NCR Voyix Corporation

And as we started seeing that happening, you kind of stick your head up and go, wow, what's going on? Is it just us? Or is it the market? What's happening? And so as we started to look around the market, and I had a lot of conversations with other people that are more in that hardware space, we found out it seems to be more of a market dynamic than just happening to NCR Voyex. And so that's when we made the decision to, we're not going to see those projects budgeted for. You can't create that kind of budget inside of these big customers in that short amount of time. These are longer lead time elements, so we pulled that out. And then that was really the bridge, and so those were the big three drivers. And then what also was exciting too is we, and you all reminded us, we left out our ARR story. And so we added that back in, and we were really excited about that. We saw 5% ARR growth in 23. And then we exposed a new metric called software ARR. And software ARR, so ARR, annual recurring revenue, is software and services. We still have a pretty big services business. inside of the business. The software business is growing a lot faster than services in that space. So when you look at software-only ARR, we saw 9% growth in 23. So that's what gives us the confidence in the software and services growth overall is seeing those metrics play out because that's the ARR. We'll see that continue to grow into 24 at very similar rates. So we're excited about the ARR growth overall.

Perfect. So that's kind of a great introduction. everything. Maybe if we go back to December quarter earnings, obviously relatively recent for you guys. You noted, I wrote down three things here, strong traction with platform sites, some of your KPIs, and then competitive deal wins. Can you maybe just talk us through some of the highlights from the quarter that you'd want to emphasize?

Yeah, I think the platform site growth is encouraging. So you look at across, I won't go into the exact numbers, but it's approaching 30,000 in restaurants and approaching 30,000 in retail in terms of the number of sites that we have connected to the platform. It was north of 60% growth in retail and about 8% growth in restaurants. And what's exciting about that is that is really, when we connect you to the platform, it gives us, one, we get an uplift immediately in terms of the recurring revenue stream. And the second piece of that is we get the recommitment from that client that they're our customer and they're recommitting to our platform as their go-forward path. And then it creates the jump-off point for cross-sell and up-sell. And that's where we're seeing the growth. That's what's driving that software ARR growth is all that connection to the platform. The other piece is over the past couple years, we've doubled the number of payment sites. While that's still a small part of our business, it's going to be critical for us. And we're still going to continue to focus on how do we get more payments growth, both in that restaurant space, the mid-market space, the mid-market side of restaurant, the mid-market side of retail, where we think we have the largest opportunity to take share, is we're going to focus on attaching payments or being a payments-led offering in that space. So that was an exciting part of that announcement. And then the wins, we are winning in the market. We talked about digital banking. I'll start there. We had 39 wins over all of 23. And when we look at those wins, it is undeniable that we're taking share in the market. So that is a crown jewel within the portfolio that we have inside of NCR Voyex. On both the restaurant side that when we have with Nautical Bowls speaks to the strategy we have around the mid-market, when you get a little more complex as an operator, our value increases. And it's really that full service, not just the tech itself, it's the ability to wrap services around it and offer that full offering. And Nautical Bowls was one that we had won. It was a competitive takeaway from one of the companies that is you know, is winning in the single site space, but, you know, struggles to get up into that mid-market space, as we described. That's, again, where we see a lot of value. And us winning in the mid-market space also creates a little bit wider moat around that enterprise business that we described where we're, you know, in restaurant and retail, we have over 300,000 sites that we support today in our install base. So we want to create a competitive moat around that. And retail, we want a competitive win, and we're expanding with existing clients. We talked about a major e-com player that in their physical stores is deploying our, self-checkout capabilities. So that's fun for us in terms of we still see self-checkout as a big driver, not just the appliance and piece of furniture itself, but it's really more about the software and services that go around that as we think about consumer choice and computer vision and mobile and RFID starting to win out in that space as well.