This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk05: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This conference will begin shortly. Thank you for your patience and once again this conference will begin shortly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
spk01: Good morning everybody and welcome to Audiocode's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings 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 will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Roger Chuchen, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.
spk02: Thank you, Jenny. Hosting the call today are Shabtai Atlasberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Niran Baruch, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer, and Dimitri Nettis, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Corporate Development. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that the information provided during this call may contain forward-looking statements relating to AudioCode's business outlook, future economic performance, product introductions, plans, and objectives related thereto, and statements concerning assumptions made or expectations as to any future events, conditions, performance, or other matters or forward-looking statements as the term is defined under U.S. Federal Securities Law. Board-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated in such statements. These risks, uncertainties, and factors include, but are not limited to, the effect of global economic conditions in general and conditions in audio codes industry and target markets in particular, shifts in supply and demand, market acceptance of new products, and the demand of existing products. the impact of competitive products and pricing on AudioCodes and its customers' products and markets, timely product and technology developments, upgrades, and the ability to manage changes in market conditions as needed, possible need for additional financing, the ability to satisfy covenants in the company's loan agreements, possible disruptions from acquisitions, the ability of AudioCodes to successfully integrate the products and operations of acquired companies into AudioCodes business, possible adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and results of operations, and other factors detailed in AudioCodes filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. AudioCodes assumes no obligation to update this information. In addition, during the call, AudioCodes will refer to non-GAAP net income and net income per share. AudioCodes has provided a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP net income and net income per share to its net income and net income per share, according to GAAP in the press release that is posted on its website. Before I turn the call over to management, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded. An archived webcast will be made available on the investor relations section of the company's website at the conclusion of the call. With all that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Shabtai. Shabtai, please go ahead.
spk04: Thank you, Roger. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. I would like to welcome all to a FOSCORE 2022 conference call. With me this morning is Niran Baruch, Chief Financial Officer at and Vice President of Finance of Audicodes. Niran will start off by presenting a financial overview of the Corps. I will then review the business highlights and summary for the Corps and the year and discuss trends and developments in our industry and business. We will then turn it into the Q&A session. Niran?
spk03: Thank you, Shabtai, and hello, everyone. As usual, on today's call, we will be referring to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. The earnings press release that we issued earlier this morning contains a reconciliation of the supplemental non-GAAP financial information that I will be discussing on this call. Revenues for the fourth quarter were $17.7 million, an increase of 6.9% over the $66.1 million reported in the fourth quarter of last year. Full year 2022 revenues were $275.1 million, an increase of 10.5 percent over the $248.9 million reported in 2021. Services revenues for the fourth quarter were $28.6 million, up 17.2 percent over the year-ago period. Service revenues in the fourth quarter accounted for 40.5% of total revenues. On an annual basis, service revenues increased by 18.1% compared to the previous year. The amount of deferred revenues as of December 31st, 2022 was 79.4 million, up from 76.5 million as of December 31st, 2021. Revenues by geographical region for the quarter were split as follows. North America, 47%, EMEA, 35%, Asia Pacific, 14%, and Central and Latin America, 4%. Our top 15 customers represented an aggregate of 57% of our revenues in the fourth quarter, of which 42% was attributed to our 10 largest distributors. Gap results are as follows. Gross margin for the quarter was 65.3 percent compared to 67.2 percent in Q4 2021. Operating income for the quarter was 8.3 million or 11.8 percent of revenues compared to 9.3 million or 14 percent of revenues in Q4 2021. Full year 2022 operating income was $31.3 million compared to operating income of $39.5 million in 2021. Net income for the quarter was $7.5 million or $0.23 per diluted shares compared to $7.3 million or $0.22 per diluted shares for Q4 2021. Full year 2022 net income was $28.5 million or $0.88 per diluted shares compared to $33.8 million in 2021. Non-GAAP results are as follows. Non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 65.8% compared to 67.6% in Q4 2021. Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $12.5 million or 17.7% of revenues compared to $13.5 million or 20.4% of revenues in Q4 2021. Full year 2022 non-GAAP operating income was $47.2 million compared to operating income of $53.8 million in 2021. Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $11.9 million or $0.36 per diluted shares compared to $13.4 million or $0.39 per diluted shares in Q4 2021. Full year 2022 non-GAAP net income was $45 million or $1.35 per diluted share compared to $51.8 million or $1.50 per diluted shares in 2021. At the end of December 2022, cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits, financial investments and marketable securities totaled $124.3 million. Net cash provided by operating activity was $0.4 million for the fourth quarter of 2022 and $8.3 million for the full year of 2022. Day sale outstanding as of December 31, 2022 were 90 days. During the quarter, we acquired 145,000 of our ordinary shares for a total consideration of approximately $2.9 million. In January 2023, we received court approval in Israel to purchase up to an aggregate amount of $25 million of additional ordinary shares. The court approval also permits us to declare a dividend of any part of this amount. The approval is valid through July 4, 2023. Earlier this morning, we also declared a cash dividend of $0.18 per share. The aggregate amount of the dividend is approximately $5.7 million. The dividend will be paid on March 7, 2023, to all of our shareholders of record at the close of the trading of February 21, 2023. Regarding headcount, on the heels of the addition of 112 positions in 2021, 84 in the nine months ended September 30, 2022, there was no increase of full-time employees in the fourth quarter of 2022. We ended 2022 with 966 employees. Our guidance for the full year 2023 is as follows. We expect revenues in the range of $286 million to $300 million, and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $1.35 to $1.50. I will now turn the call back over to Shabtai.
spk04: Thank you, Mehran. Before I start my formal remarks, I would like to remind everyone that in conjunction with our earnings release this morning, we have posted on our investor relations website an earnings supplement deck. I would like to start off by providing a recap of 2022. We entered the year with cautious optimism as we continue to leverage the multi-year circular growth trends within the UC and CX segments. that have fueled our business for several years now. We successfully executed according to plan, having delivered 10.5% revenue growth in 2022 within the range of former guidance. I would like also to note that with the late increased focus on enterprise AI and in view of our investment in the voice AI business since early 2018, we see another major growth driver for our business in coming years. Our primary growth engines during the year were Microsoft Business, which ended up growing 18% year-over-year, with Microsoft Teams up 30% year-over-year. Zoom Business grew about 50% year-over-year. CX Business up 3% year-over-year, excluding LAMP OEM revenue, where we have lowered priority already a year ago on the OEM revenue. segment, CX direct enterprise customers grew 13% year-over-year. Voice AI opportunities and activities grew over 15% year-over-year. Despite the macro uncertainty we face in the second half of the year, we believe long-term circular growth drivers remain intact. ADCOT is well-positioned to capitalize on the defenseless technologies such as digital transformation to the cloud within our core UC and CX markets and vendor consolidation favoring our primary partners, namely Microsoft, Genesys, and Zoom. We further believe that our unique blend of strong profitability and balance sheet relative to our UCCX peers afford us the flexibility to continue investment in core strategic areas of our business, enabling us to leapfrog competition when the macro storm subsides. On the operations front, we are pleased to have delivered improved non-gap growth and operating margins in the first quarter, helped by easing supply chain pressures. Based on current trends of lower pressure in the supply chain, operating margins should continue improving entering 2023. This trend coupled with better FX edging throughout 2023 and continued prudent allocation of investments gives us increasing confidence to deliver on our commitment to drive improved operating leverage and profitability in 2023. Now, shifting into some of the fourth quarter results. Studies in our press release earlier this morning saw continued momentum in both the UC and the CX markets. Key drivers of fourth quarter 2022 came from Microsoft-related business, which was up quarterly 12% year-over-year. A deceleration from prior quarters, as we saw longer sales cycles. Same, Zoom on the other end grew about 50% year-over-year and in the quarter, although albeit from a lower base. As it relates to live