8x8 Inc

Good evening. My name is Joanna and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the 8x8 Incorporated Fiscal Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Victoria Hajdan, Head of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon and welcome to 8x8 Third Quarter Fiscal 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Speaking on our call today is Dave Sipes, Chief Executive Officer and Sam Wilson, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, just a reminder that our discussion today includes four looking statements about 8x8's future financial performance, as well as its business, product, and growth strategies, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these four looking statements as they involve risk and uncertainties, they may cause actual results to vary materially from the four looking statements as described in our risk factors in our reports filed with the SEC. Any four looking statements made on this call reflect our analysis as of today and we have no plans or obligation to update them. In addition, some financial measures that will be discussed on this call, together with year-over-year comparisons in some cases, were not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the closest comparable GAAP measures is provided in our earnings press release and PowerPoint presentation deck, which are available on the Investor Relations website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you, Victoria. Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you and your families are healthy and safe. I'm pleased to speak with you today on my first earnings call with 8x8. I will cover business highlights from our third quarter results, and Sam will walk us through financial results and guidance for the fourth quarter and full year. I will then share my observations from my first 50 days and initial thoughts on the company's next level of growth. Now, let me start with Q3. Q3 was a good quarter. Total revenue grew to $137 million, a 15% increase year over year, and above the high end of our guidance range. Key drivers of the growth were strong demand for our bundled CCAS and UCAS offerings, continued upmarket focus, new logo acquisition, channel contribution, and improving operational execution. Our fully integrated CTAS and UCAS solution is a clear differentiator for us as a mid-market enterprise organization to replace legacy on-premise systems and shift employee and customer engagement to the cloud. The industry continues to recognize the value of 8x8's fully integrated platform. For the ninth consecutive year, Gartner named 8x8 as a leader in the magic quadrant for unified communications as a service worldwide. Also in the quarter, for the sixth year in a row, Gardner named 8x8 as a challenger in the Magic Quadrant for contact center as a service. Of note, 8x8 is the only UCAS Magic Quadrant leader that is also in the contact center as a service Magic Quadrant. Furthermore, we achieved our fourth sequential quarter of improved profitability. We exceeded top and bottom line guidance, improved operating efficiency, and strengthened our cash position. With a clear line of sight to improving revenue growth and profitability in the fourth quarter, we are raising full year guidance and cash balance outlook for the fiscal year. Sam will speak to this in a moment. Now let me turn to highlights from the quarter. We are pleased with the success we are seeing from our channel first strategy and upmarket focus with mid-market and enterprise customers. We had a record quarter upmarket with over 730 customers with greater than $100,000 in ARR, a 24% increase year over year. This was a result of strong execution across sales, marketing, and channel, and a combined product solution that is fit for purpose for enterprise customers. Channel execution was strong again. driving 64% of bookings in the quarter, eight of the top 10 deals, and enterprise ARR growth of 46%. The channel team across all regions delivered their highest bookings quarter on record. Channel partners are turning to 8x8 because of our integrated contact center and communication solutions deliver exceptional value for our mutual customers. Our UK value added reseller or VAR route to market is the fastest growing segment within our channel. Nearly 40% of channel pipeline in the quarter came from the UK VAR community and the number of partners registering deals grew by 70% year over year. We were also honored to be awarded the 2020 CRN UK cloud services vendor of the year and the 2020 TechTarget Archer Award for Best Channel Enablement Program in North America. Turning to specific customer wins, we observed strong growth in new logos overall, representing 56% of new bookings, up from 44% last quarter. We saw strong execution in all geographies and in key verticals such as healthcare, retail, transportation, and public sector. Let me highlight a few recent examples. In North America, a notable win was CEC Entertainment, which operates Chuck E. Cheese, the number one family entertainment center with operations in 47 states and 15 countries around the world. CEC Entertainment was looking to consolidate from multiple providers and lower their IT infrastructure expense. They needed a vendor that could rapidly deploy a unified communications platform for their restaurants and their corporate offices. They found 8x8 was able to reduce their overall cost and completely deploy our UC platform within four weeks. An additional win is a seven-figure TCB competitive cloud replacement with a medical office solutions provider who wanted an integrated CCAS and UCAS solution. This customer required outstanding call quality and integration between its voice and contact center platforms. They selected 8x8 to deploy 800 UCAS and 150 CCAS licenses. Outside of North America, we also had many important customer wins attracted by our differentiated UCAS and CCAS bundled offering. A major example is Ryanair Holdings, Europe's largest airline group. Ryanair connects travelers to over 240 destinations in 40 countries on a fleet of 470 aircraft, with a further 210 on order. Ryanair chose 8x8 to support their expected growth and provide more than 600 agents with a unified UCAS and CCAS platform. Our platform will be used to cross-run our customer service agents who will utilize our Zendesk integration to automatically log all customer activity within their CRM. Additionally, they will use our speech analytics and quality management solution to drive improvements in customer experience and to help upscale their agents. Next is Certis Energy UK Limited. the UK's largest independent distributor of fuels and lubricants. They selected 8x8 CCAS and UCAS platform to modernize communication with their customers. 8x8 will support 500 contact center agents and 1,000 back office and depot-based staff. Our solution allows Certus to have a single operational view of their contact center functions and customer interactions. Another example comes from our Australia, New Zealand region with a top multinational cybersecurity company. They wanted to replace their multi-vendor communication and contact center solutions with a single vendor solution that could provide a higher level of voice quality, call routing, and reporting globally. They chose 8x8 for a combined CCaaS and UCaaS solution and integration capabilities with CRM systems. This seven-figure TCV win is for over 850 globally distributed business users and multiple contact center locations across 44 countries. This is the initial deployment and has ample opportunity for future expansion. The public sector in the UK also continues to be a bright spot. Our UK public sector customer base has nearly doubled year over year. Notable wins this quarter included NHS Public Health Scotland, which provides specialist national healthcare services in Scotland to support the 14 regional NHS health boards. They are responsible for managing vaccination helplines and booking services for Scotland's COVID-19 response. and selected 8x8 CCAS and UCAS solutions, supporting over 3,300 seats. Kent Community Health, a UK NHS provider of community services, also selected 8x8 with 4,000 seats to accelerate their digital transformation and improve customer experience. Newham College of Further Education was an important bar win with 480 seats secured through our partnership with Virgin Media Business. Furthermore, we continue to see existing customers adopt more 8x8 services, creating a land and expand opportunity that will fuel future growth. A great example is Halfords Group, a British retailer of car parts and enhancement tools, camping, and touring equipment. Hallford selected 8x8 CCAS and UCAS for more than 4,700 seats in 2019 and have now added an additional 450 CCAS seats across their UK locations to further enhance their customer experience and solve compliance challenges after several acquisitions. Another notable example is a seven-figure TCV deal with one of Canada and Europe's leading equipment service providers who placed an add-on order of approximately 2,300 bundled CCAS and UCAS seats. Almost all of these wins, our channel partners were critical to our success, and I would like to thank them for their collaboration and support. Now, I'd like to discuss the market success of our products. CCAS and UCAS funnel offerings continue to lead the way. Fundle's contact center and communications represented 67% of upmarket bookings, bookings that were 12,000 or more in ARR. ARR from combo customers, customers who have purchased UC and CC, now represents over a third of total company ARR. Additionally, for the second quarter in a row, Combo Customer ARR grew at twice the rate of market growth. Also, I'm proud to say that more than two-thirds of our filled sales reps closed a bundled UCCC deal last quarter. The channel is also seeing the benefit of bundled UCCC. our sub-agents who historically sold UCaaS are now selling more CCaaS. The number of partners selling our bundled solution grew by over 38% year over year. Finally, this week we announced a partnership with Barent to enhance our CCaaS offering by adding additional integrated cloud workforce management applications for mid-market enterprise businesses worldwide. Next is 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, which continues to generate strong demand from customers that want to modernize their tele-opening platform with a direct routing solution from a proven UCaaS and CCaaS provider. The overall opportunity is extremely large. In a study we commissioned through Hanover Institute Research, found that more than three-quarters of organizations are likely to integrate Microsoft Teams with third-party telephony providers. In the quarter, we added the ability to manage settings such as calling configurations, voicemail, call forwarding, and logging in and out of call queues directly from Microsoft Teams. Additionally, 8x8 Contact Center is now included in Microsoft's Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams certification program. A couple of notable wins include a fast-growing retailer which operates 2,000 stores across 37 U.S. states, selected 8x8 for its ability to seamlessly integrate unified communications with Microsoft Teams. After a competitive RFP, 8x8 will deploy a mix and match solution of 10,000 UCAS seats, of which 3,500 will utilize voice for Microsoft Teams. This solves their need for a combined solution for both frontline and knowledge workers. A large one in EMEA is BDO, one of the largest global networks of public accounting, tax, consulting, and business advisory firms. BDO had been working on a large-scale digital transformation initiative and needed a communications platform that would enhance Microsoft Teams functionality. They selected 8x8 in the UK with an initial 6,000-seat license for a mix-and-match solution across UCaaS, CCaaS, and utilizing voice for Microsoft Teams. Lastly, turning to CPaaS, 8x8's API offerings are also driving new customer acquisition. An Indonesian government ministry selected 8x8 as a CPAC provider for an SMS-based application to support a job creation initiative to upskill blue-collar workers with an easily accessible learning platform. Their SMS usage increased 200% quarter-on-quarter to provide critical services to citizens. added support for KCowTalk, a mobile messaging app with over 52 million monthly active users in South Korea. The 8x8 chat app API now allows companies to reach customers across seven different services, including WhatsApp, Fiverr, and Facebook Messenger. Additionally, the Google service, Google Verified SMS, is now available to 8x8 business customers through our 8x8 SMS API. To sum up, CIOs and enterprisers are moving with urgency to the cloud. Our integrated platform sets us apart in the market and continues to drive growth globally. With that, let me now turn the call over to Sam to cover the financial results.

Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon. We appreciate you joining us as we report the third quarter financial results. I want to echo Dave's comments that I hope you and your families are staying safe. We are pleased to have delivered results that exceeded guidance, improved operating leverage, and reflect increased confidence in achieving profitability. Key drivers were better than expected performance from product categories UCAS, CCAS, and CPAS, and bundled offerings. Total revenue for the quarter was $136.7 million, an increase of 15% year-over-year and above our $132 to $133 million guidance. We had good sales linearity in the quarter. Unexpectedly, hardware grew sequentially as enterprise customers accelerated deployments and professional services were strong. Looking at service revenue, we generated $127.1 million, an increase of 15% year-over-year and above our $124 to $125 million guidance. Total ARR was $494 million at quarter end, up 20% year-over-year. Our strategic investments in the channel and product innovation over the last few years are delivering strong results. Third quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 59.6%, as expected, lower sequentially and driven mainly by product mix. Non-GAAP service revenue margin declined 80 basis points over last quarter to 66%. As we have previously mentioned, CPAS margins are significantly lower than UCAS and CCAS margins. CPAS usage increased during the quarter from holiday activities. Non-GAAP other revenue margin came in at minus 25.6% for the quarter, a large improvement from the minus 73.5% a year ago and sequentially improved from the minus 27.7%. Key drivers were continued growth in our professional services and the flex hardware rental program. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we currently expect that overall gross margins to improve mainly due to better product mix and from CPaaS usage returning to pre-holiday levels. Turning to the third quarter operating expenses, we continue to align global business to drive both improved execution and efficiency. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses improved to 39.1% of revenue in Q3, 2.2% lower than last quarter. The combination of leverage from our digital marketing programs, optimization of media spend, and moving from physical to virtual events has driven spending efficiencies. We've also added domestic and international sales capacity and have improved sales productivity. Non-GAAP R&D expenses were 10.7% of revenue in the quarter versus 9.9% last quarter. We continue to prioritize investing in our differentiated technology platform advantage. Non-GAAP G&A expenses improved to 10.8% of revenue in Q3 from 11.5% of revenue last quarter. We hope to gain further G&A advantage as we scale revenue and related operations. Total non-GAAP operating expenses were down about 1% year-over-year, while total revenue grew at 15% year-over-year, a reflection of tight expense management. We expect OPEX to be up single digit percentage year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Non-GAAP operating margins were minus 1.1% for the quarter, the best we have seen in 12 quarters. we believe we have clear line of sight to non-gap pre-tax profitability exiting march 2021 quarter and future cash generation as a reminder due to the timing of certain expenses each expense metric will not necessarily improve each quarter in a linear fashion our top of funnel metrics including pipeline coverage rates continue to be good and new logo growth was strong These results demonstrated that we are delivering solid returns on our previous investments in demand generation and the channel. We expect to see further improvement in unit economics as we continue to optimize our go-to-market motions. Our non-GAAP pre-tax loss was $1.9 million for the quarter ending December 31, 2020. This was better than the minus $3 million guidance provided in October and a result of a combination of better than expected total revenue, tight expense management, offset by a currency headwind. I'm extremely pleased with how the team is being very diligent with each dollar spent. Turning to the balance sheet, total cash, restricted cash, and investments ended the third quarter at $168 million. Excluding $15.5 million of restricted cash, the balance was $152.5 million. This is a decline of approximately $7 million quarter over quarter and includes the corporate bonus payments we discussed last quarter. Our quarterly cash usage has improved by over $40 million since the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020. We remain focused on further reducing our cash burn and improving collections, which continue to run ahead of expectations. Further, we believe the better than expected collections is a good sign that COVID related risks are manageable. We are making steady progress towards zero net cash usage and expect to see further improvement in the fourth quarter. Staying on the topic of cash, last quarter we discussed our intent to have approximately $135 million or more in cash, cash equivalents and investments on the balance sheet at fiscal year end. I am pleased to say that we are raising our expectation again to now over $148 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments, excluding restricted cash. The program improvements we have put into place are performing significantly better than expected, and we remain focused on being free cash flow positive in fiscal 2022, more likely in the second half of the year. One final item under liabilities I'd like to discuss is deferred revenue, which increased during the quarter to over $20 million. We have moved towards building contracts in advance of service delivery and expect deferred revenue will continue to grow on the balance sheet. One metric we are regularly asked about is remaining performance obligations or RPO. Simply put, RPO is the aggregate of deferred revenue and committed revenue backlog for our subscription services. For the third quarter, RPO was approximately $365 million, up from $330 million in the second quarter and $245 million in the year-ago period, or nearly 50% growth. Turning to financial outlook, as we enter the fourth quarter, we have good sales funnel metrics and continued strong demand for our bundled UCaaS and CCaaS solution and voice for Microsoft Teams. Offsetting this is the continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment as a result of the pandemic. Taking all this into account, we are establishing guidance for Q4 fiscal 2021 ending March 31, 2021 as follows. We anticipate total revenue to be in a range of $138.5 million to $140.5 million, representing approximately 14% to 16% year-over-year growth. We anticipate service revenue to be in a range of $130.8 to $131.8 million, representing approximately 16% to 17% year-over-year growth. and we anticipate non-GAAP pre-tax loss of approximately $800,000. Combining our outperformance for the third quarter with the forecast for the fourth quarter, we are raising guidance for full year fiscal 2021 ending March 31, 2021 as follows. We are raising our total revenue outlook from $519 million to $522 million to a range of $526.1 to $528.1 million, representing approximately 18% year-over-year growth. We are raising our service revenue growth range from $489 million to $492 million to a range of $493 to $494 million, representing approximately 19% year-over-year growth. And we anticipate non-GAAP pre-tax loss of approximately $13.7 million. The final topic I'd like to discuss is our IR metrics sheet. Based on the feedback from discussions we've had with the investor community, we will stop reporting certain booking metrics after the fourth quarter earnings results are published. We believe ARR metrics are a better indicator to measure business performance. We expect to discuss these changes in conjunction with our fourth quarter results in May. On a personal note, I'm excited to see the positive impact Dave has already had. His focus, operational excellence, and go-to-market expertise will help position 8x8 for our next phase of growth and profitability. With that, let me turn the call back to Dave.

