Manhattan Associates - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. My name is Sherry, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everybody to Manhattan Associates' fourth quarter 2023 conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then the one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star and then the two. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, January 30th, 2024. I would now like to 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)

Okay, thank you, Sherry, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates' 2023 fourth quarter 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 2022, 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)

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everybody, and a belated Happy New Year, and thanks for joining us as we review our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2023, as well as provide our outlook for 2024. So 2023 was a very successful year for Manhattan, setting new records in total revenue, RPO, operating profit, free cash flow, and earnings per share. And to drive future growth and innovation, we also invested record amounts in our people and in research and development. In 2023, we increased our headcount by about 10%, and our R&D investment was over $125 million. Now, for perspective, over the past five years, we've invested over $500 million in R&D across mission-critical, commerce, and supply chain technology solutions.

This level of consistent commitment is really unmatched in our industry and is one of the Manhattan's important differentiators. Given the size of the opportunity and growing demand, we're committed to increasing these investments in 2024 and beyond. These investments will also contribute to our industry-leading levels of customer satisfaction, growing our total addressable market, and extending our position as the leading innovator in supply chain execution, omnichannel, and point-of-sale solutions. Now, while we remain appropriately cautious regarding the global economy, our business fundamentals are solid, and we're optimistic about our long-term market opportunity. Like prior years, we're entering 2024 with good visibility and benefiting from several growth drivers, which include the acquisition of new customers, conversions of on-premise customers to cloud, and cross-selling our growing unified product portfolio. Pivoting to our quarterly results, Q4 was a record quarter that frankly exceeded our expectations.

Revenue increased 20% as reported to $238 million, highlighted by 38% growth in cloud, 19% growth in services, and double-digit revenue growth across all of our geographies. These strong results drove top-line outperformance and solid earnings leverage in the quarter, with adjusted earnings per diluted share increasing 27% to $1.03. RPO, the leading indicator of our growth, increased 36% to $1.4 billion at the end of 2023. Customer satisfaction levels are high, and win rates remain at about 75%, with demand for our cloud solutions continuing to be solid across our product portfolio. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale continue to drive more than 80% of our bookings in the quarter. Across our solutions, the sub verticals are pretty diverse.

The following is just a sample of some of the cloud deals we won this quarter: an industrial automation and energy management conglomerate, an airline, a fast food restaurant chain, a sporting goods retailer, a healthcare and supplies company, and a specialty retailer, as well as a number of others. This quarter's wins contributed to a healthy mix of bookings across sub verticals for the full year. Additionally, and aided by secular tailwinds and the clear benefit of resilient modern supply chains, roughly one-third of our total bookings were generated from new logos for the full year 2023.... Our pipeline continues to be strong, with solid demand across our product suites.

Net new potential customers represent about 35% of that demand, and we have significant conversion opportunity as we enter 2024, with over 85% of our on-premise customers yet to begin their migration to our cloud solutions. For this quarter's brief product update, I'd like to start with three exciting announcements that we made at the National Retail Federation Conference in mid-January. Two of which have to do with a pretty large step forward with our Manhattan Active Omni applications, and the third is an important new partnership for us. So starting with the product enhancements. This quarter, we announced general availability of Iris, the next big step forward for our store associate app.

Running on top of Manhattan Active Omni, our Manhattan Active Omni platform, Iris offers unmatched transactional performance, resiliency that's purpose-built for the connectivity issues inherent in store networks, and a great new associate experience design. We believe that Iris is the first cloud-native Point of Sale, truly designed and built to offer the next best of both worlds, continuous innovation in the form of quarter releases and onboard resiliency to handle centralized cloud deployments at scale. Many of our customers face ongoing battles to provide fast and reliable network connectivity to every register in every store. Iris insulates the store associate from the whims of networks, offering unmatched checkout performance, whether the device is connected, partially disconnected, or completely offline.

Iris also offers a great new visual experience for the store associate, seamlessly blending the three Cs of a best-in-class point-of-sale system: cart, catalog, and customer. Iris empowers store associates to maximize sales conversion rates in the store, the ability to sell both what's in the physical store and what's in the broader supply chain in a single transaction, ensuring every possible sale is converted. Furthermore, the highly visual customer profile within Iris empowers a store associate to truly deliver a personalized selling experience. Staying with retail stores just for a moment, our point-of-sale system performed incredibly well during this recent holiday selling period, with about 30,000 retail associates using our solution and customer transaction volumes exceeding any other cloud-native point-of-sale solution in the market. Now, at NRF, we also highlighted our Fulfillment Experience Insight dashboard.

