Guidewire Software - Q1 2024
December 7, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Greetings! Welcome to the Guidewire first quarter fiscal 2024 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.
Alex Hughes (VP of Investor Relations)
Thank you, operator. I'm Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me today is Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer. A complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued today, as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC, both of which are available on the investor relations section of our website. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay will be available following the conclusion of the call. Statements made on this call include forward-looking ones regarding our financial results, products, customer demand, operations, the impact of local, national, and geopolitical events on our business and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and are based on management's current expectations as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date.
Please refer to the press release and the risk factors and documents we file with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our prior and forthcoming quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, filed and to be filed with the SEC, for information on risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. We also will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. All commentary on margins, profitability, and expenses are on a non-GAAP basis, unless stated otherwise. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is provided in our press release. Reconciliations and additional data are also posted in the supplement on our IR web zone. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thank you, Alex. Good afternoon, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. We're off to a strong start to the year, and it's great to see this momentum continue following a record Q4, where we had especially high close rates. I characterize this quarter as one of continued solid execution. We are seeing good progress on the deal front as well as in operations, and also had a tremendous customer conference at Connections last month. We had record attendance with about 3,000 in-person attendees. The enthusiasm and support for our strategic direction and cloud platform was noticeable, and the event provided great validation of our progress and the tangible business impacts we are providing to our customers.
We are steadily building a franchise that will have a lasting and positive impact on the P&C insurance industry, and that will produce the durable, profitable, long-term growth that is commensurate with a vertical market leader. Since we had a chance to speak at Analyst Day last month, I'll keep today's remarks fairly brief and share my key takeaways on the business. First, Guidewire Cloud Platform continues to advance steadily and consistently with each new release. The ninth release of Guidewire Cloud Platform, Innsbruck, was made available December first and builds on the automation, orchestration, integration, and monitoring capabilities in Hakuba, and will deliver greater functionality in digital analytics, data, straight-through processing, and pricing. Each release brings greater and greater benefits to customers, which helps to grow interest in our platform. Second, we continue to see this interest manifest in sustained sales momentum.
We closed another seven cloud deals in the first quarter, including six for InsuranceSuite Cloud. This, despite Q1 typically being a seasonally light quarter for us. We closed 4 InsuranceSuite migrations in the quarter, including the first Japan-based insurer to commit to the full suite in the cloud, and also closed three net new deals, including another competitive takeaway. Insurers are responding to the greater agility, efficiency, and innovation that Guidewire Cloud Platform offers and increasingly view it as aligned with their technology and strategic roadmaps. Third is data and analytics, which is something I am excited about as a longer-term opportunity and as something our cloud success positions us well for. As a core systems provider, we have a unique opportunity to layer on data and analytics offerings to core workflows to drive greater real-time analysis and decision-making around policy, underwriting, and claims.
I was pleased to see HazardHub adopted by a Florida-based property insurer just a few months after it adopted our InsuranceNow core solution. HazardHub was chosen for its proprietary hazard risk scoring and its seamless integration with InsuranceNow. Fourth, we continue to nurture and grow an ecosystem of partners, including SIs and solution providers, which helps to drive sustained go-live activity and greater value from the platform. In the quarter, we had nine more go-lives and leading SIs, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, EY, and PwC, all now have achieved cloud migration certifications. As I mentioned previously, Connections was a tremendous success and highlighted for me the advantages Guidewire and our ecosystem deliver for our customers. The stories that were shared drove home the impact of the improved agility, speed, and innovation our platform delivers.
Definity Insurance, a leading Canadian insurer with a 150-year history, adopted Guidewire Cloud Platform in 2021 to achieve greater scale, resilience, agility, and innovation. They have now already seen deployment times improve 63%, quote response times improve 30%, downtime reduced by 75%, and platform setup times improve 10x. The speed Guidewire Cloud Platform delivers was best illustrated by GM OnStar, who spoke about successfully creating and launching an embedded insurance product from start to go live in only nine months. I thought CNA Insurance, one of the largest commercial and specialty insurers in the United States, really illustrated the complexity that large insurers have to manage through when moving to the cloud, and how Guidewire Cloud Platform's continuous release cycle supports much greater agility for these insurers, while also providing the strategic optionality they need to stay current with the market.
As we continue to sell, innovate, and expand the community around our platform, an additional key objective has been to drive greater and greater platform and company efficiency. Jeff will talk more about this, but we were all pleased to see continuing margin expansion in the quarter, even above our objectives and forecasts. The work we are doing to manage all of this while also improving efficiency through our organization is critical and not always the most glamorous part of the job. It has been exciting to see the results of these efforts continue to flow through to our financial outcomes these past few quarters. Finally, we also announced in today's release that Priscilla Hung's sabbatical is ending soon, and we are all very excited to have her back.
While we do not plan for her to return to the same operating role, we are very pleased that she'll continue to be an employee and an invaluable senior advisor at the company. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff to discuss the financials.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Thanks, Mike. We're off to a strong start in fiscal 2024, and it is great to see sustained momentum in the business. From a financial perspective, we entered into this year very focused on, one, increasing ARR and the subscription mix of our business. Two, expanding overall gross margins, primarily led by subscription and support gross margin, but we are also prioritizing services margins. And three, driving greater cash flow from operations. Today, I'll talk about how we're doing in each of these areas as I go through the details, and we'll finish with our updated outlook. ARR finished just above the high end of our outlook at $770 million. Total revenue was $207 million, also above the high end of our outlook, and this beat was primarily due to higher than expected subscription and support revenue and services revenue.
