Manhattan Associates - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. My name is Rob, and I'll be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Manhattan Associates Q1 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer period. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star and then the number two. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024. I will now introduce your host, Mr. Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Bauer, you may begin your conference.

Michael Bauer (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates 2024 Q1 earnings call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO. During this call, including the question and answer session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding the future events or the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates. We caution that these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual results may differ materially from the projections contained in our forward-looking statements.

I refer you to the reports Manhattan Associates files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections, particularly our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2023, and the risk factor discussion in that report, as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent Form 10-Qs. We note the turbulent global macro environment could impact our performance and cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We're under no obligation to update these statements. In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. We have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation schedules in the Form 8-K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com.

Now, I'll turn the call over to Eddie.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Terrific. Thanks, Mike. Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us as we review our Q1 results and discuss our increased full year 2024 outlook. Manhattan is off to a solid start in 2024, once again reporting record results. Q1 total revenue increased 15% to $255 million, and adjusted earnings per share increased 29% to $1.03, both exceeding expectations. Driving top-line outperformance and earnings leverage was 36% growth in cloud revenue and 14% growth in services revenue. While global macro uncertainty and volatility certainly persists, Manhattan's business fundamentals are solid. Our teams continue to execute well for our customers, and our steady investment in research and development has firmly established Manhattan as the leading innovator in supply chain execution, omnichannel solutions, and retail point-of-sale.

RPO, the leading indicator of our growth, increased 31% to just over $1.5 billion, as demand for our mission-critical cloud solutions remains strong and resilient across our product portfolio. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale drove more than 80% of our bookings in the quarter. Across our solutions, the sub verticals are pretty diverse. For example, in the quarter, cloud deals, one, include an omni-channel multi-brand retailer, a manufacturer and distributor of golf equipment, one of the world's largest airlines, a paint manufacturer, an apparel and accessories retailer, a tire distributor, as well as a number of others. For the quarter, competitive win rates were solid at about 75%, and we experienced strength from new customers, with approximately 1/3 of our new bookings being generated from net new logos.

That's in addition to healthy new logo activity, we continue to experience a good mix of conversions, upsells, and cross-sells. While the timing of large deals and the mix of bookings is certainly gonna vary on a quarterly basis, we believe our bookings breadth from both new and existing customers, and also across our product portfolio, exemplifies our multiple opportunities for sustainable growth. Now, to this point, our solutions pipeline remains robust, with new potential customers representing approximately 35% of the demand. An important driver to our growth is our ability to deliver industry-leading solutions that service our customers. Our best-of-breed cloud-native platform solutions provide unmatched access to innovation and are uniquely capable of unifying mission-critical commerce and supply chain functions. This is differentiating for us and helps our clients improve customer service and loyalty, drive more revenue, and improve efficiency.

Now, our product sales activity also drives our services growth and pipeline. In Q1, our professional services team completed over 100 go-lives and continues to execute very well for our customers. And while we remain appropriately cautious on the global economy, we continue to invest to drive growth. This includes strategic investments in industry-leading innovation, further enablement of our customer success, and the expansion of our addressable market. From a hiring perspective, in Q1, we welcomed over 100 highly talented individuals into the Manhattan family and are on track to meet our 2024 hiring goal of a few hundred associates. Now, let's turn to some quick updates on our products. Last quarter, I focused on some key updates to our omni-channel commerce solutions. So for this quarter, I'll focus most of my time on updates to our supply chain execution products.

One of Manhattan's guiding principles is a relentless focus on innovation. We found the move to Evergreen Software to be a real game changer for both our teams and our customers. Our quarterly release process allows our customers to benefit from new features in record time. Each quarter, we deliver a combination of smaller, more tactical features focused on customer enablement, as well as larger, more strategic features, which create an operational step change for our customers. Within Manhattan Active WM, we've released several of these larger, more strategic features in recent quarters. Now, you may recall that we announced Yard Management at last year's Momentum Conference, and we're seeing great reaction adoption for this best-in-class YMS.

