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spk00: Good afternoon. My name is Angie, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Manhattan Associate Q4 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, Tuesday, February 1st, 2022. I would now like to introduce Dennis Story, CFO of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Story, you may begin your conference.
spk02: Thank you, Angie, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates' 2021 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO. During this call, including the question and answer session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates. Your caution that these forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties are not guarantees of future performance. and that actual results may differ materially from the projections contained in our forward-looking statements. I refer you to the reports Manhattan Associates files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections, particularly on our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2020 and the risk factor discussion in that report, as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent form 10Qs. We note in particular that uncertainty regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our performance could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We are under no obligation to update these statements. In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures In an effort to provide additional information to investors, we have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation schedules in the Form 8K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com. Now I'll turn the call over to Eddie.
spk01: Well, thanks, Dennis. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us as we review our fourth quarter and full year 2021 results, as well as our outlook for 2022. Well, 2021 was a very successful year for Manhattan Associates, setting all-time records in total revenue, RPO, cash flow, and earnings per share. In February of 2018, we announced our goal to become a cloud-first company within five years. And four years into this transition, we've exceeded our own expectations and are well ahead of our initial timing and economic projections, with cloud solutions representing 90% of our pipeline opportunities. And despite the pandemic, in the midst of this cloud transition, we delivered record revenue in two of the four years and a guiding to a third in 2022. Proudly, our associates continue to execute extremely well, serving both customers and our end markets. Demand for a unified commerce and supply chain cloud solutions is very strong, creating great visibility for us as we enter 2022. And to help drive growth and serve our customers, we plan to add about 500 net new employees globally, and we remain committed to significantly investing in innovation to meet the future needs of our customers, grow our market share, and extend our addressable market. And while global ebbs and flows certainly persist, we remain very encouraged by our near-term and long-term growth opportunities. So pivoting to results, Q4 was a record quarter that, again, exceeded our expectations. Total revenue increased 17% to $171 million. An adjusted earnings per diluted share of 48 cents was up 7%, as we invested significantly in employee compensation. Regarding RPO, the leading indicator of that growth, in Q4, we added a record 126 million of RPO bookings, setting new highs in Americas, in EMEA, and in APEC. Our global sales team continue to execute well on robust demand for our cloud offerings across products, industry verticals, and geographic locations. Demand also remains solid from both new and existing customers, with 20% of 2021 contracted bookings coming from net new customers. In the quarter, our win rates continue to be very strong at 75%, as our innovation is recognized as differentiating and industry-leading. And from a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale drove more than 80% of our bookings in the quarter. And drilling into the sub-verticals, they're pretty diverse. And they include apparel, department stores, grocery, consumer goods, industrial, transportation, as well as durable and non-durable goods. On the professional services front, our global team continues to set the bar for the industry. Our cloud portfolio implementations have gone very well in 2021, as our industry-leading team successfully conducted over 100 go-lies just in Q4 alone. In line with our outlook and prior commentary, we remain focused on adding and retaining our exceptional talent in 2022. And speaking of 2022, our pipelines are strong, with net new potential customers representing about 35% of demand. As I mentioned earlier, We're increasing our investment in research and development to nearly $100 million this year. Now, let me provide a few additional details on our product portfolio. I'll start off by providing another positive update on the progress we're making with Manhattan Active Warehouse Management, the industry's first and only true cloud-native WMS serving the Tier 1 market. In May of 2020, we announced Manhattan Active WM as the natural successor of to our industry-leading on-premise warehouse management for open systems solution. So we've been in market for about 20 months with Manhattan Active WM, and we continue to see strong market demand and great enthusiasm. Customer deployments have been very successful, and we now have nearly 60 customers who are committed to deploying Manhattan Active WM around the world. And while Manhattan WMS's been known historically for the way it excels in large-scale, complex direct-to-consumer and retail distribution centers, our initial Manhattan Active WM deployments have really been highly diverse. Today, Manhattan Active WM