,000 which would represent growth of between 8% to 11% year over year. Beyond Q2, based upon our upcoming renewals for the year and current pipeline activity, we expect SaaS revenue to increase sequentially in Q3 and in Q4. Looking at SaaS and professional services revenue, we expect that to be between $16,600,000 and $17,100,000 which would represent growth of between 58% year over year and total revenue of $18,100,000 to $18,700,000 which would represent growth between zero zero and zero three dollars year over year. GAAP net loss of $1,000,000 to breakeven or negative $03 to $00 per basic share and non GAAP net loss of $500,000 to net income of $05,000,000 or a negative $02 per basic share to $02 per diluted share. We assume a diluted share count of 32,800,000.0 for the second fiscal quarter and for the fiscal year.

Lastly, on the Investor Relations front, we will be participating in multiple virtual investor conferences this month. Tomorrow, we will be participating in the ROTH Technology Virtual Conference. The following day we'll be participating in the Benchmark Technology one on one Investor Virtual Conference. And then a week from now on November 17, we will also be participating in the Craig Hallum Alpha Select Virtual Conference and on the nineteenth we'll be participating in the tenth Annual Needham Virtual SaaS one on one Conference. We hope to see some of you virtually at these conferences.

This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we will now open the call for questions.

Speaker 3

The first question will come from Philip Rigby with D. A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hi there. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to start by circling back on 2Q guidance. I really appreciate the insights and numbers you all provided there. Can you just give us a bit more color on the customers on the attrition customer and the termination customer?

Maybe what led to that decision? Was it a cost based decision to reduce spend or competitive pressures? Any color you can give there would be really helpful.

Speaker 1

Sure. I can take that. This is Ashu here. So the one that we talked about reducing and one we talked about terminating, the one that was reducing, they use multiple applications from us. And they decided that they wanted to bring the solution into their private cloud because of security reasons that they they felt that they were exposing themselves to.

We obviously have the best security and the best cloud certifications, but their IT organization felt that they needed to bring capability like that in house, in house meaning in their private cloud. So they still continue to use the other parts of our platform, but they took a significant chunk of the digital engagement and and took it in house. So that was one. The second one was, I believe more a change in the c level suite of the company. That is our assessment.

The CEO changed in that organization. It's a multibillion dollar business that we are talking about. And and he kind of brought in a new crew who decided that they wanted to standardize. They had done it before, and they wanted to standardize on one CRM platform. They told us about it, and it was something where we were doing a really good job.

They were very happy with us, but it was a decision on their part to, standardize. And so that was the, the logic for it from what they told us.

Speaker 5

Very helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 4

I have a question on your demo initiatives like Fast Track or Innovation in 30. Could you talk about what you're seeing in terms of appetite for the demos? Maybe now relative to what you're seeing in the early innings of the lockdown. And then if you could maybe talk about what you've seen in terms of conversion of customers taking advantage of these demos. Be really interested to get into that.

Speaker 1

Okay. Yeah. This I I did not really touch on that as much as I could have or should have, but the whole these both the demo and the innovation in thirty days, these are they are oversubscribed right now. In fact, we are, as Eric mentioned in his remarks, we are moving some of the spare capacity we have on the services team into doing more of those trials and demos because there is a lot of appetite, particularly around two areas, virtual assistance and messaging. Those are really active right now.

In fact so we have seen some great results from that. And the conversion we are seeing right now with those is right around, let's say, north of 50%. So both one and two will end up actually going into an investment mode. And and the others, not not because they think it doesn't work, but because they don't have a budget right now. In the current environment, we are seeing a lot of people saying they've run out of budget in the second half of this calendar year.

And so that's something we know will hopefully start to come back in with a new calendar year. Okay, thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you. The next question will come from Koji Ikeda with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Thanks for taking my questions. Hey guys, nice quarter on that SaaS growth line. I wanted to dig deeper on the SaaS revenue growth guide for the second quarter. And just thinking about excluding the customer attrition and that contract change for the prior seasonal business, it looks like the SaaS growth guide is somewhere mid teens. And that's against an easy comp too.