Manhattan Active Yard Management helps our warehouse operators enjoy the same level of process discipline and optimization in the yard as they've had within the four walls of the distribution center. Yard Management also serves to further reinforce process unification between warehouse management and transportation management, allowing for the seamless transition of a trailer moving from transportation management control to warehouse management control. Our unified yard offering is an important step in helping our customers evolve toward managing an end-to-end flow of inventory, inbound from their suppliers to the distribution center and outbound from their distribution centers to their customers. But as I mentioned earlier, we released Yard Management just a little less than a year ago. So the question is, you know, what have we done for our Manhattan Active WM customers lately?

Well, in January, we released Dynamic Load Building from Manhattan Active WM, a feature that not only optimizes the way the cartons are palletized and optimized, but also the way that they're laid out in the trailer, considering temperature, actual load, vehicle stop sequence, and so on. Dynamic Load Building is a pretty critical process in industries like grocery, food service, industrial distribution, and a number of others. And many of our customers in those industries have historically used third-party tools or even manual processes. But now they're able to take advantage of load building right within Manhattan Active Supply Chain Execution as part of our unified outbound planning process.

The release of new strategic capabilities like Yard Management, Dynamic Load Building, along with our in-app analytics and embedded generative AI, is one of our most important market differentiators. Given that strong track record of delivery, prospective customers understand that a subscription to Manhattan Active WM, for example, delivers more than what they saw in the initial product demonstration and RFP response. They're also subscribing to a continuous innovation pipeline built on design thinking principles and conducted in collaboration with some of the most forward-thinking supply chain practitioners. Customers rest assured that our investment in innovation will continue to deliver industry-leading features, all seamlessly woven into the Manhattan Active WM environments and ready for them to activate.

Now, further on the supply chain front, we continue to see great results from the activation of our Manhattan Active Transportation Management application, which recently was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for TMS, sixth consecutive year, by the way. And as a reminder, this solution is now live on four continents, serving industries spanning grocery, food service, convenience stores, consumer products, apparel, retail, and a number of others. And frankly, our supply chain unification message continues to resonate very well in the market. And to that end, one of our key deals from last year was with Schneider Electric, a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation that specializes in digital automation and energy management. And we're currently working with Schneider to deploy a unified supply chain execution offering all the way across the globe.

We're starting with a distribution center in the Netherlands, and Schneider shares our vision for unified inbound and outbound supply chain processes. In fact, they'll be sharing their vision in more detail at our customer conference, Momentum, next month. And finally, speaking of Momentum, we're planning a couple of major product announcements for our event in San Antonio, Texas, and we're looking forward to unveiling those major steps forward to both our Manhattan Associates and our Manhattan customers. And I'll look forward to telling you more about them in next quarter's update. So that concludes my business update. Dennis is going to provide an update on our financial performance and outlook, and then I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before we move to Q&A. So, Dennis?

Dennis Story (CFO)

... Thanks, Eddie. Our Manhattan global teams continue to execute well in a challenging macro environment. For the quarter, we delivered a strong, balanced financial performance across top and bottom lines. This includes posting record results across RPO, revenue, and adjusted operating income. On an as-reported basis, our Q1 results compare favorably to the Rule of 40, and if our revenue growth is normalized for our cloud transition, which excludes license and maintenance revenue, our results exceed the Rule of 50. FX had a minor impact in the quarter, with a 1% headwind, while it was neutral to year-over-year revenue and RPO growth. Now, turning to our Q1 results, our growth rates are reported on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated. For the quarter, total revenue was $255 million, up 15%.

Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the compression driven by our cloud transition, our total revenue was up 20%. Cloud revenue totaled $78 million, up 36%, and as Eddie highlighted, we ended the quarter with RPO of $1.5 billion, up 31% compared to the prior year and up 6% sequentially. Removing the impacts of FX, the Q1 sequential increase of $97 million in RPO exceeded the sequential increase we achieved in Q4. The strong Q1 performance was driven by a healthy mix of sales from both new and existing customers, with solid results from across our Manhattan Active suite of products. Our global services teams delivered record revenue totaling $132 million, up 14%, as cloud sales continue to fuel services revenue growth globally.

