Sumo Logic, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Sumo Logic third quarter fiscal 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Brian Liberator, Senior Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to Sumo Logic's third quarter fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Ramin Sayar, President and CEO, and Stuart Grierson, Chief Financial Officer. Our format today will include prepared remarks by Ramin and Stuart, followed by a question and answer session. Some of our discussions and responses to your questions will contain forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected performance for a business, expectations regarding our platform and solutions, expectations regarding our go-to-market efforts, our future financial results and guidance, our growth, expense, and investment strategies, our market opportunities, the recent economic downturn, inflation, and our overall future prospects. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from our forward-looking statements. A discussion of the risk and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. including our risk factors filed with our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and the risk factors that will be included in our Form 10-Q that will be filed subsequent to this call. Sumo Logic assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on form looking statements made on this call except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. The information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results, would be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8K filed today with the SEC on our investor relations website at investor.sumilogic.com. For certain forward-looking guidance, a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial guidance to the course money GAAP measure is not available. as discussed in detail in our earnings release posted on our investor relations website. With that, let me turn the call over to Ramin.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our third quarter earnings call. We are pleased with the continued progress and strength in our business. We once again exceeded the high end of all of our guided metrics. In Q3, we delivered total revenue of $79 million, or 27% year-over-year revenue growth, and ended the quarter with ARR of 298.9 million, or 22% year-over-year growth. We achieved these strong results while also demonstrating outperformance across both gross margin and operating margin. Our improving operating efficiency is driven by a combination of continued cost optimization, improved sales productivity, and headcount rationalization. We've driven sequential operating margin improvements throughout this year as it remains a key area of focus. Moreover, we remain optimistic about our opportunity and our ability to execute against our plans. We are committed to continuing to deliver more efficient growth as we look to accelerate our plans to achieve cash flow break even and profitability. While in the near term there's less certainty and more noise in the macroeconomic climate, We have control over how we manage the business and remain committed to delivering more durable growth and accelerating our path to profitability. Despite the macro uncertainty, we are still in the early innings of a multi-year growth cycle driven by digital transformation, cloud migration, and security modernization. Companies are increasingly relying on digital services to help grow and operate their business And we play a critical role in ensuring that these experiences are both reliable as well as secure. These long-term trends drive our business and are contributing to our strength that we are seeing in our results. In Q3, we continued to see strong win rates with our customers increasing their adoption and usage of our platform. We ended the quarter with 501 customers with more than 100K in ARR. representing a year-over-year growth of 14%. Before I share some key customer wins, I would like to reiterate that our vision is to make the world's digital experiences both reliable and secure. Our cloud native platform uniquely helps customers do three things. First, ensure application reliability. Second, secure and protect against modern security threats. And third, gain insights into cloud infrastructure. This vision and our strength was further validated by the fact that we are recently named a visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for security information and event management for a second straight year. Additionally, we are the only cloud native vendor in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for both APM and observability, as well as SIEM that offers a unified analytics platform for application reliability and security. As a reminder, At the core of our platform is best in class cloud scale log analytics. This is critical as logs are essential for detecting, diagnosing, troubleshooting, and remediating both reliability and security issues. Rapid root cause analysis is essential to minimize end user or business disruption and security and compliance risk to applications and cloud infrastructure. Given the significant overlap in the logs required to ensure cloud application reliability and security, as well as the volume of data created by these cloud apps, the ability to effectively analyze these logs at scale from a unified platform will become increasingly important. We believe we are uniquely positioned to help customers address the challenges of delivering reliable and secure digital services.

With that, I'd like to share some examples of how our customers are using our platform and talk about key wins for the quarter.