for Teams managed services, we ended the year with 31 million in ARR, achieve the target that we have laid out at the beginning of the year to reach over 30 million growth. Our execution for our strategic priority of migrating traditional CapEx to OpEx is working well with total contract value growing above 25% quarter over quarter. We ended the year with total contract value for our live subscription exceeding 100 million up from 90 million in last quarter, providing us with increased level of revenues and visibility. We expect strong momentum to continue in the live services in 2023. Our CX segment grew sequentially as expected, but was still down 7% for the prior year period, owing largely to other lumpiness from our OEM customer. As stated earlier, we have shifted our focus away from the OEM business and now focus largely on direct enterprise accounts. Our direct enterprise CX business grew 13% in the core. Imposantly, we continue to see a strong pipeline of opportunities in live CX, which couples our advanced SBC solutions with our strong managed services delivery. We now enjoy close alignment with contact center accounts, planning migration from on-prem implementation to cloud solution deployments. Additive to a growth in the core in this area was the ongoing strength in our service provider CPE market, which is related to the carrier all IP transformation and PSN shutdown projects. Our service provider business CPE group for the third consecutive quarter and was up 12% year over year. And we continue to see healthy pipeline in this segment in 2023. Shifting gears to margins and EPS discussion, we are pleased to see a snapback in non-GAAP gross margins to 65.8% in the quarter, up from 63.2% in the previous quarter. The increase was influenced by two primary factors. First, easing supply chain costs. We incurred 500,000 of our component costs in fourth quarter, which compares to 1.2 million spent in the third quarter. Lower supply chain costs relative to prior quarter accounted for roughly half of the sequential improvement in our non-gap gross margin. Second, product mix. accounted for the balance of the sequential gross margin improvement with our percentage of sales coming from soft product and managed services. Full year 2022 non-GAAP gross margin came in at 65.4% versus 69 in 2021 with 160 basis points of the change related to supply chain inefficiencies and the balance of the product mix. Also, was core at 22, was the first core in 2022, where we enjoyed higher US dollar Israeli shekel conversion rate compared to the year ago core as a result of our edge activity. We expect this favorable edge ratio to persist in 2023. Higher growth margin and tight OPEX management translated to sequential improvement in on-gap operating margin to 17.7. up from 15.5% in the third quarter. Compared to the year ago period, which was 20% operating margin, the margin difference can be explained primarily by changing gross margin and to a lesser extent, higher OPEX growth rising from our hiring activity in 2022. Ad count, we ended full score with ad count of 966 employees, down slightly from 969 employees in the third quarter. OPEX ended up growing 9% in the fourth quarter, capping on our investment in 2003 in view of the worsening global economy. Headcount is expected to grow at a very minimal moderate rate in 2023. Main driver for incremental hiring is our continuing investment in enterprise voice AI. Voice AI will go to that topic in a few slides. Now getting back to the outlook provided earlier, so given the global economy business outlook for 2023, our guidance as provided earlier is as follows. Guidance for the full year would be revenue range of $286 million to $300 million. That's about 4% to 9% growth. non-GAAP diluted net income per share, $1.35 to $1.50, which is growth from 2022. As for the first quarter, we believe we will see growth year over year, albeit lower than the range anticipated for the full year 2023, which is roughly 4% to 9%. Also, I would like to mention that while December 2022 was sort of weak, when compared to the October-November 2022 period. January 2023 was fairly normal or even stronger and on par with the November 2022 activity. Now diving into our core business engines, let's go first to Microsoft. Microsoft business delivered 12% growth in the fourth quarter, making up over 50% of our business now. Teams grew over 15% year-over-year in the core, while growing more than 30% for the full year. Skype for Business declined roughly 10% year-over-year, and is now accounting for less than 10% of our quarterly Microsoft business. We had another strong core for Microsoft Teams account additions. We had 279 accounts versus 229 accounts in the year-ago period. which speaks to the ongoing healthy adoption of Teams in our growing pipeline. For the full year, we achieved $145 million of revenue at the high end of our guidance. The business grew 18% in the year. We expect another year of growth in 2023 from our Microsoft business. All that at a more moderate rate. pays then in 2022 given the macroeconomic uncertainty and longer sales cycle as we've been discussing. The long-term opportunity has not changed given Microsoft priority to shift a growing percentage of their 280 million monthly active Teams users onto