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spk07: Good afternoon, and welcome to the RingCentral first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Will Wong, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk13: Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to RingCentral's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I'm Will Wong, RingCentral's Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Vlad Shmunis, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Mo Kadabay, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Vaibhav Agarwal, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Our format today will include prepared remarks by Vlad, Mo, and Vaibhav, followed by Q&A. We also have a slide presentation available on our Investor Relations website that will coincide with today's call, which you can find under the Financial Results section at ir.ringcentral.com. Some of our discussions and responses to your questions will contain forward-looking statements, including our second quarter and full year 2022 financial outlook and our assumptions underlying that outlook. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from our forward-looking statements. A discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our findings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is incorporated by reference into today's discussion. Brent Central assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or comment on forward-looking statements made on this call. Unless otherwise indicated, all measures that follow are non-GAAP with year-over-year comparisons. A reconciliation of all GAAP's non-GAAP results is provided with our earnings release and in the slide deck. Please visit our Investor Relations website to access our earnings release, slide deck, our gap to non-gap reconciliations, our periodic SEC reports, a webcast replay of today's call, and to learn more about RingCentral. For certain forward-looking guidance, a reconciliation of the non-gap financial guidance to the corresponding gap measure is not available as discussed in detail in the slide deck posted on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Vlad.
spk03: Thanks, Will. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings conference call. I want to start today's call by first acknowledging the horrific event taking place in Ukraine. We're shocked to see the dreadful challenges facing the local people as the situation unfolds. As a company, we are proud to support local relief and humanitarian efforts. We are matching employee donations up to $1 million, and we've already matched $850,000 to date. From a business perspective, we're enabling free phone calls to Ukraine for all customers using our RingCentral services. As you may know, this unspeakable humanitarian crisis is very close to my heart. We hope for a rapid end to this shocking disaster and we send our thoughts and prayers to the people affected. With that, I'd like to shift to our people and our business. First, I want to give a warm welcome to Sonali Parekh as our new Chief Financial Officer. Sonali will be starting full-time later this month. She joins us from HP Enterprise, where she was CFO of HPE's communications technology group, as well as head of corporate development and investor relations for the entire company. Donna Lee is a seasoned executive and brings over 25 years of experience in the global technology, media, and telecommunications industries. including senior roles at Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Jeffries, and others. I'm also delighted to share that we're appointing our Chief Operating Officer, Mo Katibe, to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer. Mo has had a meaningful impact since he joined Drink Central, including driving our strong Q1 performance. Mo brings outstanding executive leadership and a customer and people first approach. In his new role, Mo's responsibilities will be expanded to include human resources and corporate strategy alongside product, sales, marketing, and customer experience. I would also like to sincerely thank Vaibhav Agarwal for his valuable contributions to our company as interim CFO. His selfless dedication and outstanding leadership ensured that we did not miss a beat during the transition period. Vaibhav will partner with Sonali as we scale the company in the next stage of growth. Now, turning to our Q1 results. we had a strong start to the year. We delivered solid revenue growth and significantly expanded both operating and free cash flow margins, clearly demonstrating the inherent benefits of our business model at scale. Top-line growth was very robust and we are well on track to achieve $2 billion in revenue this year. In Q1, Total revenue grew 33% to $468 million, above the high end of our guidance of $455 to $459 million. Subscriptions revenue increased 35% year over year to $440 million, up from 34% last year. Total exit ARR was $1.9 billion, up 35% year over year. Mid-market and enterprise ARR, which includes customers generating $25,000 or more in ARR, increased 46% year over year to over $1 billion. Notably, operating margins expanded 120 basis points to 10.4%, significantly above our guidance of 9.2%. This is a clear testament to the inherent profitability of our business, even as we continue to grow rapidly. We had a good Q1. So, why are we winning? Let me give you a tip on the secret of our success. It's built on three factors. Trust, innovation, and partnerships, which comprise our core corporate values. First, trust. I am proud to announce that we have now achieved 15 consecutive quarters of five-nines uptime, which is a standard that most of our competitors can only aspire to. And underpinning everything we do is our dedication to security and data privacy. Simply put, We treat our customers' data like our own. We also embed state-of-the-art capabilities such as end-to-end encryption into our portfolio. Our innovation strategy is focused on the customer. We invest heavily into making our products easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to manage for businesses and partners alike, which is a key competitive advantage. As to new capabilities, in Q1, we introduced RingCentral Webinar Beta, arguably the simplest, seamlessly integrated webinar product available in the market today. Also new is our AI-based meetings, insights, and summaries, a category-defining feature that helps people catch up on meetings with short-term summaries, video highlights, and hot-linked keywords. Now on the partnerships. We're fortunate to count names such as AT&T, Avaya, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Mitel, Verizon, Vodafone, and many others as part of our valued partners. And in Q1, we