These wins were fueled by companies modernizing and migrating to the cloud, as well as cloud native companies expanding their footprint and platform usage. Many of the wins this quarter are with digitally disruptive companies leveraging new technology and modern architectures to gain market share within traditional industries. I'd like to first highlight some new logos that we landed in the quarter. The first was a six-figure new logo deal with a large online retailer who was newly spun off from its brick-and-mortar parent company. The new entity needed a security solution that could be easily deployed by the existing team and work seamlessly with a modern cloud-native technology stack. We proved our value during the POC process when we identified two ongoing threats that were quickly remediated. Ultimately, they selected our cloud sim because of its ability to scale with their business and its easy out-of-the-box integrations providing immediate time to value. Next, we landed a six-figure new logo deal with a Fortune 500 healthcare company that is moving to the cloud and expanding the use of Kubernetes for their microservices architecture. Their existing solutions had difficulty scaling with the data generated by their microservices architecture, creating excessive personnel costs to configure and maintain it. They wanted their team to spend more time developing and less time maintaining and manually troubleshooting issues. Therefore, they selected Sumo Logic for our SaaS-based analytics offering and easy-to-use Kubernetes observability solution. These wins represent companies in different verticals that are digitally transforming their businesses, thereby requiring them to adopt new solutions to ensure the reliability and security of their cloud applications without having to run, configure, and maintain those technologies themselves or needing specialized in-house skills. Besides new customers, we continue to see many of our existing and larger customers expand their use of our platform by adopting additional Sumo Logic products to solve additional reliability and security use cases. which is made easy with our flexible credits-based licensing model. Additionally, data is growing faster than budgets, and our cloud-native platform can deliver significant economic benefits to our customers via the unified platform and data tiers. I'd like to highlight a few of these exciting cross-sells. We landed a seven-figure enterprise cross-sell with a tech-focused telecommunications company who is already spending over a million dollars with us. This cross-sell is a great example of how our platform seamlessly supports a variety of security and observability use cases. First, they have made three acquisitions in the last six months and wanted to standardize their logging on Sumo Logic because of their best-in-class log analytics for troubleshooting and remediating issues in real time. Additionally, they chose to standardize on Sumo because of our shared vision of open telemetry. standard across for observability. According to our customer, their DevSecOps teams have experienced a 30% reduction in mean time to identify and reduction in the mean time to remediate versus competitive solutions. Second, they wanted a SIM for their production and application environment and saw the benefit of using our single platform due to the similar or complementary log data for both application reliability and security.

and they'll also be using our FedRAMP moderate authorized SIM in their FedRAMP environment.