Other components of revenue were largely in line with our expectations. Turning to profitability for the first quarter, which we'll discuss on a non-GAAP basis, gross profit was $121 million, representing 46% year-over-year growth. Overall gross margin was 58%, compared to 42% a year ago. Subscription and support gross margin was 65%, compared to 49% a year ago. This was ahead of our expectations due to higher than expected revenue, increased cloud infrastructure efficiency, and the timing of some cloud services credits from our cloud infrastructure provider. We are thrilled with this result as it gives us confidence to raise our profitability targets for the year. Services gross margin was positive 10%, compared to negative 9% a year ago. This profitability turnaround is a result of many quarters of work that we have discussed in prior earnings calls.
This start to the year sets us up well to hit our annual target of $30 million in gross profit for services. These results demonstrate exciting progress and margin expansion. On a year-over-year basis, subscription and support gross margins expanded 16 percentage points. Services gross margin expanded 19 percentage points, and total gross margins expanded 16 percentage points. While we still have work to do to get to our long-term margin targets, I do want to recognize all the hard work by a number of teams at Guidewire, including the cloud operations team, support team, the product development teams, the services organization, and our FinOps team to help us unlock this potential. All this positive momentum on gross margins led to an operating profit of $4.1 million.
This is a strong result when compared with our prior outlook of negative $22.5 million at the midpoint. About $15 million of this beat came from the gross profit line, and $11 million came from operating expenses. On the operating expense side, we saw slower hiring and lower travel expenses than we expected, but approximately $5 million-$6 million of the $11 million is due to timing of certain expenses now expected later in the year. Overall, stock-based compensation was $36 million, up 3% from Q1 last year, which was generally in line with our expectations. We ended the quarter with $854 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. Operating cash flow ended the quarter at negative $72 million, which is a bit better than our internal expectations.
As a reminder, annual employee bonuses and commission expenses related to Q4 sales are paid out in Q1, and as a result, Q1 cash flow is always lower than the other quarters in the fiscal year. Now let me go through our updated outlook for fiscal year 2024. Starting with the top line, we are maintaining our outlook for ARR. ARR is still the best way to measure overall sales momentum, and we feel confident in our pipeline and are on track to hit our annual targets. We are also maintaining our outlook for total revenue. We expect approximately $471 million in subscription revenue and $542 million in subscription and support revenue.
We now expect term license revenue to be a bit higher than prior expectations due to higher DWP true-ups, and we have tempered our expectations for services revenue to approximately $195 million. Our services model is shifting away from lower margin subcontracted revenue a bit faster than we previously forecasted. Additionally, our partners are continuing to lead more and more of the implementation engagements, which is great. Turning to margins and profitability, which we'll discuss on a Non-GAAP basis, we now expect subscription and support gross margins to be 62% for the year, an increase of seven percentage points when compared to fiscal 2023. This puts us ahead of schedule with respect to hitting our FY 2025 target of 63%-65%.
It is clear that the product investments we have made and the hard work of teams focused on efficiency are having the desired impact on scalability and product gross margins. We continue to expect services gross margins of approximately 15%. As I mentioned last quarter, we will measure professional services success this year by, one, our ability to deliver in conjunction with our partners' excellent customer outcomes, and two, our ability to deliver $30 million in services gross profit, and we are on track to hit these goals. As a result, we now expect overall gross margin to be approximately 62% for the full year. This is already at the midpoint of our FY 2025 target, so we are tracking ahead of schedule. With respect to operating income, we are raising our operating income outlook to between $82 million and $92 million for the fiscal year.
We are thrilled by this momentum as we work towards unlocking the profitability potential of the business. We expect stock-based compensation to be approximately $150 million, representing 5% year-over-year growth. We are increasing our cash flow from operations expectation to between $115 million and $135 million for the fiscal year. Turning to our outlook for Q2, we expect ARR to finish between $793 million and $798 million. Our outlook for total revenue is between $237 million and $243 million. We expect subscription and support revenue of approximately $130 million and services revenue of approximately $43 million. We expect subscription and support margins of approximately 63%, services margins to be around breakeven, and total gross margins to be between 61% and 62%.
We did conduct a small services reorg in early Q2, which carried an approximately $2.5 million one-time charge. Our outlook for operating income is between $15 million and $20 million. In summary, it was a strong start to the year, and as we mentioned at Analyst Day, we are at an exciting inflection point with respect to profitability and our ability to demonstrate margin expansion. Operator, you can now open the call for questions.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please. Our first question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst of Technology, Media, and Communications)
Hey, guys, appreciate the question here. Maybe Mike, starting with you, you called out kind of the Connections conference and a lot of discussion coming out of that around aligning kind of the decisioning with tangible value towards business applicability versus kind of the IT infrastructure side. I wonder how important is that conversation around business applicability as we think about kind of championing change in the industry, and maybe to what extension you're seeing that evolution play through or flow through into your conversations and interactions with customers?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Hey, yeah, great question, and Connections is a great example of an opportunity for us to talk about this and hear from customers directly on the subject. I think if you think about the, you know, the history of the cloud transformation here at Guidewire, you know, the story really began with you know IT-focused infrastructure, operational value proposition, reduced complexity, support upgrades, things like that. But what's so exciting about the momentum we've achieved in the product organization with our ski resort releases and, you know, first shifting to a twice-a-year release schedule, and then subsequently shifting to a three-times-a-year release schedule, you know, and then really importantly, doing all the work necessary to facilitate customers receiving those updates.