This capability is unique to Manhattan Active Omni and allows our omni-channel customers to compare their fulfillment performance against their peers and competitors. Key omni-channel fulfillment experience metrics like click to deliver, order rejection rates, pickup in store penetration percentage, and abandonment rates, among others, are displayed dynamically for each of our customers. We built this capability though, so that our Manhattan Active Omni customers can understand exactly how they stack up against the field. Fulfillment Experience Insights lays out these metrics for them in a clear and comprehensive manner. And frankly, armed with this information, our professional services team members can provide corresponding process and technology recommendations to help move these metrics forward in the right direction over time. Finally, we're also excited to announce our new partnership with Shopify.

Over the last several years, we've witnessed Shopify surfacing more and more often in our Manhattan Active Omni prospect and customer base. We thought the time was right to team up with Shopify to offer the market end-to-end omnichannel commerce solutions. Shopify shares our vision of providing solutions which lower purchase friction, increase conversion, and improve transparency and reliability during the fulfillment process. For our customers, both Manhattan and Shopify are focused on delivering functionality-rich solutions, which can be implemented on time, on budget, and we start delivering value immediately for them. We believe that in the near to medium term, the market will further emphasize total cost of ownership and lower project risk. The Manhattan Active Omni and Shopify partnership is well suited to deliver on both of these.

Now, speaking of partners, I am proud to report that we finished 2023 by adding a record number of new partners to our Manhattan Value Partner or MVP program. Whether it's SaaS providers like Shopify or Adyen, transportation visibility providers like FourKites or project44 or Shippeo, or material handling and robotics vendors for use within the four walls of the DC, Manhattan Active Platform applications are easy to connect and offer our partners access to a world-class customer base. And we'll continue to add and strengthen our relationships with premier third-party integration and advisory firms as well. Our network of technology and consulting partners help us connect with the broader market of target customers and improve the speed and success of our deployments.

So next quarter, I'll likely focus my product updates within our Manhattan Active Supply Chain execution suite. But for now, I'll simply mention that we continue to see strong demand and deal activity for our market-leading unified supply chain execution offering, consisting basically of WMS and TMS. This demand is coming from across the globe and across industries. And finally, throughout 2024, we'll also continue to update you on the progress that our R&D team is making as we incorporate the latest generative AI technologies into our supply chain and omnichannel retail solutions. So in summary, 2023 was a terrific year for Manhattan, and we're very excited for the numerous opportunities that lie ahead to deliver simply world-class innovation into our growing customer base. So that concludes my business update.

Dennis is gonna provide you with an update of the financial performance for 2023 and an outlook for 2024. And then I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before we, before we move on to Q&A. So, Dennis?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Thanks. Thanks, Eddie. As Eddie highlighted, in 2023, we set all-time records in RPO, total revenue, operating profit, free cash flow, and earnings per share. So a big shout-out to 4,600 team members across the globe. Great execution through the year. For both the quarter and the year, we delivered a strong, balanced financial performance on top line growth and operating margin. Both our Q4 and full year results exceeded expectations and compared favorably to the Rule of 50. And if our revenue growth is normalized for our cloud transition, which excludes license and maintenance attrition, our performance is even stronger. Importantly, Manhattan continues to deliver strong, consistent results across revenue growth, profitability, and cash flow. I'll start with recapping our financial performance for the quarter and year. Regarding FX, it was a 1-point tailwind to Q4 revenue growth and did not impact our full-year revenue growth rate.

For RPO, FX was a 1-point tailwind to both year-over-year and sequential growth. Now to our results. All growth rates are on an as-reported year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated. For Q4 total revenue, total revenue was up 238, or was $238 million, up 20%, and full year revenue totaled $929 million, up 21%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the revenue compression by our cloud transition, Q4 revenue growth was 24% and full year, 28%. Some nice double-digit returns here. Q4 cloud revenue totaled $71 million, up 38%, with full year revenue totaling $255 million, up 44%.

