Limelight Networks, Inc.

Q2 2021 Earnings Conference Call

7/29/2021

spk09: Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Limelight Network's 2021 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the end of the prepared remarks, we will provide instructions for those interested in entering the queue for the question and answer session. I will now turn the call over to Dan Bontel, Limelight's Chief Financial Officer.
spk05: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining Limelight Network's 2021 second quarter financial results conference call. This call is being recorded today, July 29th, 2021, and will be archived on our website for approximately 10 days. Let me start by quickly covering the safe harbor. We would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. Forward-looking statements are all statements that are not strictly statements of historical facts, such as our priorities, our expectations, our operational plans, business strategies, secular trends, product and future functionalities, pro forma results, and acquisition activities and contributions from acquired businesses. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our periodic filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K. forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law joining me on the call today are bob lyons our president and chief executive officer and ajay kapoor who will become our new chief technology officer bob will start today's call with an update on our improve expand and extend initiatives As previously discussed, these three operational programs are intended to support improved growth and profitability, including the recently announced acquisition of Move Corporation, which does business under the brand name Layer Zero. I'll then review financial results. Following that, Bob will use the remainder of the call to discuss aspects of our strategy and corporate initiatives going forward. We will then open the call for Q&A. I'll now turn the call over to Bob.
spk01: Thank you, Dan, and welcome, everyone. I am pleased to report that the steps we have taken to improve profitability and our competitive position are beginning to demonstrate improvements in key areas of business performance. The recent organizational and operational improvements have improved our adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. We expect continued improvement with line of sight to additional identified efficiencies and revenue growth. While we re-accelerate our core CDN business with the acquisition of Layer 0, we have laid the foundation for Limelight's evolution into a next generation platform that leapfrogs the competition. The acquisition brings on significant technical talent to oversee Limelight's evolution as an edge solutions platform. We will speak to this a couple of times on this call and we'll provide additional insights on our strategy here today and further at our strategy session on August 24th. Consistent with the first quarter, we have continued to take aggressive steps towards improving shareholder value. As a quick reminder, we have organized our approach into three programs. Our IMPROVE program is focused on network performance and operating costs. Our EXPAND program is focused on revenue growth with existing and new clients, and our EXTEND program is focused on introducing new solutions that will increase network utilization, growth, and gross margins. We have been very busy, and I would like to update you on our progress with each of these programs. Under our IMPROVE program, we have remediated the previously discussed network performance issues, and we continue to improve our cost model. This quarter include our newly formed performance operation team has reduced rebuffer rates for some customers by as much as 30% and increased global network throughput by 20%. As a result, revenue from 18 of our top 20 customers has increased 20% year over year. We have identified an additional $8 million in annualized cost of goods savings that we expect to contribute approximately $4 million in the second half of this year. The $15 million of annualized cost actions taken in the first quarter have improved adjusted EBITDA from a loss of $3.3 million to a gain of over $200,000. Additionally, as revenue ramps in the second half of the year, we expect significant flow through to adjusted EBITDA. We believe that our improved network performance is the foundation for in-year revenue expansion with existing clients. Fittingly, our expand program has focused on this opportunity as well as adding new clients. Highlights this quarter include, previously we had discussed that two of our top 10 clients had meaningfully reduced our traffic due to performance concerns. Both have begun ramping us back up, and we expect the ramp to continue supporting our expectation for accelerating revenue growth in the second half of this year. You may recall that our largest client uses algorithms to allocate traffic based on performance. We are focused on the opportunity to optimize our performance in certain regions in order to gain a greater market share of their traffic. In the quarter, we implemented a win-back campaign to focus on past clients that no longer work with us. We are in active discussions with several former clients, one of which a former top 10 client has completed integration testing and we expect traffic to return soon with an annualized revenue of $6 million. Perhaps as important, the traffic pattern was modeled largely to leverage our off-peak capacity As a result, we anticipate an improvement in network utilization of approximately 300 basis points. Last, we are excited to have Eric Armstrong join us as Senior Vice President of Growth. Most recently, he was Vice President of North American Sales and Services at Harmonic, a global leader in streaming, broadcast, and