E5 licenses which includes Teams phone license for PSTN. Microsoft recently disclosed in July 2022 since PSTN users reaching over 12 million, and more recently in January 2023, adding 5 million more users, implying only low-digit growth penetration and suggesting a significant multi-year runway ahead. Recently, our market share within Microsoft ecosystem remains strong and is well above 50%. Then our most important activity these days in the Microsoft space is the development of Live Cloud. Live Cloud is a Teams phone voice platform which provides SBC direct routing. On top of that, it adds value-add services such as recording, conversational IVR, device management, analytics, management, and then all digital cloud portals. LiveCloud facilitates the onboarding of midsize and small business accounts into Teams for service providers in a very efficient way and can be used for Microsoft Operator Connect and facilitates faster and very efficient onboarding. By the end of the fourth quarter of 2022, the three-year total contract value of LiveCloud reached a level of $10 million, more than tripling the year-ago total contract value. Now to CX. We saw wealthy customer activity during the quarter in the customer experience market. On a quarterly basis, the whole activity declined 6.5%. However, more important to us, contact center direct account for enterprise grew 13%. This is where we focus our efforts. For the full year and excluding declining OEM revenue, which we will focus less going forward, our direct enterprise CX business grew 13%. We have already introduced our entry-level Microsoft Teams native conversational AI-first contact center application for the CX market and plan to significantly expand this effort in 2023. Overall, voice applications grew above 15% year-over-year. Looking out to 2023, we see growing adoption of new products and services launched during the past 12 months, and we expect them to boost revenue growth. Among them, I'll count LiveCX, WebRTC, Click-to-Call application, VoiceEye Connect, Conversational IVR, and Recording Solutions. Among them, SmartApp and Meeting Insights. Talking about what's happening in the space, we've seen... the transition from on-prem to cloud moving ahead but with pains. Talking about some of the leading manufacturers or vendors in this field, looking on Genesys and Avaya, both vendors, customers are nervous about the future and need migration path from the on-prem solution they currently use to the cloud. And we know and we have seen several of them looking for a trusted partner that can execute this migration and solve their complexity, we're definitely there to enjoy that opportunity, take advantage of it. Recent announcements from Genesys to discontinue Genesys Engage made a lot of their customers unhappy, and for us, that is definitely a field for us to invest. Same goes for a certain number of Avaya customers with their own prime solutions. Now to voice AI. So we have seen lately increased focus on enterprise AI. First was the announcement in November of ChatGPT by OpenAI, and then the Microsoft investment in OpenAI. Yesterday, Google announced BART, the latest entry into the field of advanced chatbots for search. In fact, we see increased activity on all fronts in cognitive services, including in the areas of virtual agents, intelligent assistant, conversational, IVR, and more. I'm glad to say that Voice AI was a key investment area for us in 2022, an area where we started back in January 2018. We're glad to see growing global awareness to embedding AI technologies into the CX and enterprise applications. Obviously, we intend to keep growing investment in Voice AI this year. We now start to bear fruits. In 2022, we saw an increase of more than 15% in the Voice AI business, and we expect this activity to grow by more than 70% in 2023 and keep growing at similar rates in the years beyond. In the Voce AI Connect area, we grew above 70% in bookings and registered growth of more than 100% in new opportunities created. In our compliance recording business, we saw growth of about 15% in both booking and invoicing. Our meeting insights application for Teams was deployed earlier in 2002. It's got warm reception in the market, already handling around 250 meetings a day and a few thousand meetings every month. We now have a list of new customers that are joining and see the value in recording, transcribing, and creating a vocal interaction repository for the organization. This is an area where we're going to focus in a big way going forward. Lastly, VICA, our virtual agent technology, is handling close to 100,000 calls a day in our medical AI routing services. More to come. Now, I'd like to focus on one very important point, which is we believe that these days we are among very few, I would count less than one end, of players who can provide technology and contribution from two different fields. One is the voice over IP networking area, and the other one is the conversational AI technology area. Very few companies have got two. Yes, it's great to have those very advanced cognitive services deployed in the cloud, But at the end of the day, enterprise customers need a fully working solution to take care of everything that's needed in order to implement a solution. Let me give