So is there anything else we should be aware of in that fiscal second quarter? And then just thinking a bit further out, I know you're not guiding to the full year today, but just thinking about the second half growth comps versus the first half, is there any sort of second half seasonality or large upcoming renewals that we should be aware of?

Speaker 2

Hi, Koji. This is Eric. I'll take the question. So I think just for one point of clarification, if you look back, and I alluded to the seasonality, I think in the past, we have seen a big spike. So if look last year from Q1 to Q2, there was a significant increase.

So I think that element we have found has been reduced. So I would say that this is a fairly tough comp in relation to that component. And then I think to the point that Ashu made, what we have seen is that for some of these new logos, although the business activity is healthy, we've seen some constraints on the level of budget spending, the expectation that this will pick up in Q3 of our fiscal year. And so that also has contributed to that, the guide that we've provided.

Speaker 6

And then

Speaker 2

I think, and then to the second point, I think, you know, from our perspective, and obviously I'm always subject to change when we just look at the upcoming renewals at both the dollar value and sort of the timing of them, we don't see anything significant, from that regard. And again, over time we've seen the seasonality, somewhat subside. Nothing too out of the ordinary that we expect as of now on that.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Eric, for that. That's actually really, really helpful. I wanted to ask a question on the Avaya partnership, specifically on the Avaya partnership. I recently saw a press release from another vendor in the space expanding its partnership with Avaya. So so I guess thinking about that partnership, you know, does that partnership announcement change anything with eGain's relationship, with Avaya from a technology partner standpoint and also from a go to market strategy?

Speaker 1

Yeah. No. I know what you mean. This is Ashu here, Koji. Yes.

So, no. The short answer before I give you a little more color is no. Nothing changes. And, the long version of the responses, as you know, there are two parts to our partnership with Avaya, and I'm just focusing on Avaya. One is the the digital capabilities of our platform which are private labeled and OEM ed as Avaya CCED.

And then there is the resell component, which is all the knowledge and AI solutions, which are resold as Egan branded. So both those still continue to be active and we are seeing the pipeline continuing to mature and grow. So we hope to and expect to start to share some of the results from the Avaya partnership in Q2, meaning the quarter we are in right now and then moving forward.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks, Ashu. Thanks for that. Last question for me and I'll jump back into the queue. I'm just thinking about overall sales force ramp today.

You know, where are you at today? And how long are you thinking it will take this new November cohort sales cohort to become fully ramped in your view? Thanks for taking my questions.

Speaker 1

Sure, Tim. So I think we, like I said, about 50% of our planned growth, we are increasing our sales capacity, doubling it by the end of this fiscal year from where we were at the end of fiscal twenty one. And the first half of that increase is gonna be done by November of this month's end. And we expect that that cohort will become productive by '1, right, six months of ramp. And so we see a six month ramp in most of these sales hires.

And then the second cohort we're looking to bring on board, which is the other 50% increase in the March timeframe of fiscal 'twenty one.

Speaker 6

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Speaker 3

Thank you. The next question will come from Richard Baldry with Roth Capital. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Thanks. Earlier in the call, I think I heard you say that you felt some of the sales cycles are extending. I'm sort of curious if you can unpack that a bit. I would have felt that maybe COVID would pressure people to make some decisions faster. You've And talked about getting in some smaller deals for new logo deals that kind of seed the world first and land and expand later.

I would have thought those would be faster. So can you maybe talk about that a little? I may have just misheard. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Sure. So

Speaker 1

that is you're right and you heard it correct. So let me try to add some more detail to that. So what we're seeing is with existing customers they are doing more with us and that buying pace has picked up incrementally, you know, and also the the cadence has picked up. With new logos, what we are seeing is not not as much that the entire sales cycle has extended, but the fact that they are chunking it a little bit. So they're starting small, and then they're scaling it.

And there's the added bit, which we have heard a few times now, where people are saying we we're out of budget for this calendar year, and we will have a bigger budget next year. So let's do a smaller deal now and we'll do more later. So that's sort of the extension of the sales cycle on new logos that I was referring to.

Speaker 7

Okay. And can you talk about in terms of the overall platform, your feeling on its completeness in this world, some sort of a concept of you can do a bring your own bot. Do you feel like there could be a need to go out and buy some things like bots for people who do want to have sort of an in house preference offered up as well or different flavors of those things that can sort of react differently in different environments? I guess that against the backdrop of your, you know, cash setting a new high in the quarter. Thanks.