Another similar win came from our mid-market segment for a six-figure cross-sell with a media and technology company. They were originally using Sumo for a classic monitoring and troubleshooting use case with logs, reducing time to identification and remediation when the payments or APIs failed. They were building out the security practices and adopted our cloud SIM and SOAR as they saw the benefits of having a single vendor providing a single platform for ensuring application reliability and security of their mission critical applications. While data consumption continues to grow more than 50% year over year, data volumes are continuing to outpace budgets. With increasing data volumes, there's a natural opportunity to drive further expansions. In the quarter, we had a couple of Fortune 500 companies with seven-figure upgrades due to continued data growth. They chose Sumo because of our data tiers help lower their ingestion costs and our out-of-the-box analytics helps increase their time to value. Lastly, I'd like to highlight that we continue to see strong traction with our channel partners for both observability and security deals. More than two-thirds of our new business went through the channel in the quarter, and we think we can continue to drive this number up as we continue our focused shift to our partner-first strategy. In addition, as we shift from channel fulfilled to channel sourced sales opportunities, it will free up sales cycles for our direct sellers, improving the reach and efficiency of our sales organization. This is an important lever for our future growth. These wins highlight our continued traction, large market opportunity, as well as underscores the core differentiators of our unified cloud-native platform for observability and security. Our platform is able to handle modern data volumes at unparalleled scale as our customers' needs expand and contract. In an environment where customers are scrutinizing budgets, there's an even bigger opportunity for customers to eliminate expenses by moving to our unified platform that has the breadth and scale required to meet their business needs. Additionally, our platform is highly audited and certified for a variety of industry, security, and compliance regulations, including PCI, HIPAA, and FedRAMP. With that, I would like to share some quick product highlights. During Q3, we announced significant new capabilities and functionality to continue strengthening our full stack observability and security value by providing our practitioners with greater insights and usability. we announced reliability management, which is a better approach to measure and improve the reliability of distributed applications, shifting the focus on reliability towards the user experience. Additionally, we provided some exciting updates and enhancements to developer strategy and user experience with our real user monitoring, a unified entity model, intelligent alert grouping, and a new app to help practitioners manage their AWS performance and costs. For security, we continue to invest in developing security capabilities as well as enhancements to the platform in order to open up new routes to markets and levers for growth. This quarter, we announced that our Cloud Sim is now available as part of the Sumo Logic FedRAMP Moderate offering. With this designation, Sumo Logic became the first cloud-native sim to deliver insights into on-premises and cloud environments for public sector organizations. helping in our efforts to continue to expand our public sector presence. Additionally, we continued our commitment and focus on our DevSecOps community and end-user practitioners. This quarter, we hosted our sixth annual user conference, Illuminate, a premier global education and community event that brought together customers with thought leaders in IT operations, development and operations, security, and more. Besides the free training, certifications, and best practices content that we deliver at Illuminate, we also continue to support the broader open source community via contributions to open telemetry initiatives. I'm extremely proud of the highly differentiated solutions that we have to offer in a single platform that is recognized by customers and industry experts alike, and I feel that our portfolio offerings have never been stronger. Before concluding, I'd like to welcome Timothy Youngblood to our board of directors as we further our efforts to help CISOs and organizations of all sizes address the increasing cybersecurity challenges with digital transformation and cloud migrations. Tim has extensive cyber experience and a deep understanding of challenges faced by his fellow CISOs, and we're super excited to have him join the board. Now, in summary, Our industry-leading cloud-native platform has never been stronger, and we continue to deliver improved results on both the top and bottom line as we drive towards the commitments we've made on the path to profitability and positive cash flow. I'm extremely proud of our continued progress and results we've achieved so far throughout the first three quarters of our fiscal year. I would like to thank all our employees for their continued dedication and passion to help us innovate drive continued improvements in our go-to-market efforts, and lastly, commitment to increase our operational rigor. The impact of these collective efforts can be seen through the significant efficiency improvements from our initial guidance at the beginning of the fiscal year. With that, I'd now like to turn it over to Stuart Grierson, our Chief Financial Officer, who will provide more details on our strong financial results in Q3 and our outlook for Q4, as well as our fiscal year.

