Bandwidth Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Bandwidth, Inc. Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Wallace, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Bandwidth's third quarter 2021 earnings call. Today we'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed. The press release and an earnings presentation with historical financial highlights can be found on the Investor Relations page at investors.bandwidth.com. With me on the call this afternoon is David Morkin, our CEO, and Daryl Rayford, our CFO. They will begin with prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for Q&A. During the call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking, including statements concerning our financial guidance for the fourth fiscal quarter and full year of 2021 and and to the extent provided, future periods and our views on the impact of the recent DDoS attacks we've previously disclosed. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they may involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from forward-looking statements as described in our risk factors in our reports filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made on this call and the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to those contained in our latest 10-K filing, as updated by other SEC filings, all of which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at bandwidth.com and on the SEC's website at sec.gov. During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our press release issued after the close of market today, as well as in the earnings presentation, which are located on our website at investors.bandwidth.com. With that, let me turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Sarah. And hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This quarter, bandwidth continued to play a critical role in the enterprise move to the cloud. We celebrated a number of important wins with both new and existing customers. We largely completed the integration of our VoxBone acquisition, and we withstood an unprecedented cyber attack on our business. Bandwidth delivered another quarter of solid financial results, exceeding revenue guidance, including 46% CPAS revenue year-over-year growth. From both the mountaintops and the valleys that we visited during the quarter, I was inspired by this team's unwavering commitment to our mission and our customers. I have never been more proud of our brave and brilliant team or more thankful for God's faithfulness. I want to start by talking about the DDoS attack at the end of September. Attacks like ours have been aimed at a number of companies in our global VoIP ecosystem. First, we were prepared and we weathered the storm well. Our infrastructure includes specific DDoS mitigation systems and is routinely audited. In responding to the attack in real time, we augmented our DDoS defenses to keep pace with the attacker's evolving methods. Some customers saw periodic service disruptions and we regret any impact to their business. At the same time, we are proud of our team and our partners and the resilience of our platform in avoiding the crippling effects others have seen in similar attacks across the industry. In fact, the vast majority of our traffic continued to be delivered. Second, we serve our customers well and they supported us too. We have been moved by our customers' trust. We count many of the world's largest and most sophisticated technology leaders as our customers, and a number of them joined us in our situation room. In a true demonstration of our longstanding partnerships, they stood shoulder to shoulder with us in this fight. Nevertheless, a number of our customers did move services to other options. Our operations team worked around the clock to accommodate these choices, consistent with our commitment to always do the next right thing for our customers. Many of those customers have already brought their business back. I am confident that others are in the process of doing so in the coming days and weeks. Daryl will give more details on the estimated financial impact of the DDoS attack. Third. We are now using our lessons learned to help our customers and partners protect themselves against similar attacks. Our experience puts us at the forefront of understanding how to combat these threats against the VoIP ecosystem. We did not pay a ransom and instead relied on innovative solutions and strategies to confront the threat head on. To sum up, we believe bandwidth is now stronger than ever. and we plan to leverage what we've learned to help make the ecosystem safer for enterprise communications. With that, I want to highlight a few important milestones and wins in the past quarter. We just celebrated the first anniversary of the close of our acquisition of VoxBone, and I'm excited that the bulk of our international integration is complete. Even as we continue to chart the course for our single global platform, we are now fully serving our customers as one global band. We continue to make progress on the huge cross-sell opportunities from the VoxBone acquisition as we expand our long-term customer relationships from domestic to global. Our customers told us they wanted the bandwidth experience, enterprise-grade quality, service, and reliability around the world. They are showing us that they meant what they said. I am very pleased to announce the latest example. One of our largest and longest tenured customers signed a contract for global service in the third quarter. This is a customer that was not previously working with VoxBone and now is going global with bandwidth. In short, this is yet another growing relationship that was only made possible by the global reach achieved through the acquisition. and it is a takeaway from multiple competing international IP network providers. In the initial phase