Speaker 1

Sure. Sure. So I may have somehow conveyed the wrong impression here. What I meant with the conversation on the messaging hub was that we have a messaging hub solution that offers all those capabilities to begin with as part of our solution. That's the first thing.

Right? So we have the bot. We have the channel connectivity. We have the desktop. What we are seeing in the enterprises that we are selling into, for instance, the auto company that I talked about, they already have an enterprise wide initiative around bots.

So when you go into these conversations, they like the fact that you have your own, but they also wanna make sure that whatever they have built and there are lots of domain specific bots that people are developing now. And so that's where the ability to bring your own domain specific bot becomes quite important. So that was the part I was referring to. Now to the second point that you mentioned about looking at gaps in our solution and whether we should go out, yes, I think that we have the opportunity and we do see a lot of,

Speaker 4

I guess,

Speaker 1

mostly smaller companies, much smaller than us who have some interesting technology. We keep looking at it and that's an area that is of interest to us.

Speaker 7

And last would be the maintenance revenue line, as I back it out, only fell very narrowly in the quarter and it had been on a pretty steady downtrend. Is there anything sort of unusual in that? Any sort of change in your expectation for how long it will take to sunset that maintenance revenue base? Thanks.

Speaker 1

Eric, do have thoughts on that?

Speaker 2

I do, yes. So I think it was just more of a timing issue. I think absolutely if anything we've accelerated our push for that migration. So certainly as we look forward there's plenty of on premise customers that are in the pipeline to make that shift. Certainly would expect that to continue to move downwards in future quarters.

Speaker 7

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Thank you. The next question will come from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig Hallum. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Great. Thanks for taking my questions guys. Several for me. First on the usage, I think you commented on a decent amount of usage revenue in March, a little bit less in June. Just can you continue that trajectory?

What did you see with respect to usage in the September quarter versus prior quarters?

Speaker 2

Eric? So think that Jeff apologies maybe if you could clarify the question just a little bit more just to make sure we're responding

Speaker 8

correctly. Yes. I mean you've got some volume exposed revenue streams and I think you've commented in both of the prior quarters about usage. And I think you had expressed that March was larger usage than June. And I think the expectation was that that amount would continue to taper off.

So I'm just trying to get a sense of magnitude and directionally what you saw on the usage based, transactionally based, any of the revenue streams that react to volumes.

Speaker 2

Good. Thanks for the clarification. Yes, think we definitely have seen that continue to taper off. I think given the pricing model that we have in place we've sort of worked with many of our customers that had overages that have now sort of worked into a higher minimum. And so that usage amount has dropped off.

And as I indicated last year, we saw that spike up into Q2 and again this year we really don't anticipate that same level of spike based upon the changes.

Speaker 8

Okay. That's helpful. And then on the two customers, the one that decided to take the solution in house, maybe Ashu, can

Speaker 0

you just expand on that

Speaker 8

a little bit? What was in terms of going in house, what were they using prior to going in house? And once they go in house, is it is it a build it your you know, build your own or or they use a different premise based packaged, you know, solution? Just what what does that look like in terms of what they're going from and to?

Speaker 1

Good question. Yeah. So before they they started with us, they had an on prem solution. They kinda moved into the cloud with us. And I think what they're going with now is a combination of their own internal development.

It's a large organization, big IT shop internally, and some on premise software that they have from an existing vendor. But mostly, they are kind of taking all the intelligence and building it into their own internally developed solution.

Speaker 9

Okay.

Speaker 1

And not too many businesses in the world can afford to do that. These guys are are super large, which is how they can. Yeah.

Speaker 8

Yeah. Yep. That makes sense. And and then on the CRM, the the the other customer, what were they using from you? What specific functionality was it?

And then you said, like, I'm curious, sounded like some embedded solution in the CRM was able to ultimately Yeah, place the capability you

Speaker 1

digital engagement so largely chat and self-service, our web based self-service. Yes.