you one such project which exemplifies exactly our advantage. We have a project that was implemented with the Red Cross in Israel and is now working more than a year. Actually, I'll give you some details. This is a service. This is emergency 911 call to Red Cross. In 2019, they have handled more than 2 million calls a year. These days, and basically at the end of 2020, they have handled more than 8 million. A huge growth. They grew from like 50 million agents to like 400 agents instead of a call coming in every 15 seconds a call is coming in every four seconds so that means you know more than 10,000 calls a day now we have implemented for them a very sophisticated solution that allows treatment of incoming calls to the contact center and in order to implement that basically every call that's coming in is routed to various places, including recording, including to real-time speech-to-text transcription, and then operating kind of bots to basically have insights from that call. So to build such a system, I'll read to you the list of technological solutions that we are employing in order to provide the full solution. So we've used our SBCs and gateways for connectivity. We've used our smart app for recording. We've used our voice AI connect to convert telephony media into cognitive services. We have developed and deployed speech-to-text technology, text-to-speech. We have employed management of our one voice operation system for management. And then on top of that, we have applied analytics. Now, that gives you an idea about the complexity of those projects coming to happen and the need basically to master both voice over IP networking and conversational AI solution. And I think in that area, we'll definitely excel. And I think that really gives you a taste for the potential we have on our end going forward. And with that, I've concluded my presentation. and I'll hand over the call to the operator. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you very much. We will now be opening the floor for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your phone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For anyone using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before you press the keys. One moment while we poll for questions. Thank you. Your first question is coming from Ryan McWilliams from Barclays. Ryan, your line is live.
spk05: Hi, thanks for the question. This is Eamon Coghlan on for Ryan McWilliams. Just quickly, how has macro impacted audio codes at this point? You highlighted some uncertainty this year and and what expectations do you have for the year in 23? What is baked into your guidance? Are you seeing any differences in your deal pipeline? And then if I could, how should we think about potential operating margin improvement for 2023 and maybe what margin levers could you have improvement from here? Thanks. Sure.
spk04: Okay. So, you know, I'd like to take it from the point where I'll, you know, if I'll, remind all of us, you know, the revenue level we achieved in each of the course of 2022. So, you know, the first two quarters ended up growing 12.8 and 12.9%. In the third quarter, we grew 10%. In the fourth quarter, we grew 6.9%. I think that tells you the story of the global economy. That basically tells you that our growth has been decelerated and going forward, you know, with the outlook provided by other players in the field like Microsoft and a few more companies, it is obvious that, you know, the growth in 2003 will be below 10%. Now, it all depends on how 2023 will develop. We'll know better, I assume, in a few months. But still, I need to say that, you know, we're very encouraged by the fact that January started very nicely. Another area from which we can take numbers is Microsoft. So within the Microsoft space, we've been able to grow in each of the first three cores by 18 to 20%. In the fourth core, we grew only 12%. I think that gives us kind of a measure as to what to expect from Microsoft. Still, we do believe that we are very dominant in that area. Do not see much competition. And as I've mentioned earlier, you know, big investment, definitely in the platform, the live cloud platform, which would automate many of the functions needed to deploy voice in the Teams phone environment, that should help bring up more customers. So all in all, you know, if I had to bet, I'll bet on a 10% to 15% growth in 2023. Now, to operating margin, we believe that, you know, comparing to 2022, there are two areas where we will improve, definitely. One is now the cost of components will come down, so we expect about $4 million of higher profit in 2023 simply because we will not secure those components. excessive cost. So $4 million for that. Another $2 million will come from better conversion rate of the U.S. dollars versus the Israeli shekel. So all in all, I think we're seeing a good improvement in that. Add to it the fact that we intend to keep growing in income. As I've mentioned, between 4% to 9%, but still have a heavy hand on expenses. We try to cap them to We will add a few positions just to enhance the voice AI and conversational AI area, but we do not expect that to be a major part. So all in all, we see those three areas as factors affecting better operating margins. Appreciate the call.