also added Frontier with more to come. Our partnerships are accretive to our growth and profitability. Mo and Beboff will go deeper on this. Looking forward, we see four global megatrends that give us confidence in the long-term prospects for our business. These are, one, the semantic of hybrid work in the post-COVID era, which in turn reinforces the need for cloud-based communications platforms. Two, ongoing adoption of mobility by businesses worldwide that drives the need for solutions that enable work in any mode on any device worldwide. from anywhere. Three, Microsoft Teams in the enterprise, which creates a meaningful opportunity for well-integrated enterprise-grade UCaaS and CCaaS solutions. And four, continued preference from CIOs to evolve to cloud-based unified communications and contact center as an integrated solution from a single provider. Mo will expand on how each of these megatrends are a positive long-term growth driver for RingCentral. We have now delivered 35 straight quarters of strong performance, driven by focused execution, and we're excited to start 2022 with solid momentum. With two seasoned leaders in Mo and Sonali now at the helm, we have the right management team and skill set to drive the next stage of our growth. The market opportunity ahead of us is large, and our innovation and go-to-market strengths are a key differentiator. Looking ahead, we're firmly focused on durable revenue growth, sustainable profitability, and stronger cash flows. With our leadership position in UCAS, unique partnerships, and most importantly, our great people, I am very optimistic about the future for RingCentral. With that, let me hand the call over to our President and Chief Operating Officer, Mo Kative.
spk08: Thank you, Vlad. First, I'd also like to welcome Sonali. I know she's going to be an amazing partner as we execute on our strategy of delivering sustainable growth and profitability. With that, let me give you more detail on our strong results. As Vlad stated, we see four key megatrends that are long-term growth drivers for RingCentral. Hybrid work, adoption of mobility, Microsoft Teams, and CIO preference to evolve to cloud-based unified communications and contact center from a single provider. Let me go deeper on each of these items and the key capabilities that differentiate RingCentral and allow us to win. First, hybrid. it's clearly here to stay. A good example of Room Central being a preferred solution for the hybrid world as well as a testament to the traction of our strategic partnerships is Suffolk County in New York State. Suffolk County selected Avaya Cloud Office to connect more than 6,000 employees across more than 200 locations and everywhere else that their employees happen to be on any given day. This digital transformation project consolidated numerous on-premise phone systems across police departments and social services and community buildings onto a modern platform. And it delivered significant ROI, with the cost being approximately half of their legacy solution. And more broadly, as people are complementing their legacy phones with personal computers and mobile devices, we are seeing that the use of RingCentral on both desktop and mobile devices is outpacing our overall growth in a meaningful way, a clear proof point that RingCentral is an enabler and a beneficiary of hybrid. Second, mobile. Across every vertical, we are seeing customers select RingCentral for their entire workforce. And why? The industry-leading capabilities that we provide across all modalities, including wireless devices, whether they're being used in the office or on the go. A great example of how increasing reliance on mobile phones is a growth driver for RingCentral is SCM Insurance Services, Canada's largest independent claims management firm. SEM needed a mobile-centric solution that let them replace a disjointed network of regional legacy systems with a modern cloud-based solution. The key differentiated capability that they required was the ability to quickly spin up local numbers for any region or area affected by a disaster. This allowed SEM's distributed workforce to reassure victims that they were getting help from someone close by. Also, SEM is using our native RingCentral video service, both internally and to give their customers choice in how they want to communicate with SEM employees. Third, Microsoft Teams, which we see as a significant incremental growth opportunity for RingCentral. The large majority of Teams customers are on E1 or E3 licenses, which do not include any sort of phone or telephony service. a key part of any business identity. This creates an immediate opportunity to complete the cloud communication suite by adding a well-integrated UCaaS solution like RingCentral. And as to the minority of Teams customers who have an E5 license, well, first, they still require an incremental calling plan to make calls outside of their company. And even more importantly, they often need a richer feature set, Five9's reliability, integrated contact center options, larger geographical footprint, all things that RingCentral can offer. Let me give you two recent healthcare wins to illustrate this. The first is a large dental services organization who purchased embedded dialer integration across their 350 locations. Our win was based on our ability to deliver key incremental features such as human-assisted call routing, multi-line appearance on a single device, and deep analytics, which allowed the customer to gauge employee productivity. The second is a large healthcare recruiting and staffing firm. who augmented teams with RingCentral due to the importance of Five9's reliability and our enterprise-grade call queuing capabilities and integrated workforce management capabilities. The customer historically used the spreadsheet to track and dynamically manage their on-call agents. RingCentral was able to fully automate the process by creating custom call queues for each scheduling scenario in support of their nursing staff after hours. The net here is that our team's revenue is up 500% year-over-year and with very healthy ARPUs. We are going to be hosting an event in the near future to provide deeper insights into our emerging Microsoft Teams practice. Please stay tuned for details. And last but not least, the fourth megatrend is integrated UCaaS and CCaaS. This integration matters because historically, at least 60% of existing on-prem UC and CC deployments were purchased from a single vendor. RingCentral is currently the only company offering a fully integrated solution combining a market-leading UCaaS and a market-leading CCaaS and on a single bill. Consequently, we are seeing continued growth in attach rates for Contact Center for our largest customers. with