Thank you, Sam. In closing, I'd like to share some of my initial observations and thoughts. This is now day 50 for me, and I've been spending time with our employees, customers, and partners to better understand our strengths, and where we can focus to make meaningful improvements. I have a deep appreciation and respect for the strong technology our team has built. I joined 8x8 because I believe we have an incredible market opportunity in front of us. Additionally, I'm very encouraged by the talent and dedication I'm seeing amongst the 8x8 team. Looking forward, I see the opportunity to leverage my 20 years of experience to drive improved operational execution and transformation to help the company reach its full potential. First, as has been demonstrated for years now, the resiliency of the business model really is special, and the market opportunity is massive. Not many SaaS companies have reached the half a billion revenue size that 8x8 is today. Yet, we're just scratching the surface. Moving business communications to the cloud is one of the largest SaaS market opportunities there is, period. That transformation is still in the early innings. Yet recently, we have seen it become a top business priority. The urgent adoption of work from anywhere has accelerated the timeframe in which companies are making and planning to make the move to the cloud. Enterprises now see cloud communications as a critical component of employee enablement, customer connection, and business continuity. Having been a pioneer in cloud business communications from the beginning, 8x8 is well suited from a product and experience base to capitalize on the accelerated nature of this transformation. Second, 8x8 has a unique technology to capitalize on this opportunity. I have spent a considerable amount of time with our engineering and product teams in strategic business review meetings. Based on my initial evaluations, I'm confident in the platform and the product suite of solutions. 8x8 has developed an integrated platform leveraging a decade-plus of innovation. We have consistently been recognized in two Gartner magic quadrants, both UCaaS and CCaaS. A tremendous business and customer base has already been built upon these products, yet And I find this an exciting positive. There's even more we can do to fill the promise of cloud communications to deliver an amazing experiences for the customers. In the quarters and years ahead, we will continue to be a customer first, product first, and team first company that consistently delivers amazing innovations for the business user. Third, we are focused on execution. I have been impressed with the progress that has already been made towards revenue growth and profitability. In today's announcements, you are already seeing some of those hard-earned results. I do believe there are further additional opportunities to become even more efficient and streamline processes. We are reviewing everything from top to bottom, including where to best focus our resources and drive stronger operational excellence. building a highly scalable, efficient, streamlined go-to-market engine will be a strategic area of focus in the coming quarters. I am excited about leading 8x8 into this next level of growth. I'm confident that through our focus on execution, our differentiated technology, and this unique, massive market opportunity, we will progress down the right path to provide the best communication solutions for our customers and partners and will be recognized and rewarded for such. I look forward to discussing our strategies more in the future. Lastly, I'd like to thank our customers and partners for their continued support and the 8x8 employees for making me feel welcome. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions.

Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Matt from BTIG. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question and welcome to the team, Dave. It's great to have you aboard. I guess my first question goes on the press release from this morning and you touched on it quite a bit, but the Microsoft Teams integration and all the capabilities you've built out there, In our work, we continue to hear, and it's no surprise to anyone, the teams is very well proliferated across the enterprise. But can you just help us understand sort of what the opportunity is for 8x8 from a total addressable market and how maybe the margin structure, the contract structure is a little bit different than going in with more of a direct sale on the X-Series?

Sure. I'll talk to the market opportunity. I'll let Sam talk to that last part. This is David. So what we're providing with the Microsoft Teams Direct Connect is an ability for our end, our customers to utilize the Microsoft Teams endpoints with our market-capable UCaaS and CCaaS offering. And it brings an ability for customers like that fast-growing retailer we talked about to utilize their current Teams environment Additionally, because we are unique in providing that direct routing capability of being able to bring on also contact center agents and other employees like frontline workers that might not be in the team's environment, we can create a mixed environment for those customers. And we're having quite a tremendous amount of pickup in that product capability. We also launched some capabilities there, the ability to set settings from within Teams and in and out of call queues. So there's continued innovation that we're putting into that product to create differentiation. And the market TAM is large as there's a large ecosystem around Teams chat that has adopted today and through the pandemic. And probably about 115 million daily users is the size of that and growing. And we commissioned that research with Hanover Institute that says about three-quarters of those companies are going to institute third-party integrations for the UCAS telephony capability. So the market opportunity is large. We're leading in some of the capabilities there. and are having success both in the channel and directly with customers.