All that, you know, you could think of it as like all that work, engineering, plumbing, so to speak, of a cloud system, gives us the ability to ship business value improvements consistently release over release over release. And that's increasingly the, the story really of Guidewire Cloud, which is not just, "Hey, we have a core system, it runs effectively," but we have a core system that can help you differentiate in the market. We can help you make changes to your products more efficiently and faster. We can help you adjust your prices, assess the risks associated with the insurance that you're writing. We can help you optimize your claims processes more effectively, predict outcomes more efficiently, and all that—all those capabilities are delivered, you know, legitimately more efficiently through these cloud releases.
That is much, much more part of the conversation, and what the customers are excited about, effectively buying, when they buy into Guidewire and our cloud story. So for sure, this is a shift in the way that we're taking the product and the company to market. It's being very, very well received, and I. You know, somewhat, I feel like we're really just getting started, honestly. This is like really just starting to kick in, and these updates are starting to take hold. You know, that was.
You know, we were talking today actually about our key takeaways from Connections and the reality of the, you know, just how fluid these update processes are going for our cloud customers was one of the big takeaways. So I appreciate the question. I think it's absolutely part of the story, and probably one of the things that's helping us continue to drive and improve sales momentum in the business.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst of Technology, Media, and Communications)
No, that's great. Thank, Mike. Maybe switching over, Jeff, on the operating side. A lot of healthy momentum here in outperformance, from a margin perspective. I guess, maybe help us think through kind of some of the seasonality, maybe any variable puts and takes on a quarterly basis, and how we should think about some of the sustainability. I know you called out some kind of reallocation there, but sustainability of the outperformance here relative to even when we met 30 days ago, maybe, maybe versus what was more one time in nature, if anything. Thanks.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah, no, it's a good question. We were obviously very thrilled with the margins we saw in Q1. It caught me a little bit by surprise. I wasn't expecting to be at 65%, and there was some one-time elements in there. We did benefit from a bit higher higher revenue. Some of that revenue was tied to platform usage that was billed in arrears. So think about that as kind of catch-up revenue that was recognized in Q1. That flowed through to the margins. Additionally, we did have a little bit higher credits from our infrastructure provider in Q1 than we're expecting in the back half of the year.
But in general, we've made, you know, really strong progress in, you know, how we think about the efficiency of the platform that we're delivering, and it gives us a ton of confidence as we kind of start to march towards those longer-term targets. So there was a little bit of one-time effect. I, you know, I would couch it around, you know, around two to potentially three percentage points when you factor in the top line, that was some of that catch-up revenue, and you factor in some of the credits that may not recur throughout the end of the year, but in general, just really healthy progress.
Dylan Becker (Research Analyst of Technology, Media, and Communications)
Great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Kumar with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.
Kevin Kumar (VP)
Hi, thanks for taking the question. I guess I'll start with the cloud deals. I think seven in the quarter, pretty impressive, particularly given it's a seasonally slow, typically seasonally slow, and I think that compares to four deals maybe last year. So curious, Mike, you know, how are you thinking about maybe carrier appetite for cloud modernization today versus perhaps a year ago? And maybe what are the key drivers that you would attribute to, you know, the stronger deal activity that we're seeing out of the gate?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thanks for the question. Yeah, I would say, you know, sort of probably two things. Number one, steadily building confidence in the, you know, just the stability of the operating conditions for insurance companies, feeling more confident about the future, enabling them to make these decisions, pull the trigger on these projects. That's part of it. But I think the bigger part of it is just growing confidence in our direction, our capability to deliver success, follow through, and see the projects live. You know, we've talked for years about, you know, sort of the, how conservative the customer base is and how they want to see other people sort of pave the road, so to speak, for them to drive down in the future. And I think we're starting to see that.
That factored into the momentum in Q1. I think it's also helping us feel comfortable and confident about the pipeline over the next three quarters and the outlook for the rest of the fiscal year. We really just are seeing, you know, all the hard work and energy that we've put into the platform and the products, and the customer stories that are positive customer stories and the business impacts that we've achieved with them help improve the, you know, the propensity of these either migrations or net new deals to come to the platform. So it's all those things I think, adding up to result in a very positive start to the year for us.
Kevin Kumar (VP)
That's great. And then, Mike, you called out analytics, and I guess Guidewire now has a fairly robust portfolio of analytics applications. So just curious kind of which applications are seeing the most traction, where is there room to maybe improve attach rates? And, you know, how do you think about the overall kind of add-on strategy going forward?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
So yeah, we mentioned the deal that we did with HazardHub, which we're really excited about. We think that there's a, you know, revolution maybe coming, if I'm not exaggerating too much, in the way that people approach property analytics. We talked a lot about that at our Connections conference. We think that the approaches that most of the insurance industry is taking to measuring the risk associated with properties can be vastly improved by taking a much more specific and much more local, even address-by-address, location-by-location approach. And HazardHub is our mechanism for driving that change in the industry. We think it'll have broad applicability to multiple different lines of business, and there's a lot of excitement about driving traction and adoption of that product in our customer base, but also throughout the industry.
