eGain - Earnings Call - Q3 2020

Transcript

Speaker 0

Welcome to the eGain Fiscal twenty twenty Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Jim Byers of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to eGain's third quarter fiscal twenty twenty 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 in material respects. 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, 05/07/2020, and assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward looking information on this conference call. In addition to GAAP results, we will also discuss certain non GAAP financial measures such as non GAAP operating income.

Our earnings press release can be found in 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. In addition, a replay of this conference call will also be available on 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 2

Thank you, Jim and hello everyone. We are pleased to report solid financial results for the third quarter. But before I go there, let me share a quick update on COVID-nineteen with respect to our business. As the pandemic unfolded in March, we adjusted our business and within days, we successfully transitioned our worldwide teams to a 100% work from home operation with no business interruption and no material impact to our service delivery capabilities. In short, our business continuity plans worked as expected.

That was good. Turning to the business impact of COVID-nineteen, some of our deals, especially new logos, flipped in March as purchasing decisions stalled. Some of those stalled deals have been closed in April and most others remain engaged and they look to resume once lockdown restriction leave. At the same time, we saw a positive increase in business from our customers looking to deflect more phone interactions to digital and drive more automation. Many of our clients successfully handled customer contact surges with our solutions, driving more self-service and more digital engagement.

In addition, they also enabled workforces and reconfigured them with our knowledge and guidance solutions. In fact, some of our clients who were impacted by the sudden shutdown of their global operations, especially on BPOs, managed to use our knowledge and guidance solutions to empower their field and store staff who are not contact center folks to resolve customer queries in the interim. So, agile and flexible responses enabled by our solutions. Some other customers activated our virtual assistant to offer conversational self-service, reducing pressure on their contact centers. For example, a European insurance client handled a 700% increase in customer contact.

They are a life insurance provider. You can imagine that concern from customers using our self-service solution and logic solution. In North America, telco client reconfigured thousands of field personnel and store staff to handle a double increase in their digital customer contact, 100% increase. A financial services client in North America also doubled their use of virtual assistance and digital service from us as customers, their customers look for more help. Faced with this disruption, now we see most businesses recognizing that digital engagement is no longer an add on to voice.

In fact, digital is the new voice. Once the lockdowns relax, we expect to see acceleration in demand for our solution. In fact, in the last month, in April, we already seeing growing interest from prospects in our solutions. Having said that, we do anticipate some negative impact in the short term as investment decisions get delayed and projects pause because of the COVID-nineteen situation. And those will take some time to spin back up.

Like most technology providers, we will be subject to the economic slowdown. However, we believe that our exposure should be limited because first, roughly 90% of our existing clients are large enterprises. That is businesses with over a billion dollars in annual revenue. This includes government organizations as well. Second, 75% of our business, total business is in the verticals of banking, financials, insurance, telco, government, and healthcare.

And we expect that these verticals should not be significantly impacted, though there will be some impact. 9% of our business comes from retail, which we think will be impacted. And finally, 2% comes from travel and hospitality, which has been severely impacted as we know, and we can see that that will result in reduced demand as well as customer churn and reduction in the travel and hospitality sector. So, our view on the whole COVID-nineteen situation with respect to our business is that while in the short term, have seen deal slippage. We have been able to deliver strong results with healthy bookings in the March.

And now let's turn to the outlook for the near future and the medium term. So before I go there, let me talk about business performance for the quarter. We saw healthy bookings, new bookings with a mixture of new logos and strong expansion in existing clients. Some notable wins, we had a new logo, which was a financial services Fortune 500 company in The US, another new logo, which is an insurance provider in Europe. And the third one, is notable, a new logo, which is a large utility company in The US.

On the expansion side, we had some strong expansion with health services and insurance provider in The US. We had good expansion on knowledge and guidance solutions with a large telco in Europe. And we had good omni channel desktop expansion with a large insurance company in Europe. So all in all, a balanced, good booking environment, but we did have some new logo slippage as I mentioned in March, but those not all of them, but roughly half of them we managed to close in April. Turning to our field and our partners.

In the last quarter, we announced our OEM agreement with Avaya. This was followed by the announcement of general availability of the product in March. I have to say that this is a significant milestone in our strategic partnership with Avaya. It is early days, but now we are on the runway, jointly executing our go to market plan with them to roll this compelling digital solution out to the global customer base of Avaya, Avaya Elite customers to be precise. And we are working with their field partners to do so.