On the topic of Microsoft Teams margins, we don't see a materially different margin between a Teams seat and a non-Teams seat. particularly when we look at the bottom line. On the top line, there might be a slight decrease in margin, but that's usually more of an effect that we're selling to a larger company and they're buying in large volume. But when compared to the bottom line with the reduced support costs and those kinds of things, it's effectively the same. We're agnostic to either one, and I think that's one of our great benefits is we want to do what's right by the customer, not necessarily push them one way or another.

great. And then on the contact center side, obviously a ton of traction here and we continue to come across, you know, more and more usage, more and more focus on how you're going to meet your customer in the digital world as as everything shifts. E commerce given the pandemic, um you know what are what are you seeing is this mostly still rip and replace of of some or you know a consolidation of multiple vendors that are in a customer or are you really starting to see kind of net new use cases i know you highlighted maybe nhs in scotland as one that are you know helping roll out the vaccine but are you seeing enterprises look um to stand up maybe small contact centers where historically they've not had anything

Well, I find that the mass majority of the market is still on legacy solutions. And so bringing that to the cloud with a modern solution that combines both contact center and unified communications is a massive opportunity and is where the bulk of the new logo acquisition comes from ultimately. And we're in the early innings of this market transformation. The changes of work from anywhere that's occurred has created increased urgency in that transformation, but we're still in that early phases of early customer adoption and then people planning the adoption of replacement of the older systems.

All right, great. Thanks. Good job on the quarter. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams from Stevens. Your line is open.

Congrats on the results. Dave, I appreciated the color about what attracted you to 8x8. I'd love to hear how you think your experience and skill set can help the next leg of growth for the company. Thanks.

Sure. And I found it invigorating so far. There's been a very warm reception from employees and partners and customers. even investor as an analyst. And part of that is there, you know, there was felt there was a good fit, right? Between myself and the organization with my knowledge of the customer and my operational, you know, bent as well as go to market expertise. And I feel that is largely playing out. So it feels like, you know, the right opportunity at the right time. Additionally, with the, increased elevation of moving organizations from legacy to cloud, the profile of the whole category is increased, and that is creating even tremendous opportunities. So, overall, it feels like a strong, you know, combination at this point.

Excellent. Yeah, and the travel hospitality and retail lens you mentioned certainly wouldn't be some of the first wins that come to mind in this macro environment. But would the channel bookings in the quarter be encouraging the acceleration growth you saw there? Can you just talk about the composition of what your pipeline looks like heading into 2021? And are there larger deal sizes in there? Thanks.

Channel is obviously an area with momentum, and I think it's attributable to consistent execution and great leadership that we have at 8x8 that's building the strong relationships with the channel. We are seeing strong congruence between mid-market enterprise customers. And I would say pipeline-wise is healthy. And our goal is to continue that momentum and growth of our channel capabilities and marrying that with our ability to help the channel close those deals and accelerate the penetration into that Category 4 combined UCAS, CCAS offerings.

Appreciate the color. Good luck, guys. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Rich Valera from Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Thank you, and let me add my welcome, Dave. I'm glad to see you aboard. dave i want to ask you about the channel since that's something that sort of you've clearly been involved with a lot in your career and just to give your assessment of where eight is in terms of presence and mind share on both the bar and master agent side of the channel and if you see opportunity for them to increase their mind share while also improving unit economics you know obviously there's been some issues in the industry historically with folks sort of buying channel presence that maybe wasn't that economically wise. But in any case, just your thoughts on where you guys stand on the two parts of the channel.

Yeah. So like I said, channel momentum has been good, and there's been an element of catch up to some degree, but I think there's also a preference that's being created at this point, and through consistent execution. The economics, we like the economics. We think there's a good mix between channel and direct today, and we're encouraged by that. Where we see additional success, and we saw obviously overall momentum, but VAR in UK continues to be China with generating 40% of the channel pipeline. And that's a differentiated model that is an opportunity to continue growing that in that market as well as probably an opportunity to move into additional countries beyond the UK for that.

Great. That makes sense. And then question on the API business. When that acquisition was done, one of the thoughts was that you'd ultimately be rolling that out in some higher margin geos, and that would help the margin profile. I'm just wondering if we have any update on where you stand in terms of rolling that out beyond some of the initial geos when you bought that property.

Yes, and I think we mentioned in our last quarter's call that we did roll some, you know, limited availability of the API business into the U.S., U.K. We have closed customers, you know, existing customers onto that. I mean, still the vast majority of the business in Asia, we expect it to stay in Asia because it continues to be, you know, robust growth there. So I think stay tuned. It's definitely a source of differentiation, particularly when we mix it with our contact center products.

That's great. Thanks, gentlemen.

Ladies and gentlemen, may we request to limit your question to one, and your next question is coming from the line of Tim Horan. Your line is open.