the average deal size increasing 34% year over year. A great proof point is Rider Systems, a leading Fortune 500 logistics and transportation company. Rider was an existing RingCentral MVP customer who recently expanded to add our contact center solution. By using our integrated platform and its unified directory, Rider call center agents can easily transfer calls to non-contact center employees at any of their remote facilities and to do so with one click. This and other integrated capabilities allowed Rider to significantly reduce cost and training times, as well as capture end-to-end performance metrics across their entire business. Now, building on these megatrends, I also wanted to give an update on our partnerships and channel. First, we had outstanding pipeline generation in the quarter, up almost 50% quarter-over-quarter, including record sequential increases from our channel partners. Second, on our strategic partners, Mitel is ramping materially faster than originally expected, and this is even before the full enablement of the Mitel endpoints on RingCentral. Avaya was up 30% quarter over quarter and showed progress across all customer segments and regions with international leading the way. And international continues to be a meaningful opportunity for RingCentral with only 10% of our revenues coming from outside of North America. In one queue, we launched the first RingCentral wholesale program for Europe to capitalize on this. In closing, my time at RingCentral has only increased my conviction and confidence of our market, our product portfolio, and our team. We have a world-class product, a large underpenetrated market, and a business model that is inherently profitable. We are now laser-focused on driving both growth and margin expansion with discipline and operational excellence. With that, I will now turn the call over to Vaibhav to cover the financials.
spk17: Thank you, Mo, and good afternoon. Q1 was a solid start to the year. All key metrics came in above the high end of guidance. Subscriptions revenue grew 35% year-over-year, up from 34% in Q1 of last year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 10.4%, an expansion of 120 basis points, putting us well above the rule of 40. And we ended the quarter with $302 million of cash and generated non-GAAP free cash flow of $39 million. This represented a free cash flow margin of 8.2%, reflecting 170 basis points of margin increase year over year. To summarize, we delivered strong growth, higher profitability, and a corresponding increase in free cash flow generation. We are committed to durable, profitable growth as we capture this massive market opportunity. Now let me provide you with the key underlying drivers of growth. First, upmarket traction. Enterprise demand for our cloud-based communications platform remains strong. Enterprise customers, defined as customers with $100,000 or more of ARR, increased 53% year-over-year to $790 million. These customers account for over 40% of our business, up five points from a year ago. Second, contact center. Our unique offering of industry-leading UCAS, deeply integrated with industry-leading CCAS, continues to be a strong differentiator. We are seeing bundled wins with both new and existing customers. Contact Center ARR is now over 10% of our business and is accretive to our growth. Third, our strategic partnerships. With Mitel still in very early innings, Avaya, Atos, and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise continue to ramp. While we do not expect this to be a metric we consistently share, we do note that we achieved a milestone of approximately half a million seats across our strategic partnerships. This is already a positive ROI on a lifetime value basis relative to our initial investments into the first three relationships. As our strategic partnerships are ramping up, we are now seeing that in many cases our partners are working with the channel to deliver our services to customers. In the spirit of better aligning our reported metrics, With current market dynamics, we will be providing total ARR and segment metrics going forward. Now let's turn to ARPUs and profitability. Overall ARPUs remain stable quarter over quarter and year over year and are north of $30. And off note, new customer acquisition ARPU also remains steady and over $30. This is driven by the value created by our industry-leading, seamlessly integrated, enterprise-grade message, video, and phone and CCaaS offering, which is a competitive advantage that we expect to last well into the future. Subscription growth margins were stable at 82%. Operating margin expanded by 120 basis points to 10.4% as we drove efficiency through a wide range of initiatives across the company. As demonstrated in Q1, the inherent leverage in our model allows us to invest in innovation and growth while delivering sustainable margin and free cash flow expansion as we scale. Further, as the mix from strategic partners increases, our profitability will continue to expand. The unit economics from these partners are better than the company average as we can leverage their highly experienced sales forces marketing investments, and installed customer bases. This drives lower customer acquisition costs. In addition, their upmarket focus and longstanding customer relationships result in lower churn and higher lifetime value. These factors result in a higher LTV to CAC ratio. Now turning to guidance for the full year 2022. We are raising our subscriptions revenue growth outlook to 28% at the midpoint versus our prior outlook for growth of 27%. We are maintaining total revenue growth of 25% to 26% year-over-year. This factors in an increasing demand for our mobile and soft phone applications while accounting for shifts in demand for legacy desk phones. We are raising our non-GAAP operating margin outlook to 11.5%, which represents 130 basis points of year-over-year growth. This represents a more than three times increase from our prior outlook. And we are increasing our non-GAAP EPS outlook to $83 to $87, up from our prior outlook of $69 to $72. In summary, we had a strong quarter and are focused on durable, profitable growth along with driving operating and free cash flow margin expansion. Looking ahead, we have multiple incremental growth drivers and margin levers, and we believe that we will scale to become a multibillion-dollar company with profitable growth. On a personal note, I would like to thank Vlad and the board for the incredible opportunity to serve as interim CFO over the last six months. It has been an immensely fulfilling and a rewarding experience, and I look forward to partnering with Mo and Sonali to scale the company to the next level. With that, let's open the call for Q&A.