We expect this partnership to favorably impact our top line in fiscal twenty one. Looking ahead, we are quite bullish about our business despite the short term COVID uncertainty. Our digital customer engagement platform is increasingly become positive for organizations making the urgent shift to digital. And it's not just about digital connection with customers, which is the foundation, but it's equally about solving the problems and having intelligent automated conversations through those digital channels. And then finally, it's about optimization and learning from those conversations.

So with our solution and our product leadership, which includes all these three components of digital connectivity, conversational automation and guidance and analytics and learning. We believe that our leadership, which is corroborated by the field and market analysts is second to none. In fact, Forrester Research in their recent digital customer service wave rated eGain number one in current product offerings. In the current product offerings, we were number one. Much of what analysts consider a vision for the future, we deliver today.

So, we are accelerating in the term. Thanks to our healthy balance sheet and business performance. We continue to increase our investment in products and partnerships. Two areas where we see significant opportunities in the medium term. With that, I'll ask Eric Smith, our Chief Financial Officer, to add more color on our financial performance.

Eric?

Speaker 3

Great. Thanks, Ashu, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. As Ashu mentioned, we had solid third quarter results all around with top and bottom line results that exceeded our guidance and were ahead of Street consensus, and we delivered these results while transitioning our business to a work from home operation without missing a beat. As I noted last quarter, as we have shifted to a 100% SaaS business, substantially all of our professional services are now for our SaaS customers, so we believe the combination of SaaS revenue and professional services as a useful measure to value our business on a forward looking basis. Looking at the financial highlights for Q3, SaaS revenue was up 26% year over year and 5% sequentially.

Non GAAP net income was 2,400,000.0 or $08 per share on a basic and $07 per share on a diluted basis and cash provided by operations for the quarter was 415,000 and that puts us at 8,500,000.0 cash from operations year to date. And finally, we ended the quarter with $40,700,000 in cash with no debt. Now looking at our quarterly results in more detail, starting with revenue. For Q3 our SaaS and professional services revenue was $16,300,000 and comprised 89% of our total revenue and 20% year over year. This highlights our progress towards our long term target model of total revenue growth of between 2025%.

SaaS revenue was $14,800,000 up 26% year over year and accounted for 81% of our total revenue in Q3. On a sequential basis, SaaS revenue grew 5% over Q2 and year to date SaaS revenue was up 24% year over year. Our renewals and retentions continue to be in line during the quarter and the trailing twelve month SaaS retention rates remain healthy with gross retention in the low 90 range and our net retention which includes upsell and uplift continues to be above 100%. Legacy revenue was $2,100,000 down 40% from the year ago quarter and down 9% sequentially from Q2, driven by the continued migration of our legacy customers and some increased terminations. Legacy accounted for 11% of our total revenue in the quarter, which puts us ahead of our plan to reduce legacy revenue to below 10% of total revenue on a quarterly basis by the 2020.

Professional services revenue was 1,400,000.0 or 8% of total revenue. This was down 15% from 1,700,000.0 in the year ago quarter. As we've noted before, our goal was to get PS revenue into the high single digits as a percentage of total revenue, so this is in line. However, the timing of the completion of certain engagements resulted in the sequential decline this quarter, but when I look at it for the fiscal year, we are still tracking to our internal target for PS revenue. Now looking at non GAAP gross profits and gross margins, gross profit for the third quarter was $13,000,000 or a gross margin of 71% compared to gross profit of $11,900,000 or a gross margin of 70% a year ago.

Our subscription gross margin was 78% in Q3, up 100 basis points from the prior year. PS margin was negatively impacted in the quarter in part due to the timing issue I just mentioned. In addition, we ramped hiring to support the increased demand we are seeing for the business around the PS, and so margins we expect to continue to be impacted while these new members ramp up their productivity in the upcoming quarter. Now turning to operations, non GAAP operating costs for the third quarter came in at $10,700,000 compared to $9,500,000 in the year ago quarter. For the first two months of the quarter, we continued to ramp our sales and marketing spend, but this was obviously impacted as travel restrictions were put in place in March.

As Ashu mentioned, we have and will continue to ramp our investments in the delivery and product innovation side that will of course be very prudent in this current environment. Our non GAAP operating income in the third quarter was $2,300,000 or an operating margin of 12%, which was significantly ahead of our guidance. Now looking at net income, non GAAP net income for the third quarter was $2,400,000 or $08 per share on a basic and $07 per share on a diluted basis. This compares to non GAAP net income of 2,000,000 or $07 per share on a basic and $06 per share on a diluted basis in the year ago quarter. GAAP net income for the third quarter was $1,900,000 or $06 per share compared to $1,400,000 or $05 per share in the year ago quarter.

Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows, total cash and cash equivalents as of March 31 was $40,700,000 compared to $31,900,000 at June 3039, and cash provided by operations during the quarter was $415,000 and year to date cash provided by operations was $8,500,000 or an operating cash flow margin of 16%. Now turning to our financial outlook and guidance, before providing revenue guidance a few points to highlight. We have spent the last sixty days or so assessing the potential impact that COVID-nineteen could have on our customer base and our business going forward. As as Ashu mentioned, approximately 90% of our ARR is with customers that have 1,000,000,000 in revenue or large government organizations, and then drilling down into the spread by vertical banking financial services insurance, telco, healthcare, and government make up close to 75% of our total ARR with retail following at 9%, and finally travel and hospitality at 2%. So this customer distribution has resulted in limited impact to our business in the short term, but again, as Ashu indicated, regardless of size of vertical, we don't expect any business to be completely immune from the disruption and are therefore looking at making adjustments accordingly.

Again, as Ashu indicated, we have seen a few deals slip as businesses deal with the impact of COVID nineteen, and certainly from a new logo acquisition standpoint until business normalizes we'll expect to see challenges in that area, and we've reflected this in our updated fiscal twenty guidance. Some other points I want to highlight as it pertains to our guidance, as I mentioned earlier, test revenue plus professional services is a metric that is becoming increasingly relevant for us. We believe it is the best measure of the overall growth rates of our core business going forward as our total revenue growth has been negatively impacted this year by the declining legacy business that has been faster than originally planned with our accelerated push to migrate our remaining on premise customers to the cloud. And finally, as the guidance we have previously provided and will be updating today is in constant currency, carries an update on the FX impact year to date, which we have factored into this guidance. For our SaaS revenue, the negative impact for the year is $416,000 and for total revenue it's a negative 686,000.

Looking to Q4, if the US dollar to British pound exchange rate remains at the current levels, don't anticipate a significant further impact on the revenue for the remainder of the fiscal year. Now on to our guidance. For fiscal twenty twenty year, we provide updated guidance for SaaS revenue of between $56,000,000 to $56,500,000 on a constant currency basis, which would represent growth between 2526% year over year. SaaS and professional services revenue of between 62.3 and 63,000,000 on a constant currency basis, which would represent growth of between 2021% year over year. Total revenue for the fiscal twenty twenty full year of between $71,700,000 to $72,400,000 on a constant currency basis, which would represent growth of between seven percent and eight percent year over year and finally non GAAP net income of between $6,500,000 to $7,500,000 or $0.20 to $0.23 per diluted share.

Before my closing remarks, just a couple of investor relations updates. Egan will be participating in three virtual investor conferences later this month. We will be participating in the Oppenheimer Virtual Emerging Growth Conference taking place twelfth May. We will be presenting at the Needham and Company Virtual Technology and Media Conference on May 20, and we'll be participating in the Craig Hallum Virtual Institutional Investor Conference taking place May 27. We hope to see some of you virtually at these conferences.

So in closing, as we navigate through these uncertain times, it's become increasingly clear to us that a digital customer engagement platform is becoming a necessity for organizations making the urgent shift to digital. Our product leadership is corroborated by clients, partners, and market analysts. As Ashu stated, Forrester Research, their new digital customer service wave rated eGain number one in the current product offering, much of what analysts consider vision we deliver today, so we are accelerating in this turn. Thanks to our balance sheet and business performance, we are increasing our investments in products and partnerships, two areas where we see significant opportunities in the medium term. This concludes our prepared remarks.

Operator, we will now open the call for questions.

Speaker 0

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. When it is your turn to ask a question, you will hear an audible prompt letting you know that your line is open and live. Please be sure to state your name before posing your question.

Again, please press star one to ask a question. We will pause momentarily to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We will take our first question. This comes from Koji Ikeda with Oppenheimer.

Speaker 4

And Eric, nice to hear your voices, and hope you and your family and friends are all safe out there in these weird times. First question is here is on the guidance for SaaS revenue for the fourth quarter. It calls for growth to accelerate, I think. So what's giving you that confidence? How much of that acceleration is being driven by push deals that already closed?

And I guess, is there anything else in there that we should be aware of?

Speaker 3

I think thanks, Rajee. Thanks for the the words. Yeah. I think we're everything is doing well, and I hope hopefully, the same for you. So I think when you look at the actual numbers, the SAS numbers on a sequential basis are going to be flat to declining is what we've guided.