Thank you, and welcome, Dave. Can we dive into Teams, please? It's been really an incredible 18-month growth for Microsoft, really unprecedented, and almost, I think, very few of these customers are on UCAS at this point. Can you talk about the benefit of customers using UCAS with Teams? What's your go-to-market strategy there? And why would these customers use you over, you know, the many other options that they have? And I guess, how unique are you? And then lastly, like, can you give us a sense of how important this is to your growth or, you know, percentage of growth of incremental customers you expect in a year or two? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll answer the first part of that. You know, being able to light up the Teams chat application with a full-blown UCaaS and telephony capabilities is really kind of at the broadest stroke of what the opportunity is. Doing that in the approach we've done it with direct routing creates a high-quality interface. And doing that with a reliable, high-quality, dependable vendor is really what the customer's looking for in that case. Additionally, we provide the ability to bring in things like contact center agents that is differentiated and unique, in addition to other types of workers that might not be on the Teams environment, even in a large organization. As you can imagine, there's different types of deployments within those organizations. So this allows to mix and match a customer to enable their entire organization with real-time communications with that asymmetric communication platform that Teams is providing.

I think I just add one small tidbit to what Dave was saying is, look, Teams is generally purchased by the IT department. We generally sell to the IT department. We offer a global solution. It's a one-stop shop with the direct routing. We don't bog down the end users in the areas where they're on Teams, and so it's a very clean solution for the IT department. The IT department doesn't have to have a bunch of telecom expertise or get a bunch of local carrier partners in regions in the world. And so the net to the IT department is, you know, it's one-stop, it's a great TCO, and it's low manageable ongoing operating costs. It's just kind of a win-win, and I think the handover research which suggests that 75% of all Teams customers will be using a direct routing solution supports that also. So I think it's just a – it's one of those rare instances. I mean, I think you're spot on. Microsoft's got a winning product on their hands, but the IT department still needs to deploy it globally and make it work well, and we're just a nice hand-in-glove solution to that.

And so what's your go-to-market strategy there and how important will it be to grow for a year or two from now?

I mean, I think the easy answer to that is I don't want to say it's something sophisticated, right? We hit the digital channels, the regular subagent master channels. We've also targeted a bit the Microsoft channels because they are super interested. Remember last quarter we signed up PAX 8, which is a traditional Microsoft partner. We have some of the largest Microsoft partners in the UK who are selling our products. So, I mean, to the mid-market enterprise customers, they're a little bit more channel-focused, so we hit them through the channel. Through the smaller customers, we hit them through the traditional digital route.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Keyes from Summit Insights Group. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats for the quarter and the welcome for Dave. And I wanted to ask about, I guess, two product lines here. Obviously, your UCAS and CCAS are doing well. I wanted to double-click first on your CPAS. You talked about it with the holiday usage, that it came back from previous quarter. It came back. It sounded like it rebounded enough so that it brought down the margins. With that particular product line, can you talk about what your expectations in terms of the growth could be for that product? I know you're trying to integrate it with your other products offering portfolio, but it's still being sold separately. It's still not completely bundled with the other products. So if you can just talk about at least what you think the market rates would be for the growth for that product would be in terms of where you're trying to deploy it. And the second thing I wanted to click on and product-wise would be your video. Video is obviously pretty hot during the pandemic, during lockdown. Can you talk about, you know, maybe this is more for Dave here, what your vision is for the video and, you know, the development for that and where you see that going? Thanks.

All right. I'll take CPAS, and I'll give the video to Dave for your suggestion. On the CPAS side, look, as we had said last quarter, we expected gross margins to be down sequentially. I mean, we do generally see a pickup in the traditional SMS portions of the CPAS business and some of the lower margin portions of the CPAS business during the holiday season. And that was reflected in the financial statements. And then, correspondingly, post-holidays now, we expect that rebound in gross margins. You know, it's a fully integrated segment into our business, so I'm really not going to break out the growth rate separately for a whole host of reasons. But mainly, you know, it is a faster-growing piece of the overall business. I think right now we're very focused on next steps, and I think that's great about having Dave on board. He brings a fresh set of eyes to it about the next steps that we want to take with that business. and figure out those next steps. So I would say stay tuned a little bit on the last part of your question. We'll get to answering that. And I'll turn it over to video to Dave.

Yeah, on video, with our Jitsi community, we've had a great opportunity and launched a product called Jazz, which is Jitsi as a service. And it creates a differentiated approach to bringing video meetings into other app developers, allows organizations to embed a full meeting experience at a high level of APIs into different applications or workflows. That's a product that we put into beta. We have over 1,000 developers on it. And it's unique in its ability to – it has a simplified pricing model based upon monthly active users. that allows those organizations to implement it fairly risk-free into their products. Additionally, it has portability capabilities across different cloud environments. So a number of differentiations. That is an early launch of an interesting product that we will be watching and looking and building the success of.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Will Power from Baird. Your line is open.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, hey, Dave. Yeah, congratulations. Great to chat again. Hey, I guess one of the big questions for us, and I think investors generally, is as you look forward and you look at some of the cloud communications, industry leaders and growth rates, I think we're just trying to understand what some of the challenges are that you face to kind of close that gap with some of the industry growth leaders versus some of the advantages you might, in fact, have over some of the other leaders. And I know you spoke to the strength you're seeing in the channel. I think even some of our own survey work kind of validates that. So how do you think about that? I mean, what are the big challenges? What are the advantages? And what helps you kind of close that gap over the next couple of years?