Speaker 8

Okay. And then just one last one for me. The IVR replacement opportunity, I mean I think you had some press out today and you emphasized it again tonight. You just talk in a little more specifics exactly what that looks like? You've got a legacy IVR solution.

What's how does that view how does that look to the consumer? What exactly are you bringing and how does it extend the lifecycle of the IVR? I get a fair volume of questions and a little bit of confusion around that.

Speaker 1

Sure, okay. So there are three parts to it. The first part is that let's take an IVR from, in this case I'll give you the example of the retailer that we are working with that will make it real. So what what the retail business has is an existing IVR from one of the big vendors. And what we're doing is going into their IVR design studio, we have a piece of code that will just plug into one of the nodes software points of the IVR tree.

So press 9, let's say, and it automatically detects the fact that you're calling from a a smartphone. And based on decisioning that the business would set up, you would get an option to say, would you like to chat with us on SMS, let's say. And you say yes. You start to talk on SMS with the customer. At that point, they still can retain the position in the IVR, but they they're now chatting on SMS.

And in that SMS, they can, and in this case, they will have our virtual assistant doing the automated responses to begin with. And if the customer then gets escalated, they'll go to a human chat agent on the other side on our desktop, eGain desktop, and that conversation will conclude. So that's the doing part of it, both the connect part and the solve part. And then there is the analytics on top to make sure that you we can do that. We we have the ability to do analytics across IVR, across digital, across the contact center, so end to end analytics.

So all those three pieces together.

Speaker 8

Yes, very helpful. Thanks so much.

Speaker 3

Thank you for the question. The next question will come from Mark Schappel with Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Eric, let me start with you. Help me if you could better understand the SaaS revenue guide for fiscal 2Q. It appears that even with the $750,000 reduction and termination, growth appears to be significantly lower than say the past eighteen months or so.

Speaker 4

Help me with

Speaker 9

the puts and takes there.

Speaker 2

So I think in addition to the $7.50, I also indicated the fact that there was about this one fifty k of seasonality that we weren't expecting this quarter that we saw last quarter. And then from a business standpoint, I think as we've seen this increased focus on the new logos, I think some of these initial deals that we've been closing have started off smaller, which I think is contributing to this in this environment. But over time we would expect that to pick up.

Speaker 9

Okay, great. Thank you. And then, Ashu, with respect to the priority or initiative to expand your partnerships to the CRM vendors, how far along are you with respect to partnerships with the various CRM vendors?

Speaker 1

Some of them are more advanced than others. But I would say that we are still probably six months away from meaningful pipeline that we can have. And so I expect that the CRM partnerships will yield new business to us in the '1, so beginning fiscal 'twenty two.

Speaker 9

Great, thank you. That's all for me. Sure.

Speaker 3

Thank you. The next question will come from Ryan MacDonald with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hi, thanks for the question. This is Alex on for Ryan. It was announced that the company achieved in process status with FedRAMP. What do you expect to receive in full FedRAMP authorization? Can you give us any sense of what you're seeing with the government vertical from a pipeline perspective?

Speaker 1

So at this time our expectation, and again, this is dependent on the certification authorities and whatever we discover in the process of certification that we have to remedy. And we are actively in the process as we speak. The expectation is that we should be certified by calendar q '2 in '21, calendar q '2.

Speaker 5

Okay. Great. And then with the recent shutdown occurring in EMEA, you give us a sense of what you're seeing from customers over the past couple of weeks? Do you think that businesses, are now positioned better to operate effectively in the lockdown environment versus what was happening, before COVID? And as well as what are you kinda seeing in EMEA with elongated sales cycles as well?

Speaker 1

Yeah. We've seen a I don't know if the last two weeks change has quite rippled through our business. But what we have seen up until say a month ago and leading up to now is that businesses have kind of accommodated operating in EMEA around the new rules. But I am not sure how the recent lockdown say in Europe and particularly The UK is going to affect things. Hard to say.

But I would say that leading up to that we were seeing reasonable business activity mostly around more automation, more digitalization. So all the things we talked about in The U. S, we see that there as well.

Speaker 5

Great, thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'll turn it back to our speakers.

Speaker 2

Great. Well, thanks, operator, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. And look forward to updating you when we finish up our Q2. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's event. You may now disconnect your lines.