Thanks, Ramin, and thanks, everyone, for joining us on the call. I'd like to start with a brief summary of the financial highlights for the quarter and then go into more detail on each topic. First, as Ramin mentioned, we've continued to deliver strong top-line results with Q3 year-over-year revenue growth of 27% and ARR growth of 22%. Second, we have continued to deliver our commitment to more efficient growth, In cost of sales, we executed some focused initiatives to drive efficiencies in our cloud infrastructure and operations, resulting in a reduction in cost of revenue from the prior quarter. These efforts combined with the strong revenue in the quarter resulted in gross margins of 73%. In addition, as discussed in prior calls, we are executing on our revised go-to-market strategy, and these actions are starting to pay off, resulting in improved operating performance. To recap, under Lynn Doherty's leadership, we segmented our sales team into a hunter farmer model, implemented a channel first strategy, brought in new sales leaders, and up leveled our talent to better fit this new model. The result has been a rationalization of the sales force while driving productivity gains and maintaining growth. We have consciously reduced discretionary spend and overall hiring across all organizations in order to bring our cost structure more in line with our long-term operating plan. The result was Q3 operating margins of negative 7% of revenue, a significant improvement from the midpoint of our guidance of negative 23.5%. These results reflect our commitment to driving more efficient growth as we execute on the path to profitability we shared with you at our Investor Day on September 20th. As mentioned on our last call, we believe ARR is the best leading indicator of growth in a SaaS business. We ended the quarter with ARR of 298.9 million, representing 22% year-over-year growth. Our ARR is impacted by the reduced number of total sales reps and ramp sales reps from the changes we've driven in the sales organization. While these efforts are delivering better sales efficiency, it'll take time for the sales organization to ramp and reach full productivity. As previously discussed, the benefit of these changes will not be linear in nature, with greater impact as we progress into the second half of FY24 and beyond. Our 100K plus ARR customers are foundational to our ARR growth. In Q3, the number of 100K plus ARR customers grew 14% year over year. While the incremental count of these customers was not as significant as in prior quarters, their relative contribution to ARR was consistent as our larger customers contributed significantly to the growth this quarter. As expected, our dollar-based net retention was consistent at 115% for the third quarter in a row. This remains a significant improvement from the prior year as we improve both our expansion and retention rates. We do expect Q4 net retention rates to be a few percentage points lower given some known Q4 downsizing driven by budgetary pressures as some customers look to reduce spend in this uncertain macro environment. Turning to billings, calculated billings for the trailing 12-month period was $311.7 million, up 18% year-over-year. Recall that we look at calculated billings over a trailing 12-month period as this metric can fluctuate from quarter to quarter due to the timing of our renewals and variances in billing schedules, which was particularly true this quarter for some of our larger customers. Remaining performance obligation, or RPO, remains healthy at $354.9 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 21%. Now I'll review the income statement in more detail. As a reminder, and unless otherwise noted, all metrics are non-GAAP. As previously stated, total Q3 revenue increased to $79 million, up 27% year over year. We once again saw better than expected linearity in the quarter, a positive indicator of the improved rigor and discipline in the sales organization. In addition, there were some upgrades in the quarter with associated contract revisions resulting in moderate revenue acceleration in the quarter. Q3 gross margin was 73%. which was a few percentage points better than the prior quarter. The improvement was largely driven by several focused initiatives to lower our cloud infrastructure costs. We expect Q4 gross margins to be in the 72% to 73% range as we sustain the savings from these initiatives. Longer term, we expect gross margins in the mid 70% plus range as we drive efficiencies in our cloud infrastructure and operations. With regards to operating expenses, we've continued to rigorously scrutinize hiring and discretionary expenses. By the end of this fiscal year, we will have eliminated roughly $27 million in expenses or approximately 9% from our original plan. As previously mentioned, in Q3, we reduced operating expenses across all functions from the prior quarter. While we expect to modestly increase our operating expenses in Q4 as we add capacity in sales, we also remain cognizant of the greater uncertainty caused by the macro environment and will invest cautiously. As stated previously, our Q3 operating margin was negative 7%, driven by revenue outperformance, improvements in gross margin, and careful management of operating expenses. Net loss in the quarter was negative 4.4 million, or negative 4 cents per diluted share, based on approximately 119.1 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. We remain well capitalized and end of the quarter with 342.1 million in cash and marketable securities and no debt. Free cash flow in the quarter was negative 9.1 million or negative 12% of revenue. As we've shared previously, given the variability of free cash flow from quarter to quarter, We recommend looking at free cash flow and free cash flow margin on an annual basis. We expect to end the year with free cash flow margin of approximately negative 10%. We also expect to continue to deliver improvements in free cash flow margin in the future as we focus on driving more efficient growth. Turning to guidance. As a reminder, we believe that it is more relevant to measure the growth of our business on a full year basis given potential variability from quarter to quarter. The macroeconomic environment continues to create a higher degree of uncertainty. While we did not experience a material impact to our business in Q3, we are seeing increased scrutiny over budgets and buying decisions. We also believe this environment and the associated uncertainty will progress through Q4 and into next fiscal year. Despite this backdrop, we believe that our offering is more resilient than most as we enable teams to work more efficiently allowing them to accomplish more with fewer resources. The need to deliver reliable and secure digital experiences for mission-critical applications will continue to be a top priority for our customers and the broader market. For the full fiscal year 2023, we expect total revenue of $298 million to $299 million, representing 23% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP operating margin of negative 16%, to negative 15%, and non-GAAP loss per share of negative 36 cents to negative 35 cents on approximately 117.5 million weighted average shares outstanding. For the fourth quarter, we expect total revenue of 77 to 78 million, representing 15% to 16% year-over-year growth, non-GAAP operating margin of negative 14% to negative 13%, and Non-gap loss per share of negative $0.09 to negative $0.08 on approximately 120.5 million weighted average shares outstanding. In summary, we are pleased with our continued strong execution on both our top and bottom line priorities. We remain committed to delivering more efficient growth while accelerating our path to profitability as we navigate this uncertain macroeconomic environment. Our unified cloud native platform for reliability and security continues to resonate with our customers as more customers are seeking to provide best-in-class digital experience to their end users. With that, Ramin and I are happy to take any of your questions.