Yeah, well, and good talking again. You know, I think about it in a few different ways or different steps, and I am going through in depth the organization and the capabilities, but always looking for opportunities to reinforce success and You're seeing a number of those even on the call today with Channel, with UK, with a combination of CC and UC and with Microsoft Teams. So where there is strong muscle, continuing to build stronger muscle and effectiveness in those areas. Also, creating more operating efficiency in the organization is key. And that's something that there's been great strides in and Sam is a great CFO to have on that and is all over that. But there's further opportunities to be world class in how we operate and how we go to market and how we serve customers that will help smooth out and create opportunities for investments into those areas that are working well. And then obviously improving go-to-market motions and playbooks, everything from how we position and how we message, how we talk to prospects. So all of those will help smooth out and create a strong drivetrain between applying force and seeing results in the market. Obviously, these things take some time. And you have sales cycles that are nine months in enterprise, so things won't happen overnight. But working across those key areas I know will create better capabilities and opportunities to get market-leading growth opportunities.

Okay. And maybe if I can just ask a quick follow-on. Just as I know there's a big focus on enterprise and you've seen generally, I think, improving trends there. Is there any low-hanging fruit to help improve the growth rate of the S&B business? Because I know that's one of the elements from a mixed standpoint that's holding back the overall growth.

Look, I mean, we have good growth in SMB in the U.K., and obviously we rolled out the e-commerce initiatives to both increase the number of new logos we're putting on board and bringing them on more efficiently. If you look at a lot of the third-party research, the SB business overall in the U.S. isn't growing that, you know, robustly fast. I think we're at or above market growth rate. So I think it's more about growing profitably and smartly than it is about just putting up a raw number.

Okay. All right. Good luck to you all. Thank you. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Levine from Evercore. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you. And, you know, great quarter. And, Dave, welcome to the company. You know, I think most of us know the success you had in your prior life. And it's lucky to duplicate that performance or playbook here. You know, what did you see coming in day one that you knew needed to be addressed And I guess to kind of fight against like Biden's first 100 days, if you can kind of go into further detail on the opportunities you see, whether that be operational products or on the partner front, what's top of mind for you out of the gate?

You know, there's always a strong product background with 8x8s and applying world-class go-to-market capabilities always feels like a good fit and opportunity. And those are the areas we're digging into. I'm not going to go into, like, depth at this point. Those are things we'll come back to you as investors and lay out how we see that playing out. But that opportunity to create greater capabilities, greater awareness, better deal velocity, those are all general areas where we'll combine the strong product capabilities with a world-class go-to-market capability for the organization.

Okay. And maybe for you, Sam, do you see a materially different post-COVID expense profile for 8x8 as it relates to sales and marketing, travel expense, real estate? Just curious to know how you're kind of managing the business as we kind of hopefully, you know, turn the corner on COVID.

I would say you're reading the CFO journals. That's what we all talk about in there. Look, I believe in corporate America, there's been a very clear realization that we don't need to travel as much and do as much T&E to generate business like we did in the past. And I think it's on both sides. I think it's both on the seller side and the buyer side. So I think we're open to the idea of more remote workers in lower-cost regions, lower T&E expenses, so that we can fund more engineering initiatives and more sales capacity and more marketing capacity. And so I think I'm not unique in saying that that is definitely something we are looking at, and it's something that we are looking at institutionalizing coming out of the pandemic.

Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from the line of Nita Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. I wanted to dive into kind of some of the new customer deals that were greater than 100K. And, you know, you noted that, you know, 53 deals, but only 34 of them were new logos. Just getting a sense of, you know, clearly that means you're upselling your customers quite a bit. Is that, you know, tacking on more seats? Is that selling contact center secondary? Is that pulling through? You see just a little bit of kind of commentary on some of these new deals that come from existing logos.

So I'll start with some general characteristics, and then I'll let Dave pick up if he wants to add anything. So I hate to be so obvious, but it's a little bit of all of the above. So definitely we add on more seats. Definitely, we cross-sell. So if we land a customer with UC, we cross-sell contact center. Every once in a while, we'll land a contact center customer and cross-sell UC. I think one of the biggest things as we move into mid-market and enterprise, we do find is we'll frequently land one region, one buying center, one division. and they're the first you know the first group that moves to the cloud and then the rest of the organization catches on and we sort of get an overall corporate buying decision that gets made um you know looking through the deals this quarter and over the last previous quarters i'm constantly surprised when we land the european division of the u.s division of a multinational and then they want to roll us out to asia they want to roll us out to the rest of their global operations And so I do think almost every one of these six-figure deals that you'll see is, you know, cross-boundary, cross-geographic, cross-products in the end. Dave, anything you want to add?

No, I think when you see, you know, like Halfords where we already had 4,000-plus seats in there in a UCAS perspective and then are able – we have the open discussion with the buyer – and then are able to cross-sell a whole product category with Contact Center. And there we added, you know, 450 seats. That's a great opportunity because we get to tell the story of the integrated product and with a relationship that is already strong in the customer. So that's an area that is quite fruitful.

You got it. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Lattimore from Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks very much. I guess, Dave, on the 8x8 platform, it sounds like you view maybe the number one differentiator being the full UCCC stack. Just want to make sure that's right. And then second, can you give sort of a concrete couple examples of you know, if a customer uses this full stack, you know, what benefit do they get versus, you know, buying another platform that uses sort of an integrated approach to the platform?