Where there's an opportunity for us to maybe drive more attach is with our Predict product. You know, I think that most insurance companies have what I call predictive analytics, machine learning projects up and running. You know, they're working hard with great teams of people to try to sort of predict outcomes and predict next steps and predict severity on risk and claims and things like this. Where they struggle is actually deploying it. They struggle actually getting it into the core systems, into the core system workflows, in front of the people and the users at the points in the business workflow, in the business processes, where you can really take action and have an impact on the business. And that's where Predict really shines.
is making it possible for us to actually deploy effectively and efficiently and fast, all this work that the, you know, the data scientists and engineers have done inside these insurance companies. And so this is one of the areas where we think that there will be more attached going forward, more joint selling, and more just positioning and deploying InsuranceSuite applications and InsuranceNow applications alongside these predictive analytics models with Predict. So hopefully that gives you a sense of how excited we are about it.
Kevin Kumar (VP)
No, that's great. Thanks for taking my questions.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC. Please proceed with your question.
Rishi Jaluria (Information Technology Equity Research Analyst)
Oh, wonderful. Thanks, guys, so much for taking my questions. Nice to see continued momentum in the business, especially coming out of Connections. Maybe starting with, you know, Connections, right? What— There was a lot of excitement with partners and customers we talked to at the conference around Jutro. Maybe can you talk to us now that the product, if I'm not mistaken, did come out GA at the beginning of this month, maybe what has early feedback from customers and partners been since, you know, talking about it at the conference and now since kind of going live? And how we should expect, you know, this to maybe help you competitively, but also really help just build out a stronger and more robust ecosystem. And I got a follow-up.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Okay, yeah, great question. You know, feedback was extremely positive. You know, one of the things we did that I thought was a little bit risky, but also a lot of fun, was, you know, we worked on this project to sort of take a collection of business requirements and turn it into an insurance application that was exposed digitally on top of the platform. And Jutro was one of the primary enabling mechanisms for us to be able to deliver something in 24 hours. It's really a game changer in terms of the way people think about deploying digital applications. We are incredibly excited about it, and the feedback so far from customers is also very, very positive.
You know, it's somewhat the feedback from the customers who are seeing it and putting their hands on it and looking at the demos at Connections, but it's also what we call our early access customers, who have been working with us over the past couple releases to really use this, build applications with it, deploy those applications into the public domains, you know. And ultimately, it's about enabling them to create these consumer experiences in a much, much faster way.
We, you know, it's a real change in the way that traditionally these, you know, agent-facing and/or consumer-facing applications are developed, deployed, maintained, and we think it's gonna provide a significant boost to the, to the development teams, the IT teams, the business teams who are responsible for, you know, rolling these things out and ultimately making insurance just easier to consume, and making the whole process more efficient, but also, more convenient and more friendly. So very, very happy that you noticed that, and very positive feedback from initial customers and the customers we showed it to at Connections.
Rishi Jaluria (Information Technology Equity Research Analyst)
All right. Wonderful. Really helpful. And then, you know, in your prepared remarks, you talked about, you're continuing to grow the partners that you certify for cloud migrations. Can you maybe talk a little bit about, you know, how you might be able to, number one, accelerate the number of partners that can do that and, you know, continue to offer some of that services? And maybe number two, tying generative AI into all of this, right? But to what extent can partners, you know, utilize, whether it's AI or actually generative AI, to accelerate the pace of those migrations and maybe even speed up the time to being certified for that? Thanks.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Well, so we... Yeah, it's a great question. We've been working very, very hard to ensure that the consultants in our ecosystem are certified on each cloud release. That was number one most important thing, right? Because we're changing the approach more quickly. The pace of innovation from Guidewire has increased, and so it's very important that we ensure that everybody that's, you know, selling themselves or deployed on a live project knows the latest and greatest and knows how to do the implementation the way that you should do it based on the latest release. That's number one. Number two is we recognize that there's a particular skill set in, you know, sort of assessing the current state of a Guidewire on-prem implementation and optimizing the approach to moving that over to a cloud implementation.
So that obviously needs you need to understand, you know, you need to be cloud certified, but you also, there's a, there's just a whole bunch of things that we've learned now from about 100 projects, that we can help disseminate more effectively into the broader ecosystem. And that's so that's what's behind that effort to cloud, you know, to create those migration certifications. Certainly, we're looking to add additional horsepower to that program, you know, and we're, we're very open about the approach to recruiting partners and training consultants because, you know, in our opinion, you know, we're creating a lot of demand for that Guidewire expertise. And, you know, the more capacity there is to do these sorts of projects, I think the more demand, honestly, we'll be able to create.
So, you know, our certification approach is very open, and we're constantly trying to recruit more and more consultants to be experts on the projects. I really think this is one of the best things you know, sort of a consultant can learn if they want to ensure that they're gonna be able to find billable projects for probably the next decade. I mean, Guidewire is an incredible, an incredible skill, an incredible asset for consultants to have if they wanna make sure that they're gonna see a demand for that expertise over the next 10 years. So that's number one. Now, the question you asked about generative AI, I think, is a very interesting one. It's certainly something that we're looking at very carefully.
It's like, if you can see a path towards developer productivity improving with these tools, can we also see a path towards migration velocity increasing? It's definitely something that we're looking at, and there's a number of partners who have projects in place to sort of assess this, and try to test it and try to validate that it's gonna work and accelerate. There's definitely upside there. I think it's probably a little bit too early for us to call a sort of and put a number on, you know, that acceleration potential. But it's definitely something we're looking at and also partners are looking at, around how, you know, not just migrations, but also just implementation of functionality on the platform.
You know, that concept is not, you know, it has been brought up a number of times, and it's something we're looking at and have a lot of hope for, let's say. So that potential is definitely there.
Rishi Jaluria (Information Technology Equity Research Analyst)
Really helpful. Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Okay, thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Pete Heckmann with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed with your question.