We closed out 2023 with RPO of $1.4 billion, growing 36% year-over-year and 8% sequentially, as we experienced strength from across our Manhattan Active suite of products. Excluding FX impacts, RPO exceeded the high end of our $1.4 billion outlook by $13 million, which was stronger than expected. Services had another fantastic year and great, great performance, with Q4 revenue increasing 19% to $119 million, with full-year services revenue up 24% to $488 million as cloud sales continue to fuel services growth globally. Q4 adjusted operating profit was $77 million, with an operating margin of 32.2%, representing a 200 basis point year-over-year improvement.

Full-year adjusted operating profit totaled $281 million, with a 30.3% operating margin and represents a 265 basis point improvement over 2022. Both Q4 and 2023 results were driven by strong cloud and services revenue growth, combined with operating leverage as our cloud business scales. Q4 earnings per share increased 27% to $1.03, and GAAP earnings per share increased 30% to $0.78. Full year adjusted earnings per share increased 36% to $3.74, and GAAP earnings per share increased 39% to $2.82. Q4 operating cash flow increased 60% to $88 million, with a 36.3% free cash flow margin and a 32.9% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Our full-year operating cash flow was $246 million, while generating 26% free cash flow margin and 30.9% adjusted EBITDA margin. Turning to the balance sheet, our deferred revenue increased 13% year-over-year to $239 million. We increased our cash position to $271 million, with zero debt, up from $182 million at the end of Q3. In 2023, we invested $166 million in share repurchases, and we are entering 2024 with a board-approved $75 million share repurchase authority. Moving to the outlook, as consistently mentioned, our financial objective is to deliver sustainable double-digit top-line growth and top-quartile operating margins, benchmarked against any enterprise SaaS comps.

As noted on prior earnings calls, our goal is to update our RPO outlook on an annual basis. Additionally, as previously discussed, 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, we are raising the midpoint of our preliminary 2024 RPO revenue, operating margin, and EPS targets that we provided last quarter. For RPO, we are now targeting $1.75 billion-$1.8 billion. The $1.78 billion midpoint compares favorably to our prior midpoint of $1.75 billion and represents 25% growth.

For full year 2024 guidance, we now expect total revenue of $1.015 billion-$1.025 billion, with a $1.02 billion midpoint, comparing favorably to our prior midpoint of roughly $1 billion. Bunch of billions in there. Represents 16% growth, excluding license and maintenance attrition, and all in, our target is 10%. For Q1, we are targeting total revenue of $241 million-$245 million, which at the midpoint, represents 16% growth, excluding license and maintenance attrition, and 10% growth all in. For the rest of the year, at the midpoint, we are targeting total revenue of about $255 million in Q2, $264 million in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $258 million in Q4.

Driven by our revenue growth and the inherent leverage in our business model, we continue to track ahead of our original margin expectations. As such, we are raising our 2024 adjusted operating margin guidance range to 28.75%-29.25%, with the 29% midpoint comparing favorably to our prior midpoint that we provided last quarter of 28.25%. Additionally, included in our outlook is 175 basis points of headwind from our license and maintenance revenue attrition to cloud. At the midpoint, a0djusted operating margin on a quarterly basis is expected to be about 28% in Q1, 28.5% in Q2, 30% in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, 29.5% in Q4.

The results in a full year Adjusted EPS guidance range of $3.69-$3.79, and a GAAP EPS range of $2.81-$2.91. For comparison purposes, our 2024 adjusted tax rate is nearly 350 basis points higher than our 2023 adjusted tax rate. For Q1, we are targeting Adjusted EPS of $0.85-$0.87 and GAAP EPS of $0.71-$0.73. For Q2 through Q4, we expect GAAP EPS to be about $0.25 lower than Adjusted EPS per quarter, which accounts for our investment in equity-based compensation. Here are some additional details on our 2024 outlook.

For full year 2024, we continue to expect cloud revenue of $326 million-$330 million. At the midpoint, this represents 29% growth and assumes roughly $75 million in Q1, $79 million in Q2, $85 million in Q3, and $89 million in Q4. For services revenue, we are increasing our forecast of $532 million-$542 million, representing 10% growth at the midpoint. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 services revenue of roughly $128 million, $137 million in Q2, $141 million in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $131 million in Q4. On transition to cloud, we expect maintenance and license to represent about a 6-point headwind to total revenue growth in 2024.