spk05: Thanks.
spk01: Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Samad Samana of Jefferies. Samad, your line is live.
spk06: Hi, great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up maybe in a similar vein. Just as I think about the Microsoft revenue specifically in Teams, could you maybe help us understand what the linearity in the December quarter looked like? How are customer trends? Was Teams revenue up or down from the third quarter in dollar levels? Just help us maybe understand what the trend looked like through the quarter and what the final number looked like.
spk04: Yeah, so December was a bit unique, but, you know, one can understand why. You know, the first two months in the quarter were good and strong. Actually, November represented the largest revenue created in that month. However, you know, usually in the fourth quarter, you know, our sales force is focused substantially more on closing deals rather than generating new ones. So I think that that has affected our ability to generate more new opportunities in December. Niran, can you add to that?
spk03: Yes, sure. In terms of your question about the dollar, Q4 versus the Q3, total Microsoft grew significantly. by 10% quarter over quarter to a level of approximately $41 million. Out of it, Microsoft Teams is about 90% of this amount.
spk06: Okay, great. Thank you. And then as I think about the guidance on the – I know you touched on margins, Shabtai, but how should we think about balancing – growth being maybe slower than expected in 2023 versus growth investments? Or do you feel like the companies at, I know headcount didn't grow in the fourth quarter, but just how should we think about maybe the investment framework? Or is there a possibility that maybe you'll pull back on OpEx or cut expenses to make sure that there's additional margin leverage in 2023?
spk03: With regard to OPEX, we ended the fourth quarter at a level of $34 million, just compared to the first quarter of 2022, where we had $32.6 million. Going forward, we believe, although we handed $34 million, this amount will be increased over the next quarter to a level of $34 to $35 million because, as Shabtai said, we will continue to invest at this stage. So if you need to model it, I would take, on average, $35 million. for 2023 each quarter.
spk06: Okay, great. Thanks for that additional color. Appreciate it.
spk01: Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Greg Burns of Sidoti and Company. Greg, your line is live.
spk07: Thanks. So just to follow up again on the leverage for next year. So just looking at the guidance, there's not much earnings leverage, so it's about Low single or mid single digit revenue growth, mid single digit EPS growth. So is the expectation here that margins build throughout the year? Do you have an expectation of where margins will be at the end of the year versus at the beginning of the year?
spk03: First, with regard to the gross margin, we ended 2022 at 65.4%. Our long-term target is 67% to 70%. I would assume, and this is our estimation for 2020, the model estimation that we will be at the low end of this long-term target or even less. I would take 66% of gross margin. OPEX, I told you, we will be somewhere at 35% in average. All in all, with regards to operating margin, we ended 2022 at 17.1%. Even if we will be at the low end of our revenues, which is $286 million, we believe that the operating margin should be at 17% at this level, and that's how we come to the $1.35 low EPS guidance. So all in all, for 2023, we will be somewhere between 17% to 19% of operating margin. As Shabtai said, at the first quarter, we will be at the low end of this range. And during the second half of 2023, we believe we will be at the high end.
spk07: OK. For the CX business, what percent is that OEM-related revenue that, I guess, is declining now?
spk03: This quarter, it was declined to 10% of total CX revenues compared to 20% a year ago.
