Good day. Welcome to the Integrated Research Limited Half Year 2023 Results Investor Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. For operational assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. Finally, I would like to advise all participants this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome John Ruthven, Chief Executive Officer, to begin the conference. John, over to you.
Thanks, Gavin. Good morning and welcome to the first half FY23 results briefing for Integrated Research. My name is John Ruthven, I'm the CEO of IR. With me today is Matthew Walton, our CFO. I'll open the presentation and hand to Matthew to take us through a detailed financial review. He will hand back to me to talk through strategy and key priorities for the balance of FY23. At the conclusion of the presentation, we will open the call for questions. This morning, we posted our results presentation to the ASX website, which we will be referring to during this call. You can also find a copy of it in the ASX announcements section on our website at ir.com. Moving to slide two.
Integrated Research or IR, as we're better known, is a global software company providing performance and experience management solutions for critical business systems. We have three product lines. Collaborate for unified communications and UCaaS or Unified Communications as a Service. Transact, which sits in the payment space and our Infrastructure product for Hewlett Packard Enterprise or HPE NonStop environments. Common to the customer use cases that we support are complexity, mission criticality, and scale. Now on slide three. IR is a company with deep domain expertise in two primary market segments, unified communications and payments. These are competitive environments. However, we are well-positioned to succeed. The world is evolving fast to meet the requirements of hybrid work environments, and IR is well-positioned to help businesses navigate this with our Collaborate suite of products.
Our products are specifically designed for troubleshooting complex collaboration technologies and can be easily customized to meet each organization's unique requirements. Our expertise in these domains provide our customers with the necessary insight to ensure users have an optimal experience. IR stands out from the competition with a solid ROI or return on investment, helping our customers avoid the cost and consequences of poor communication and collaboration experiences. In the cards and NonStop markets, our success has been built up over many years. This success has enabled IR to expand into adjacent payment sectors. With purpose-built solutions, we differentiate ourselves from competition. Key to this is our expertise in real-time data collection and analysis. Very few competitors match our combination of proven product, domain expertise, and outstanding customer service. On slide four. IR was founded more than 30 years ago.
We have over 600 customers across our global enterprise customer base, including more than 25% of the Fortune 500 companies. We serve customers in more than 60 countries through offices in the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Australia, via a global channel-driven distribution network. Our Transact solutions are used by large banks and payment processors to monitor over 600 million transactions per day. Whilst nearly 6 million users benefit from our Collaborate product line as it is deployed to manage the performance and user experience of mission-critical unified communications infrastructure. Slide five is the money shot for IR. Well-known global brands in key industries including technology, telecommunications, financial services, government, healthcare, higher education, retail, and industrial services. Our customer base is long-tenured on long-dated, non-cancelable contracts with mission-critical requirements. I'm on slide six. CEO key messages.
We've had a strong start to FY23, with sales measured as Total Contract Value or TCV up 22% on the same half in FY22. This result is underpinned by a solid renewals period driven by improved sales execution. As I reflect on the change in momentum in the business, it's important to understand that there will be a lag between the improvement in TCV and some key pro forma metrics. The weak performance in prior periods will take some time to wash through our pro forma numbers. A key indicator of customer confidence is contract term, and we saw average contract length bounce back to over four years from a low point of two and a half years in H1 FY22.
It's important to understand that customers will only commit to long-term contracts when they have confidence in the future and the strength of their partnership with IR. Key to our strategy are the structural market trends of remote working and cashless payments. These macro trends continue to drive growth across the Collaborate and Transact ecosystems. Our phase track strategy remains intact. Innovation, execution, and scale. We are deep in the execution phase, and this half we've benefited from more disciplined sales execution and investment in Generation 2 product innovation. Importantly, our balance sheet remains strong with no debt and an improving cash balance as at end of January. On slide seven, we summarize our statutory results. Company achieved profit after tax for the half of AUD 3.2 million. Statutory revenue for the period was AUD 38.4 million, up 19% on the prior year.
The stronger performance was a consequence of improved sales execution, a larger renewal book, and healthier external trading conditions. The company built sales momentum through the period with a strong finish to the second quarter. Pleasingly, the benefits of refreshed sales leadership are starting to show and the license renewable grew by 10% through price increases and term extensions. Cash receipts from customers totaled AUD 31.7 million, down 16% over the prior period. While the company continues to benefit from long-term based non-cancelable license contracts with a high quality customer base, the AUD 6 million reduction in cash receipts and AUD 3 million in cash at bank is a consequence of lower period sales in Q4 FY 2022 and significant sales towards the end of the current period for collection in the following half. Now on slide eight and switching to pro forma results.