of the contract, this customer is testing voice services over our global network in select countries during the fourth quarter. We expect services and coverage to expand throughout 2022. Our team is humbled by this customer's desire to build with bandwidth to the ends of the earth And we look forward to growing this foundational relationship at a global scale. Powering the platform players and internet giants has always been a core strength of ours. And this win demonstrates again how compelling a truly global offering is to these customers. We also see significant momentum building among global 2000 enterprises executing their digital transformations. The enterprise migration to the cloud is extremely complex and fraught with technical and regulatory challenges. We are nimble and quick in a world of sluggish, entrenched legacy carriers. Today, I want to zero in on an area where we are particularly winning in the enterprise category, global contact centers. Customer service agents are becoming critical to helping brands create a better customer experience in a post-COVID world. But the contact centers in today's large global enterprises can be enormously complex. There may be multiple locations with expensive on-premise equipment requiring top-tier expertise to manage. To connect it all, most enterprises have been relying on multiple carriers, each with different contracts, uncertain redundancy, and traffic limitations. They have the need to retain critical call data to power third-party integrations, such as CRM, voice authentication, fraud detection, AI monitoring, and other services essential to a better customer experience. Bandwidth simplifies this challenge. Our network is cloud native, so it can work seamlessly with the largest cloud contact center platforms for global interoperability, scalability, and security. The biggest global contact center players are recognizing our new global capability and potential. I'll share what one enterprise customer told us recently after successfully rebuilding their entire contact center architecture on the bandwidth platform. Quote, we built a better architecture, a smarter architecture, and we've saved a ton of money. This migration has been a huge success. One of the contact center wins we closed in Q3 is a global leader in electronic signature. This customer chose bandwidth because with our expanded footprint, we could move their entire 15-country global contact center stack to the cloud. Not only were we able to eliminate the complexity of their existing on-premise equipment, but we consolidated their nine legacy carrier agreements into one. The project has propelled this customer forward into the efficiency and scalability of cloud-based communications. Our customer values bandwidth's ability to integrate with nearly every major communications platform and enterprise needs, from UCaaS to CCaaS, which opens the door to more efficiency and savings. We're also continuing to win with U.S.-only enterprises. This was the case for a new deal this past quarter with a $16 billion Fortune 200 managed care provider. This company is on the front lines of patient communication, and their contact center is critical to managing customer engagement. They came to us and said, no kidding, that they wanted to take all their legacy communications hardware, throw it into a giant dumpster, and light it on fire. It was that cumbersome and frustrating to manage. They chose bandwidth because we were uniquely able to power their entire communications stack in the cloud, both UCaaS and CCaaS. In addition, our tools and automation enable them to manage their system without specialized telecom expertise. They can literally drag and drop using CPaaS software to make real-time number changes on the fly. This customer joins a growing cohort in the healthcare space who rely on bandwidth to power their cloud communications needs. In fact, healthcare is one of the markets where we are seeing particularly strong momentum. in both the large enterprise space and also with innovative app developers that are building a better patient experience. In closing, I want to talk about our continued thought leadership in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. We take seriously our obligation to help our customers navigate issues like fraud and robocalling, which impact their businesses and their customers. Bandwidth has been at the forefront of implementing new security standards like Stir Shaken, which went into effect on June 30 in the United States to reduce fraudulent calling activity. We will continue to aim to use our seat at the table with the leading standards and rulemaking bodies to provide our customers with critical support and over-the-horizon insights on important regulatory developments. We are also providing our customers with innovative and unique solutions to enable them to meet evolving 911 compliance requirements. Bandwidth's dynamic location routing solution can deliver enhanced location information to 911 dispatchers and help to ensure first responders are sent to the right building, floor, and room. Our solutions are among only three that have been certified for use with Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and are powering Zoom Phone as well. Emergency services continue to be a growing and important component of our suite of service offerings. Often it serves as a unique door opener. Customers who come to us for help with emergency services learn about the broader power of the bandwidth platform, driving new cross-sell opportunities. With that, it is my pleasure again to welcome Daryl Rayford, who is joining us for his first earnings call as our new Chief Financial Officer. He has been a great addition to our team, bringing strong leadership and new perspective. I'll now turn it over to Daryl to walk through our financial results and outlook.

Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm thrilled to have joined such a remarkable company at a pivotal point in its history as we lead enterprise communications into the cloud on a global scale. I've enjoyed meeting some of you and look forward to interacting with more of you in the coming months. And thanks to my team for helping me get a running start. So let's dive into some of the highlights of Q3. As Sarah said in her introduction, We posted an earnings presentation detailing our third quarter and historical financial performance on the investor relations section of our website. I'll now take you through the third quarter financial results and outlook for the fourth quarter. We provide guidance for CPAS revenue, total revenue, and non-GAAP EPS. For the third quarter, each of these measures exceeded their corresponding guidance ranges. On a consolidated basis, our third quarter results are as follows. Third quarter revenue was $131 million, up 54% year over year. Total revenue on our U.S. platforms, which excludes our international VoxBone integrated platform, increased 22%. Non-GAAP gross margins came in at 49%, unchanged from last year's quarter. Non-GAAP net income was $6.5 million, stronger than expected due to higher revenue, improved mix, and operating expense favorability, and non-GAAP EPS was 25 cents, an increase of 1 cent year-over-year. Turning to our segments, CPAS revenue was $107 million, up 46% year-over-year. This solid result is inclusive of the negative impact of approximately $3.25 million from the DDoS attack in line with our earlier announcement describing the revenue reduction from lost transaction volume and customer credits in the third quarter. Our third quarter CPAS revenue outperformance was driven by broad-based demand across our products and geographies. Within the CPAS segment, in terms of U.S. and international revenue contribution, CPAS revenue growth on our U.S. platforms grew 20% when normalized for last year's COVID and political messaging benefits. As a reminder, in the third quarter of last year, our U.S. platform benefited from $6 million of COVID-related and political messaging tailwinds. Our international platform operations contributed approximately $26 million to CPAS revenue in the third quarter. Bandwidth CPAS gross margins continue to be strong, setting another record margin at 54%, up 4 percentage points from last year's quarter, enhanced by improved operating leverage and inclusion of higher margin international business. Turning to our other segment, other revenue contributed the remaining $23 million of total revenue, which is up 112% from the same period a year ago. The growth in other revenue was primarily driven by carriers implementing additional A2P messaging surcharges, as well as continued growth of our messaging volumes, which drive more surcharges. ADP messaging surcharges in the quarter totaled $14 million. Turning to our operating metrics, our dollar-based net retention rate, which excludes the VoxBone acquisition until we lap the acquisition close, was 108% in the period. Our normalized retention rate was 113% when taking into account the previously described COVID and political messaging benefits from last year. We ended the third quarter with 3,173 active CPAS customers, representing a net addition of 122 customer accounts in the corner. In terms of our balance sheet, our cash and investments balance at the end of September was $331 million, an increase over June 2021 and September 2020 of $12 million and $30 million, respectively. Adjusted EBITDA was $14.2 million in the third quarter, or 11% of total revenue. Now, turning to our updated financial outlook for the full year, we've updated our CPAS revenue and total revenue estimates. As you already know, in October, we continued to experience the lingering financial effects of the DDoS attack through lower usage demands from certain customers who shifted their traffic. While we are encouraged by many customers that have already returned their usage traffic to our network, along with other customers expressed intentions to do so, the result is that we expect lower usage in the fourth quarter than we have previously thought. Thus, our updated outlook for full-year CPAS revenue is now between $407 million and $412 million. Driven by our earlier announced $9 million to $12 million estimate, of the full-year impact from lower usage and customer credit as a result of the DDoS attack. We estimate full-year total revenue outlook to be between $480 million and $485 million. We further estimate our non-GAAP net income to be slightly higher than our previous August outlook, and accordingly expect non-GAAP EPS between 74 cents and 78 cents. Our higher gross margins and operating leverage experienced in the first nine months of 2021 gives us confidence to preserve our profitability outlook notwithstanding the DDoS impact to revenue, which is a testament to our business model of sustained profitable growth. Going forward from here, Despite the challenges caused by the DDoS attack, we believe our fundamental growth drivers remain unchanged. Enterprises continue to value our unique combination of software platform and global network. Many of our largest customers have a greater appreciation for our resiliency and commitment to serving their mission critical communication needs. We remain well positioned to serve a large and growing global communications market that is benefiting from transformational secular trends. And we believe we are uniquely positioned to help enterprise customers navigate complexity. Now with that, I'll turn it back to the operator for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question is from Bhavan Suri from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, everybody. It's Matt Stottler. I'm from Bhavan. Thank you for taking the questions. Just a couple here related to DDoS attacks. I'll start with one and then have a quick follow-up. Just in terms of the remediation, obviously helped out your customers moving traffic to where they needed to. Good to hear that some have come back. I guess when you look at that 9 to 12 million hit that you talk about from usage and customer credits, any color you can provide on how much of that is usage versus customer credits and then As you think about the tail from here and the visibility you have into customers that do intend to come back and what have you, do you just speak to expectations beyond Q4 as to what we should expect when we're thinking about year-over-year comps beyond just the fourth quarter?