spk07: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Our first question comes from Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
spk18: Very much. Vlad and Mo, congratulations on a fantastic start to the year. Mo, I couldn't help but notice that you talked about the megatrends, and one of the trends was Microsoft. And I want to just get behind that a little bit more. Do you see this as a trend whereby Microsoft customers that have purchased the E1 bundle are increasingly looking to a specialist provider like RingCentral to augment their capabilities. And I also wanted to understand, I think you've thrown an eye-popping number, 400% or 500% growth in your Microsoft practice. Can you just elaborate that a little bit? And besides that, it was great to see that the output trends are very stable. I think there was a fear that that is going south, but you certainly did a good job talking about the stability there. And one for Vlad, of course, you're not going to be forgotten. With the changes, tremendous changes in the management team, you've brought on board some really experienced executives from outside the company. How do you think it's all going to gel together from a go-to-market, finance, strategy standpoint? What are the changes we should be expecting or you should be expecting from your new management team? Thank you so much.
spk03: Okay. Well, hey, Gash. So, yeah, I guess I'll take the second question since you addressed it to me. Well, look, you know, it's hard to predict the future, but I would say so far so good. We had, you know, Mo joining in January. As you know, there were quite a few concerns, you know, with some of the turbulence we've experienced in Q4. And as you can see, and I should say as advertised, so far so good. We had a fantastic water. Mo had a lot to do with it. You see the numbers, and they speak for themselves. And certainly his recent promotion to president is extremely well deserved, even if we just were to limit it to the numbers. But what you don't see is all of the work, you know, which is under the surface, the next layer of management that he is bringing in, you know, the type of talent we're adding. I can tell you now with virtually 100% confidence. Why virtually? Because, you know, it's never, you know, you never really don't know for sure, you know, macro matters, for example. But with that aside, we will emerge a lot stronger from all of the events of last year with a more experienced management team. Very importantly, a better online management team. And specifically, what both Mo and Sonali will talk about here next, what they both bring in tremendous amount of discipline and the culture of discipline and the culture of true profitable growth a two billion dollar company like we are should absolutely be delivering tangible results and what you're seeing with our results and our race profitability outlook and our record free cash flow generation and This is, we expect this to be systemic, and both Mo and Sonali, I believe, are fully aligned with that and will implement. Again, as to Sonali, the new CFO, well, firstly, my understanding is that some, maybe many of you, should have crossed paths with her in the past. In particular, she did have a, you know, further nice stint at Goldman, so... I already was getting some congratulatory notes from some of your coworkers there. So yeah, couldn't be more excited, and she'll be joining later this month. I can tell you that our entire management team, both the finance org, but very importantly, entire org, entire 360, if you will, was deeply involved in the sourcing and interview process. So Nellie was our unanimous winner. I understand she also had options, so the stars have converged here. So couldn't be more excited and more happy. And it's a new beginning for RingCentral, with the little caveat aside that it is a $2 billion business, run rate certainly. that's profitable and still, you know, very strong growth. So I think we're in a good spot. Hey, you know what? And since I'm on the roll here, let me take a quick stab at your Teams question as well, and Mo can add. But look, as I think most of us realize, you know, Teams is a great product, certainly has good traction, especially in the enterprise. They simply do not have a viable competitive PBX in the cloud component. It's completely missing by packaging. It's just missing from E1 and E3. And you need to pay, what, $18 to get as an add-on. to get really a much weaker version. There is a reason they started calling it Microsoft Phone again, maybe, because it's not really quite a full PBX. And with E5, look, we are absolutely having success with E5 customers who realize limitations of what Microsoft has to offer. And please don't forget that Even with the features aside, and features are not aside, they simply don't have all of the check boxes checked, but you have the situation to where you don't have the 5.9 availability. It's at best 3.9, and it's not even being SLA'd at 3.9, because they SLA everything but the telephony portion. So that's one. We have a vastly, vastly... expanded geographical coverage area. Mo, we just looked at it. How many countries? 12 additional countries. Okay. Which matters. If you happen to be in one of those 12 countries, then the thing is simply not viable. And also remember, even for E5, it's still not free. You still need to have an underlying carrier, which you need to pay for. Again, you don't get the countries in any case. But very importantly, you don't have a single straw to choke. PBX in the cloud or any enterprise communications, it's about reliability and it's about low drama. So if you have a poor quality call, unless there is an end-to-end vendor like RingCentral, you know, who are you going to complain to? Is it Microsoft's issue? Is it, you know, Verizon's or AT&T's issue to somebody, you know? So again, this is why we think that Teams, it's not a foe, it's a channel. I think we mentioned we have tremendous growth. It's a meaningful size business even now. We will eventually be disclosing the number, but for competitive reasons, let's just say this is one of our stronger growth drivers at this point. And what we set out to do was simply to provide world's best Teams integration, which at this point we already have. Between direct routing and embedded dialer, we really are the only sizable vendor to support both. That opens up tremendous amount of opportunities for us. and some of our competitors have quoted their team's penetration, I can tell you that we're at least 2x that already. Okay? So a lot of juice left there.