So although that has resulted in, the strong results for q three combined with the q four numbers give us the increased overall guidance for the year. But, certainly, we've factored some impact of the slip deals into the guidance that we've provided that provides the numbers that we've outlined.

Speaker 4

Eric, that's super helpful. Thank you. And maybe a big picture question on the go to market for either you or Ashu is, how are you guys thinking about the ability to close the split between new deals and execute upsells here over the next six to nine months? And then

Speaker 2

I just want to follow-up. This is Ashu here. Hi, Raju. Yeah. So I do think that new logo acquisition will be slower in the next six to nine months.

It will happen. We are seeing new deals close even in this quarter, but we do see sales cycles getting a little longer, especially on some of the larger deals that are new logos. On the expansion opportunities, I believe that the pickup or the reset will be faster. Already seeing some of those larger deals, which are in the expansion bucket are starting to spin back up. So, I think that the expansion side will recover faster.

The new logo side is gonna be slower to recover.

Speaker 4

Got it. Got it. Thank you. And then just my last question here is thinking about the 25% of the companies that are in, I guess you could call it troubled industries today. What is eGain doing to work with those customers that are that could be negatively impacted in that 25% bucket?

Thank you for taking my questions.

Speaker 2

Sure. A couple of things. One, we are trying to understand what the nature of their challenges. I mean, for instance, if I take an example of a few clients in the travel and hospitality sector, their business is just the bottom has fallen under it. So, what we are saying is, can we reduce the commitment that they have because their needs have suddenly gone down.

So try to reduce that and then build back up as their business picks up. And in all this, it's about making sure we are helping the customer through the tough time. And hopefully then as business picks back up, we get back to a better place with them. And then the second thing we're seeing is making sure that if there are any concerns around particular aspects of applications that are used with us, where the demand may have shifted into other channels. For instance, some customers who maybe have agent based applications from us, certainly feel like their agent utilization has gone down, but they would like to drive more self-service.

And we are providing that licensing flexibility on our platform. It's something that our customers appreciate. And that's another thing we are doing for them.

Speaker 4

Thank you for taking my questions.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Ryan MacDonald with Needham. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 5

Hi, Ashu and Eric. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess, first, you mentioned that you obviously have started to see some of the deals that slipped closed in April. I'm just curious to see what you're seeing in terms of pipeline and conversion outside of those slipped deals. Are you starting to see sort of an increase back in activity or maybe a little bit more disruption than you expected?

Speaker 2

So, hey, Ryan, this is Ashu here. So yes, it's a good question. What we are seeing so far is that deals that are large and in the pipe for let's say one or two months out. They are likely gonna shift by another couple of months before they get to the same stage of imminent closure, right? So, you're seeing that shift.

I think a quarter shift is what we think we are anticipating in many of those cases. The priorities are not changing. We don't sense that, but we are definitely seeing a quarter or so shift in that buying pattern. On the other hand, interestingly, we are seeing early stage pipeline building surprisingly well in April and in May. It's not surprising, but it's good to see because what we're seeing is a lot of companies are actually starting up engagement saying we need to get better at our digital customer engagements capabilities.

So that's what we have seen so far.

Speaker 5

Excellent, thanks. And then in terms of the customers that are sort of potentially struggling right now, are you offering anything around the flexible billing terms as a part of assisting them and trying to understand the needs that they have right now given that their businesses have slowed down?

Speaker 2

It's a good question. It's something that we have an open mind toward, but what we are seeing is given our customers are very large businesses, as we mentioned, 90% of our customers by revenue are billion dollar plus companies or government organizations. We have not seen that pressure yet, in the one case that I have heard of, and that too is a smaller business. So I think we will have that kind of activity in our, that 10% zone, but not in the other 90%. But Eric, any other comments on that?

Speaker 3

No, I think that's accurate, Ashu. You know, it's it's a a very small number of customers have reached out to us, and if anything, it's maybe delaying, you know, moving to a quarterly billing cycle from an annual one, that type of delay, but nothing significant for us to date.

Speaker 5

Got it. And then just one more follow-up. In terms of implementations and those in process or in the pipeline, have you been able to complete those or work through those a 100% remotely? Or is there any aspect where you need to be on premise? That's it for me.

Speaker 2

Right. So there are two parts to that. One is what we can do. And the second is what the customer can and is willing to do. On our end, we are able to do a 100% of our work remotely.

So that is good. On the other hand, we have had quite a few cases where customer project teams have gotten disrupted or they have been pulled into taking care of other business continuity kind of priorities within their business. And so that has paused some of these projects because of lack of resources in their side, but that we are starting to see that start starting to pick back up, but that we have seen.