For maintenance, we expect a range of $121 million-$123 million, or a 15% decline at the midpoint. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 to be $32.5 million, Q2 $31 million, Q3 $29.5 million, and Q4 $29 million. We expect license revenue to be roughly $6 million, or less than 1% of 2024 total revenue, and hardware to be between $5 million-$7 million per quarter. For consolidated subscription, maintenance, and services margin, we are targeting about 100 basis points of year-over-year improvement for 2024 and Q1. We expect our effective tax rate to be 21.5% and our diluted share count to be 62.8 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. And finally, in summary, 2023 was a great year, and we expect 2024 to be another year of balanced performance across revenue, growth, profitability, and cash flow. Thank you, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thanks, Dennis. So indeed, 2023 was a very successful year for Manhattan. And, you know, while we remain appropriately cautious, given the volatile macro conditions that are out there, our business fundamentals and momentum are very solid, right? Manhattan enters 2024 as the industry leader with world-class technology, with record levels of R&D investment that's contributing to our 75%+ win rates in the field, with industry-leading levels of customer satisfaction and a strong pipeline with numerous drivers for sustainable long-term growth. So in closing, I'd just like to echo Dennis's comments and thank all of the Manhattan team members around the world for a fantastic 2023. Your dedication and commitment to our growing customer base is just unparalleled and clearly one of our key differentiators. So Sherry, that concludes our prepared remarks, and we'd be happy to take any questions at this point.

Operator (participant)

Okay. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. 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 your star keys. One moment while we pull for questions. Our first question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please proceed.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Hey, good afternoon, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike, and it's great to hear all the talk about the billion. Maybe Eddie, a question for you, and then I had a couple follow-ups for Dennis. You know, as we just get further along in kind of the monetizing the cloud innovation cycles that you have, I'm curious, are you starting to see customers, whether it's existing customers or prospects, kind of look at all the things you have from a platform perspective, so, you know, supply chain, unified commerce, and starting to think about, hey, we wanna go get more aggressive initially with more like a platform deal, where it's a couple of major kind of sets of products, as opposed to maybe WMS or OMS or PS?

I'm just kind of curious about the buying behavior, if they're starting to feel like, "Hey, yeah, we want to go bigger, faster," or does it still feel like, no, there's the initial wedge, and then over time, they add the other products? Kind of curious about the buying behavior around just all the, what you deliver with the platform.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, sure. It's a great question, Terry, and it's really the latter. You know, primarily, if you think about it, because these are pretty big initiatives. Let's just say, you know, WMS and order management or something, you know, any two of the major products, they're pretty big initiatives in themselves, and usually, our customers can only digest one of them at a time. So they're unlikely, let's you know, take that example, to buy WMS and OMS, knowing that they've got to pay OMS SaaS fees while not beginning an implementation for six, nine, maybe even 12 months. So I think, you know, they have a vision to be able to build on the platform and you know, acquire additional products down the road.

But, you know, just practically speaking, it doesn't make a ton of sense, frankly, to pay, you know, SaaS fees for products that you can't get to the implementation of.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Okay, understood on that. And I guess maybe, Dennis, just to follow up in terms of the cloud booking strengths in the quarter, it's great to see and the upside. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit, double-clicking then to that, in terms of was there just some greater large deal exposure or benefits in the quarter, or was there a larger number of just actual kind of units or customers signed up? Just kind of curious if there was anything that was interesting or different versus the prior couple of quarters. And then I had a follow-up.