service provider video infrastructure, and will help continue our efforts to accelerate growth. Continued expansion of revenue and profitability also requires us to extend our product scope to higher margin products that leverage our global private network. We are excited to announce the pending acquisition of Layer Zero Corporation. Layer Zero is a SaaS-based application acceleration and deployment platform for developers. Their flagship product enables us to capitalize on the accelerating trend of developers utilizing the edge to better address application performance, overall productivity, and reduce the attack surface. We believe that the combined Layer Zero capabilities and our proprietary global network will give Limelight the best application delivery solution in the market. With the acquisition of Layer Zero, we will be immediately launching a new web application acceleration and deployment solution. We believe that our solution will benchmark better than alternative offers on performance, price, and productivity. We expect Layer Zero to contribute over $20 million of incremental revenue in 2022. We have identified approximately $3 million of additional annualized cost synergies. We also believe that Layer Zero will be accretive to adjusted EBITDA in 2022. And this acquisition meaningfully improves our software product management and engineering capabilities. Ajay Kapoor, Layer Zero's founder, will join Limelight as our chief technology officer. Ajay brings with him an entrepreneurial spirit and approximately 90 team members that will be instrumental in our vision for enabling our solution set within our global edge network for developers. Layer Zero currently serves customers such as Coach, United Airlines, Revolve Fashion, Shoe Carnival, Kate Spade, Sharper Image, and several top 50 US banks. We are very happy with the progress the team has made in such a short time, but much work remains to be done. We will continue our relentless pursuit of operational excellence, restoring client confidence, improving performance, and returning value to our shareholders. We will continue to communicate our progress as well as our opportunities to improve. I believe that our improved performance, our cost management, and the launch of our new application acceleration and deployment solution positions Limelight to capture more market share. At this time, I will turn the call over to Dan to report second quarter financials. Dan?
spk05: Thanks, Bob. Revenue for the second quarter was $48.3 million, a decline of 17% from the second quarter of 2020. As Bob noted, we believe the operational improvements implemented over the last several months and the alignment of our client success team with the metrics that matter most to our clients position us well to participate in expanded market share and traffic gains as more and more new content is released. Despite short-term headwinds due to easing COVID restrictions resulting in changing streaming patterns, we are confident the actions we are taking will increase our ability to grow profitable revenue long-term. Our top 20 clients accounted for approximately 78% of total second quarter revenue compared to 79% last year. International clients accounted for 39% of total revenue in Q2 compared to 38% a year ago. Approximately 11% of our second quarter revenue was in non-U.S. dollar denominated currencies, up from 10% last year. Cash gross margins declined to 33% from 51% in the second quarter last year. Our largely fixed cost structure coupled with a concentration of large video streaming clients results in a suboptimal network utilization. Our network has high demand for a relatively short period of four to six hours each evening in each region. While this remains true, our cash gross margin will have a high sensitivity to overall demand patterns and network utilization. We will improve our network utilization by focusing on onboarding more software download customers and extending into the web application delivery space with the acquisition of Layer 0, both of which generate significantly more off-peak traffic. Win-back opportunities in the software download area are expected to drive utilization improvements in the second half of the year. We have recently improved alignment and focus on our global infrastructure with a regional management structure. We believe this alignment will further improve our ability to capture opportunities in the markets we serve, resulting in continuously improving our performance, utilization, and cash gross margins. Total operating expenses were $19 million, a decrease of 29%, or $5.6 million, excluding restructuring and transition-related costs, which totaled $2.2 million in the second quarter and $11.7 million in the first quarter of 2021. We have started to realize the savings anticipated from the actions taken in March of this year, as well as improved management of all operating costs. We expect restructuring and transition-related charges to be approximately $2 million for the remainder of the year as we continue to evaluate opportunities to further optimize our performance and cost structure. The aforementioned operational improvements resulted in a meaningful sequential increase in adjusted EBITDA to a positive $200,000 from a loss of over $3 million in the first quarter. Cash and marketable securities total $119.6 million, an increase of $2.6 million. We paid $4.1 million related to restructuring and transition-related expenses, and the capital expenditures were $3 million during the quarter. DSO at the end of the quarter was 42 days compared to 51 days at the end of March. We anticipate continued DSO performance in 2021 within our normal range of 50 to 60 days. On to guidance. We are leaving our current expectations unchanged except for capital expenditures. We currently expect CapEx to be in the range of $15 to $20 million for the year compared to previous guidance of $20 to $25 million as efficiency gains through software enhancements and focus on better asset utilization are expected to provide the capacity needed to meet our revenue guidance. We do recognize there is timing risk associated with expected traffic ramp in Q3 and Q4. As we discussed in our last quarter earnings call, we will continue to monitor this risk and communicate any adjustments should it be necessary. Early indications are that we are ramping traffic, but there is risk associated with the rate of ramp and to what extent post-COVID traffic patterns continue. Offsetting these risks are a few new growth assumptions in our model. These include the win-back of a large software download client that will heavily utilize our off-peak traffic capacity. This represents $3 million of in-year revenue and an annualized revenue target of $6 million. Also, the acquisition of Layer Zero provides the ability to immediately expand their existing product offering to bundle with our delivery service with existing clients, and we expect to contribute approximately $20 million in 2022. Let me take a moment to add a bit more color on the Layer Zero acquisition. We believe that Layer Zero fits perfectly into our strategy of adding new high margin, high growth SaaS solutions that leverage our global private delivery network. In short, we are combining the benefits of our world-class global edge network with Layer Zero's unmatched application performance and developer productivity capabilities to create a leading edge solution with higher margins, high growth, and that improves our network utilization. By offering this type of product solution, we expect to diversify our customer base with more SaaS-oriented revenue versus our traditional non-committed usage base. As we grow this product offering, it will lead to customer count growth, reduction in revenue concentration risk, and a more predictable revenue stream. Approximately 65% of Layer 0's revenue is contracted recurring subscription SaaS-based revenue with a gross margin of over 70%. Layer Zero's flagship product is growing rapidly at well over 30% per quarter. Layer Zero was operating at essentially a break-even level on an EBITDA basis. We expect to gain $3 million of cost synergies on an annual run rate basis once we get through closing the transaction and integrating the teams. Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Limelight intends to acquire Layer Zero for approximately $55 million, subject to customary closing adjustments, and an equity pool to retain this talented team and introduce new products driving our future growth trajectory. With that, I will turn the call over to Bob.
spk01: Thanks, Dan. We continue to be energized with the opportunity that lies in front of us. The acquisition of Layer Zero is a very strong step forward in our strategy to position Limelight as a leading provider of edge orchestration solutions. The technology that Layer Zero brings to us will allow us to offer a solution set at a performance level that we and our competitors have not been able to offer in the past. Market research tells us customers value sub-second powered websites. Developers also want the ability to access the edge of a global network to create their front-end applications, preview their content, and deploy instantly. They also want to deliver their applications on a platform that includes their basic security needs such as WAF, DDoS, and threat detection. By combining the SaaS assets of layer zero with the global edge platform of Limelight, we believe our application delivery solution will drive significant value for customers, including driving better performance for our clients with website speeds that are four times faster than current competitive alternatives, improving developer productivity with our JAMstack tool set, making it simple to deploy web apps built for the edge, and providing a holistic solution that includes observability tools, self-service onboarding, edge compute, serverless compute, and other capabilities that will be utilized in our existing content delivery solution. Layer 0 will immediately add approximately 80 new clients to Limelight's global network with an average annual spend of $160,000. We believe there are thousands of companies who currently are underserved by their existing provider. These companies are looking for an end-to-end solution that improves performance, productivity, and has security embedded in the functionality of the service. I look forward to sharing more details of the future of Limelight at our August 24th strategy session. Please join us for the discussion where feedback and questions will be welcome. We will issue a press release with dial-in and webcast information on August 10th. With that, operator, please open the lines for the question and answer session.
spk09: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will be from James Breen with William Blair.
spk07: Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple. One, can you just talk about, obviously, revenues down this quarter, $48 million sequentially. you know, was that sort of a broad-based weakness or did it come from a couple of customers? And then, you know, what's your confidence in that this quarter sort of being the bottom in terms of your core business historically? And then as you think about closing on layer zero in August, you know, any thoughts on how much that can add in the back half of the year? You talked about another deal that could add, you said, six million annualized, which would be three in the back half, but In order to get to that low-ending guidance, you need to do about $120 million in the back half. So just trying to piece things together here from where we are today to where we'll be at the end of the year. Thanks.