Speaker 0

Our next question will come from Richard Baldry with Roth Capital. Excuse me. Our next question will come from Mark Chappell with Benchmark. One moment, please. Caller, please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hi, thank you for taking my question and nice job on the quarter. Ash, starting with you, healthcare has been one of your target verticals, maybe not your largest, but definitely one of interest. Was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what areas of healthcare you have been seeing your solutions deployed historically.

Speaker 2

Okay, so in healthcare, what we're seeing is more and more these providers are starting to adopt our digital engagement capabilities. And that's an area where we see even through our partners more interest. That's something we are pushing on. And then the other area is the payer side, which you could put into insurance or you could put it into healthcare, but we see the healthcare aspect. So for instance, providers like the Blues, we are seeing some good success in, and those are larger opportunities where they are, again, toward more and more digitalization of their customer engagement.

So, in both areas, we are seeing demand, but I would say the size of opportunities is larger on the payer side, but the number of opportunities is larger on the provider side.

Speaker 6

Okay, great. In healthcare, there's been a lot of talk of late just because of what's going on with respect to telehealth. And it strikes me that messaging could play a large role there. And I know it's early days, but I was just wondering if any healthcare providers have been approaching you or you're in any discussions with healthcare providers regarding possibly helping out in the telehealth front.

Speaker 2

We have had a few of our customers who are in the health space asking for messaging based solutions. We have engaged with them, but broadly what we see is our sweet spot is in digital plus automation. And that's the area where we are looking, for instance, with one of our healthcare providers, started with agent side knowledge and guidance solution, and now we are working with them on virtual assistance through messaging. Yeah, it's a combination of messaging plus automation.

Speaker 6

Great, thank you. And then, Eric, a question for you, guidance implies basically low single digit operating margins, which is much lower than the prior quarter, at least this fiscal year. And is this just being conservative or do you expect investments to pick up in the current quarter?

Speaker 3

Think, Mark, I think in this environment, there's certainly an element of conservatism built in, but, you know, this historically, it's our fiscal year end, so there's, you know, year end bonuses and comp adjustments and the like that have to be factored into the step up of the expenses. So those are elements that we've considered here as well.

Speaker 6

Okay. Great. Thank you. That's all for me.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Richard Baldry with Roth Capital.

Speaker 7

Thanks. Can you hear me?

Speaker 3

Yes, we can.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 7

Okay. Thanks. Not sure what happened last time. So can you walk us through on the partner side, if we were to look out a couple a quarter or two and client demand shifted pretty dramatically in favor of cloud based solutions and they were to see their legacy installed bases start to, I guess, recognize because of COVID's issues a need to move faster, how quickly could you ramp or what type of resources would you need to ramp? Is there any gating factor there to respond to an increase in demand that could be challenging if you're trying to be careful about the additions you're making internally in the interim?

Speaker 2

Good question, Rich. So, areas. That's why I mentioned that we are going to continue to steadily increase our investment in product and partnerships. In the partnership area, the part we are investing is on enabling the partner as well as boosting our delivery service capability, the professional service capability, which is the point that Eric mentioned, where we are still increasing our investment. So, those are areas we are anticipating more increased demand in, and we believe that preparing for that will give us the advantage in a couple of quarters as we ramp up and train our new team members, and we start getting more demand, we can deliver that nicely.

On the cloud side, we don't see much of a concern. Our public cloud architecture that we're based on can scale very nicely and easily. So, that is less of a worry for us.

Speaker 7

And it may be too early, I guess, to have much feedback on this. But have you noticed any change in body language from partners who, again, seeing this type of disruption, possibly understanding what their clients are going to shift their demand going forward? Any change in their discussions on what type of resources they want to allocate in partnership with you? Or do you feel they're probably bogged in their own issues right now and too soon to get to that?

Speaker 2

No, in fact, like I mentioned to, and in response to another question, we have seen, and it seems like not an aberration over the last thirty days. You've seen a steady increase in interest through partners from prospects. And so, I think that there is definitely a change in mindset and like you said, body language, and it is reflecting in those early deal registrations, that's the way we track these early opportunities through partners, seen a distinct jump in that in the last thirty days now. If we see that sustained over the next couple of months, then clearly then that should be a good pattern to capitalize on.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks.

Speaker 0

I now show no further questions and turn back the call to Ashu and Eric. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Alright. Great. Well, thanks, everybody, again for listening on the call, and hopefully, I'll get an opportunity to, interact with some of you at some of the virtual events, scheduled for later in the month. Thank you.

Speaker 0

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