subscribers are located in 12 different countries and represent 21 distinct industry sub-verticals. And this diversity in our customer base really reinforces our belief that supply chains of all kinds are looking to embrace cloud-native, always current, fully extensible technology for their distribution centers, regardless of their industry. And recent events have certainly shown us the critical importance of technology that allows businesses to respond quickly and effectively to supply chain disruptions. Because of the cloud-native nature of Manhattan Active WM, we empower our customers to deploy technology new sites, new capabilities, new users, very, very swiftly. And that close relationship with Google Cloud allows us to deploy our WM, Manhattan Active WM, excuse me, nearly anywhere, anytime, with high levels of reliability and extremely low levels of latency. The robustness of the underlying Active Platform, its best-in-class user experience and functional capability, and the strengths of our team on the ground are combining to produce exceptional customer outcomes. So now I'll provide you with just a quick update on Manhattan Active Transportation Management. As you recall, our customers can deploy Manhattan Active Transportation alongside Manhattan Active Warehouse Management to form Manhattan Active Supply Chain, the industry's first and only cloud-native, fully unified supply chain execution platform. And since its launch in May of 2021, Manhattan Active Transportation Management has enjoyed outstanding market interest and uptake with strong international traction as well. In fact, half of our initial Manhattan Active Transportation subscribers are outside of North America. And our EMEA and Latin America teams are doing very well with Manhattan Active TM thus far, actually with the product's very first go-live that was in Brazil. And we've communicated in the past. Building a global customer base for our TMS application has been one of our strategic goals, and the hard work of our international TMS teams is really starting to play off. And we're encouraged that the results of Manhattan Active Transportation Management show that our supply chain unification message is really resonating in the market. Almost half of our Manhattan Active Transportation Management customers are also Manhattan active WM customers and our teams are reporting that customers are placing a really high value on our ability to offer a single user interface to manage all aspects of supply chain execution to orchestrate end-to-end processes both across WMS and TMS and keep all of their supply chain applications fully integrated and current and finally on the product front Maybe a quick update on our omnichannel commerce solution, Manhattan Active Omni, including our point-of-sale application. Our point-of-sale project teams, they remain busy with a number of new deployments and rollouts. And throughout the year, we're slated to light up a large number of additional stores running our point-of-sale application. And many of those customers also run enterprise order management. And similar to the benefit I mentioned earlier, many of our Manhattan Active Omni customers certainly see the advantage of a unified solution across both their digital and bricks-and-mortar channels. And this quarter, we'll kick off our first Manhattan Active Allocation project with one of our strategic customers in EMEA. Manhattan Active Allocation is a next-generation inventory optimization solution designed for fashion retailers. It's built on our industry-leading Manhattan Active architecture, and we believe that it brings a fresh approach to a software category that's been mired in decades of old technology. And finally, just this past quarter, we released an exciting new capability within Manhattan Active Omni, our interactive inventory capability. And it's getting a powerful boost from an all-new machine learning capability that really further optimizes order promising. Many of our Manhattan Active Omni customers are shipping orders from hundreds of stores each in addition to their distribution centers. And this new solution analyzes multiple static and dynamic market factors to make a much more accurate shipping and delivery prediction in real time as customers are shopping and checking out. And the initial results we're seeing indicate over a 50% reduction in late deliveries thanks to this sophisticated machine learning algorithm. And for our Manhattan Active Omni customers, it's really another great example of the advantage of an ever-evolving operational platform with new game-changing capabilities like this one being delivered to them on a very regular basis. And we continue to be really very excited about our long-term growth potential. Secular tailwinds are numerous. and the benefits of resilient, modern supply chains I think are pretty clear. Now, why are we confident that Manhattan Associates is well-positioned to gain market share and outgrow the market in 2022 and beyond? Well, we're the industry leader, and our technology is world-class. The competitive environment is favorable, and our win rates are strengthening. The pipelines for our market-leading solutions continue to progress very well. Our cross-sell opportunity is large and growing, and in fact, we've dedicated more resources to cross-selling in 2022 and see the opportunity to expand this over time as well. And then finally, we have a significant pipeline of existing on-premise customers who want to shift to our cloud-native applications that are scalable, versionless, and extensible. So that concludes my business update. Dennis is going to provide you with an update on our financial performance and discuss our outlook for 2022 and beyond. And then I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before moving to Q&A. So Dennis, take it away.