Operator?

At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the start keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from the line of Camille Sazari with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you, and congrats on the strong quarter. Several of your peers have announced plans to slow down hiring Can you provide more detail on how you're thinking about headcount changes going forward? Are you planning more rationalization or given the initial success of the Hunter farmer farmer structure, would you be adding to the sales organization?

Yeah. Hey, Camille. Um, we are actually, as I said in the, in the prepared remarks, uh, we'll be looking to add capacity to the sales organization. So we're down year over year. Um, obviously as we've, we've made the changes, we want to make sure we have the right people in the organization. But we will always balance hiring with continued view to productivity gains. But our expectation is to add capacity in the sales org.

That is helpful. And I realize that ARR is the right metric to focus on, but there is a bit of divergence between revenue, ARR, and billing's growth. Can you help us bridge the gap between these metrics, and what's driving the strong revenue acceleration?

Yeah, so I think, you know, as we've shared, and I think you're right, ARR is the best metric to look at in terms of kind of the leading indicator of growth. And so as we have made the changes in the sales org capacities down, in particular ramp capacities down, and that does have an impact in ARR, and that's what you're seeing in the numbers. You know, and then revenue is a trailing indicator in a SaaS business, and so we're getting the benefit of the strength in the prior quarters. As I mentioned, there was some very moderate impact this quarter on some revenue acceleration, which helped with the beat, although we were glad of the strong beat regardless. But that's the dynamic that you're seeing. From a billings perspective, just to touch on that one, we've talked about this in the past. We will have variability from quarter to quarter, and some of that's got to do with billing schedules. And so one of the comments I made was we did see this quarter A number of our larger deals had billing schedules that were, while they were one or multi-year contracts, some of the billing schedules were less than one year in duration. So they were either quarterly or semi-annual, and so that can impact the perspective of billings growth year over year.

Got it. That's very helpful. Thanks again. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, thank you. This is actually Matt Swanson on for Matt. I guess this would kind of be for both of you, but it's really impressive to see the DBNRR hold consistent for three quarters, given how challenging the macro has been. Could you just kind of expand, I guess, on what you think this means about how your customers are seeing your platform? And then given the challenging macro, one of the trends we've heard a lot this quarter is about consolidation to fewer vendors. Do you feel like you're seeing that onto the platform as well?

Hey, this is Rami, and I'll start. I think the first part of that answer is pretty simple. We are really well positioned in two very large markets that are growing, both on the reliability side and security. I think uniquely we're well positioned even more so because of that single unified platform that not only meets the technology requirements, but also the business needs in this circumstance and macroeconomics uncertainty. More specifically, a lot to do with the tiered analytics and licensing model. Now, the other part of your question in terms of a single platform and consolidation, yeah, we see elements of that. But honestly, there's still a lot of best of breed that's out there, a lot of homegrown solutions, and a lot of other commercial products that just don't meet the scale, let alone economic needs that are ripe for replacement and displacement by Sumo.

That's super helpful. And then congrats on the Cloud Sim getting the FedRAMP certification. Do you mind just commenting a little bit on how federal was in general for the quarter?