The lead performance indicator, Total Contract Value or TCV, was AUD 38.9 for the half, up 22% on the prior corresponding period. We continue to report revenue on a pro forma subscription basis, which while a lag measure, we believe is more reflective of the long-term underlying performance of the business. Subscription revenues for the period were AUD 34.1 million, down 1% as a result of lower sales and lost clients from FY2022. The lag impact of clients lost in H2 FY2022 resulted in a 7% decline in ARR. Revenue from testing solutions and services contributed to the period-on-period decrease in total pro forma revenue as the half had a large renewal focus.
Our cash conversion rate for the half got to 83% as a result of the volume of sales and invoicing late in the half and the strong cash collection in H2 FY22. Before I hand over to Matthew to provide a more in-depth look at our financial performance, I would like to provide a progress update of sorts that is aligned to the key priorities that I outlined in last August's earning announcement and again at the AGM in November. Foundational to turning the business around is returning Europe and the Americas to growth. Pleasingly, Europe was up 19% PCP on a TCV basis, and the Americas steadied under new field leadership. Both regions had strong renewals half and APAC again outperformed. Capturing market momentum with new products is central to our innovation strategy.
We've invested significantly in our SaaS platform and are in the second phase of new product enhancement. We are behind plan in this regard. However, we are seeing good demand for hybrid solutions in our Collaborate portfolio, specifically for Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex. We've also achieved some early wins for our Transact real time and high-value products. A strong renewals half provides confidence in the enduring strength of our value proposition. Our Transact portfolio continues to have high customer retention. The Collaborate retention rate is still lower than we would like, but has steadied and is slowly building back. This dynamic is reflective of where customers are on their collaboration platform journey. With the ongoing move to UCaaS, think of Teams and Webex.
We previously shared that we made decisions several years ago to launch a new SaaS platform to support our customers as they moved workloads to newer environments. We placed a bet that hybrid is a critical phase of this. That is where customers run workloads that are both on-premises and cloud. We launched Generation 1 products quickly and are now in a co-invent phase where we are collaborating with customers on use cases and enhancements required. This is a critical phase in our innovation strategy. Our balance sheet remains strong and we are debt-free. There was no debt factoring in the period. We continue to focus on improving our cash position through strong operational performance and disciplined receivables management. I will now hand over to Matthew to take us through a detailed review of our financial performance.
Thanks, John. We're on slide 11. Slide 11 shows the linkage between Total Contract Value, statutory revenue, pro forma revenue, and annual recurring revenue. It's worth unpicking this for a moment. Total contract value or TCV, the black line, is the total value of a revenue-generating contract written in a period of performance. This includes software license and related maintenance, cloud testing, and consulting services revenue. TCV is a function of the term of the contract and the annual value of the contract. For example, client TCV can reduce significantly if the term is reduced, even though the annual value of the license subscription has increased. Statutory revenue, the red line, is revenue recognized per the accounting standard. This has strong upfront revenue recognition with less revenue recognized over the life of the contract. As a consequence, there is a strong alignment with TCV.
Performer subscription revenue, the middle purple bar, is the license and maintenance revenue from the contract spread over the life of the contract. It is non-statutory and unaudited view that we believe better represents the recurring nature of the contracted revenue streams. Pro forma revenue, the left gray bar, is pro forma subscription revenue, plus other non-recurring revenue streams, typically professional services and one-time through testing services. Recurring revenue, the blue bar on the right, is the annualized end of period subscription revenue and best represents the ongoing or recurring value in the revenue stream. This chart highlights that while there is more volatility in TCV and statutory revenue, there is more consistency in the revenue streams over time as represented by pro forma and annual recurring revenues.
Two key points to address in this slide are: one, the convergence of TCV and statutory revenue is driven by the shift to SaaS with less upfront revenue recognition. Two, the lag effect of pro forma or, and ARR and recurring revenue flowing from lead indicators of TCV and statutory revenue means the growth of pro forma and recurring revenue occurs as new clients and TCV is added to the renewal base, and the renewal base is extended through price increases. Slide 12 presents our TCV statutory revenue, performance subscription revenue, and annual recurring revenue by geographic region and by product set. This slide should be considered in conjunction with more detailed slides in the appendix. Points to highlight include: The Asia-Pacific chart clearly shows consistently strong pro forma and recurring revenue growth of 10% on a five-year CAGR.