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

I don't know about interesting or different. I thought it was pretty consistent, kind of across the board, Terry.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yep, I would, I would agree with that, Dennis. I mean, I'll tell you, we, we had no record-sized deals, you know, in the, in the quarter. We always like those, but we had no record-sized deals in the quarter. I would say from a geographic perspective, we had very good and very nice sort of balanced contribution from both the Americas, EMEA and, and APAC. You know, that, that was enjoyable.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Yeah. Yeah. No, it sounds enjoyable. I guess just a follow-up question for Dennis or Eddie or Mike is just related to... Y'all did move up the RPO balance a little bit, so that was nice to see, just given that we're still in the beginning of the year. One thing I'm curious about is it does look like Q1 and Q4 were the biggest RPO or the bookings quarters in 2023. I'm not trying to pin you down to quarterly kind of guidance. But is there starting to be a common buying pattern with these cloud deals? Maybe it's at the very beginning of the year or very end of the year with budget flush. I'm just trying to get a sense on, if you could kind of foretell how, like, there's a pattern recognition now around booking. Thank you, and great job.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

No. Thank you, Terry. No, no, not really. So, you know, I would say definitely no budget flush at the end of the year, given that obviously they're annual subscription fees, you know, so, so there's no, you know, license buys right at the end of the year or anything like that in terms of budget flush. You know, Q1, I can see maybe. Thank you for saying you're not gonna pin us down on this. But I think, you know, in Q1, we sometimes see a little bit of a stronger buying pattern because there's still time to get systems in before peak, if you kind of buy early in, you know, in Q1. You know, that, that is definitely an opportunity there for us, but no budget flush at the end of Q4. Thanks.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Terry.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please proceed.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director of Application Software)

Thanks, gentlemen. Congrats on the strong quarter. So, Eddie, I'd love to give me an update. I know in the past you've shared some details on the number of booked customers or implemented custom customers for Active WM. Any updated perspective that you can share there?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Yes, I think I can. We're at somewhere, I don't have the exact number, frankly, off the top of my head, but we're 120+ contracted customers. Live customers, again, don't quote me to the exact, we're about 75 live customers and right at 200, just over 200 facilities live around the globe. So, you know, and some of those, of course, are very large, you know, very large facilities, highly automated and so forth. So, you know, with, call it 125, 75, and 200, I mean, this is a rock solid, proven solution now. You know, we went through, of course, the peak season of 2022 with live Manhattan Active WM customers, but as you can tell, we had hundreds of facilities that went through peak of 2023.

So I think it's sort of a take it to the bank, you know, bulletproof solution that's proven at the top end of the market now.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director of Application Software)

No, it's great to see that progress. And maybe just a follow-up on services hiring and anything on productivity. Just, you know, obviously, we got the guide for the margins, but love to understand how you guys are thinking about services capacity in 2024. Thanks, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, well, you know, we plan on increasing capacity, obviously, to help, you know, with customer satisfaction and so forth. As we've talked about before, hiring came in a little lower in 2023 than we had originally projected at the beginning of the year, only because we saw attrition very low, frankly. So we, you know, we modulated our hiring accordingly. You know, the onboarding and the productivity of the team members that we brought on has been outstanding, frankly. Now, that's a combination to our kind of services, operations team, all of the training programs, the center of excellence we have and so forth, that is very focused on making those individuals, you know, productive as soon as we possibly can. But certainly, you know, expect several hundred hires this year as well.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director of Application Software)

Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Pleasure. Pleasure, Brian. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Joe Vruwink with Baird. Please proceed.

Joe Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start with the Shopify alliance, which sounds pretty interesting. You mentioned there's some existing customer overlap. Can you maybe quantify that or, you know, where you see the most synergies in the customer base today? And then, obviously, when you think about the global Shopify merchant count, that's a massive number. I would imagine that's not all addressable by kind of your enterprise-grade technology, but what sort of expansion and audience do you think this could ultimately mean for Manhattan?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. So let's see. Great, great, great question. Look, this is driven probably a little more, to be perfectly honest, Joe, with, you know, Shopify obviously has a fabulous history, a really great technology platform, and have been doing exceptionally well in, I hope they won't be offended by this, but, but in the SMB space, and have gradually been coming up the stack, you know, toward the enterprise where we play. So that's why, you know, we've started to see a lot more sort of cross-fertilization of prospects and customers as they come up into, you know, kind of the real enterprise, enterprise class, versus, you know, us going down so much into, into SMB. We've had that conversation many, many, you know, many, many times, about our focus on both, you know, tier one, tier one and tier two.

But, but, but we really do think, you know, the combination of our advanced technology and platform and Shopify's advanced technology and platform can really deliver some, you know, substantial and a very effective and efficient results for, you know, our customer base and, and, and so forth. And one of the beauties, and I mentioned this in my prepared remarks, you know, both they and we are very focused on essentially speed to value. You know, they've become—they are experts at this for, you know, the smaller merchants and so forth, and, and, you know, we think together we can bring fast, efficient, effective enablement up into the enterprise.