spk08: Well, Vlad, I think you hit all of it. And, Cash, if you have any follow-ups, I'll have to chat with you later. Why don't we move on to the next question?
spk18: All good. Yeah, sure. Thanks so much.
spk07: The next question is from Terry Tillman with Truist. Please go ahead.
spk10: Yeah, congrats for me as well. And Vlad, you certainly are on a roll. You crushed it with those answers there. Thank you. And hi, Mo and Vaibhav, and congrats to Sonali. Just two quick questions. I guess first for you, Mo, you've had more time under your belt here at the company, and there's probably always going to be some low-hanging fruit areas on the go-to-market or operational excellence side that you can make an effect quickly. So anything you could touch on in terms of where you've been able to have an early impact? And then the second part of that question is, The market's been rough, obviously, for software, but the shares are a three-time sales on 23. And what do you think is most misunderstood about the story? And then I had just a quick follow-up for Ray Bob on Office ARR. Thank you.
spk08: Very good, Terry. So let me jump in and say two things that I'm quite proud of relative to the first quarter. The first one, as we articulated, we saw a record increase in pipe from the channel. And, you know, anytime we're seeing it come in from the channel, it's It's illustrative of just the foundational power of the product that we're providing and customer demand being strong. And so you can imagine behind the scenes there was a lot of really good operational work by our sales and channels teams to go drive that and really enjoyed seeing that come to life. The second one is obviously the 120 basis points of margin expansion that we saw in the quarter and how we've raised our guidance for the year relative to that. And it really boiled down to the way we accomplished that was driving efficiencies across three key areas that are representative of the whole organization. One is how do we think about our people, our hiring, our headcount? The second one is how do we think about our program spend? And then the third one is how are we managing our supply chain and vendor ecosystems? And, you know, clearly, as we're lifting the guidance for the year, that should give you confidence about how we're thinking about the sustainability of this and really building on the points that Vlad made as well. And then I think you had a second question for Vaibhav.
spk10: Well, it was a tough question. It was just what do you think is most misunderstood given the stock is where it's trading? It's such a low multiple compared to growth. So, again, tough question, but curious how you'd respond.
spk08: Well, you know, part of today is getting your questions that I think flesh some of that out. But, look, I think that what's happening with teams is a huge part of that in terms of is that a revenue opportunity for us or is this a company and a product that is going to come in and essentially win a lot of the legacy PBX seats that we're going after? And the heart of it, as Vlad articulated, is it is 100% a vector of growth for us. We're seeing it as a route to market for us to go win alongside and into Teams customers. And the 500% growth that we've seen is a huge part of it. And then, frankly, the other key piece that I think is misunderstood by the market, and this is a big one, is ARPU. Cash made reference to it a little bit ago. And we included a slide in the DAX pay box, fairly explicitly hit it. But ARPU is over $30. It has been stable across our base of customers quarter over quarter, year over year. And arguably most importantly, our new acquisition ARPU. So new customers that we're selling to in the quarter, that ARPU is is also above a three and stable year over year and quarter over quarter? Those are kind of the two biggest questions that I most often get, Terry, and how I'd respond to it.
spk10: That's wonderful. Thank you. And just real quick here for Vabob, in terms of seasonality of office ARR for the rest of the year, anything we should think about the seasonality of this business at this point, given all the things you have going on, or should it kind of ramp higher than that new ARR you add each quarter as we progress through the year? Thank you.