So our public sector business is something we've been investing in more now on the go-to-market side as we've now achieved obviously FedRAMP moderate for our Cloud Sim. We've had capabilities for logging there and we've expanded that. And so now we're the only cloud-native business solution that's available through that means and channel. And so a lot of effort will be focused on our channel partners driving that public sector business.

All right. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Derek Wood with Cowan. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, great. Thanks. It's Andrew for Derek. Congrats on the strong quarter. Stuart, I think the $7 million revenue beat was one of, if not your largest beat ever, and you called out that there was some revenue acceleration there, but any quantification of what that helped drive the beat would be great. And then is that kind of the main driver of the Q4 guy down sequentially, which I think normally would be up sequentially?

Yeah, sure, Andrew. So just to quantify the Q3, you know, not the beat, but the impact of the acceleration is about one and a half million of the overachievements. Obviously, it was a nice clean beat irrespective of that, but that definitely helped with the, to your point, larger than usual beat that we saw. And I think as you look at Q4, you know, we signaled, you know, as early as last quarter. that there was going to be, you know, that number is going to be smaller. We have raised guidance. And, you know, that's obviously with the visibility we have, but also being cognizant of the environment we're in and the uncertainty. But I think, you know, we raised guidance effectively by 2 million from where we were three months ago.

Yeah, great.

And just lastly, I think just to, you know, we've talked about variability from quarter to quarter. as well. And obviously, you know, what we've always focused folks on is the annual growth. And so, you know, now we're guiding to 23% annual growth versus the 19% we were at last year.

Yeah. Great. Thanks. And then Ramin, APEC and Europe were pretty strong last quarter. Just wanted to check how that performance was this quarter and how pipelines are looking after Q4.

Yeah, international combined was strong again. We've seen direct business there as well as the partner business continue to perform. It's really about coverage and capacity on the direct side and then time in the saddle with a lot of new partners that are VARs or DISTs as well as MSPs as we look to grow that segment of our business. So that's continued effort investment for us going forward. I think it was north of 23% or 22% contribution international for last quarter, which was more than 50% growth year over year.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Our next question comes from the line of Gray Powell with BTIG.

Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys, thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the good set of numbers here. So, yeah, a couple on my side, and I was really just hoping to square the ARR and revenue comments. So, specifically, how should we think about the sequential growth in ARR in Q4? It just seems like you could probably get pretty close to your Q4 revenue, guys, with little to no growth beyond the Q3 ending ARR run rate. And then I know you mentioned a customer downsizing. So we're just trying to, you know, just think through those things and, you know, just basically verify that I'm doing the math correctly here.

Sure. I'll take this one, Gray. So, Stuart, obviously. You know, obviously we don't give ARR guidance at this point. But I think just to give you a little maybe color and perspective, you know, I think I would look at kind of the capacity we have. with being down both year over year in absolute sales reps and then also from a ramp perspective. That's what has the impact on ARR in the near term, which is why we talked about how as those reps continue to be on board and ramp, the impact gets greater as we get into FY24, particularly the back half. So that's how to think about ARR. You know, from a revenue perspective, you know, I think our philosophy has remained consistent on how we're guiding to revenue is, you know, we put out numbers that we have a high conviction that we can deliver on. Obviously, you know, you build a little in and given the uncertainty that we have in this environment, but that's how we think about revenue guidance.

Okay, that's really helpful. And then in terms of like the assumptions for Q4, are you assuming like a stable macro environment versus Q3? Things worsen? Just kind of curious what's sort of like underlying your view of the world.

Yeah, listen, I think we're seeing more discussions around, you know, buying decisions and budgets, right, than we saw even as we were in Q3. So we're definitely seeing, you know, more scrutiny. And so, you know, we've seen that, I would say, tick up from where it was in Q3. And I think we expect that to continue to Q4 and into next year.

All right. Understood. Very helpful. Thank you very much. And our next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh with Morgan.