spk05: Yeah, thanks, Jim. This is Dan. Appreciate the questions. And listen, I think we're at an inflection point with the company. I do think that Q2 represents the low end of our reported revenue numbers, and we're really excited about what the addition of Layer 0 is going to bring. as well as the future of what we see from our existing customer base. We mentioned that 18 of our top 20 customers actually increased their revenue by 20% this year. We had a couple of our bigger customers that didn't see the traffic growth that these other customers had seen. But we think that the performance improvements and the operational efficiencies that we had put in place have really shown through for many of our other customers. And we're excited that that ramp will continue in the back half of the year. And that's what gives us confidence that we can hit those growth targets that we set for the back half of the year and in Q3 and in Q4. Yeah.
spk01: Hey, Jim, it's Bob. And I just add to that, I think... You know, it's largely driven by really one customer that has seen a little bit of a post-COVID softness due to people just getting out as well as lack of content. We don't expect that to continue, but that's really what's driving that. I think the issues that were self-inflicted that challenged our revenue in the past, we've addressed those. And so at this point, it's really... It's going to be more market-driven, and that's going to come back. The only question for us is really when. The other, I think, important point is that we've done a lot of work on the cost side of the equation over the last four months. And so when that revenue does come back, it's going to flow pretty heavily to the EBITDA line. So it should be good on both fronts. And so it's really not a challenge of performance. It's really just waiting to see how the market shapes up with an area we happen to be pretty concentrated with the customer.
spk07: And just last question. On layer zero, you talked about $20 million in revenue in 2022. Can you give us any color around what that company is growing at now from a PACE perspective? Thanks.
spk05: Yeah, I mentioned that it's growing 30% quarter over quarter, and we expect those trends to continue. And so with that said, backing down from the $20 million in 2022, You can get to roughly $4 to $5 million in the back half of this year that will contribute also to that revenue ramp that we are suggesting with our guidance. Perfect. Thank you.
spk09: The next question will be from Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street.
spk03: Just to follow up on that most recent comment you just made about the revenue. The guidance that you've reiterated now includes how much revenue from Layer 0?
spk05: About $4 to $5 million we expect back after the year, growing significantly as we head into 2022.
spk03: And do they make a contribution to EBITDA? Do they weigh against the prior EBITDA guidance and you're overcoming that with more cost cuts? Or what's the impact to the EBITDA guidance?
spk05: Yeah, Layer Zero was operating about break-even on a standalone basis. We plan on adding salespeople into the mix in order to sell the new product that we're going to be introducing as well as marketing of that new product. But with them operating on a standalone, even a break-even basis, we do believe that there are cost efficiencies that we can drive into the results of the company as combined with Limelight. of approximately $3 million. And so we do think that that will come in in a relatively short amount of time, and it will improve EBITDA coming out of the fourth quarter of this year.
spk03: Okay. And then just to be clear, that acquisition has yet to close. It will close in August. Is that correct?
spk05: Yeah. We signed it yesterday, announced that signing yesterday, and then we expect a couple weeks to close.
spk03: Okay. Thanks. I'll turn over the mic.
spk09: The next question comes from Colby Sinasale of Cowan & Company.
spk02: Hi, this is Michael from Colby. Two questions, if I may. If I'm not mistaken, last quarter you said that you expected revenue and gross margins to be flat quarter over quarter, and this quarter we saw a sequential decline. So my question is, I mean, as it stands, how would you describe your visibility into the business and into your guidance? And then secondly, you know, related to the software downloads, if I'm not mistaken, I believe in 2019, the company backed away from doing software downloads. And I think the reason was because it was unprofitable. Just wondering, you know, what's changed in that area and, you know, why you're pivoting to pursue that now. Thank you.
spk05: Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the struggles that we obviously have is the visibility into the the traffic and market share of the traffic that we get from our existing customer subset. And so one of the things that I'm really excited about with the layer zero product and capabilities that are going to be coming online with us is that ability to have that exclusive contract with the customer, a more predictable revenue stream that we can you know, then layer into our forecasting process. And that is in a high growth area that we're expecting to contribute more and more to revenue on a longer term basis. And so while we do lack the visibility with our current subset of customers, the product and capabilities that come online with layer zero are completely different from what we've experienced in the past. And we do believe that we have visibility and the line of sight into the growth in the third quarter and fourth quarter of this year. with additional content coming online, with the addition of Microsoft and the software download type of business that we're getting back into. And what has changed there is the ability to manage and monitor that type of traffic within our network that allow us to provide better pricing and incentives for the type of traffic that those customers can deliver for us or that we can deliver for them. and provide a value proposition to them to move to us because we can monitor that traffic and move it around within regions at off-peak times to better utilize the network.