Adjusted operating profit was $80 million, with adjusted operating margin of 31.3%. This is 250 basis points year-over-year, up year-over-year. Our performance was driven by strong cloud and services revenue growth, combined with operating leverage as our cloud business continues to scale. Importantly, as Eddie discussed, we continue to invest in innovation to drive sustainable long-term growth. Turning to EPS, we delivered Q1 adjusted earnings per share of $1.03, up 29%, and GAAP EPS of $0.86, up 39%. Moving to cash, operating cash flow was a solid $55 million. This is down slightly from the prior year period due to a record 2023 cash bonus payout and timing of cash collections. This resulted in 21% free cash flow margin and 32% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Regarding the balance sheet, deferred revenue increased 21% to $265 million. We ended the quarter with $208 million in cash and 0 debt. In the quarter, we leveraged our strong cash position and invested $73 million in share repurchases. Additionally, our board has approved the replenishment of our $75 million dollar share repurchase authority. That covers the summary results. Now on to our updated 2024 guidance. As consistently mentioned, our financial objective is to deliver sustainable double-digit top-line growth and top-quartile operating margins benchmarked against enterprise SaaS comps. These are important drivers to our best-in-class return on invested capital, as we maintain a balanced investment approach to growth and profitability.

With our solid start to the year and increasing visibility, we are raising our 2024 revenue, operating margin, and earnings per share guidance, which can be found in today's earnings release. We are also reiterating our 2024 RPO target range and midpoint of $1.78 billion. As noted on prior earnings calls, our objective is to update our RPO outlook on an annual basis. Lastly, on RPO, as previously noted, our bookings performance is impacted by the number and relative value of large deals we close in any quarter, which can potentially cause lumpiness or nonlinear bookings throughout the year.

With that, for the full year 2024, we expect total revenue of $1.026 billion-$1.034 billion, with a $1.03 billion midpoint, comparing favorably to our prior outlook and representing 17% growth, excluding license and maintenance, and 11% all in. For Q2, we are targeting total revenue of $254 million-$258 million, which at the midpoint represents 17% growth, excluding license and maintenance attrition, and 11% growth all in.

For the rest of the year, at the midpoint, we are targeting total revenue of about $263 million in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $256 million in Q4. For adjusted operating margin, we are increasing the midpoint to 29.75% from our prior midpoint of 29%, which includes a 170 basis point headwind from our license and maintenance revenue attrition to cloud. And as Eddie highlighted, given the combination of our demand and size of our opportunity, we continue to invest in our business. At the midpoint, adjusted operating margin on a quarterly basis is expected to be about 29.5% for both Q2 and Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, 28.5% in Q4.

This results in our full-year adjusted earnings per share range to increase to $3.86-$3.94. On a quarterly basis, we are targeting Q2 earnings per share of $0.96, Q3, $0.99, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $0.93 in Q4. For GAAP earnings per share, our midpoint ticks down 4 cents to $2.82 on higher investment in equity-based compensation. For Q2, we are targeting GAAP earnings per share of $0.66. Here's some additional details on our 2024 outlook. We are increasing our cloud revenue midpoint to $332.5 million, representing 31% growth. On a quarterly basis, we are targeting $80.5 million in Q2, $85 million in Q3, and $89 million in Q4.

For services, we are increasing our forecast to $538 million-$544 million, with $541 million midpoint, representing 11% growth. On a quarterly basis, we are targeting Q2 services revenue of $137 million, Q3, $140 million, and accounting for Q4 retail peak seasonality, $132 million. For maintenance, we are targeting a midpoint of $124.5 million, which represents a 14% decline. On a quarterly basis, we are targeting Q2 at $31 million, Q3, $30 million, and Q4, $28.5 million. For consolidated subscription, maintenance, and services margin, we continue to target about 100 basis points of margin improvement for the year. And finally, we expect our tax rate to be 21.5% for the balance of the year.