The Asia-Pacific growth was across all products and new business and renewals. There's strong Collaborate renewal in the period, including a significant growth in contract term. New Transact sales will grow future pro forma revenue and ARR. New leadership in the Americas and Europe is driving license and TCV growth. We now turn to slide 13. This slide focuses on key metrics underpinning value, namely the level of recurring revenue, the contract length, and the proportion of new business to renewals in the period. Returning revenue is nominally increased as a proportion over the prior period. Normalizing for the same level of non-recurring revenue, such as testing and services revenue, has recurring revenue consistent at 84% of pro forma revenue.
Contract length has improved over the prior period, with the average length of contract written in the half increasing to 4.1 years, up from two and a half years in the prior corresponding period. Renewals dominated the half with AUD 25.3 million in TCV. Turning to slide 14 titled Operating Costs. IR has continued to manage costs tightly. While costs have increased 5% on the prior period, this is a result of inflationary pressures offset by managing the headcount. Natural attrition continued through the period as the market for technology staff was competitive. Pleasingly, IR was able to replace all critical roles quickly with high caliber candidates. Our innovation agenda continues as illustrated by the left-hand chart.
The jump in product and technology expenditure primarily reflects a lower level of capitalization and costs associated with the hybrid/cloud offer as we pursue a balanced and disciplined approach aligned to value drivers. Our sales and marketing spend pulled back during COVID with less travel and trade shows. This experience has reversed as customer face-to-face meetings and marketing events have returned. Consequently, while our headcount is lower than FY 22, this is offset by increased travel costs and upward pressure on remuneration. The company's general and administration expense increased with the lift in provision for doubtful debts and the costs incurred in retaining and recruiting staff in a competitive market. Turning to slide 15. Cash flow from operations shown on slide 15 was AUD 1 million for the period with a cash conversion rate of 83%.
The company experienced the flow and effect of cash collections from customers of low sales in the fourth quarter of FY22, together with strong sales late in the current period, which will be collected in future periods. The company's cash position has improved significantly since balance date, with a cash conversion rate of 93% in January and the cash balance increasing to over AUD 12 million by the end of January. Slide 16. While the company had statutory EBITDA of AUD 8.5 Million, only AUD 1 million of cash was generated from operations. The primary drivers of this difference are historic debtor factoring of AUD 2.5 million and working capital of AUD 3.9 million in the form of trade receivables as sales late in the period await client payments.
We should note the company is not factoring any receivables and the current factoring runs out in December 2023. Slide 17, the balance sheet. This shows a 4% improvement in net assets and a 4% improvement in tangible assets. The decrease in cash is more than offset by the lift in receivables from sales at the end of the period. Receivables remain a strong source of cash flow in current and future periods. The company remains debt-free. I'll now pass back to John.
Thank you, Matthew. Moving to strategy. I'm on slide 19. Our strategy remains focused on three core product lines: Collaborate, Transact, and Infrastructure. The core pillars to this strategy are leverage the structural market changes of remote and hybrid working and cashless payments. To support our customers in their evolving journey as they transition from on-premises through hybrid and cloud. Leverage our existing customer base and market position to move into adjacent and higher value segments. Continue to build long-term recurring revenues as we transition the business model away from upfront revenue recognition. Leverage success in key verticals like healthcare, higher education, law enforcement, managed service providers, and large banks and payment processors. Slide 20 details our multi-year phased transition, innovation, execution and scale. The innovation phase kicked off with the launch of our SaaS platform as the foundation for a range of new products.
This innovation is ongoing. The launch of new and enhanced products will continue to meet current and emerging customer use cases. We are deep in the execution phase, and while it's taking longer than we anticipated, we are confident that our go-to-market strategy is right and the return to face-to-face engagement, including trade shows, will assist our demand generation. We're also now engaging more closely with our customers and partners to evolve our first-generation products with enhanced use cases and accelerated time to market. As we transition to scale in the future, we'll move our focus and reporting to subscription-type metrics to better inform the underlying performance of the business. We will also leverage our success in key verticals like healthcare, higher education, financial services, to drive our product and innovation agenda. On slide 21, we now look at some customer wins from the prior period.