spk17: Yeah, thanks, Terry, for the question. Look, we don't specifically guide to Office ARR, but what I would tell you is that we had a really good bookings quarter. We generated about $100 million of bookings. You know, ARR is growing kind of in the mid-30s, which is very, very healthy. We did have some effects of the U.S. dollar strengthening during the quarter, about a point or two. But overall, you know, demand environment looks good. you know, pipeline remains healthy as we get into Q2. So overall, I feel very good about, you know, where we are and what we've guided in terms of revenue and operating margins.
spk16: That's wonderful. Congratulations.
spk03: You know what, Vlad here, let me just add a few words here. I think, you know, the rest of the folks on the call might find it useful as well. Because you asked a fantastic question about what's misunderstood, and we hit on some of the highlights. Look, when you think at the high level, there are two things that people maybe don't quite realize, and they're related. Basically, it's okay, hey, you have your competitors, and they're larger, Microsoft Zoom, like that, and you look at their phone, or cloud, or PBS project is lower than yours, your prices are not going to hold, yeah? And the fallacy in that is they're not quoting the entire package. If you look at the entire package of Ring versus Zoom, you know, it's very much similarly priced with the aside that the very heavy list of, you know, five nines, fully featured, partner ready, you know, global PBX in the cloud with tons of integrations and tons of preference cases, you know, we have and the others do not. And this is why we keep on, you know, at least holding our own there and keep posting these very nice growth numbers without eroding our pools because, again, on apples to apples increases, our pricing, is quite competitive, certainly when you compare to any of the larger companies. And the second one, and it's a little bit related as well, is people tend to forget that we are not what we call an MVP, message video phone, not just a message video phone, but we are message video phone plus contact center company. We still today have the world's only integration between Gartner MQ leading UCAS and Gartner MQ leading CCAS available from a single vendor on a single invoice. It simply does not exist elsewhere. And it's no secret our high-end contact center is done in partnership with Knife-In-Contact. But there is tons of IP from both sides that went there. It's not an integration that's easy to replicate. And as a case in point, it has not been replicated. There is no one else, none of our competitors can both close and none of in-contacts as well. So there is real IP, there is real longevity there. And this is what lets us continue winning in enterprises, frankly of all sizes, including some very large ones, because we are able to offer differentiated fully functional solution you know frankly fairly reasonable prices and again if you look on the blended basis I think we mentioned we now share that our blended our pool you know is still over $30 our V up our pool is same and our new position our pool is same And they think that what we're hoping is that now with these additional disclosures that people will feel, let's call it incrementally, comfortable, more comfortable with our ability to stay at this level and continue growing at this level without losing profitability or margin.
spk10: That's great. Thank you very much.
spk07: Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time and in order to get to as many of you as possible, please limit yourselves to one question each. The next question is from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
spk09: Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to follow up on Terry's question on ARR. As you guys become more enterprise-focused, I know that's growing faster than the rest of the average. Does the bookings growth outpace ARR growth? Maybe we shouldn't look at those metrics as the same thing. I know not everything is implemented or in ARR to start, but I just wanted to make sure I understood that. kind of the difference between what bookings is and what ARR is trending during the quarter.
spk06: Yeah, so thanks for the question, Brian.
spk17: So ARR is growing in the mid-30s. And look, as we grow and mature as a company, ARR is a metric that we kind of look at internally. And we are continuing to add bookings quarter on quarter. So, you know, like I mentioned earlier, We had a $100 million booking quarter, which was pretty strong. ARR growing in the mid-30s, and that's what's going to continue to layer on growth as we grow as a company. Mo, anything to add?
spk08: The only thing I'd add to that is, of course, I think all of us have hit on this, is at the same time of delivering about $100 million of bookings, we had a very healthy margin. We're getting the scale. We're ensuring that we're balancing both our revenue and our profitability. which is why you're seeing us guide the way we're guiding on both.
spk07: The next question is from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. So I just wanted to ask maybe on the subscription revenue guidance, if I think about the beat versus management's guidance and then the revised guidance, it's actually slightly, you don't roll the full beat board. So I'm just curious if there's something that's a difference in the In the guidance methodology, or if that's just conservatism with more macro uncertainty, just how should we think about footing that guidance?
spk17: Yeah, thank you, Samad, for the question. So on subs, we did, from a full year guidance perspective, we did flow in the beat from Q1 and the raise from Q2 on the subscriptions revenue side. We did have, you know, with the dollar strengthening, We did have some FX impacts that are flowing through the subscription revenue line. It's around, call it between 5 and 10 million. So that's something that we factored in into the guidance.
spk07: The next question is from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
spk11: Great. I wanted to dive into the kind of increase you noted on the channel partnerships. you know, noting 30% quarter-and-quarter ramp in Avaya and 50% in Channel. You know, do you think that that is just maturing of those relationships, or were there any kind of particular efforts over the last kind of six months to kind of drive that uptick? Thanks.