spk02: Thanks, Eddie. Our Manhattan global teams continue to execute at a high level, as Eddie highlighted. In 2021, we set all-time records in RPO, total revenue, cash flow, and earnings per share. Hats off to our global associates for the outstanding performance. I'll start with recapping our financial performance for the quarter and year. All growth rates are year over year, unless otherwise stated. Q4 total revenue was $171 million, up 17%. Full year revenue totaled $664 million, up 13%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the revenue compression by our cloud transition, Q4 revenue growth was 24%, and full year was 20%. Q4 cloud revenue totaled $35 million, up 51%, with full year revenue totaling $122 million, up 53%. We closed out 2021 with RPO of $699 million, growing 126% and up 22% sequentially as demand continues to be robust. Our global services team delivered Q4 revenue of $82 million, up 15%, and on the year, $335 million, up 10%. Importantly, Cloud sales continues to fuel services growth globally. Our Q4 operating profit totaled $39 million with adjusted operating margin of 22.8%. And our full year operating margin was 26.8%, up 160 basis points over 2020. Factoring in Q4 retail peak seasonality, we exceeded margin expectations. As discussed in our Q3 call, we also invested an additional $10 million in performance-based compensation and employee retention investments. Our Q4 earnings per share of 48 cents exceeded our prior guidance, with full year totaling $2.23 on 27% growth. Q4 operating cash flow was $40 million, and our full-year operating cash flow increased 31% to $185 million, generating a 27% free cash flow margin and a 28% EBITDA margin. Cash never lies. We ended the year with $264 million in cash and zero debt. For the year, we invested $100 million in share buybacks, including $20 million in Q4, and last week, Our board approved replenishing our repurchase authority to $50 million. Moving to guidance. As consistently mentioned, our overarching financial objective is to deliver sustainable double digit top line growth and top quartile operating margins benchmarked against enterprise SAS comps. With increased visibility, we are conservatively raising the midpoint of the preliminary 2022 revenue, operating margin, and EPS guidance that we provided last quarter. We are also reiterating our 2022 RPO guidepost midpoint of $1 billion and all our guideposts for 2023 and 2024. Our cloud revenue and RPO guideposts from 2021 to 2024 can be found in today's earnings release supplemental schedules. So for full year 2022, we expect total revenue of $700 to $715 million with a $708 million midpoint up from our previous midpoint estimate of $705 million. Excluding license and maintenance attrition, this represents 16% growth and all in our target is 7%. First half, second half total revenue splits are 49% and 51% respectively. For Q1, we expect total revenue of $168 to $170 million. Our full year adjusted EPS range is $1.98 to $2.10. The $2.04 midpoint is up from our previous $2 estimate. For GAAP EPS, our guidance range is $1.31 to $1.43. For Q1, we expect adjusted EPS of $0.44 to $0.46 and GAAP EPS of $0.33 to $0.35. For Q2 through Q4, we expect GAAP EPS to be about 19 cents lower than adjusted EPS quarterly, which accounts for our investment in equity-based compensation. For full year 2022, we are increasing our cloud revenue range to $161 to $167 million, representing 34% growth at the midpoint. or 34% growth, I'm sorry. And at the midpoint for Q1, we estimate cloud revenue will be roughly $36.5 million, and that it will increase to $39 million in Q2, $42 million in Q3, and $46.5 million in Q4. For services revenue, we are increasing our revenue forecast to $365 to $373 million, representing 10% growth at the midpoint. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 services revenue of roughly $86 million at the midpoint and $94.5 million in Q2, $98 million in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $90.5 million in Q4. For maintenance, we are refining our revenue range lower to $135 million to $138 million as more customers convert to cloud. For Q1, we anticipate maintenance revenue of about $35.5 million at the midpoint and $34 million in Q2. For Q3 and Q4, we expect approximately $33.5 million of maintenance revenue per quarter. With license revenue attriting in favor of cloud, we expect $13 to $15 million for the full year, representing approximately 2% of total 2022 revenue. I think we're a cloud company. For Q1, we expect roughly $5 million of license revenue and $3 million in Q2, Q3, and Q4 respectively. For hardware, we anticipate $6 million in revenue per quarter. And for consolidated subscription maintenance and services margin, we are targeting about 53.7%. Q1 will be about 52.7%. Q2 and Q3 is expected to increase to between 54% and 54.5%. While accounting for seasonality, Q4 is expected to be about 53.5%. And our 2022 adjusted operating margin range will be 23% to 24% with a midpoint of 23.5% up from our prior midpoint of 23.25%. Our full year operating margin objectives incorporates three significant variables as we anticipate the following. First, license and maintenance attrition of 300 basis points on customer demand for cloud, Second, 250 basis points of investment for talent hiring and retention, including wage increases. And third, 200 basis points of additional investment in our business, including the return of pandemic impacted expenses. For Q1, we expect operating margin of approximately 21.7%. And for sequential improvement of about 175 basis points in both Q2 and Q3, Accounting for seasonality, we expect Q4 operating margin to be approximately 23.5%. And beginning in 2023, we continue to target 75 to 125 basis points of operating margin expansion going forward. Finally, we expect our tax rate to be 21.5% and diluted share count to be approximately 64.5 million shares. which assumes no buyback activity. So that covers a fantastic financial update. Thank you very much, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.