Through the first half, we closed around 200 individual transactions, large and small. The largest deal closed was just shy of AUD 5 million, measured as TCV. Approximately half of our TCV in the period came from seven-figure deals. With our high-quality enterprise customer base, renewals and new business are critical to our growth. We were pleased that our renewal yield was up around 10%, providing a solid foundation on which to grow. A significant portion of our business was concluded in November and December, and with large enterprise customers, it takes time to get their approval to use their name and logo. That said, it is important that we provide some color on the type of customer wins that we achieved in the half. We won a new commercial banking customer in Africa through our long-standing partnership with ACI.
Leveraging a strong inside supporter who'd used our products at another bank, we were able to conclude a contract close to $1 million to help this customer monitor their card payments and ATMs while they were going through a merger. In the U.K., we renewed and expanded the current agreement with a large financial institution who's been a customer of ours since 2015 in a deal worth close to AUD 4 million. They operate in over 40 countries and have a complex environment of merchant acquirers. We provide real-time monitoring of transactions of their customers. Moving to slide 22 in our Collaborate product portfolio. Our largest deal of the half was a new customer win with LANcom in Taiwan, a major service provider in this market. The contract is for 120,000 users supporting their Cisco on-premises customers.
Our solution is critical to their operations teams monitoring their customer environments. At a nuts and bolts level, this is alerting and troubleshooting issues to ensure that they meet their service levels with their customers. This win also sets apart the foundation for a follow-on opportunity to support their MS Teams or Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex customers. Proving out the longevity of Cisco on-premises, we closed a three-year renewal in the U.S. for a 32,000 user environment with a not-for-profit healthcare provider. Our solution provides end-to-end monitoring for operations teams across their core unified communications, rooms, and contact center environments. We provide a critical set of tools to help them deliver a better patient experience. As Matthew referenced earlier, slide 23 highlights that our innovation agenda remains firm.
Across the last two years, we've enhanced our cloud platform and brought new solutions to market for both Collaborate and Transact. We've continued our investment in our on-premises solutions. The combination of all these investments has facilitated the capability to serve on-premises, hybrid and pure cloud environments. This means we can flex with the market and respond to new and emerging use cases. Moving to slide 24. Innovation continued in our Transact product line as Generation 2 product comes to market. In close collaboration with our customers, their inputs and business needs are driving our product roadmap priority and decisions. Two central themes stand out. First, product enhancements for existing customers that ensure strong renewals and increased usage. Simpler integration and user interface improvements are key. Second, new capabilities focused on providing greater data insights and value-added services.
This is evidenced across all three payment product segments and builds upon a well-established monitoring and troubleshooting capability. This approach to innovation has good momentum with 18 renewals and three new customer wins in the last year. We're also gaining traction with new product into targeted global markets. These markets have solid growth projections using a combination of direct and indirect sales channels. This is evidenced through a growing presence in the Middle East, with multiple countries now on the cusp of deploying real-time payment schemes and multiple banks in the U.S. who are just completing long-running SWIFT related projects and are now looking to deploy new high-value related services. On slide 25. The unified communications and contact center markets continue to undergo significant change in both the vendor landscape and solution delivery models.
The vendors we've traditionally supported are traditionally transitioning their solutions to cloud technologies as demand increases among their larger customers. As they adopt our solutions to provide both migration and service assurance for these newer technologies, we are engaging them to refine our solutions to support their hybrid technology investments. We now have customers adding cloud technologies to large on-premises environments and others moving to newer cloud-native solutions and creating a need for solutions like ours. Reducing mean time to repair is a major customer benefit of Collaborate. Significant effort went into capturing ways customers were using the newer solutions and streamlining access to the data needed to identify and resolve user-reported issues. Large enterprises and service providers often use ServiceNow to provide service desk functionality, and we continue to evolve that cloud integration with our early adopters.
Our contact center customers have been exploring moves to Genesys Cloud, we are working closely with a large customer to provide a hybrid solution that meets their initial set of needs and that can be built out further as adoption grows. At the same time, we're broadening the support of vendors of our newer capabilities to drive adoption with our service provider customer base. Ribbon SBC or session border controllers support is coming out soon and will continue to evolve as the service providers gain traction with that solution to Microsoft Teams direct routing. Moving to the final slide 27. We have a clear and consistent set of priorities as we work hard to return the business to growth. Firstly, we're pleased with this first half results in Europe and the Americas.