Yeah. So, look, there's a – it goes back a long time. Customers have wanted those products combined and legacy solutions have combined those. There's the ability to have high reliability, high uptime from a single vendor and not – create complexity and chance for duplication across multiple vendors. There's opportunities to reduce total cost of ownership. But additionally, when you're talking about an IT buyer, being able to have integration out of the box and not having to integrate the two products, as well as being able to maintain integrations into corporate workflows. Additionally, we see feature capabilities not only for manageability from an administrator, but also ability to share presence or analytics across the product suite for adoption usage. Um, and you know, high, a measurement of high levels of call quality and loss scoring across both products. So I would say bucket ties into like several areas and it's a, innate buyer demand that's existed previously in legacy and they're looking for also in cloud.

Got it. And just quick on the gross margin on the sort of other product line, you know, negative 25%. Is there an opportunity to kind of improve on that over time?

Heck yes. We've improved it pretty radically over the last year, and we will continue to improve it. It may not be every quarter. It depends on certain things that happen, particularly around sometimes we have to do phone sales and sometimes we get larger enterprise phone sales. But yes, we definitely have room to improve gross margins on the other revenue line.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Catherine Trebnick from Collier Severe Leaves. Your line is open.

Catherine Trebnick Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations, Dave. Nice to see you there and a great quarter. Mine has to do with the channel. And what we're seeing in this quarter is some consolidation of master agents and VARs and SI firms. What's your take on if that persists? Where do you see your strengths at 8x8? And then also, in addition, can you give us an update on ScanSource and where that partnership is and how it's progressing? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll take the first part of the fact that there's consolidation in the channel I think that's helpful overall. We like to work with large partners, and we have a reputation in the market for being easy to work with, flexible and supportive of the partner community, and that will continue to support us going forward, as well as we're getting known for having the differentiated combination of UCAS and CCAS and continue to leverage that with the channel going forward.

And then specifically on scan source, I never would talk about a single partner without their permission, so that would be a little bit inappropriate. But on the U.S. VAR program in general, it continues to roll out. It's something we're reviewing continuously to see what the next steps for it are. But it continues to roll out, and not much else to say.

Okay. Thanks. Great quarter, guys.

Thank you, Catherine.

Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton from Craig Hallam. Your line is open.

Thanks. Dave, I may be the only one that goes back to your WebEx days as well. So nice to work with you for a third time. So I did want to double click on the UK channel success. Now, my question may be inappropriate based on Sam's last answer. But the Virgin program, along with the CloudFuel program, I'm just wondering if you can give us a little bit better sense of why that has been so successful.

Thanks, George. Sam was running our European operations previously.

Yeah, so I wouldn't give you specifics on Virgin, but I'll certainly talk about the UK market. Look, the company entered the UK market in 2013, first through an acquisition and then doubled down again in 2016. We've been there for eight years. We are, you know, the team always tells us we're the number one cloud player in the UK market. And it's a lot of what Dave said earlier about our success in the U.S. We're known, we're reliable, we're easy to do business with. We figured out how to do the VAR wholesale billing in the UK and all those things. intricacies of the business model there over time. And I think it's a real competitive advantage for us because we've got years of Head Start compared to everyone else there. And so I definitely think that the VAR you mentioned in particular saw what our capabilities were and selected us for their next phase of growth there.

Gotcha. That's it for me. Thanks, Jess.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of James Green from William Clear. Your line is open.

James Green Thanks for taking the question. Just one clarification from the cost side, Tim. I think you talked about expenses being up sequentially 1%. I just wanted to clarify that. And more for Dave, just on the competitive side, what are you seeing in the market? Is your success that you're going head-to-head with similar competitors that you were before, you're getting invited to more deals, you know, and generally in these deals, and especially in the larger ones, you know, how many competitors are you seeing that you have to beat in order to win the deals? Thanks.

All right, I'll take the first one while Dave gets to get a second thought. I think what I said was we would be up single digits year-over-year growth for OPEX in the fourth quarter. So single-digit year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter for OPEX.

Great, thanks, Eric. Competitive landscape, largely similar. As you might expect, the buyer's the same. So it's meeting those needs. There is a little more back to the contact center side on competitive and buyer side needs. And that's the only difference.

Have you seen, in terms of the sales cycle, I think there was a little bit of a disruption when we went to a lot of remote work earlier in the year. Have things improved a bit more if people have gotten more comfortable with buying and installing the product without the face-to-face?

Well, so you threw the last part in absolutely, right? So the multiple face-to-face meetings required have now turned into remote video conferences using our own products and remote video demos using our own products. So definitely that's the case. Look, I think the biggest thing that's changed in my mind looking through what's happened is the IT department's used to this now. We did have panic buying. I think we talked about that over the last couple of conference calls. Now it's less panic buying, and it's more course of business. They know what they're doing. They know how to remotely deploy. They know how to remotely enable their users. And we're, you know, look, I think it's great. I think it's great because the cloud has really shown through during this pandemic. And, you know, no one's ever going to think about buying an on-prem system again for all the reasons that this pandemic showed.

Terrific. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Speakers, there are no more further questions. I would like to turn it back to the management for closing remarks.

Thank you so much, and obviously there's a replay available on our website. And until next time, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.