spk01: Terrific. Thanks, Dennis. Well, as you can tell, we're very pleased with our strong fourth quarter and record-setting 2021 results. Well, there certainly is some turbulence in the global macro environment, but we're entering 2022 very well positioned. Our business momentum is strong. And we continue to deliver market-leading innovation that drives our customers' digital transformation. And as a result, we anticipate long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth for Manhattan Associates. So to wrap up, I want to thank all of our employees globally for a fantastic year in 2021. Your relentless dedication and commitment to our customers is one of Manhattan's key differentiators. So thank you. Thank all of you. And Angie, we're now ready to take questions.
spk00: If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star 1 to ask an audio question. Your first question comes from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please state your question.
spk06: Yeah, thanks, and congrats on the RPO and the fourth quarter of the records. Hi, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike. I guess, and also, by the way, Dennis, thanks for all that extremely fine-grained guidance every quarter. It makes it pretty simple to model. First question is for you, Eddie, in terms of, you know, being able to have this kind of unified technology stack, how much are the conversations and the pipeline activity involving customers wanting to buy both the WMS and the TMS in that conversation? and does it create a potential kind of vendor consolidation play? Thank you.
spk01: Well, certainly vendor consolidation, no question about that, Terry, and that's our objective. In terms of buying both together, certainly those conversations are happening. Certainly the conversations about the roadmap of, frankly, which system to implement first and so forth are happening. Honestly, the answer to the question really comes down to the capacity of the customer's organization to be able to implement both solutions simultaneously because that is quite a plateful. So we work with them to figure out, you know, which one first, which one second, you know, which piece is first, which piece is second to deliver the best results for them. But it's a pretty exciting time for us and for the market for sure.
spk02: And it's a nice cross-sell, up-sell opportunity, Terry. Sure.
spk06: Thanks. So Eddie had a comment. I think it was great visibility. So I want to put you on the spot, Dennis, in terms of Eddie's comment about great visibility and the prepared remarks. You know, as we think about RPO activity throughout the year, you know, as part of the visibility just coming from you've got 60-plus customers, you've got more go-lives, and you're starting to see this kind of waterfall effect of just the installed base now, you know, more comfortable. Hey, you've been in market for a while, and that's kind of the key crux on the strengthening visibility is the installed base saying, hey, we're ready. And then I had a follow-up on the seasonality of RPO.
spk02: Yeah. Was there a question there, Terry? What I tell you is absolutely. Visibility is fantastic, forward-looking. You know, we're doing – Quite well there. And I think that's represented really in the guidepost that we've put out and reaffirmed.
spk06: Okay. This will definitely be a question on seasonality. How do we think about RPO? Because, you know, you have been at it for a while now. And so are you seeing any market changes in seasonality and how we should be thinking and forecasting RPO across the quarters? Thank you.
spk02: I think demand blew through seasonality in Q4, so we'll update you next Q4 as well.
spk01: I don't think there will be any real difference in buying patterns in the cloud world versus licensed world, Terry. There's not a ton of seasonality, but we do tend to see a little more buying patterns. at the end of Q4 and in Q1, getting ready because customers want systems implemented prior to the busy season in the following year. It's not huge, but if there is some seasonality, that tends to be what it looks like.
spk02: And it tends to impact services more than it does the cloud sales.