Joe Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, that, that's great. And then maybe a one for you and Dennis. Just the maintenance revenues, they have been exceeding plans, you know, still growing here in Q4. Obviously appreciate the 2024 outlook and maybe the pace of attrition picking up. I'm wondering if you just have any updated thoughts on kind of the migration timeline and those existing on-prem customers you mentioned at the beginning. What sort of duration might you expect for the majority to ultimately choose one of your cloud offerings?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yes. I mean, look, I've been saying it for a pretty long time, you know, I think it's a six-seven year run. Now, it would be fair of you to say, "But Eddie, you said six-seven years at the beginning of the year, and now you're saying six-seven years at the beginning of this year as well." Yeah, you know, it's still in that range, in that range, Joe, would be my estimate. To get through the bulk of the transitions, my guess is there'll still be, you know, 5%-10%, at the end of that period of time, there'll be sort of laggards and so forth, but it's a six or seven-year journey, in my view.

Joe Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, very good. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

I'm sorry, the one, the one thing I'll mention, just a, just a reminder there, Joe. We essentially offer no incentives for either our customers or for our sales guys and our sales team, you know, to promote it. Our strategy is when the time is right, we're there for you. So there's no, you know, no, no incentive, and frankly, the, you know, there's no-

Joe Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Gun to the head.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Gun to the head. Thank you. I was gonna try looking for a better, a nicer expression than that, but you know, there's no threats of lack of support or anything else.

Joe Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Yes. Okay. I understood. Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Joe.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Mark Schappel (Managing Director)

Thank you for taking my question, and, nice job on the quarter, guys. Eddie, with, with respect to your point-of-sale business, I was wondering if you could just, you know, highlight or point out some of the, the biggest opportunities you face and also some of the challenges you're, you're facing right now. So for instance, are you facing, you know, challenge-wise, are you facing, more, more so on the marketing side or, or maybe on the product side?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Great, great, great question, Mark. So, let's start, let's start with the challenges, get those out of the way. I just think we've still got a little bit of an awareness, you know, challenge, challenge at this. We are beating the drums and telling neighbors, friends, and aunts and uncles as best as we, as best as we publicly possibly can about this world-class solution, you know, that we have, number one. Now, at the National Retail Federation show, conference, I should say, you know, a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned in my prepared comments, we launched the next generation.

So, you know, we still have got the most revolutionary cloud native Point of Sale in the industry, but we updated it yet again, you know, next generation, and launched it at NRF, and very well, you know, very well received. So I think awareness is still kind of our challenge. Now, you know, you and others have heard me talk about the goal by the end of the year was to have about 10 live customers. Well, we've got that. We've got about 10, 'cause I think that sort of gets you over the hump in terms of, okay, this is not a little, you know, early cycle product anymore.

And the fact of the matter is, we went through the holiday peak season here with 10 live customers, 30,000 store associates using our system, every penny of revenue if you think about the customers that run both Manhattan Active Omni and Point of Sale, right? All of their wholesale business, if they have it, their direct consumer business is all running through Manhattan Active Omni. All of their foot traffic revenue is running through Point of Sale. So every single penny of their revenue is running through, you know, the Manhattan solutions. 30,000 associates, and you know, right around 1,500 more now, but right around 1,500 stores live on Point of Sale through the peak season.

You know, and transaction volumes that, you know, are substantial, let's just call it that, and certainly exceed any other cloud-native point-of-sale system out there. So feel really good about, you know, kind of where we are with the product. We've noted, so, long answer here, but we noted, you know, some of the wins we've had against best of breed Point of Sale companies, head-to-head with no other solutions from Manhattan and no previous experience with Manhattan. So clearly, you know, we can, we can go head-to-head. And now, I mean, if there was ever any question about scalability and so forth, we, you know, sailed through Q4 with, again, 30,000, 1,500 stores, very high transaction volume. So feel like we're there. We just got to beat the drum, get the, get the word out.

