Teradata Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Q4 2019 Teradata Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants lines are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Nabil El-Chichet. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Teradata's interim president and chief executive officer will lead our call today, followed by Scott Brown, Teradata's chief revenue officer, and then Mark Culhane, Teradata's CFO. and other information. The reconciliation of our GAAP results to our non-GAAP results and other information concerning these measures is included in our earnings release which is accessible at investor.terradata.com A replay of this conference call will be available

Good afternoon, everyone. Since our last call, we have spent a significant amount of time reviewing our operations. Our efforts have confirmed that while we were making progress in several areas, our execution was not up to an acceptable standard. We have taken decisive actions to not only implement focused operational practices, but also to ensure our entire organization knows what our priorities are and where they fit in. The other key takeaway from our efforts is that our strategy remains solid. We need to adjust our efforts to make sure we are focused on the most important things first and that they are properly staffed and funded. Our main area of focus will be accelerating the improvements in our cloud offering. This will ensure that Teradata continues to be a leader in the rapidly growing demand around solving the analytic solutions required by our customers. We are confident that our efforts position us for a solid 2020 and believe that we will also accelerate our growth and support our path to higher profitability. While 2019 was not the year we had hoped for, we did have some key wins. The adoption of our cloud offerings resulted in outstanding growth for that portion of our business. You will hear more about this from Mark. We strengthened our flagship Vantage platform, maturing its capabilities both in the cloud and on-premise to address our customers' needs for a highly performant and massively scalable hybrid analytic offering. We saw solid adoption of Vantage as customers continue to rely on Teradata to help them get the answers from all their data regardless of where they are on their cloud journey. Also, we largely completed our business model transition to subscription. Now, nearly 90% of our bookings are recurring and I am proud of how quickly we have moved to this model. Finally, we brought in some exceptional new leaders throughout our product and go-to-market organization. As important as it was to advance our hybrid cloud technology, it was equally important to strengthen our executive ranks to purposely lead the organization forward. We are blending the new talent with the folks that built Teradata, and the result is an extremely strong team. So with 2019 behind us, we firmly believe we made the right calls at the right time to address our challenges in execution and now all of our focus and efforts are on delivering a solid 2020. In 2020, we will be riveted on three key areas. First, accelerating our transition to the cloud. We know our customers, among the world's largest, will remain in hybrid analytic environments for the foreseeable future, something Teradata is uniquely suited to address. As they move into more cloud deployments We will be right there with them. Second, driving consumption advantage. And third, expanding our market opportunities. And of course, we will continue to drive operational excellence, improving efficiencies throughout the organization. Scott and Mark will cover these focus areas in more detail, but I want to be clear that we have taken a thorough assessment of where we are, addressed needed adjustments, and are focused on a stronger future. Teradata has been and remains unique in our ability to help the world's leading enterprises harvest the ever-growing volume of data and get the answers they need at the scale and speed they require. We do that better than any other company on the planet and we intend to maintain that position while delivering for our customers the tools they need and our shareholders the returns they deserve. As I hand the call off to Scott to address some of the key actions we are taking, I would like to provide a quick update on our CEO search. The board's independent search committee is taking a thorough and expeditious approach, working with the executive search firm to vet and review candidates. The process is well underway and we feel good about our ability to find and outstanding permanent CEO for Teradata. Also in preparation of the onboarding of a new CEO, the board determined to adopt the corporate governance practice of separating the CEO and chairman's role by naming an independent director, Mike Giannone, as chairman of the board. Mike has served as lead independent director as well as heading the CEO search committee. I will remain as interim CEO until the new CEO is selected, at which time I will continue to serve the company in my position as a member of the board of directors. Now, let's hear from Scott.