spk06: But just to finalize here on kind of the commentary, so, Eddie, like the reality is maybe there's a little bit of lumpiness in a positive way in 4Q, but also you could see some activity earlier in the year just as they've got budget and they're ready to commit, and then obviously they need to get it going before the season, the holiday season.
spk01: That's right. That's right. Again, it's not a huge swing, but we see a little bit of that. And then, of course, you tend to see a little bit of a – a slowdown in the summer that's probably more in Europe than here, and a little bit of a slowdown going into peak while IT organizations and so forth are focused on getting ready and a little distracted from the buy-in process. But I'll reiterate, no major swings here, but those are the cycles. Nice job, guys. Thanks. Thank you, Terry.
spk00: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please state your question.
spk05: Hello?
spk00: Brian, your line is open. Please state your question.
spk05: Hey, sorry, guys. The mute button got me. Well, congrats on the RPO numbers. Those are fantastic. But just kind of following up on Terry's question on the RPO. I'm curious, are your customers willing to commit to more products now that you have kind of a broader cloud portfolio? So, you know, we were talking about seasonality, but I'm curious, are people willing to buy more products at the same time now, just given that they're more integrated? And I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that, Eddie.
spk01: Yeah. I mean, again, it's really same answer, Brian. There is great opportunity for cross-sell and up-sell, obviously, because of the integrated and you know, in unified, you know, unified nature, you know, about 15% of the 2021 bookings were, you know, kind of that cross sell and upsell. Now, you know, the specific simultaneous purchase, you know, again, comes down to, hey, how much can we, you know, how much can we knock down all at the same time? versus kind of that roadmap conversation and the follow-on sequential business that comes one behind the other.
spk05: Makes sense. And Eddie, just maybe a follow-up. We've gotten a question a lot from investors on what the supply chain disruption kind of does for demand. Obviously, we're seeing active WM coming in really strong. I'm curious, from your perspective, What does that do for the demand environment? And are there other parts of the portfolio where we could see improving demand in 2022 and 2023? Thanks, guys.
spk01: I don't know that there's going to be major shifts in 2022, Brian. I think that the general geo supply chain disruptions are going to continue. I don't think you're going to see a ton of nearshoring being able to be pulled off in 2022 because it just takes time to you know, to build that, you know, to build that strategy out. But, you know, demand is certainly high for capacity, you know, on the digital transformation side as e-commerce continues to grow. There is obviously some slowness and some shortages of product coming into the country. So as a consequence of that, as soon as it hits shore here or hits land, there's a real immediacy and an urgency to get product distributed out to end consumers. And the optimization of the deployment of inventory around the country becomes particularly important. And that just really, I know it's a little bit of a coy expression, but You know, supply chain flexibility and agility is just super important, you know, across the globe.
spk05: Good call. Thanks, Eddie.
spk01: Pleasure, Brian.
spk00: Your next question comes from the line of Joe Roerink with Baird. Please state your question.
spk07: Great. Hi, everyone. Maybe I'll start, Eddie, in your prepared remarks you mentioned about how you saw a growing addressable market opportunity. Can you maybe just expand on where some of the biggest new opportunities lie and maybe related to that, you know, it definitely seems to be coming up more often Manhattan active WM moving outside of that most automated level four, level five warehouse environment. How much is the persona of your customer starting to change? And so there's consequentially, just more potential users of a cloud product, and that contributes to the TAM expansion.
spk01: Yeah, I mean, it's the modernization, really, of the supply chain versus going down market a ton, Joe, to be perfectly honest with you, that's driving a lot of the demand. As we've talked about a number of times, distribution centers today look quite different to the way they looked you know, even five years ago, but certainly 10 and 15 years ago with the levels of automation, robotics, and so forth. So the need to have sophisticated software to be able to drive that inside the four walls transformation is important. Obviously, you know, the digital transformation of the way consumers are ordering and consuming goods requires a whole different strategy for distribution, whether it be the number of distribution centers or the size of the distribution centers, the hours of operation of those distribution centers, all of those things contribute to the modernization of a sophisticated distribution network. In terms of growing at addressable markets, certainly we're continuing to expand our product portfolio, particularly out on the front end into the retail store portfolio. We feel like we're doing pretty well from a market share perspective. Again, we've talked about this before with manufacturers and wholesalers becoming much more direct to consumer. That drives greater demand for sophisticated fulfillment and distribution. I was talking to one of our customers the other day and just sort of mentioning, hey, we really consider ourselves a cloud-first company now. And this was a company that had been a traditional wholesaler for 30 years. And they said, funny you should say that. We now consider ourselves a direct-to-consumer company. And they had been traditionally a wholesale for 30 years. And so a great marriage there and just a lot of great market expansion opportunities for us.