Thank you for taking the question. Congrats on the solid execution this quarter. Stuart, I guess my question was really around the really great sort of operational efficiencies you guys have been materializing in the business. If I look at sort of OPEX, I think it's down sequentially quarter over quarter. And then I think two of the three lines in OpEx, R&D and G&A are down year over year. Sales and marketing is sort of slightly up. Heard you loud and clear on the need to invest on sales and marketing. I guess my broader question is, as we look over the next four to five quarters, is this pace of efficiency sort of sustainable? How structural are are these efficiencies that you're seeing within gross margin, R&D, G&A? Should we assume that that sort of sustains going forward, realizing that there needs to be more investment in sales and marketing as you ramp go-to-market and product? I just want to get a sense of how long-lasting some of these margin improvements can be going forward.

Yeah, so our expectation, Sanjit, is obviously, as I said, we're going to invest in sales capacity. given we are lower. Listen, we need to invest across the business as we scale. We recognize that we needed to improve our up-loss profile. We still got work to be done there, obviously, as we laid out a picture of driving the company towards first cash flow break-even, then operating margin break-even, and we're trying to accelerate that path. And so, you know, we're going to evaluate this every quarter. It's an ongoing thing where we're looking at hiring plans. We look at where do we hire. We look at discretionary spend. And so obviously while we had a big impact this quarter, and it's pretty unusual for businesses growing like ours to be able to take down expenses quarter over quarter, I don't think you should continue to expect that. But certainly we expect to have, you know, the better leverage and efficiencies relative to revenue as we scale this over the next several quarters.

And so big picture, you know, the mantra here is that the team is going to invest behind revenue versus ahead of revenue, which had been more of the case the past couple of years.

I would say that's true. Obviously, I think the most important thing there that we evaluate is both the environment we're all operating in as well as the productivity that we're seeing in the sales force, right? And so it's constantly evaluating those. and that will dictate the pace at which we invest in sales capacity.

Understood. That's very clear. And then, Ramin, maybe this might be a question for you, Stuart, as well. On some of these customer downsells, to the extent that it's happening, is there a profile of customers where that's occurring more versus less, whether it's a market segment, mid-market? large enterprise versus SMB or in particular industries or customers that may have really expanded significantly with SumoBlog in the past couple of years, they may be going through a digestion period now. Is there any sort of patterns that you are picking up in some of the customers that are indicating that they may be looking to rationalize some of their spend going forward?

Sanjay, I don't know if anyone's immune to what's going on out there. And if they are, I don't know... how they're operating a business, right? You know, I think as we look at the macro, you know, headwinds, there's also some macro tailwinds, right? And I think those companies that have similar tailwinds are continuing to invest but just not at the pace that they were investing in before. So the size of the upgrades or cross-sells may be temporarily reduced or the length of the contract, right? I think no particular vertical is better than another right now, to be honest. I think we've seen probably stronger contribution internationally than we originally thought, given everything going on with the war and the macroeconomic uncertainty, GDP, all that. I don't know how long that will persist. Our business and the enterprise is continuing to progress, as is in the mid-market segments. And we'll continue to as Stuart mentioned, moderate that investment as we see demand and kind of budgets dictate how we invest.

Got it. That's very clear. It makes a ton of sense. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And our next question comes from the line of Blair Abernethy with Rosenblatt Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. Nice quarter, guys. I mean just want to dig in a little bit more on the channel side just well you know in terms of the managed service providers how are they performing in this macro and the cloud service providers that you've been working more closely with the last couple of last year so just want to get a sense of you know how the channel is is performing for you now in the environment

Larry, good to hear your voice. First, let me start by saying that we're in this transition to a channel-first strategy, right? Meaning that we are trying to make sure all new opportunities involve and are actually transacted through a channel partner, whether that's a VAR, a DISD, or in a lot of cases, like you're referring to, an MSSP or an MSP. Now, to your question specifically about managed service providers, I think they're going to play an increasing role going forward, particularly because of labor shortages, the concerns around the breadth of security kind of risks and services of attack, and the technologies that are insufficient that are continuing out there. It gives us a great opportunity to go sign up new ones as well as continue to expand and differentiate their businesses. Last quarter, we did sign up some new MSSPs. We saw the contribution from channel, as I mentioned earlier, increase. Now we're seeing the pipeline being deal reg as well as opportunities from the channel being brought to SUMO start to increase versus solely the other way around. So those are all great indicators, but we have a lot more work to do.