Hey, Matt. This is David. Thanks much for your question. The vast majority of the financial impact was utilization or usage, not credits, to answer the first part of your question. We expect far less. of an impact in Q1 than we have seen in Q4 and are predicting for Q4. It's early. Obviously, we have a lot of Q4 still left ahead of us, and we don't want to get ahead of ourselves in terms of providing guidance for 22, but Q1 we expect will have far less of an impact than Q4.

Yeah, that's helpful. And then maybe just one follow-up. You know, obviously, You're still able to close several large deals. I mean, you talked about a number of pretty impressive ones here. Even in this environment where you're dealing with this DDoS attack, how is this changing your conversations with customers? I'd love to just kind of dig into what's changed, kind of their reaction, both obviously with the new customers you're expanding with and as you're continuing to sell to and land new customers. How is this factoring into those conversations?

You know, it's pretty remarkable, Matt. Those conversations unexpectedly have become extremely positive regarding bandwidth being the most resilient and best place to go if you are concerned about a DDoS attack. And the reason is we have successfully fought back against the latest methods in the VoIP space that before now were unheralded, unprecedented. We essentially won. And so the conversations with customers have gone something like this. There is no better place on the planet to go than bandwidth right now regarding DDoS attacks worldwide. And we're extremely proud of that. It comes with scars, but we bear those scars proudly.

Got it. Thanks again.

The next question is from Mark Murphy from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, David. Just kind of continuing along that thread, I was wondering if you could clarify. I mean, you said you were prepared for the DDoS attacks, and you've been regularly audited with those preparations. But, you know, the service was impacted. You do have revenue impact. What was it that was unique about this attack that it kind of sort of overcame the full capability to, you know, prevent any impact?

Hey, Mark. If the attack had occurred in July, it would have set a world record for DDoS volumes of any kind. This attack was unique in not only was it massive in its size, it was specifically on a dimension using UDP packets and fragmented UDP packets, which had never been seen before or only seen very recently in our space. With voice, while you need signaling and media and UDP fragments, we can't just block wholesale in the way that you can with an HTTP attack. So we had a very good, robust solution for attacks that had been seen in the past. We rallied during this attack and used vendors like Cloudflare and taught them how to address this issue for the first time and collaborated with them in a way that they then were able to go to the whole industry and share. So it was an unprecedented size and in a very unique way that we experienced this attack for what was really the first time. Confident the way that we've adjusted our defenses that we can withstand this and other similar attacks going forward.

Okay. What percentage of your overall traffic do you think was moved to other options in the wake of that attack? And I'm wondering, you know, how much has returned, you know, of what you lost, how much has returned? How much of it, if any, do you think could be permanently lost?

So we had some of our most important customers that we said, you need to move quickly. We're experiencing this. And we were around the clock, 24-7, middle of the night, all hours, all hands on deck. to have our customers evacuate during the early stages. And we're delighted that those customers watched us communicate well with them, watched us restore service so quickly, and most of them returned.

Okay. One other question for you, just at a high level. How is usage trending into reopening of the economy and with people you know, starting to return to the office, starting to travel a bit more versus what you might have expected six or nine months ago?

You know, we're global now, so it does depend on the theater that you're talking about, and things do change. We've got some sectors of our customer base, like hospitality and rideshare, that benefit from the return, and indeed, even the travel industry customers that we have. So those numbers are obviously improving, and we're excited about reopening of borders. And then we've got a cross-section of all of our UCAS, CCAS, and conferencing customers. And so it's a blend in terms of the current dynamic with usage, but overall we're excited about the reopenings that are occurring that benefit our enterprise customers everywhere.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark.