spk07: Okay, that's great. And then Uh, just in, in regards to, uh, being focused on cross sales and dedicating more resources that way, um, you know, talk a lot about what that might mean for WMS paired with TMS. Does that also include, I guess, within kind of WMS functionality thinking of things like, uh, you know, execution control. yard management, labor management. I mean, when you wrap all those capabilities into what Manhattan can provide, are you ultimately seeing your ACVs get bigger just within the WMS category?
spk01: It really, so certainly we're seeing a lot of synergy, you know, across those products. By the way, you know, as you look at Manhattan Active Omni, point of sale, Manhattan Active Omni now becomes integrated with WMS being much more sophisticated with late-stage cancellation, order consolidation, order aggregation, and those kinds of things. In terms of ACV growth, though, or NACV growth, it still comes down to whether this is kind of a roadmap purchase or a multi-product buy up front, which, again, comes down to how much can our customers bite off in terms of project initiatives all at once. So, you know, it hasn't, you know, we haven't seen it manifest itself in a significant ACV growth, you know, at an initial contract. But we're okay with that, right? We're in this for a long term. We want to make sure our customers are successful over the long term and make sure that they implemented a pace that is aggressive but yet comfortable for them.
spk07: Okay, great. Thank you very much.
spk01: My pleasure, Jill. Thank you.
spk00: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Gutowitz with Rosenblatt Securities. Please set your question.
spk03: Hey, guys. I'll play my broken record here and, again, congratulate you on some great results. Eddie, I wanted to see if you might pull the curtain back a little bit on – the new CMO that you brought in and, uh, a few months ago, I think it's been, and I'm just curious if, uh, uh, there are any tangibles you, you might be able to share in terms of what, uh, your marketing or branding looks like this year relative to last and, and, you know, specifically across either product or geo or, or perhaps using different types of ad mediums. Uh, that would be helpful. Thanks.
spk01: Yeah. So, so what, and is doing a fantastic job. We're thrilled to have her on the team and, uh, Not only does she do fantastic work, she's integrating the team wonderfully and really spreading her wings across product and across that geography. So I'm not going to put her on the spot with very specific marketing initiatives in her first 90 days here or so or even in the near term. But I would tell you that she's got us and our company very focused on digital marketing. number one. And number two, you know, we've said for a long time that, you know, we think we have some of the best kept secrets on the planet. Well, here comes Anne, you know, 90 days or so into the business and she certainly concurs. Now she's, you know, got under the hood a little bit and is focused on making sure that we don't have a lot of secrets, that we are loud and proud, you know, with our marketing strategies going into into 2022 so you sure certainly should expect us to see again see us again be you know a little more verbose frankly um in in communicating some of the very innovative solutions that we have in our portfolio got it i suppose we're not expecting a super bowl ad this year though well you you never know don't get up to go to the restroom mark you know you might okay all right that's good i like that uh
spk03: anticipation here. Last question, and I might have missed it, just a housekeeping on POS goal eyes. I know you've chatted about them in the past, but just curious how that had trended.
spk01: Yeah, going pretty well. And what I said was that we've got a number that are underway, and we expect by the end of the year to light up a bunch more stores, both here in the U.S. and some internationally as well. So the pipeline continues to grow that clearly is, demand out there for, you know, a really integrated strategic suite of selling, you know, selling products across bricks and mortar and, you know, in digital. And, you know, as we get more established in this world, in this world and in this market, you're going to see us start to talk about, you know, some really nice brands that are starting to, you know, starting to adopt the solution.
spk03: Got it. All right. Thanks, guys. Our pleasure, Mark.
spk01: Thank you.
spk00: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Chappelle with Loop Capital.
spk04: Hi, nice job on the quarter, and thanks for taking my question.
spk01: Sure thing, Mark. Thank you.