spk08: Hello there, Meeta. What I'll tell you is we've got marketing and sales plans with our partners, each of them, to capture both those customers that have issued RFPs, call it the organic growth, as well as programs that are designed to actively go and put our message in front of customers that may have not yet made the decision to move to the cloud. And as you pointed out, it was a strong increase quarter over quarter with Avaya. I'm particularly pleased with the ramp that we're seeing from Mitel. And it's that confidence that's allowing us to come out and also start disclosing. where we're at in terms of the seats from the partnerships. And look, the heart of these partnerships is we did them for three key reasons, right? Between them, they account for over 200 million legacy PBX seats. There's just a huge base out there, and we know that these are customers that are going to need the product that we have. Second, the structure of the deals, and Vaibhav hit on this, means that the unit economics are accretive to our overall company economics. And then the third one is really about being able to leverage our partners' experienced sales and marketing teams and their longstanding company relationships that they have with these customers. We know that they're continuing to drive adoption over time, and we're going to give you periodic updates on how those partnerships are going and the number of seats that they're throwing off.
spk07: The next question is from Matt Stotler with William Blair. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking the question. I think I'll just ask a follow-up on Microsoft, maybe a little bit more pointed. You know, we saw this morning that Avaya announced that they were expanding their relationship with Microsoft, their co-selling relationship to not just include Contact Center, but also the entire OneCloud portfolio. So I wanted to, you know, see what you can share in terms of confirmation that that includes
spk08: Co-selling relationship for a Viacom office what that implies for for that product the opportunity there and then any thoughts on the potential for an expanded Go-to-market relationship with Microsoft in the future Well, you know, we certainly can't comment on other companies announcements, you know have to direct questions on that back to Avaya and Microsoft what I will tell you is that I As we articulated a little bit earlier, we're continuing to see increases quarter over quarter in our own relationship with Avaya. That's on both a seat and a new revenue bookings basis. And, you know, at the heart of it, I think it boils down to they've got a lot of legacy PBX customers that's outside of the CCaaS section of their business, which is, I think, where they focused on this morning, that need a solution to move to the cloud. And that's where our partnership with Avaya is currently focused.
spk07: The next question is – go ahead. I'm sorry. Okay. No, I'm sorry.
spk08: I was going to say, and obviously, you know, can't speculate on any future partnerships or other go-to-market or relationships with Microsoft either, but we're very excited about the MS Teams practice that we talked about quite a bit earlier, so I won't repeat myself.
spk07: The next question is from Matthew Nicknam with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
spk14: Hey, guys, thank you for taking the question. Can you talk about how churn trended across cohorts between small, mid-size business and enterprise? Thanks.
spk17: Yeah, so overall churn, Matt, trended in line and was stable quarter over quarter, year over year, you know, and that was true across the segments as well. So no material kind of trends to kind of outline. I think from a net retention standpoint, You know, when you look at the cohorts, every subsequent cohort has been better than the previous one. When we look at the 2021 cohort as an example, you know, net retention is, call it north of 150%, so healthy net retention trends there.
spk07: The next question is from George Sutton with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk02: Thank you. Using Frontier as a proxy, how many Frontiers, how many Mitels remain out there from your perspective with relatively untapped customer sets?
spk08: Thanks for the question. This is Mo. I'll take that one. You know, what I'll tell you is first we're excited to welcome Frontier as our latest global service provider partner in the quarter. And broadly, we're seeing strong seat and revenue growth from our GSPs, those service providers. You know, these are relationships that are going to continue to unlock new sales addressable markets for us for the foreseeable future. To get to the heart of your question, you know, here's the way I'd have you think about it. Last year, we ended the year with 12 contracted relationships with GSPs. And of that 12, only three of them were producing meaningful revenue because of the cycle between when you do the contracts, you go and you actually build the product together, you integrate your products, and then you enable your sellers and they go off into the market. So 12 contracted, 3 producing revenue. We're expecting at the end of this year that we're going to have about 18 contracted relationships, so 6 more, and of that, 9 are going to be producing meaningful revenue. The net here is that the new revenue-producing GSPs are going to continue to grow both this year as well as next year, and then we can talk about 24 at a later point in time.
spk06: The next question is from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.
spk07: Please go ahead. Hi.
spk00: Thanks so much for taking my question. I wanted to touch on operating margins and the guidance raised there. So if we look at Q1, it looks like most of the leverage was coming from the R&D and G&A line in terms of leverage. So I guess when we think about the raise for the full year, and I know, Mo, you had some commentary earlier on that. Can you just talk about where we should see most of that increase coming from and how to think about that in relation to the model?