spk02: Got it. Thank you.
spk09: The next question will be from Jeff Bannery of Craig Hallam.
spk06: Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Just a couple from me. Maybe with respect to Layer Zero, can you talk through, I guess I'm curious if you'd sort of compare and contrast the sales process, the path the customer captures. So what does sales for Layer Zero look like versus your core products when you think about the buyer? Are these similar buyers? Are they similar sales motions and processes? Are they similar marketing structures? The synergies, just how are those two going to come together and play together?
spk04: Thanks, Jeff. This is Ajay Kapoor, today the CEO of Layer Zero and soon to be CTO. First off, thanks to Bob and Dan for bringing us on. Me and the team are extremely thrilled and very excited about what we can do together as joint forces in the market. As it relates to go-to-market for our products and the evolution of that product within and on the LineLight Network, There is definitely more of a transactional mid-market engine that we're going to be bringing and that we're going to be scaling. That's one piece of it. Another piece of it is that there is more committed contract revenue. So it's a higher velocity model, but it's building committed contracts and more predictable forms of revenue. So those are a couple of components that are there. And we have found that the persona that we go into They tend to be, in some cases, the same industries, such as media and software, and in other cases, different industries. So we're expanding to different industries, such as e-commerce, travel, hospitality, and a variety of just kind of the big content, web content providers that are out there. So the persona and the people at the company tend to be different, but it's a big expansion of whom we can talk to in the market.
spk06: Yeah, I'll tell you, I guess just to follow up on that then, you know, as you were building the business, and out-winning deals, what was the typical competitive, you know, takeoff? Who would you ultimately see most frequently at the end of the day?
spk04: It's interesting because the category of JAMstack is a new and rapidly expanding one. So we would come in and we didn't need to always, we could complement and work alongside the application delivery networks and the typical names you know there. So it wasn't always competitive as it was additive. And we continue to see that to potentially be the case for a bit. So someone would come in and say they just need developers to be able to release features more quickly. They need a sub-second website because Google is coming and saying that they're going to rank websites, and they are ranking websites based on that speed. So it was through those dimensions that people bought, even when it was used alongside one of the hyper-cloud vendors or one of the edge application delivery networks.
spk06: Okay, fair enough. And then I guess just back to the sort of the core existing business to date, I don't know, Bob or Dan, on the traffic trends in the quarter, maybe just spend a minute longer talking about what you observed overall in terms of traffic growth, pricing, COVID-specific behaviors, you know, how things evolved, start to finish through the quarter.
spk01: Yeah, this is Bob. I'll take that, and then, Dan, feel free to chime in. I think, look, the way we think about it, You know, the primary question we're trying to solve, obviously, is how do we position this company to create shareholder value going forward? And there are really three things that we've got to be confident in in order to make that true. First is, is there a bounce from historical performance and certainly the recent few quarters of downtrends? Secondly, what will that bounce look like? And third, can that bounce be sustainable and continuously improved upon? And so when you look at those three questions, We're pretty confident that bounce happens in this quarter, Q3. All the things we're seeing, I think to answer your question, I've had conversations with all of our top clients. We're not seeing pricing issues. In fact, I've verified that we're pretty in line with market. I think the only headwind we're seeing at this point is really just people not watching as much TV right now and waiting for that to come back around and normalize. People are getting out of the house now finally for the first time. But, you know, based on that, we still see the bounce in Q3. The question then becomes is, you know, what's the trajectory of that look like? And we're waiting to see that. That's where the risk is right now. And then how do we make sure that's sustained? I think, you know, all the things that we've done around improving performance ensures that our core business will continue to grow in a sustainable way. And the addition of things like MoveWeb, you know, allow us to diversify that and give us other channels of growth and profitability and gross margin improvement. So we feel pretty good about all that. And I think the last important point is, given that we don't, you know, currently, I don't want to jinx us, but we don't currently see any surprises with pricing pressure or anything like that right now. You know, the work we've done on the cost savings as traffic does come back, which it will, you know, we see that doing a pretty good job on the bottom line for us as well, given how we've really tightened up the business over the last quarter and a half.