Mark Schappel (Managing Director)

That's helpful. Thanks. And then, shifting gears a little bit here. With respect to your, your sales motion, could you just, give us a sense of what percentage of bookings were, were cross-sell, up-sell, during the quarter, or actually, well, actually during the year?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

I think, let's see. We're right around... Give me a percentage here and there, but we were just under 30% for the quarter, and I think for the year, we were right in the 26%-27%.

Operator (participant)

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

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay, thank you, Mark.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Matt Pfau with William Blair. Please proceed.

Matt Pfau (Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. Hey, great, thanks, and nice, nice quarter, guys. Wanted to ask on the Shopify partnership, is that just a product integration partnership, or is there a go-to-market motion there as well with them?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, both. I mean, as is, so obviously, we've announced the partnership, as is customary with us, and I think, you know, Shopify, too. We're gonna make sure that, you know, we've got all of the technical aspects of the product integration, you know, end-to-end, end-to-end integration and process flows completely ironed out, you know, before we do anything, anything more. But now it's at the moment it is, you know, we're working on the certified integration. We've got joint clients that are in active implementation, we expect to be live in, you know, in Q2.

Matt Pfau (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Great. And then wanted to ask, you know, on the margins. Understand that I think the margin, slight margin decline, operating margin decline you're guiding for in 2024 is effectively all driven by revenue mix with the runoff of maintenance and license. Now, as we think, like, longer term about the cloud gross margin, which you know, you don't break out specifically, but is that still ramping?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Right.

Matt Pfau (Equity Research Analyst)

Is there still upside to that as you scale? How do we think about that?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Yeah, there is. You know, I mean, we're effectively continuing to increase operating margins if you take out the, you know, if you take out the drag. And, you know, we're, we still think there's, you know, scale opportunity in cloud operations and, you know, and up and down the PNL, frankly.

Matt Pfau (Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, great. Thanks, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Matt.

Operator (participant)

Our final question comes from Blair Abernethy with Rosenblatt Securities. Please proceed.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks very much. Nice quarter, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Dennis, just wondering on the professional services side of the business, you know, if you look at your overall hiring, your total employee headcount was up around 10% in the year, but your professional services revenues were up around 24%. Can you just help reconcile sort of, you know, capacity in that professional services business and, and pricing in the market, how that, how that's, how that performed in 2023 and sort of what you're looking at for 2024?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Well, Eddie here, just a couple of points. I mean, obviously, we have seen a little bit, not a ton, but we have passed on a little bit of wage inflation and so forth to our customers. So you've seen hourly rates tick up a little bit, but most of the leverage comes from the efficiency of the organization, but for sure. You know, particularly as we continue to focus on the centers of excellence, as I talked about, the training and the onboarding of the new resources. Now, the other thing that I mentioned, we had forecasted a little bit higher headcount acquisition in 2023 than we needed because attrition was lower than we expected. That helps efficiency for sure.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, great. And is there, with the Shopify relationship, will that also drive some professional services, I guess it would, if for, if larger customers, adopt your solution?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, no, no, no doubt it will. Now, you know, part of our objective there, just to be clear, is to take out any of the base integration work that's needed to be done. We'll, you know, between us, we'll carry that, you know, carry that cost. So the idea is to speed up implementations, reduce the total cost of ownership and so forth. But nonetheless, there's still professional services fees associated with, you know, with implementing that joint solution.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, great. Great. And then my next question was just really around, just maybe a little more color on the guidance, the revenue guidance for fiscal 2024 of sort of 10% on the top line. You did 21% in 2023, you did 15% in 2022. And is there a—I just wanna get your sense of sort of how you came to your 2024 revenue view.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Well, our revenue growth guidance coming into 2024 is roughly the same as it was coming into 2023. Slightly higher, actually.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, now, is the environment feeling about the same as 2023 at the end of last year?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yes, in the same ballpark. Obviously, there's a few things going on around the world, that are happening now, that weren't happening at the beginning of 2023. 2024 is an election year, et cetera, et cetera. So all the things that you know about, but aside from those things, everything feels, you know, about the same.

Blair Abernethy (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, great. Thanks very much.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

My pleasure, Blair. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Eddie for closing remarks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Okay, terrific, Sherry. Well, thanks, everybody, for attending the call today. Again, we're pleased with 2023. Looking forward to a fabulous 2024, and we'll look forward to updating you on the Q1 results in about 90 days. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

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