spk04: Hey, Eddie, just starting with you, a question on your point of sale business, just building off the former question here. Over the past year or so, the focus was basically just building up reference accounts with respect to that product. Now that you have many of those reference accounts in place, I'm wondering if you would expect point of sale to become a greater percentage of your business at Dog Forward.
spk01: Look, it's a slow burn, Mark. People don't wake up one morning and say, hey, it's the heart and soul of the retail operation. Certainly retailers do not replace their point of sale systems on a whim, and they're very, very strategic decisions. But I've got to tell you, we can feel the momentum building kind of throughout our organization, everything from initial pipeline acceleration to deployments and go-lives. So I guess you'll be the judge of whether it's a significant part of the business as we march through the next eight or ten quarters. But certainly momentum is building nicely.
spk04: Nice, thanks. And then regarding just supply chain in general, given the increasing attention that companies are placing on supply chain these days, how much are you seeing higher-level executives involved in your sales processes than, say, three or four years ago?
spk01: Yeah, much more so. I think we've always been mission-critical solutions to our customers since day one of the company's existence. But never more than, you know, in the last year or two have we been participating in, you know, board level and C-suite level conversations. I don't think there's barely a company on the planet that isn't very focused on supply chain, you know, supply chain issues, whether manufacturer, wholesale, or retailer. And, you know, we really are becoming, you know, one of the most important IT systems in our customer's landscape for sure.
spk04: Okay, that's helpful. And then just finally here, I was wondering if you'd just comment a little bit on what you're seeing or whether you're seeing any changes with respect to your customers' budgeting cycles for the upcoming year.
spk01: No. It's a pretty simple answer to that, Mark. No real change in budget cycles that we've seen.
spk04: We like simple answers.
spk01: Yeah. Appreciate it.
spk04: Thanks. That's all I have.
spk01: Sure thing, Mark. Sure thing. Thank you.
spk00: To ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Matt Fowle with William Blair. Please state your question.
spk08: Hey, guys. I wanted to ask on the labor side of things, and obviously you ramped up some compensation to retain and presumably attract employees. On the services side, have you been able to hire to plan, and has labor been helpful? a bottleneck there at all, and then within your customers, has their ability to engage with you been any limiter to getting deals implemented?
spk01: Yeah, I mean, we've hired the plan, so that's been good. I think so far this year, we've got about somewhere in the 75 to 100 new associates with the company, so that's exciting to see for sure. You know, in terms of the reticence of our customers to move forward because lack of resource on their side, haven't seen a ton of that. Now, we have seen them ask us to take on maybe a little more work. And, of course, we're seeing a very, very vibrant system integrator participation. And certainly we're being asked to introduce more. our system integration partners into the mix to augment our customer teams. But I wouldn't say we've seen any buying trepidation or buying slowness due to lack of resource on the customer side.
spk08: Great. And then in terms of existing WM customers moving from an on-prem deployment to the cloud, Maybe just some update there and what the interest level is. And I think if I recall when you released ActiveWM back in 2020, the original plan was to support the on-prem version for five years. So presumably we're a bit over three years out now from when that would end. How are discussions with customers sort of progressing around moving over to the cloud from existing deployments?
spk01: Yeah, a lot of enthusiasm. Look, we've just said we've got about 60 different customers under contract now. I may not be exactly correct percentage-wise, but it's about 50-50. 50% of those 60 are brand-new customers that we've never done business with before, and 50% are existing customers that are converting or transitioning from on-prem into the cloud. So it's a pretty exciting time. You know, we're very pleased about where we are. Obviously, we were very pleased with our financial results. But at the end of the day, we've only transitioned 30 of our customers so far, existing customers that we've built up over the last, you know, 30 years so far. So we're encouraged by the, you know, the enthusiasm there and, you know, their desire to move to, you know, scalable, extensible version of the software in the cloud.
spk08: Okay.
spk01: Great. Appreciate it, guys. Sure thing. Sure thing, Matt.
spk00: At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the floor back to management for any additional or closing remarks.
spk01: Yeah, good. Thank you. As you know, real closing remarks, just would like to thank everybody for all of their support during 2021. We're thrilled to be started with 2022 and look forward to giving you our first 2022 update in about 90 days or so. In the meantime, have a great evening. Thank you. Bye-bye.
spk00: Thank you for participating in today's conference call. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.
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