Our diluted share count to be 62.5 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. So in summary, a solid Q1 performance by the Manhattan Global team. Thank you, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yes, terrific. Thanks, Dennis. Well, look, we're very pleased with our solid start to the year and our record Q1 results. You know, we continue to be appropriately cautious, I think, on the volatile conditions that are out there, but our business momentum remains very favorable, and we remain certainly optimistic about the business opportunities that is in front of us. So thanks. Thanks, everyone, for joining the call, and thank you to our global team for all the exceptional work that you do for our customers. So that concludes our prepared remarks, and Rob, we'd be happy to take any questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, you may press star one from your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to withdraw your question from the queue. For participants that are using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Thank you. And our first question is from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Yeah, thanks for taking my question, and good afternoon, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike. First and foremost, great disclosure there on the FX impact to RPO. That's really helpful. So it's, I guess, the constant currency adjusted numbers, $97 million. So thanks for the disclosure. Just the first question-

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Maybe for you, Eddie, is on the... Just an update on stats on Cloud WMS. I got knocked off the call, so I may have missed it. I don't know if you said anything, but I think last quarter, when asked about it, you gave something in terms of maybe sites that are up and running. But just anything you can share, whether it's sites, whether it's conversations with some of the folks that had hesitated to move going forward, just would love some statistics that you can share on just where you are on Cloud WMS adoption. And then I had a couple follow-ups.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Terry, you'll have to give me just a little bit of license. We're going live quite frequently with sites these days. So, the live site count is right at about 225. Actually, I think it's a little bit more than that, but close enough, close enough for this conversation. 225, you know, and there's certainly no reticence in terms of moving, you know, moving to the cloud, either for new customers, you know, of course, they're moving directly to the cloud with us, or our existing customers that are, you know, that are converting and migrating, you know, migrating over time. You know, some are moving pretty, pretty aggressively, frankly.

You know, we've got customers that are doing more than one site a month on a global basis, going live. These are large, automated, be it a 1 million sq ft facilities and, you know, and so forth. So yeah, just strong, you know, strong momentum there. We're working hard to, you know, to keep up with the demand.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

... That's great. Maybe just a follow-up, and then I had a question for Dennis on the cash flow. But just, Eddie, in terms of evergreen software and your customers starting to experience this in kind of the zero downtime, is it starting to kind of accelerate the conversations? Because you all have this vision for your customers of unified commerce, but is it starting to kind of accelerate conversations on, well, okay, now we have the WMS, it really does make sense to do the TMS or OMS. I'm just curious where you are on that, that's starting to manifest in cross-selling and upselling.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it, it definitely is. Look, we've said it over and over and over again, these are enterprise-class systems. You know, you don't see immediate hockey sticks and so forth, but, but we definitely see it. In fact, I, you know, I mentioned Schneider Electric, on the, in my prepared remarks. You know, they've actually bought both WMS and TMS simultaneously. We've got a very large global roll out of unified supply chain execution for, you know, for those guys. They'll be talking about it at, you know, Momentum. You know, the, there's no question that we're starting to see, that unified message pick up momentum.

I don't think there is a conversation that we have with either a customer or, you know, a new logo prospect about TMS that doesn't include WMS, and about WMS that doesn't include TMS. Again, they may not all be like Schneider Electric buying both together, but, you know, the conversations are, you know, certainly conjoined.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Thanks for that, Eddie. And Dennis, I guess, on cash flow, you called out the largest, you know, kind of cash bonuses in the seasonality and impacting cash flow. But, you know, is Q2 something that sequentially anything you can share about how to think about it, or just maybe even full year and how you're thinking about maybe a free cash flow margin? Thank you.

Dennis Story (CFO)

Yeah. So, you know, Q2 will snap back from Q1, definitely, 25%-26% free cash flow margin on a full year basis. We may tick up from that. There's a little bit of conservatism there.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Wonderful. Thank you.

Dennis Story (CFO)

Thank you, Terry.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.

Brian Peterson (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director in Equity Research)

Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question. So, Eddie, you mentioned some examples of global supply chain investments for customers with Manhattan. You know, I'm curious, for somebody that has a truly global project that's hitting multiple DCs, how long does that product or project take? Is that something that can be done in a few years, or is the timeline usually longer than that?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Well, that's a great question, and there's no perfect answer, Brian, frankly. It really depends on the, you know, on the size and the, and the magnitude, of course. Look, if I were to pick how long does it take to roll out a unified supply chain execution program, both WMS and TMS, let's assume 30, 40 or 50 distribution centers, something like that, that's probably a 3-year program, I would say. You know, could be a little longer, probably not gonna be shorter.