Pete Heckmann (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. You spoke about a little bit on the Investor Day, made some recent progress with migrating clients on classic platform. It reminds me, I believe you have four left, but the two does that imply that there were two that migrated over the last 12 months or so? And how are you thinking about the timetable on those remaining four?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, we have had success in moving a couple of those customers over from classic from our classic approach to our GWCP approach. We're in active conversations and planning with each one of those four customers. You know, these things are somewhat complicated and often have a lot to do with their internal priorities and other projects that they're executing as part of their overall IT landscape and project portfolio, and other business ambitions, like, you know, building out new product lines or optimizing business processes or digital implementations. And so factoring in that shift is something we're working closely with them. And so my expectation is that this isn't something that's gonna be transitioned all in one year, and it might stretch out two or maybe even three.
But we're pretty comfortable right now with the dialogue that we have with these customers and the planning and approach that we're taking. You know, we're also doing a lot of work to continue to optimize the implementations that support them on the classic approach to Guidewire Cloud. So we feel comfortable about that. You know, we're always working to make sure that it goes well. But you know, from an investor perspective, I don't think it's something that really factors as much as it did into the overall picture at Guidewire as it did maybe a year and a half ago. I feel really good about this approach.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah. Pete, I was gonna say the same thing. I mean, I think if you look back to the Analyst Day two years ago, or a year, a little over, like, a little over a year ago, two Analyst Days ago, you know, the impact that the classic customers had as a drag on the overall margin was quite significant. As we've migrated, you know, a group of those over to GWCP, as we've improved our overall efficiency in managing the classic customers, and just as we've grown our business, that's gonna be a smaller and smaller piece of the overall pie. So we'll be less material to the margins going forward, but it's something we're still working hard on.
Pete Heckmann (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Good. Well, that's, that's good to hear. And then in terms of just the, this, second quarter guidance that the, the—just looking at a little bit at, and I wanna make sure I'm interpreting this correctly, but, you know, it looks like it, it should be a fairly, a relatively more solid term license quarter, with a little bit lighter growth in subscription, and then, and then another, you know, kind of down high teens type in services. And, and so is it—On the services side, should this be the last quarter where we see that type of decline, and then, and then we start to see year-over-year growth again in the back half?
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah. So on the services side, you know, as we noted in the prepared remarks, we've been doing a lot of work to move away from lower margin subcontracted revenue and pushing more and more business through our partners. That's impacting top line, but bringing in a much higher quality revenue stream that is at the higher margin profile. So that is playing out. Q2 is also the holidays, and so it's not uncommon for Q2 to be a little bit slower than Q1 with respect to overall services.
And then we have capacity and, and we have a, a fair amount of work to do, in the back half of the year, and so are expecting, revenue growth in the back half of the year vis-à-vis the first half, and have structured our cost basis in a way that we can do that at a, at a nice margin. So that's how we're, we're thinking about the services side of the business. Term license, as you know, it kind of bounces around with when the renewal activity happens, and so Q1 is always light from a term license perspective. Q2 will, be seasonally higher, which is pretty consistent for us.
And then on the overall subscription side, the only thing I would call out is, is that we did have a little bit of, you know, what I would call more one-time revenue that impacted subscription in Q1. In general, we feel very good about the start to the year in terms of how we march towards our, our longer-term targets and our annual target for this year, but some of that did impact the sequential growth rate from Q1 to Q2.
Pete Heckmann (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Okay, that helps. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Wanted to circle back on some of the commentary you made around HazardHub and some of the other analytics products that you're adding in there. And I guess as we look at those on a go-forward basis, how much should we think about those being additive to ARR on, you know, a specific contract or for customers in general, versus being sort of a more of a carrot to get customers to move to GWCP and really start to unlock all the value of being in the cloud and using some of those more advanced features?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, it's a good question. I would say, primarily, our expectation, my expectation is that this, you know, develops into a, and I don't wanna say independent, but linked and incremental source of ARR for the company. You know, we can certainly use them as carrots to drive cloud adoption, but, I'm more and more comfortable that the core cloud value proposition, the value proposition of InsuranceSuite, you know, with the cloud services that we have built to support it, creates enough support for the, you know, direct core sales. And then the analytics sales of these, of these products, Predict and HazardHub, can be incremental. They can be linked sometimes, and we certainly work hard to link them and sell them both at the same time.
But over time, our ambition is absolutely to create an incremental analytics business that, you know, like I said, is linked to but accelerates the overall growth of the company.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Okay, very helpful. And then, great to see the Japanese carrier moving to a full GWCP deployment. Do you think this is sort of the breaking of the dam of some of the international clients being ready to make that full switch and really embracing the cloud, maybe as partners are more prevalent and more trained? Or, is this still a little bit of each carrier needs to make their own decision, there's not necessarily this bigger group wave from country to country, like we've seen here in the U.S.?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, I don't think we're ready to call it, and I don't know if we'll ever really see it, you know, a sort of metaphor like breaking the dam or anything like that. It's certainly helpful. It is an incredibly positive signal, you know? We had another Japanese customer go to the cloud and, you know, this is our second one. This is a full suite implementation. It's certainly helpful. It helps us validate the model. It helps us exercise all the particular things we need to do to make sure that the system works and can go live successfully. And so it's all very, very helpful. That kind of approach played out across each of the countries we operate in, certainly helps.