Okay, great. And thank you. And Stuart, Just on the cloud, the gross margins this quarter, any other color you can give us on what you were able to do on the cloud margin, the gross margin, and should we be thinking of this as the new level?

Yeah, so, Blair, I'm not going to get into specifics as what we did. I mean, there's lots of things you can do as you run a SaaS service in terms of optimizing your infrastructure costs and operations, and so You know, we as a team looked at opportunities and you saw those results in the current quarter. You know, I signaled 72 to 73% gross margin for Q4. And so we have a number of initiatives that we're looking at. Some of them will take investment in order to drive the savings further down the road. And so obviously our goal is get back to the 75% plus range over time. And so Yes, I think, you know, we're going to build up towards that level and evaluate different things we can do every quarter.

Okay, great. And one last quick one. Just any FX impact on the top line this quarter of note?

No, we price in U.S. dollars. Obviously, we do have – I mean, obviously, that impacts the cost of the solution for folks internationally – but not a dynamic that we could point to having any meaningful impact at this point.

Great. Thank you.

And our final question comes from the line of Pendulum Borough with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. This is Noah. I'm for Pendulum. Thanks for taking our questions and congrats on the quarter. Maybe just a quick follow-up on the sales reps. Could you maybe just talk about the rep productivity trend in the third quarter and how that's heading into the fourth quarter? Thanks.

Yeah, I'm not going to give specifics, Noah, on the productivity gains. And when we sort of talked about it on investor day, we're continuing to see, I'll say, just same levels of productivity gains for the folks that we've been bringing on board. And so we're very encouraged by the results, feel like we've made the right moves in the sales organization to get it moving in a better direction. And we'll be – obviously, we track this, you know, month to month and quarter to quarter as we move forward, expect to be able to drive further gains down the line.

Got it. And then just for a follow-up question, you know, maybe – Based on your conversations with CIOs, how do you think the industry growth trends next year? Do you think it'll take a step down or do you think it'll be more resilient?

You know, to be honest, a lot of our CISOs, CIOs, it's all over the place. A lot of them are going through that finalization of budgets and planning now. I can tell you there's still a lot of demand and concern around continuing investment in security. which we're well positioned for, but there's also the reality of shortage of staff, right? And so back to the MSSP conversation. So that's one area. The second area is I think the effort around migrating of workloads to the cloud hasn't slowed down. I think the question really is how do I replace some of the traditional homegrown, you know, piecemeal parts that were stitched together with a consolidated platform is some of the conversations that we're having and leading to some great cross-sells and upsells as well as new opportunities. Other than that, it comes down to people, process, and technology decision as every CIO looks across their portfolio of spend and where they can drive X percent savings. And we think we're well-positioned because we can help them save money as well as continue to innovate and drive agility and growth.

Got it. Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session.

I'll now turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Wonderful. Thank you again, everyone, for joining us today. In summary, our industry-leading cloud-native platform, in my humble opinion, has never been stronger. We're completely in control of the efforts this past quarter and our plans for the year. to deliver efficient growth and efficiency improvements, particularly based on from our initial guidance earlier in the year. We'll continue to deliver improved results on both the top line and bottom line as we accelerate towards eventual cash flow breakeven and, of course, profitability. With that, I want to take a moment to thank all of our employees once again for their hard work, their dedication, as well as everyone today for joining us on the call. Thank you very much and happy holidays. And this concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your line at this time.

Thank you for your participation.