spk08: Thanks. So great question. Thanks for asking it. What I'll tell you is that R&D, G&A, and sales and marketing all actually saw improvements in the quarter relative to those three areas that we focused on. On the S&M side, we were able to take some of those savings and actually invest it as part of driving broader awareness of RingCentral in the marketplace. We know that our win rates are quite strong in the industry, and as more and more businesses become aware of RingCentral with that same win rate, it'll drive more organic revenue growth into the future. And so that's what happened there. And then as you think about the rest of the year, same general dynamic. This is not about being focused on any one line item of the P&L. It's about those three key areas that we're focused on, which is how do we think about discipline and operational excellence as we look at hiring and our headcount, How do we think about our program spend and where can we drive efficiencies? And then third, how do we continue to go rationalize our supply chain and vendor ecosystem and drive savings there? Deval, anything you want to add?
spk17: No, I think you covered it.
spk07: Thank you. The next question is from Peter Levine with Evercore. Please go ahead.
spk12: Great. Thank you for taking my question. I guess you addressed it on the pair of marks, but can you walk us through or quantify what the incremental margin contribution looks like on a partner deal, led deal versus direct? And as we think about the model longer term in terms of profitability, where do you think that leverage comes from? Thanks.
spk17: Yeah, thank you for the question. So I think the way to think about the various go-to-market motions is as follows. You know, when we book a deal through our direct, the cost to book is the highest because we are paying for the lead gen and for our sales force. So we are paying kind of end-to-end for getting the sale. As we utilize our channel partners, you know, we are only paying for wins. And as the strategic partner-led motions take share, it's even more accretive on two fronts. One is in terms of the upfront cost to book, we are able to leverage the sales forces of our partners and their marketing motions. So we get efficiencies there that results in a lower cost to book. And then on the other hand, because these partners have had longstanding relationships with these customers, and they are incentivized for the customers to stay on the platform, churn is lower and it drives higher lifetime values. So when you kind of put some of the parts together, you know, the LTV to CAC ratios are incrementally better on the partner-led motions when compared to the overall business.
spk07: The next question is from Michael Turin with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
spk15: Hey, guys. This is Austin Williams on for Michael Turin. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to touch on the seat contributions from partners. How should we think about the mix of those 500,000 seats from Mitel versus the 3As? And as a follow-up, is there any clarity you could provide on how those GSP partners have added to the count in the context of those as well?
spk08: Okay, so the seat count that Vaibhav articulated earlier often actually excludes Mitel. So it's only from the first three relationships. So I think that answers the first part of your question. And then on the GSP side, we don't disclose the number of seats that we get from those relationships. But I guide you back to my earlier comments, which is, What I love about the GSP relationships is that they're stacking over time, and as they come on board and actively start producing revenue, I think of that as incremental growth that we have line of sight into not just for the rest of this year, but 23 as a minimum as well. Thanks for the question.
spk07: The last question will be from Alex Zukin with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hey, guys.
spk07: Thanks for taking the question.
spk05: I just want to get a better understanding. I'm doing the calculation on the ARR, and I'm trying to get just a sense of – if I look at net new ARR added, it's down on a year-over-year basis versus Q1 of last year. Is that – I think to someone else's question, is that just delayed recognition? Is that currency? Is that something – something in the business we should be mindful of. And then on a gross margin standpoint, can you just maybe comment on, if I look at GAAP gross margins, they were pretty significantly down sequentially. Again, if you could just comment on kind of where that stabilizes and what's the driver there.
spk08: Very good, Alex. I'll take the first half and then hand it off to Babal. So I'll come back to what I articulated a little bit ago, which is good bookings quarter, about $100 million. If you look at the last X number of years of our business, Q1 is almost always the seasonally lowest quarter of the year. And really, as we think about how we're managing the business, it's about both driving that top line revenue growth and new bookings, as well as ensuring that we're doing it in a very disciplined and profitable way. And, you know, that's where management's focus is right now. We want to drive both top line and bottom line. And that's why you're seeing us accelerating our margin guidance about 3x up for the rest of the year versus our prior guide last quarter. And then, Bebo, if you want to talk about gross margin.
spk17: Yeah. So on the gross margin side, you know, when you look at the non-GAAP gross margins, there are multiple kind of good guys there. You know, as we are upgrading to our native video product, you know, we get efficiencies and generally... you know, with scale, we are spreading the cost, you know, the fixed costs over a wider base and we are getting scale. From a gap perspective, the two things that we exclude are stock-based compensation and intangibles amortization. And we acquired the CloudLink technology from Mitel last quarter. I think that the amortization of that technology is running through you know, we are getting the full impact of that in the quarter that's driving down gap growth margins.
spk07: This concludes our question and answer session, and the conference is also now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
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