But I wouldn't— I don't have a vision, and we don't have a financial plan that sort of imagines some, like, future flood, you know? It's gonna just be steady improvement, increased propensity to trust us and to trust the model, and that all just builds country over country, quarter over quarter. That's more the approach we're gonna take. Or, and to modeling the business, and really, it's also our expectation. And I think kind of relates to what you just said, which is there is this overriding factor of what are their priorities, what are their objectives, what are their timelines, and how do those, those factors have a big... You know, those, those things factor into, in a large way, the timing of those deals for them.
So this is certainly helpful, and the progress we've made internationally, over the past couple of years, certainly points to the eventual success, but I don't see it coming all at once, you know, at all.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Okay, very helpful. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Parker Lane with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Hi, this is Matthew Kikkert in for Parker. Thanks for taking my questions. So you're on your ninth cloud, cloud release now and have a strong amount of go-lives. How would you compare your effectiveness and speed in those cloud implementations this time compared to at the beginning of your cloud push?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, that's a great question. I shouldn't admit it, but it's night and day. I mean, we are just so much more confident now around what it takes to run these successfully than we were when we first got started. You know, we did a good job, you know, when we got those first cloud deals done, and we got those first cloud customers live.
But, you know, I don't know, I wanna put it into a measure, but, you know, many, many orders of magnitude, more confident, just having done and experienced all of these different circumstances that can arise in one of these projects, and having built really a world-class organization in terms of understanding, you know, and assessing what we learned from each one, documenting it super effectively, building it into better operational processes to enable that we're more prepared, you know, that we're sorta, you know, making sure that the gotchas that held up other projects don't occur again. Incredibly proud of the work that our teams and our partners have done to ensure that these programs go live more and more effectively with each cycle. That same concept also, by the way, applies to the updates, right?
So it's not just the initial go-live, but it's also the subsequent update and making sure that customers are thinking about that and planning for that and testing for that so that those things can operate more smoothly now. You know, it's just incredible, how much progress we have made over the past few years around this topic. And by the way, I don't think we're done. You know, I think we're at nine, and so, you know, how many letters are there in the alphabet, right? We'll run out eventually and have to come up with a new marketing approach. But when we get to 18, we're going to be even better. You know, these things are going to be going even more smoothly.
You know, we have established the improvement function inside of Guidewire around these projects and are, you know, really, really doing a much better job than we were initially. That experience is, you know, that positive experience for customers is shared and does help us sell more effectively and helps us feel confident in the progress and the momentum in the business. Appreciate the question. Unfortunately, makes me admit that we had a lot to learn when we first got started, but very, very proud of the progress that we've made so far.
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Yeah, awesome. That's great to hear. And then at the end of your prepared remarks, you mentioned you did a $2.5 million services reorg earlier in the second quarter. Could you provide just more detail around the changes that you made there, and what was the thought that went into that move?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
You know, it was really around just doing some right-sizing. You know, we have seen our partners take on more and more of the burden. That is a great outcome for us, is that it improves our overall scalability as we address this very large opportunity in front of us. And so, it was a relatively small action, but it does kind of play into the services margins in Q2, so we wanted to call that number out for you. But that, that's all I would call out on that particular topic.
Matthew Kikkert (Equity Research Associate)
Okay, terrific. Thank you very much.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer & Company. Please proceed with your question.
Ken Wong (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Great, fantastic. Mike, I wanted to circle back to your upbeat analytics commentary. You know, how might reforms to risk modeling, I think in California, specifically, allowing forward-looking data, spark demand for analytics? And might this have any kind of pull-through for cloud interest?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, great question. I'm glad you pointed that out. We're, we're excited about the, the changes that the state of California is, working with the industry to, to make. You know, there's obviously a lot of turbulence in the insurance market in California, which, you know, many of us personally, feel, having the, you know, a lot of the employees at Guidewire work and live here. So, we think, we see it as very positive, you know, and a, a very positive update to the approach. And, we expect that, solutions, specifically HazardHub, can play a very positive role for the industry in taking advantage of these changes and just better understanding, you know, number one, the real risk profile associated with these properties and with these locations.
You know, but also things that, you know, insurance companies and also homeowners and businesses can do to mitigate that risk. We think that's all part of the equation when it comes to operating a more effective and efficient insurance market. And so, you know, California is making some changes, but we also think that HazardHub and property analytics in general can really significantly improve the approach that carriers take to, you know, managing risk and pricing risk and operating the industry overall more and more effectively. We expect, intend, we're excited about playing a driving role in that. You know, I'd also say that this extends not just to, you know, our products and HazardHub, but also our partners.
You know, there's a number of analytics partners that plug directly into Guidewire and can be deployed super easily on our platform, that are going to facilitate this, you know, sort of new, modern approach to risk management, risk selection, you know, managing, you know, disasters, if they occur, more effectively. It's very, very exciting, you know, applying this InsurTech innovation to the industry, and we're excited to be a part of it. You know, that California change, it's like.
It sort of, for me, kind of makes all the work we do here real, you know, because if you talk to people that live in California, there's not any of us who either haven't experienced or know somebody who's experienced a change in their insurance provider because of the, you know, because of the risks associated with the weather changes and the, and the risks profile in California. So that makes it all kind of personal for us and makes it pretty exciting. You know, whether or not it helps us sell cloud, I certainly hope so. You know, I think overall, you know, agility is the word I like to use.
I think, you know, if you live in a world where risk is changing faster, then the more agility you have, the more pace around which you can operate your insurance company, the more effectively you're going to be able to manage those changes, manage that risk more effectively, update your operations and update your company more effectively. And so Guidewire Cloud, you know, and modern solutions, you know, provided by InsuranceSuite applications and InsuranceNow, it delivers that agility and enables the industry to operate more efficiently. So we're very positive on that change and look forward to seeing the, you know, helping drive, honestly, just a better, more efficient industry. So anyway, thanks. Hopefully, that helps.