The next question is from Will Power from Baird. Please go ahead.

Hey, this is Charlie. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to ask one about the DDoS attack and kind of going off of that last question. So for those customers, especially the large ones that have not brought their traffic back to bandwidth, is there any sort of common theme or common thread between them in terms of the main reasons why they site, why they haven't come back to bandwidth?

Large customers move slower. It's that simple. I think administratively you've got different procedural steps to take for large customers. Those that have continued to believe in us are moving back at the speed that's appropriate for their operating team. I think it's that simple.

Okay, got it. And then I also wanted to ask about VoxBone. I think the CPaaS revenue from VoxBone, $26 million in the quarter, was about flat sequentially. Is there anything specific to call out there? Sounds like things are going pretty well from the customer anecdotes, but just wondering if there's anything to call out there.

You're right, Charlie. This is Daryl. Things have gone pretty well from the customer side. The $26 million is essentially flat to the second quarter. It's a bit of a half glass full. We were gratified in the second quarter that we were able to accelerate some timing and bring customers on early. versus, you know, in terms of scaling. And, of course, we operate a global platform, so having exact predictability across all of our, through all of our 60 countries and where the usage is going to be and the like is, you know, not 100% perfect. But in the second quarter and in the third quarter, our aggregate platform beat our expectations. So we're happy about that.

Got it. All right. Thanks, guys.

The next question is from Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Karana from META. Thank you for the question. So appreciate that you guys are having pretty positive conversations with customers, sort of rerouting revenue back to your platform. I guess just if there's any more detail you can give on how long of a process it is based on the customer size of bringing that rerouted revenue back to the platform and timing around that, that'd be helpful. And then I have a quick follow-up.

You bet, Karana. This is David. I shared earlier this evening on one of the calls that we expect in Q1 of 22 that the shortfall from the DDoS attack will be far less than what we are projecting for Q4. So that's very encouraging and reflects the pace of the return. And I would hope that that pace accelerates, but that's what we're thinking at this moment in time as we continue to finish out Q4.

Okay, got it. That's helpful. And then just a quick follow-up in terms of the cross-sell opportunity between VoxBone and bandwidth. I guess just has there been more interest one way or another? And then just any detail around that opportunity would be helpful in terms of whether you're seeing it accelerate one way or another. Thank you.

Thank you. The cross-sell opportunities that we've been most excited about and open in talking about are among the US-based large technology customers that we serve and their desire to go globally with bandwidth. We have shared that we, for example, closed a global leader in the electronic signature space who are consolidating nine different providers across 15 countries because of our singular global footprint. That's an example of a strong technology leader that uses our combined US and international platform And we think we'll see more of that.

Got it. Thank you.

The next question is from Steve Enders from KeyBank. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. This is George on for Steve. Two questions. First one on gross margin, so really nice quarter-on-quarter step-up. Can you give a sense for kind of unpacking? I think you mentioned international mix as well as scale. and if you could rank forward to the effects and where should we expect that number to go? And then second question on the linearity of customer ads, also a fairly healthy metric. Wondering if you saw any slowdown in October tied to the DDoS tax and how you see that trending. Thank you.

Hey there, this is Daryl. Thanks for the question. In terms of unpacking the record 54% margin in Q3 for CPaaS, You know, revenue did exceed our expectations, so certainly revenue does help in that scale across a fixed cost base. We also experienced just better improved operating leverage, which means costs, favorable costs, as well as the mix you alluded to. Our international platform margins are higher than our U.S. margins, and so we were able to improve through mix as well. That's essentially how we've looked at it. And in terms of customer ads, you know, we're pleased with the customer ads, but really nothing to call out that would say, you know, it's an outlier in terms of some sort of customer mix issue.

Great. Thank you again.

The next question is from Tyler Radka of Citi. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to just ask, excluding the DDoS attack, which understandably there's a lot to talk about there, but just how did you see seasonality and overall usage trends play out through the third quarter? Obviously, there's been a lot of talk in the industry just around a summer slowdown. So I was just kind of wondering to see what you saw on that front. and just anything to call out in terms of the overall usage and seasonality trends that you've seen here thus far in Q4?