spk07: Okay. And then the mix of Microsoft sales between... kind of the CapEx model and the new live model. How has that been trending? Are you seeing more customers gravitate towards live?
spk03: You know, most of the revenues also at the teams and actually at TotalLogic revenues is capex deals with regards to the fourth quarter if we see the teams the live teams versus the capex deals it's about one third live and two third capex deals and the kind of the trajectory of that mix is it moving more towards live or is it just kind of i guess staying at that those ranges No, it's moving more to live, and we are very focused on this transition.
spk04: Okay. Let me just add, Greg, just let me add that, you know, on a year-by-year basis, live teams grew 35%, while CapEx teams grew only 8.9%. So the trend is definitely to the live teams.
spk07: Yep, perfect. Thank you.
spk04: Sure.
spk01: Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Ryan Kuntz of Needham and Company. Ryan, your line is live.
spk08: Thanks for the question. I want to ask about CX and certainly understand the OEM decline there. And I want to understand what sort of market motions and partners you have there to shore up that growth. It seems that the CCAST, the cloud-based contact center players, whether it's in the Nice and Contact or Five9 have some pretty durable growth. And how do you attach yourselves to those sorts of companies a little closer? And what's the competitive landscape there? How do you view your share, I guess, in the cloud contact centers? I guess that's a big question. Thanks.
spk04: Sure. Well, regarding OEM, this is really an old business related mainly to 911 services and next-gen services. Exogen 911, so that is declining. Those are the majority's SBC cells, and so that is coming down. As far as contact center is concerned, I mean, we all know about the trend of moving from on-prem to cloud. However, one needs to realize that it's pretty complex to do that. Large company may take, you know, four to five years just to implement that transition. Now, you need to Understand that within that period of time, one needs to implement and operate two different solutions at the same time. That provides a lot of complexity. Also, the fact that you need to deploy new technologies such as, you know, WebRTC and managed SBC. And on top of that, you know, the disruption coming from... So think about the disruption coming from... call automation and self-service. Once the vendors, such as Genesys, announce end of development for the on-prem solution, it means that those customers with hundreds and thousands of agents really lack this type of solution because the vendor will not offer them. Obviously, we've got an opportunity in this area. Mainly focusing on the migration from the on-prem solution to the cloud for a vendor that moves to a different vendor cloud environment and the application of self-service solution. All that represents big opportunities for us and we definitely see momentum in this field.
spk08: All right, great. Thanks for that caller. And on the Zoom front, sounds like those trends remain very strong. How would you view your share in the Zoom enterprise environment? Is it relatively high today? Is that becoming a bigger growth driver for the company?
spk04: Yeah, we enjoyed a good year regarding Zoom business, which grew more than 50%. Still, when comparing the Zoom business in the enterprise to Microsoft Teams business, it is relatively smaller. So, Yeah, we do anticipate we have a lot going on in terms of cooperation and supporting new deployments of new Zooms coming out with a service for service providers similar to the Microsoft Operator Connect. We are embedded in that. They look for adding resilience to their branch, to the branch offices in their solution. We are involved in there. We have for them some of our more advanced IP phone and meeting room solutions. So, yeah, we do support Zoom, but all in all, it is still a fairly smaller part of our business. Got it.
spk08: Thanks for that.
spk01: That's all I have. Sure. Thank you very much. And, ladies and gentlemen, if you do still have any questions, please press star 1 on your phone keypad. Thank you. Okay, we appear to have reached the end of our question and answer session. I'll now hand the call back over to management for any closing remarks.
spk04: Thank you, operator. I would like to thank everyone who attended our conference call today. With continued good business momentum in the fourth quarter of 2022 and strong underlying market trends in our industry entering 2023, we believe we are on track to grow this year I'm definitely fairly excited about the role of AI in the enterprising this year and coming years. So we look forward to your participation in our next quarterly conference call. Thank you all. Have a nice day.
spk01: Thank you, everybody. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.
Disclaimer