Brian Peterson (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director in Equity Research)

Got it. Okay, that helps a lot, actually. So, and just maybe follow up, by the way, this is more on the supply chain execution side, but point of sale-

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah.

Brian Peterson (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director in Equity Research)

Some really strong stats to share last quarter. Curious what the feedback has been from customers and prospects to start in 2024. Thanks, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Yes, you know, continues to go well from an execution perspective in the field. I think we brought a couple of new customers live this quarter. We did secure one nice deal, one nice new logo deal in the quarter. Very pleased about that. I think we've reported this same scenario before. This is a brand new customer. We've never done business with them before, and the only product that they bought from us was point of sale. So it stood alone on its own merit. You know, I forget exactly, but I think it's right around a 225 store chain, so we're looking forward to getting that project rolling as well.

So, you know, continuing to see strong momentum in the, you know, in the field, both from an execution, a go live and, a nice little bit of sales motion there as well.

Brian Peterson (Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director in Equity Research)

Great to hear. Thanks, Eddie.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yep. Thank you, Brian.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Joe Vruwink with Baird. Please proceed with your questions.

Joe Vruwink (Managing Director)

Great. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. One upfront, just on the composition of RPO bookings across WMS, OMS, TMS, have your expectations changed at all in terms of the relative share of what's flowing into your backlog, just given how the year has started?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

No. I would say, you know, it bounces by quarter. We, you know, talk about that all the time, Joe. But in terms of the makeup, I think, you know, we expect it to be pretty consistent. You know, the way I think about it is, you know, on an annual basis, and it'll bounce around, you know, kind of quarter by quarter.

Joe Vruwink (Managing Director)

Okay, great. And then Active WM, that debuted in the spring of 2020. You saw a pretty nice step up in RPO bookings, really towards the end of that year and then certainly 2021. So the early adopters at this point, they're in year three, year four, some are maybe coming up on renewal conversations, but certainly many are far enough along in live, where you've probably engaged with the new cloud installed base just on cross-selling. How has that experience, both experience at renewal and then maybe net retention experience over the course of that initial five years or so engagement, how has that fared so far? And does it change at all, kind of the evolution of your model as more of the model is just gonna reflect cloud financials and how the renewal base is evolving over time?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Let's see, quite a bit packed in there. But you know, we haven't seen obviously material renewals just yet, 'cause to your point, we haven't even quite met the four-year mark for launch, you know. So you know, next year and the year after is when we'll start to see you know, more of the renewals. But renewals, you know, net retention rate is very, very strong. Cross sales, you know, we're pleased with. So I know I'm a bit of a broken record here, but again, bounces around a little bit quarter by quarter. You know, this quarter, I think the cross sales were you know, in the 20%, maybe just a tick above 20, you know, 20%.

That seems to bounce around, frankly, between anything from, you know, 15-35 on a quarterly basis, but usually settles in annually to be around about 25%, you know, cross-sell, upsell.

Joe Vruwink (Managing Director)

Great. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay. Thank you, Joe.

Operator (participant)

Our next questions are from the line of Mark Chappell with Loop Capital. Please proceed with your questions.

Mark Schappel (Managing Director)

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Eddie, could you just provide a little bit of an update on the Shopify partnership that was announced recently, specifically with respect to the, you know, the product integration efforts?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, sure. Sure, be happy to, Mark. So we, you know, we announced that at NRF, and, you know, in our instance, seems, you know, seen a lot of interest around the, you know, the Shopify partnership. I'll try to make it short. The, the, you know, the gist of it is that Shopify sees an opportunity for them to come up into the enterprise with, you know, with their web store and, and, and e-commerce store- e-commerce storefront. We obviously are a great partner for them because, they, they would love to be able to integrate directly into our, enterprise class order management system and, get after our enterprise order management system customers. So that's, you know, sort of, great news, you know, great news for them.