Well, clearly, you know, we did say the third quarter was impacted by the $3.25 million, which over those five days is a little less significant than our estimate of the full-year impact. The third quarter, the international platform on a normalized basis grew 20%. We're happy about that in terms of CPAS revenue. That's right where – that's right pretty much where we'd like it to be. And we normalized for the last year's $6 million of political messaging and COVID. But that – in terms of 20% to 25% growth, that seems kind of in our zip code. So we just feel like the market is – expanding at the pace we'd estimate. The digital transformation is underway, and we think that's kind of a long-term rate for us.

Yeah, thanks, Daryl. This is David. I agree. We did not see some slowdown that was isolated to within a specific sector or something that was seasonal. We were on track based on our understanding of how the year would go, so we haven't seen that.

Great. And if I could just ask you around the customers that you did help migrate to another platform, I guess just where did those customers go? Is it kind of the main competitor? And I'm curious, as you've looked to restore that traffic, have you had to make any more kind of aggressive price concessions? I would imagine that whoever... kind of benefited from that traffic would do a lot of things to, you know, hold on to those customers. But just curious some of the dynamics as you try to get back that traffic.

You bet. So when we moved some of our largest customers, they moved to, depending upon the nature of their service, they moved to large incumbents as quickly as they were able to. So Verizon, AT&T, Lumen, You have others that they might move to overnight. When they came back, it was under the terms of our service that they left with. So there's not been a discount season to return. It is all clear.

You've trusted us for years. Welcome back.

Great. Super helpful. Thank you.

You bet.

The next question is from Andrew King from Collier Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey there. Thanks for taking my question. I mean, moving on from the TDoS attachment, we've got plenty of questions on that. I wanted to dive a little bit into the E911 opportunity, specifically for this next quarter as we see the next level of implementation with Raybomb and Harry Wong coming in Q1. How much will P2 expect from this? And where's your primary competition with these solutions? Is it more in-house developed, or is there another player out there that you're seeing a lot?

No, thanks for calling in from the upper deck of a stadium somewhere. But in all seriousness, I do love the question about the 911 special service that we do provide. For example, at Microsoft Teams, we're one of only three certified providers, and we do dynamic location routing that satisfies the latest requirements for both fixed and nomadic lines. Those are huge door openers for conversations within the large enterprise. And we're excited about the season that we're in where emergency service is featuring so importantly in the minds of decision makers that are going through a digital transformation move to the cloud. And Microsoft is just one example. We have other Duet products with other providers we're proud of where the 911 service is a leading conversational piece.

Great.

The next question is from Ryan Coons from Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Thanks for the question. With a drill down on your commentary around the contact center market and how you're tapping into that, is this a different go-to-market motion you're finding traction with or are these like strategic relationships with these partners that they are referencing you straight in without much effort on the sales side? I have a follow-up.

That's a good question, but I want to make sure I understand it. The two differences that you're asking about in our sales motion, I thought I understood the first part, but then your comment about a strategic partner I didn't follow.

As you partner with these contact center players, are they referencing you in, or is it more of a proactive effort to penetrate their incumbent base, their install base?

Got it. Thank you. So we have an aggressive, active, outbound enterprise sales motion where we are focused on the C-suite decision maker, the SVP decision maker, and the contact center leader. And certainly there's word of mouth in the industry. When you solve a problem for a financial, you might get a reference into another large strategic financial. But it is an individual effort. We don't have a channel. We've got a dynamic group of enterprise salespeople that are making great inroads. And this quarter, we announced a great win among the Fortune 200, a managed care provider, $16 billion company. And that was a direct win into the senior decision maker. And it's an example of that sales motion that we have. But the contact center is filled with enormous complexity. They're trying to take call flows and route calls for authentication, for using AI, whether it's to prevent fraud or for sentiment analysis. There are lots of very creative, intelligent things happening in the contact center. And because we are a network and platform owner, we're able to have both the signaling and the media to route those calls very, very flexibly. Literally, a contact center executive can drag and drop call flows for different reasons to different places in real time. Compare that to what you can get from a large domestic or international incumbent, and it's night and day. So when you think about all the emerging, exciting technological change in the contact center, you've got to have a flexible partner-like bandwidth in order to have the actual audio transit all these solution providers elegantly. And so that merit-based value prop is resonating audibly in the contact center.