spk05: Yeah, and I'll just add one more thing. items onto that. You know, we have these growth expectations for Q3 and Q4, and that is to some extent predicated on new content and streaming patterns returning to normal. I think people were a little tired of being cooped up and not being able to do things out in public, and that has impacted growth in the second quarter. But we see that coming back in the third and fourth quarter. In addition, you know, we've expanded pretty rapidly in Latin America with some partners in down there. As quickly as we build that capacity, it's being taken up in demand from our existing set of customers. We're going to continue along that strategy and continue to work with our partners in South America to continue to add capacity. We expect that capacity to continue to be in demand. The large software download customer will also contribute to the revenue growth and traffic, increase in traffic in the back half of the year as well. So all those things, you know, I feel really good about. Like I said, I do think this is an inflection point for the company that we are on an upward trajectory. And we're looking forward to that growth and seeing that flow to the product and adjusted even.
spk06: Fair enough. Thanks so much.
spk09: Again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. The next question will be from Rudy Kessinger of DA Davidson.
spk08: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I'm curious if you could talk to kind of the share that you guys have lost with a couple of your key customers. Just how much of that have you gotten it back? Are you all the way back to where you were? And at what point did you achieve that? Was that later in the quarter or earlier on? And then also, could you talk to Maybe some of the early signs of success you guys have had moving traffic from the peak hours to the off-peak and sort of how you're going about that to encourage those customers to move.
spk01: Yeah, so I'll start. This is Bob. Thanks, Rudy. And then, Dan, feel free to chime in. You know, there were a couple areas where we lost traffic due to, you know, performance with share. I think in one case in particular, we lost all the share and they were a top 10 client. That client is now back and starting to re-ramp and it's early days on that. And so, you know, that's one of the areas where we're going to see a lift going into Q3 and Q4. And I think the other customers where we might have had a fraction of a percent, you know, percentage decrease, those are all also ramping back up. So we're really not seeing headwinds today from performance. We do have some time to ramp it back. It seems to go away, you know, quicker than it comes back, but it is coming back. And so that's one of the areas where we're looking closely at monitoring as we go in the back half of the year. That's one of the risk areas.
spk05: Yeah. Yeah. And again, the operational performance and the metrics and the focus of our customer success teams on the metrics that matter to our customers, we can see that really making a difference with their engagement with us. And we feel that that will all continue as we continue to work through the different sort of things that our customers are working on and want us to work with them and partner with them going forward.
spk01: Yeah. And then your question about how do we use off-peak traffic You know, it's not really feasible to try to shift viewing patterns to off-peak. So what we have to do is use that off-peak capacity for other things. And so obviously we talked about the file download business and the way that we've been able to position that to be actually profitable for us and a growth engine. And then also doing things like MoveWeb, which is very complementary to our off-peak traffic. And then we'll talk about how we're going to do that in more depth at our August 24th strategy session. We have a lot of thoughts around that, and that is a key part of our strategy of how to leverage that off-peak traffic. Or, I'm sorry, off-peak capacity.
spk08: Got it. And then I'm not sure if Eric's on the call or not, but, you know, I'd be curious, what are kind of his top priorities in your term, especially with the Layer 0, you know, sales team coming in and trying to integrate those?
spk01: Yeah. No, he's not on the call. We're very excited to have Eric. I think we spent a lot of time doing a search for the right person and pretty excited. He knows our business very well. He knows the industry very well. He has a lot of contacts and avenues into clients that we don't have today, as well as some of our existing clients. We're pretty excited about that. The strength of Eric is really that he is a very strong builder and operator of sales and demand gen teams, and probably one of the best that we've seen. We talked to, I can't tell you how many people we've talked to as candidates. We had a lot of really good candidates, but he really rose above all of them in that capacity. And one of the things that we've said is, look, we're going to give the company more products, growth products to sell, and then we want to expand and build a high-growth team. And Eric has demonstrated that. The company he just came from is demonstrating 40% growth. in the same space, and we're really excited to have his capabilities and have him really build a team out. So I think the strengths of him are going to be his ability to build a team out, really drive high-performance sales processes around that, and his, you know, connections in the industry to be able to leverage those to really help us accelerate the success we have in the sales and marketing end of things in, you know, in demand gen in the company.
spk08: Got it. That's it for me. Thank you.
spk09: This concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Bob Lyons for any closing remarks.
spk01: Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to presenting our vision in further detail at our strategy session on Thursday, August 24th. Have a great evening. Thank you.
spk09: Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.
Disclaimer

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