Ken Wong (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Yeah, no, very helpful, and appreciate all the thoughtful details there. And then just a quick one for you, Jeff. I'm not sure if, you know, from quarter to quarter, we see too many changes, but just wondering if there's any update in terms of what kind of the deal ramp dynamics might look like in Q1?
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah. No major change. Q1, if you look at Q1, it generally, as a portfolio, tends to have a little bit of a shallower ramp than the rest of the year, just because it's so smaller and a lot of the activity is kind of more true-up and renewal, compared to the overall bookings profile. But it was very consistent with Q1 last year, so kind of steady, steady as we go, no change to ramp assumptions at this point.
Ken Wong (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot, guys.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
David Unger (Equity Research Analyst)
Hey, great. Thanks. This is David Unger from Michael Turrin tonight. So, similar to, to Ken's question they just asked. So, you know, we've been picking up a bunch of tidbits that you're positioning in the competitive environment has improved within the last year, especially. You know, you mentioned you have high close rates. So I'm wondering how this all translates into deal dynamics as you sign new cloud deals.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, interesting question. So, you know, first of all, you got to understand for these, for these big cloud deals, they're very often very long sales cycles, very involved, you know, very involved, often, pretty significant proof of concept phases, even pilots. You know, we work with these—these decisions are not taken lightly and, you know, we're involved in them for many, many months, often—sometimes off, sometimes over a year on a particular deal. Close rates over the past, couple of years, and especially through the cloud transition, have remained stable. We provided some detail around this at the Analyst Day, and you know, you'll find this in the slides we prepared and the talk track that we went through around competitive, you know, win rates, close rates.
Very, you know, pleased, I'd say. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe I should say I'm never pleased until we get it to 100, right? It's a competitive market. But we have remained steady throughout the transition and continue to feel more and more confident about our position competitively. The reason I call out these, these competitive deals over the past few quarters is just simply that it's almost like we, we consider it almost a bit of an expansion to our total addressable market. In that, once a carrier modernizes to a system, we sort of expect that it's not going to come back up for grabs for maybe five, 10 years.
And to see a few of these deals, and now, you know, multiple quarters in a row, where we see these customers coming back to market and looking for us to make that shift from a sort of modernized system or a modernized system decision to Guidewire, we just see that as a very positive trend, and something that we think just as, you know, points in our favor in terms of being able to support our growth projections, bookings projections, and ability to address the overall insurance market.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah, the only thing I would add is, you know, just like the value of a stock, right? The more risk associated with the company, that has an impact on the overall stock price. So as we negotiate these deals, the more proof points we have, the more we can de-risk the path from going to where they are today to our cloud. That helps us as we think about building a business case and making the, you know, case to the insurer that now is the time to go, and that these price points are reasonable. It is clear that some of the early adopters got preferential pricing because they were taking a bigger risk. And as we think about future engagements, we are going to be firmer and firmer in how we think about discounting.
This was part of the strategy all along. So, I think we're starting to see that. These deals are still heavily negotiated, as Mike said. You know, you never want to lose one of these, 'cause when you lose one, you feel like it goes away for 10, 15 years. So we fight tooth and nail to make sure that we're well-positioned and win. But it is our expectation that we can do better on discounting as we look ahead.
David Unger (Equity Research Analyst)
I really appreciate all that detail, guys. A little more high level, higher level here. So I know it's early, but is there a way to think about the insurance industry's budget commitment trends, you know, as we look forward into next year, their commitment to software spend versus the prior year and their appetite to convert to the cloud? Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think, you know, we've talked over the past few quarters about the shocks that the industry has dealt with, you know, in terms of inflation, weather-related risk and loss, and the cycle that they have to follow in terms of getting rate increases approved by regulators and how that all flows through the system. So as we get through a cycle of that, and hopefully, you know, we have a stable inflation environment, we have a stable interest rate environment, you know, knock on wood, or hopefully we get a stable climate-related, weather-related risk environment that's harder to control, obviously. Those things are, you know, work to our favor in terms of creating the type of stability that enables them to feel comfortable making a big project decision around core system modernization.
So, you know, certainly, that is improving, and we watch it very closely, and hopefully, that stability continues and it'll help increase the propensity for these deals to be green lighted, which results in our, you know, bookings events for us.
David Unger (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you very much.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi. Please proceed with your question.
Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, thanks for taking the question, and apologies if this was covered earlier. I was hopping around a couple earnings calls tonight. But, Jeff, I was hoping just on the—if we look at the ARR guidance, obviously, it you beat the high end by $1 million here in Q1. But if I look at Q2, it came in, I think, a little bit below where consensus was modeling, and overall, it looks like the first half from a net new perspective is down versus a year ago, and that's expected to improve in the second half. Can you—I know there's ramp and timing factors that are at play, but can you just help us understand that a bit more?
You know, was there any change in the ramp of the contracts you're expecting to kind of layer in this year?
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah, no, I mean, like, our Q2 outlook is very consistent with our expectation as we went into the year. You know, we obviously have a lot more visibility than you all in terms of when the ramps hit, and that has a big, that's a big variable into how we model out quarter by quarter. So, you know, Q1 got us off to a good start. We're very pleased with it. We always kind of think about our business on an annual cadence. I think we're off to a very good start. Q2 is consistent. The ramps are falling the way we expected them to fall. The attrition profile in the business is still, you know, very, very small and kind of falling the way we expected it to fall. So there's really no change to our internal expectations.