Super interesting. Thanks. And a quick follow-up, David. You mentioned the VoxBone integration, mostly complete integration. Can you give us any color there in terms of, is this mostly IT, customer systems, headcount? I mean, any other color you can give us there on the box phone would be great.

You bet. The customers that we serve are primarily focused on having one point of contact, one resolution path for issues. They're okay if they have more than one bill right now. We've achieved integration with all of the personnel on both sides of the company's which is vital for our large customers. So single point of contact, single individual is the first point. Second point is all of the SOX compliance, all of the IT controls, all the ERP, all that hard heavy lifting work is largely behind us. Where we're headed next is a single pane of glass experience where a customer has a universal journey through the bandwidth service during their lifetime. That will take some longer time, but the team has done an extraordinary job during a time when we could not be together physically for the vast majority to do the vast majority of the integration.

That's great. As we think about the OPEX impact of that going forward, does it stand out much at all in terms of what remains, or is it kind of just small stuff?

It's going to be, you know, this year we've clearly experienced integration costs that's embedded in our OpEx cost structure. Going forward next year, we'd expect that to be much less and become more business as usual, continuous improvement as we innovate and serve our customers.

That's really great. Thanks, Pat.

The next question is from James Fish from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. This is Quinton for Jim. Thanks for taking our question. maybe just to beat one more time on the dead horse of the DDoS attack. But is the majority of the cybersecurity investment now behind us, given the rapid response in quarter? Or should we expect some additional investments as we move into Q4 or beyond, just to stay ahead of these attacks? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Jim. This is Daryl again. The bulk of it is behind us. The incremental investment was less than $1 million yesterday. in terms of what we've experienced. And there's going to be some maintenance. You know, this is software, this is some service, this is some maintenance and things like that that would go on. But it won't be noticeable in our cost structure.

Got it. Super helpful. Thank you.

The next question is from Pat Walravens from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Oh, great. Thank you. Congratulations for getting it all under control. So I suspect, Dave, that everyone on this call has had the experience now when they navigate to bandwidth site, there's a little pop-up from Cloudflare that says, please hold on a second while we check your browser. And then the little dots go by, and then you get to your website. So you didn't have that before. You do now. Did Cloudflare not work for some reason? for your kind of a network before and it does now? What's going on there?

So when the attack started, Pat, we had a network-based, best of breed, awesome solution by a great vendor in the industry. And it worked well for the first 48 hours of the run and gun battle. After that, there was a different dimension to the attack. on a different protocol, different ports, different origins. And you're talking about attacks originating in a different nation state, transiting through a partner that doesn't know any better, and then hitting all your IP ranges with different flavors of traffic in different ways. And so we migrated from the original defense that we had stood up that was working and used Cloudflare thereafter. They were superlative in working with us, rallying with us, we shared in real time aspects of the vector of attack or the changing dimension, and they would adjust with us their solution in real time. And it was a combined effort and one that should be celebrated and I think resulted in many others in the voice industry probably becoming Cloudflare customers. It is a small price to pay right now as a prophylactic security to have that additional nominal step at the beginning of a user experience. We're not We're not a consumer service, so that brief interruption we don't think deters prospects or those who know us from a user experience right now that's appropriate, but we will work that out of the user experience here shortly.

Great. Thank you. And my follow-up is just I noticed the same thing pop up on a completely different vendor's site. So is this something that you're sharing with Others in the industry who might have a similar risk profile than you had before it?

Yes, we immediately reached out to our top competitors and shared everything we knew. We told them, get ready. It's probably going to hit you next. Here's what we did. Here's how we did it. Here's the playbook. And shared openly. And the vitality and the quality of our work ecosystem is essential for enterprises around the world. And so we wanted to protect it with those that we happen to compete with and did so openly right out of the gate.

Got it.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, Pat.

This concludes the question and answer session as well as today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.