Our field leadership changes have delivered an improved field discipline, renewal yield, and new business pipeline. We are confident that this improved cadence will continue in the second half and beyond. Second, the first half was underwritten by strong renewals. At the same time, we built a growing pipeline of new business opportunities. In the second half, we're focused on converting this pipeline and achieving a greater TCV contribution from our new products. Third, in the first half, renewal yield was good. As was customer retention in our Transact and Infrastructure pipelines. The increase in contract length to over four years was also a positive. In the second half, we are focused on understanding the customer dynamics in our Collaborate portfolio to maximize retention. We have a solid renewal book for our Collaborate customers this half.
Fourth, leveraging the significant investment in innovation and new products over the last couple of years, we're now collaborating with customers and prospects to refine and extend the value proposition of our products. We've moved product and engineering closer to the field and redefined our development priorities to support this. Last, our balance sheet remains solid, and our cash position is strengthening. We will continue to focus on improving the company's working capital position to fund innovation and growth. We do not provide specific guidance or specific future guidance. However, the transition of our business is gaining momentum. Operator, that concludes the presentation, and we can now open it up for questions.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. That is star one to ask a question. We'll pause for a moment just to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Chris Savage of Bell Potter Securities. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good day, John. Good day, Matt.
Hi, Chris. How are you?
All right. Thank you. Just wanted to get some more color on the renewal pipeline for H2. I just picked up in your comments late then that the renewal pipeline in Collaborate sounds strong in H2. Can we get an idea in Transact and Infrastructure as well, please?
Consistent with what we referenced, I think in both the August earnings and at the AGM, H1, we benefited from a strong renewals book of business. The second half is less than the first half, but it's still a good solid foundation for our half. I only call out Collaborate on the basis that we're addressing the retention issues there. With a solid Collaborate portion of that renewal base, we're confident that we'll start to see that retention come back.
Okay. In that August release or announcement, I went back and had a look at it, and it said, it said there that the renewals were weighted to the second half this year. Did that change in the last few months?
No, I don't believe. I think we've specifically maybe we'd messaged at the AGM. Certainly we look at our renewal base just in terms of when contracts naturally fall due. The weighting of the contracts was always slightly heavier to the first half.
Okay. You mentioned Microsoft and Cisco a lot in Collaborate. Where's Avaya these days? Have they just sort of dropped off the cliff, or are they still alive and kicking?
We can I mean, you would've seen press yesterday that they filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S.
Yeah.
We continue to do business with them. In certain markets they are still quite a prominent provider. We have, I think, a limited exposure, but Matthew can also provide a little bit more color there.
Yeah. It's fairly like run rate, Chris. Our exposure in book receivables would be the AUD 21. 2 million. That's across the U.S., the Americas and the rest of the world. We're pursuing the path as we did two years ago for critical vendor status. That path, when we went down it two years ago ensured that we got full payment.
That kinda leads nicely into my last question, just the increase in provision for doubtful debt. Is that related to Avaya?
No. It's generally looking over the aged receivables, particularly those over 90 days. You know, we operate in a range of different markets, and there's different collection processes within that. We've just worked through a prudent approach to look at recovery and while we still pursue recovery of those amounts owing to us.
Okay. Great. Thanks very much.
Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. It is star one to ask a question. Your next question comes from the line of Stella Wang, Private Investor. Your line is open.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. The question is around the previous two years with the major customers taking time formulating their true cloud strategy. Once they moved into hybrid mode, they normally chose a vendor native tools to start with when evaluating important monitoring tools like yours. Where do you see them now in that process? I just take notice of the key renewals case you mentioned in the presentation. They seem to be more still on-premises clients. Have you seen any clients that's already gone on hybrid and previously moved on to vendor native tools now actually choosing more sophisticated tools like yours? If they do that, have they chosen yours or your competitors?
It's a good question, and it sounds like you understand the dynamic quite well. What we've been seeing in the pandemic was that customers, because of the overnight requirement to literally support their employee base in a remote working scenario, they had to scramble very quickly to ensure that their business continuity plan worked. Large enterprises, which, you know, I think you might be aware that, you know, our customer base in Collaborate, the average number of users per customer is well over 25,000. We tend to be at the larger end. These customers have generally made pretty significant investments in their collaboration infrastructure. They are generally slow to make decisions around how quickly they'll move away from that.