We understand that you all have to make your best guess on your quarterly estimates, but very consistent with how we thought about it as we started the year.
Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, that's helpful. And, Mike, you talked about how the number of deals you closed in the quarter was better than you expected. Was there any timing factors there pulling stuff in? And then, if you could just talk about kind of the composition of those deals, just in terms of the size and were they, you know, on the sort of smaller side of things, just given the seasonality of your business, any additional color, that would be great. Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
No, there wasn't anything special about pulling in deals or anything. It's just continued positive momentum in the business. And like I said, especially coming out of a strong Q4. You know, typically, you get... You end up with a strong Q4 by pulling deals in from Q1, and so then we use that as sort of an explanation for a light Q1. But we followed up a strong Q4 with a very solid Q1, and, you know, I think that that speaks volumes about the momentum that we have in the business. Deal count was also great to see. You know, we had 4 migrations, which I was very, very happy to see. So it's not all net new, or it's not all migrations, it's a good spread.
And like I said, we, you know, seeing this deal in Japan is just phenomenal. It's a phenomenal milestone for us, when you think about the long term and the potential that we have internationally and especially in Japan. I was very, very excited to see that deal close. And like we said, like, we worked for a lot of years building relationships and making sure they understand the strategy and the story, and building confidence, and getting a deal like that in Japan across the line in Q1 was great. So I wouldn't read anything special into it, you know, in terms of deal size, pretty normal, you know, kind of where we expect it to be. And like I said, really strong start to the year.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Yeah, the only thing I'd add, Tyler, is, look, I had obviously modeled a little bit lower bookings activity in Q1 as we went into the quarter. And some of that was just a reflection of the strength of Q4. So we were pleased to see the activity in Q1. It was a little bit higher than what we'd modeled, but it was not. I wouldn't say there was any sort of unnatural pull-in. It's just, you know, we look at this on an annual cadence, and we got off to a good start.
Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Thanks a lot.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah. Thank you.
Jeff Cooper (CFO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Mike Funk with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Speaker 14
Hi. Great. Yeah, this is Matt on for Mike Funk. Thanks for the question. You mentioned especially high close rates in the prepared remarks. Can you provide any incremental color on how deals are moving through different stages of the pipeline relative to prior Qs? Thanks.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, I would, I just... I wouldn't say that we've seen an acceleration in deals moving through. I'm trying to think about... Sometimes you see these things just push, you know, and I guess if we don't see them push and we see them close, then I guess that's sort of like an acceleration relative to the average. But it, I wouldn't say that the expectations we have for how long an evaluation will take have changed.
We just feel more comfortable about the outcome of the evaluation and the outcome of the deal process being positive as we gain confidence, as, you know, I guess as we gain confidence, as the market gains confidence in the solution and our ability to deliver success, and as the references and other customers who have already deployed and gone live on the service validate that. So it's just, you know, I wouldn't describe it as a cycle acceleration, as much as it is just more confidence in the deal to actually close and be decided in our favor.
Speaker 14
Super helpful. Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, thank you.
Operator (participant)
Our next question comes from the line of Aaron Kimson with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Aaron Kimson (VP and Senior Analyst)
Great. Thanks for the question. You announced a partnership with Swiss Re at Connections, talked about it a little bit at the Analyst Day. Can you comment on early progress there and your appetite for more potential partnerships with reinsurers going forward?
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, this one's a very exciting relationship. It is, I guess it's been in the works for a while, talking to them about what we might be able to do together, and I think that the, you know, the, you know, obviously, the Connections event precipitated the opportunity to announce this and talk about it with customers and talk about it publicly. Our, I would say, our momentum in the cloud facilitates a much deeper understanding and relationship with our insurance customers, which creates the potential for us to play a far more interesting role in terms of what I guess I'd say is like orchestrating, you know, the relationship between insurance companies and reinsurance entities.
There's a significant amount of data sharing that goes along with providing reinsurance and assessing risk, you know, sort of back and forth between these entities, and Guidewire can facilitate that relationship. We can make that more efficient. You know, there's a lot of exciting things that we can do with companies like Swiss Re, you know. To the extent that they have analytics models that they've developed or would like to see their, you know, their insurance partners utilize to manage risk more effectively, if Guidewire can be a facilitator for that, for the sort of activation and operationally managing that model, such that the insurance companies are making better decisions that are aligned with the expectations that their reinsurance partners have, that's a big, big benefit.
I think that what we're seeing is a lot of excitement about this new model for a centralized cloud service supporting the entire industry, can really play a different sort of role in overall risk management up and down the value chain. So I appreciate you bringing this up. I mean, we've got a lot more work to do with Swiss Re. We're incredibly excited about where this might go. And you know, we're excited to be working with them and have the opportunity to talk about that work in public.
Aaron Kimson (VP and Senior Analyst)
Great. Thank you.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Yeah, thank you.
Operator (participant)
We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I'll now turn the call back over to CEO Mike Rosenbaum for closing remarks.
Mike Rosenbaum (CEO)
Hey, I just wanted to say thanks to everybody for participating in the call. We're incredibly pleased with the start to the year, and we feel great about how things are progressing on the platform with customers and with partner program and overall momentum in the business. So we look forward to catching up with everybody throughout the quarter. And if we don't, I guess we'll see you at the end of the next quarter. So thanks very much.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.