eGain Corporation

Good afternoon, and welcome to the eGain Fiscal 2025 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Byers, MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to EGAIN's Fiscal 2025 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. On the call today are EGAIN's Chief Executive Officer, Ashu Roy, and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Smith. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this conference call, management will make certain forward-looking statements which convey management's expectations, beliefs, plans, and objectives regarding future financial and operational performance. Forward-looking statements are generally preceded by words such as believe, plan, intend, expect, anticipate, or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are protected by safe harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ in material respects. Information on various factors that could affect EGAIN's results are detailed in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EGAIN is making these statements as of today, November 12th, 2024, and assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward-looking information in this conference call. In addition to GAAP results, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as non-GAAP operating income. The financial tables included with the earnings press release include reconciliation of the historical non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. EGAIN's earnings press release can be found by clicking the press release link on the investor relations page of eGain's website at eGain.com. And along with the earnings release, we will post an updated investor presentation to the investor relations page of eGain's website. And lastly, a phone replay of this conference call will be available for one week. And now with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to eGain's CEO, Ashu Roy. Ashu Roy Thank you, Jim.

And hello, everyone. We are pleased to report first quarter revenue and profitability ahead of consensus estimates. In what is a seasonably light new bookings quarter for us, our new bookings were up significantly year over year. Returning to business highlights, during the quarter, we booked good new and expansion business. Let me share a couple of examples. We signed up a client who's looking to improve the productivity of its field service engineering team worldwide, about 4,000 plus engineers. They are very large, multi-billion dollar data center builders, and their business is booming in the AI space. This client tried to unsuccessfully solve the knowledge problem a couple of times before we got the mandate. First, they tried to solve it with a homegrown solution. That didn't scale. Then they toyed with the knowledge capability in their CRM platform, but that couldn't handle the complexity and compliance requirements they had. As I've said before, some of our best clients tend to be those who have tried and failed at getting value out of their knowledge management initiatives before they come to us. With our hub, this client intends to create a single source of truth delivering trusted answers using AI and experts in the loop. This is an exciting entry for us into the market for field service, a huge adjacency to our current market focus on B2C customer service. Another one I want to mention is a recent client, one we signed up in Q4 of last year, so about five months ago. they are now expanding the use of our AI knowledge hub based on the quick value we delivered. The client, in the first few months of their deployment, established a solid knowledge foundation in their business focused on customer-facing knowledge. That worked very well. And so now they are centralizing all of their company knowledge in the eGain hub. In fact, this is a trend we see in the market where businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of a centralized knowledge hub that natively uses AI and experts to deliver trusted answers to all stakeholders. Starting with customers and service agents, where the pain point tends to be very high and measurable, these companies then recognize the value and extend out the capability to serve other functions across the enterprise. This, to us, is the Productivity and experience prize that AI knowledge can deliver when done right. And that is transformational impact at speed and scale. In fact, I've discussed this before. I'm sure you're aware of it. The McKinsey data about potential cost savings of 35% in customer operations definitely feels well within reach. Moving to renewals. We saw good renewals in the quarter with no significant churn. Now, as we have entered Q2 of this fiscal year, our deal momentum has picked back up post the seasonal slowdown in the summer. And we have closed some interesting new logos in the current quarter. I just want to talk about a couple of them because they confirm our assessment of the market trends toward enterprise knowledge hubs. One is a hyper-growth energy solutions provider for projects in North America. They are initially starting with knowledge for customer service and field service, and then they plan to scale knowledge across the enterprise. Another one is a very large video games developer and publisher in the U.S. They are initially looking to embed knowledge into the flow of play for their customers, so more self-service, and also empower their trust and safety teams. all from a knowledge hub. And with that knowledge hub, then they intend to take it out to the rest of the enterprise. We see knowledge centralization as a powerful trend in the market, especially as businesses are looking to get more business value out of their AI projects and investments. The centralization of knowledge in the right architecture ensures compliance, improves experience, and boosts productivity all at the same time. Looking at customers and products, I want to talk about our Solve24 event in Chicago last month in October. That was a very, very good event for us. We had clients sharing their success stories of real business impact at scale with AI and knowledge. And I mentioned in my keynote at that event that the excitement around generative AI continues to grow, but also that we all recognize that generative AI is a commodity. It's a commodity that will keep getting faster and cheaper. The big question for every business is how to marshal that commodity in the context of a business to deliver transformational impact. Our clients share their stories about how the eGain AI Knowledge Hub and associated knowledge method process helps them accelerate value realization in an easy, quick, and assured manner. We also, at the event, announced an exciting new solution. We call it eGain AI Agent. It's a conversational self-service offering that can be used across all touchpoints. What's special about it is that it uses trusted knowledge from within the eGain hub and taps into necessary enterprise data using connectors and delivers guidance and customer inquiry resolution going beyond simple FAQs and narrow domain interactions that are pre-programmed. Moreover, it does not require clients to engineer a solution themselves, starting with an AI toolbox. With eGain AI Agent, we will challenge the plateau of poor customer self-service that most businesses are stuck in for many years now. We believe that our AI Agent solution will help clients achieve significant incremental customer self-service adoption. This solution-oriented approach that we have taken, using AI and knowledge, is very different from the tools approach that most providers offer today. We intend to deliver working AI agent solutions and then partner with clients to drive effective adoption. We do not want to sell a DIY AI toolbox and walk away. An approach that is commonly offered and we believe is causing significant frustration in the market as businesses find themselves in the operationalization gap in trying to go from an AI prototype, which is very exciting, to value at scale. Given the rapid pace of AI technology change now and in the foreseeable future, we believe our full-stack approach to delivering these solutions is an attractive and low-risk proposition for the markets. And that is the value we are pursuing with our increased product investment in partnership with our clients. With that, I'll ask Eric Schmidt, our Chief Financial Officer, to add color around our financial operations. Eric?