We think there's gonna be, over time, a wave of, you know, e-commerce platform replacements, given some of the older systems have kind of fallen off of the wayside and so forth. Obviously, Shopify do as well, and we'd like to attach to that replacement cycle as it happens over the next few years, you know, hence the benefit of the partnership for Manhattan Associates.

You know, we, we've busily been building standard integration and out-of-the-box integration with, you know, with Shopify, you know, and, and, you know, both our R&T teams on both sides have been working very closely together, and seems to have been, or it, it, it is, not seems to have been, it is a very productive relationship and partnership and, you know, looking forward to seeing what comes of that, you know, in the future. It, it, it will feature, you know, as one of the things that we talk about in a little more detail, Momentum with our existing customers as well, and I think it'll be interesting for them.

Mark Schappel (Managing Director)

Great, thanks. Then, growth in the Asia-Pacific region seemed a little bit softer this quarter than maybe in the past. I was wondering if we should read anything into this, or is this just quarterly variability in the numbers?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

No, actually, it was actually pretty strong this quarter. Now, you know, as you know, APAC for us is you know, in the 6%-10% of our revenue, so it can be you know, a little bit on the smaller side from an actual numbers perspective. But we had a good quarter, frankly. You know, good margins, and the pipeline looks pretty good in APAC as well, maybe with the exception of you know, China, where things are not quite as strong for us.

Mark Schappel (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you. That's all.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay. Thank you, Mark.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of George George Karr with Citi. Please proceed with your questions.

George C. (Procurement Manager)

Thanks for taking the questions. Happy to be on the call. Maybe just high level on the demand backdrop. You guys described kind of a volatile environment that you're executing through. You know, maybe you could just double-click on kind of what you're seeing there relative to what you saw last quarter, and if there's kind of any particular verticals that you describe as maybe seeing a little more impact. Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

I would say no, George. And look, the macro volatility that I'm referring to is the exact same volatility that every single company on the planet is observing. I think I should, you know... Look, I'm gonna repeat myself from, I think, last quarter. 12 months ago, there was a healthy amount of macro volatility and it seems to us that none of those have come off the table, but more issues have been added to the mix, you know, just hence the reference to the volatility and so forth. But you know, it hasn't had a particular impact on any vertical.

You know, for us, you know, as I pointed out in some of the wins for the quarter, we've got pretty good diversity across, you know, airlines and paint suppliers and golf equipment retailers and so forth. So we feel, you know, pretty good about the diversity and how we can smooth out some of that volatility. But I think it would be inappropriate for us not to mention, you know, all of the, you know, the backdrop of the things that are going on around the world.

George C. (Procurement Manager)

Got it. That makes sense. And then just on the, the updated guidance, obviously flow through, you know-

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah

George C. (Procurement Manager)

mostly upside for the quarter. But, you know, thinking about the back half of the year, maybe a very slight tweak down, maybe just any puts and takes in how you're thinking about the rest of the year.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, the not a big change. I mean, you know, Dennis obviously highlighted the FX challenges we've already seen in Q1 since we, you know, did our budgets and put the plans out. That was, you know, just a sort of a little bit disappointing, frankly. It's you know, not a material change. You know, we made it clear that we're only gonna provide our annual RPO guidance. Now, you know, we did say for the year that our growth would be at about, you know, $360 million in RPO, you know, in RPO growth, $90 million a quarter.

You know, in constant currency, we did $97 million in RPO growth for the quarter, so kind of a little bit ahead, again, constant currency wise. You know, but, but no, no material change in, you know, in outlook for, for the year at the moment.

George C. (Procurement Manager)

Great.

Dennis Story (CFO)

George, we like to underpromise and overdeliver, so there's not a material adjustment in the back half of the year.