What we are experiencing is that a number of our on-premise customers will now add hybrid. A customer that might be a large Cisco customer on premises, they will add Microsoft Teams, and in that scenario, they may use the vendor tools for some use cases. In these large, complex environments for multinationals, they generally need a much more sophisticated tool like ours. They would then add Microsoft Teams to that environment. Similar to the improvements we've seen in contract length, we've also seen customers becoming clearer in terms of what their strategy is for the next three to five years.
Whilst you can speculate on how long on-premises is around, et cetera, the customer confidence that we're experiencing by them contracting with us would confirm that it's here for quite a long time to come.
If we look further for IR, when and how should we assess your product development roadmap securing your future of growth along there, more on cloud path?
Our strategy has been by launching the new SaaS platform a few years ago, was that we could support large enterprise customers on their journey, whether they remained significantly on-premises, whether they went pure cloud or more likely, that they went hybrid, which means that they run workloads in the collaboration space in both environments. We believe that our strategic direction is very well aligned to the journey that large enterprise customers are moving on.
Thanks for that. I guess we'll just look out for the new business signing, trend, on that front. Is that about right?
In terms of new business wins?
Yeah, in terms of new businesses, mostly for their hybrid or on cloud use cases. Is that right?
On that-
In relation to real time.
Yeah, no. Well, in Collaborate, we're winning net new customers on-premises. We're winning net new customers in hybrid. I think, you know, we can certainly and we flagged it in our commentary, we certainly would have liked to have done more new business in the first half. It was a very strong renewals half. Certainly I think your point of, you know, looking at our new business performance is a good way to think about the success of our technology investments.
Great. Just last question, please. When you talk about SaaS revenue, is it also signed on multi-year terms like your, you know, when you talk about four-year average signing, that's including the hybrid SaaS revenue. Is that right?
Yes, it is.
Great. Thanks for that.
The total contract.
Oh. Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Cooper, Shareholder. Your line is open.
Good morning, John. Peter Cooper from Sydney Invest in Melbourne. Just a quick question on the Americas. It looks like the ship's been steady there. What other tools or programs are you planning to implement to continue to drive the improvement in the U.S. business over the next sort of six- 12 months?
Yeah. We're certainly to your word, we, you know, we think the first half demonstrated that we've steadied the ship, so to speak. There's nothing, you know, particularly sophisticated about the work ahead. It's belts and braces, good disciplined selling. That starts with leadership. We're pleased with the leadership changes we've made there, driving a very strong focus around disciplined sales execution, pipeline management. What's already in place, and I think we'll continue to benefit from over the next six- 12 months, is making sure that we've got the right salespeople in place. That they are trained and enabled, and that they're focused on the right things in terms of how they manage customer and prospect relationships.
you know, I think what we've established in H1 is now a case that we just need to drive that through and ensure that we consistently execute.
Okay. That's great. John, just to follow up on that. Two-part question. In the U.S., what's the competitive environment like for your products? Secondly, are you able to get through price increases to cover your increase in costs?
We put a 7.5% price increase into the market for both, or for all of our product lines. I guess a proofing point from the first half was that our renewal book, we were able to get a 10% improvement. That's a combination of the new pricing washing through and I think more disciplined sales execution at the time of renewal. From a competitive standpoint, I don't think the U.S. is any more or less competitive than the other markets that we participate in. The competitive set tends to be the same globally. You know, we've often said that our competitive environment, you've got essentially three types of competitor.
You've got the vendor tools, you've got some small, point solution, direct competitors. Then you've got, you know, large companies where our domain expertise is probably what differentiates us there. That they'll be a generic large player, whereas we're very focused on the Payments, Collaborate and Infrastructure domains that we're in.
Okay. Thanks very much, John, and good luck for the second half.
Thanks, Pete.
Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. There are no further questions at this time, I'd like to hand the call back to our presenters.
Thank you all for joining our first half earnings release today. We're obviously pleased with what we've achieved in the first half and very focused on what needs to be done to continue the momentum in the first half. For those individual investors that we're meeting with in the next few days, we look forward to extending the conversation. Thank you for joining.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank You for participating. You may now disconnect.