George C. (Procurement Manager)

Got it. Makes sense. Thanks for taking the questions.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Sure thing, George.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please proceed with your questions.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, gentlemen. Great to connect to you. Appreciate you taking the question. Maybe Eddie, starting with you. We've talked a lot about kind of the continued investment and, and innovation, and what that can create from a cross-selling perspective, given kind of this cloud migration can unlock some of this. I wonder how you are thinking about the, like, blueprint phase and the importance of that dynamic of services in not only getting the customers live, but maybe giving, like, a bit of a peek under the hood and, and maybe a strategic source of helping inform some of those R&D or kind of platform investment initiatives as you work through some of this transition as well.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, there's no question. I mean, one of the, one of the sort of secret weapons of our company is our services business, from the perspective of being shoulder to shoulder with our customers. You know, understanding what market trends look like, understanding what their specific needs look like, and informing, you know, our product roadmap as we, you know, as we go forward. Now, on a, on a more near-term basis, also no doubt is where, you know, blueprinting and designing, maybe it's a WMS, a TMS, an order management system, as it's being deployed, it's quite helpful to have the full portfolio available to us. So, you know, we can, you know, guide and maybe help our customers understand the benefits of a fully unified, you know, product portfolio.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Okay, that makes a ton of sense. And maybe kind of sticking with that theme from a kind of an adjacency perspective. As you migrate more of these customers and consolidate kind of more of these systems around that idea of unified commerce, how should we think about the opportunity for kind of data monetization or embedded analytics use cases and things of the like? I know there's kind of some embedded benchmarking today, but maybe kind of connecting data and workflows, what unlocking automation can mean for monetization, given these systems that historically been so disparate. Seems like it's kind of an incremental unlock opportunity.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've got obviously, we've got a lot of analytical power in our system. We've got a lot of very valuable data, and we've got, you know, a lot of analytical power and tools that we provide, you know, to our customers, as you point out, embedded in, you know, embedded in our solutions. And, you know, cross-sell and upsell for us is certainly the name of the game. We're pretty clear about that.

You know, when we sell solutions to our customers, we're very open with them: "Hey, we would like the opportunity, as the need comes up, to help you with all of your supply chain needs, you know, kind of, you know, kind of end to end." And, you know, the unified platform that we have certainly helps enable that. We believe the bridges to get from one of our solutions to another, is much shorter, given the technology underpinnings that we have, the, zero data replication, in terms of transactional data replication, that's, you know, that's required. It makes it smooth, makes it seamless, faster, and of course, a lower total cost of ownership.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you all. Appreciate it.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Sure thing, Dylan.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our last question will be coming from the line of Blair Abernathy with Rosenblatt Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks, and thanks for taking my question. Just following on the last line of thought there, Eddie, on the migration to the cloud. As you get the whole more and more of your customers' data flows, workflows and data flows related to those in the cloud, are there other opportunities there for you to partner with other outside parties to help the customer leverage their data more?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Sure. Yeah. You know, always, obviously, our principal data partner and technology partner is Google, who, I think everybody knows is pretty powerful when it comes to a combination of analytics, data leverage, generative AI, business analytics, of course, their BigQuery, and so on, you know, so on and so forth. And, you know, they've done some really, you know, clever work in enabling their customers and our joint customers to be able to monetize the data that's inside of, you know, that system. And, you know, we get to benefit from that as well, as we put together our cross-sell and upsell opportunities and roadmaps with our customers and prospects.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you. And, and, just Dennis, one quick one for you. I, I missed the early part of the call, but I'm not sure if you talked about the hiring environment at all, sort of how your retention rates are going and, and your hiring plans for 2024.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yes, I did mention it. We welcomed about 100, 100, almost exactly 100 new associates to the family in Q1. And, you know, on track with our hiring plans for 2024. Attrition is, fortunately, you know, running at a very low rate for us. So we're able to keep hold of our great talent, and they continue to gain more and more experience, which is really helpful for, you know, for us, for our customers, and everybody concerned. But hiring plans on track for, you know, several hundred hires this year.

Blair Abernethy (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Perfect. Thanks very much.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

My pleasure, Blair. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, we've come to the end of our question and answer session, and I'll turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay, very good. Well, thank you, Rob, and thanks everybody for joining us. We really appreciate your time, where, as we mentioned, we're excited about the start to, you know, the start to the year and re-reporting out to you the results in about 90 days or so. So thanks again.

Operator (participant)

This will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.