Hello, everyone, and welcome to our analyst and investor track here at Interactions 2019. My name is Marty Cohen, and I'm Head of Investor Relations at NICE. Also with me today is my IR colleague, Iskar Rez. Also joining us is, we have Chairman of the Board here, David Kostman, and also another member of our board, Joe Cowan is here as well. Let me take you briefly through the agenda for the rest of the day, and then we can begin. For the investor track, we'll hear presentations from different members of our senior management team, and then we'll end the session with a panel discussion where you'll have a chance to ask questions. We ask just to hold all your questions until the Q&A session at the end.
We'll hear presentations from Barak, our CEO, Craig Costigan, our CEO of our Financial Crime and Compliance Business, and Beth Gaspich, our CFO. We'll take a quick 15-minute break after that, then we're gonna come back here, we're gonna have lunch in this room, and then we're gonna hear a presentation from Eric Burton, who is the Vice President, Tools, Technology, and Quality at Comcast. After Eric's presentation, we've arranged for you a private tour of the demo showcase, so we've lined up a few solutions for you to see. Following the tour, we're going to come back again into this room, into a breakout session, and we're gonna hear presentations on RPA, IFM-X, and which is our new fraud management solution, and predictive behavioral routing, or as you know it as PBR.
Finally, I just want to let you know that all numbers in the presentations except cash flow are non-GAAP and exclude security. The 2018 data are presented under ASC 606, while all the other years are presented under ASC 605. With that, I'll now invite Barak up to the front.
Thank you, Marty. Hi, everyone. Good to see you all here in Vegas. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed the opening session, the general session we had in the last couple of hours. As you saw, we had a full room and we have a record attendance both in terms of attendees, but also actually in terms of sponsorship. We had to shut down registrations of new sponsors as of two weeks ago because we had a record number, and I think it speaks a lot to some of the changes the company NICE has been going through in terms of opening up and building an ecosystem. I'll talk about that in just a few minutes.
I'll try not to be repetitive to what you've seen this morning, so I'll talk a bit about the broader aspect and the vision moving forward. I covered a lot on the customer engagement side. I will cover that again, but also, of course, the financial crime and compliance business. Before I talk about the next few years and what's the plan moving forward, I think it's important just for a second to reflect what is our kind of renewed starting point as we stand today, what we refer to as five years into our journey. Now we are looking five years into the future and trying to envision what's the next step for the company and share with you what's our plan.
There are many ways to look on the past five years, and this is not a history lesson. Many of you have been our investors for those five years and, way more than that. Of course, the analysts here are covering us, many of them for more than that. As I said, there are many ways to cover the different transformations the last few years, but another way to look at it is about kind of the two big things we've done in those couple of years. The first few years, the first couple of years, were about transforming the company into a true enterprise software company. You've all been, you're all very familiar with what we've done, starting from the divestiture for defense business and all the way to the way that we operate as a company.
Of course, it had a positive impact on our financials and how we look as a company, both operationally, financially, and our overall story as a company. The following two to three years actually were dedicated to what we define as building scale in two pillars that we highlighted throughout those years, cloud and analytics. You'll see some numbers to all of a sudden see the difference between 2014 and 2018. You can see that we actually dramatically built scale in those both areas, both cloud and analytics, to the point that it is giving us a great starting point or a great renewed starting point to what we believe is a very exciting future for the company.
Another way to look on the difference in the company between 14 and 18, Beth will actually show you some numbers, which I think are impressive. Are also the NICE of today, the NICE that we kicked off 2019 with, is actually very different from the NICE we were five years ago. To name a few of those changes, back in 14, we were a company of a mix of product and projects company. Today, I think with no doubt, our model, the way we operate, is of an enterprise software company. We used to have kind of a suite of solutions.
You'll hear me talk a lot about, and you heard me in the last few earnings talk about the platform strategy of the company, or actually the two platforms that we have, and I'll refer to that in just a second. That's a dramatic shift. It's not just a marketing spin or anything like that. It changes the company completely from the way we think on our products, we develop, we partner, and so on and so forth. We've been playing in the past primarily in the WFO business when it comes to the customer engagement business. Today, no doubt, we are disrupting the infrastructure of the contact center technology. You saw, those of you who attended Interactions several years back and attended today, you just saw the MoneyGram presentation.
One of the things he didn't mention is actually, one of more and more customers that are using the entire stack of technologies of NICE. They're also an Actimize user. He related to AML and to fraud. Back in 2014, although we were a leader in analytics, we were not the leader or we didn't have the scale in analytics. Through both organic and inorganic moves in those few years, we have today a very significant scale when it comes to analytics. Back in 2014, the market of CCaaS, I believe, was at its early stages. Today the adoption level is going upmarket in a very rapid pace, we believe that we are the leader or leading that emergence of CCaaS. We were predominantly an on-premise player. You'll see numbers later on.
Cloud was almost a non-material part of our revenue back then, and we concluded 2018 with above 30% of our business in the cloud and growing in a rapid pace. I think that's. The next one is kind of the most important thing, the difference the different company between 2014 and today. This is that we were a leader in our markets, but the markets we played in in 2014 did not allow us to grow as a company and were not enough to satisfy our growth in the future. The biggest change is that today we play in much larger TAMs, you'll see numbers in a second, and those are growing TAMs.
Meaning that our mission statement changed from let's look for new TAMs into let's execute well and lead the market in the existing TAMs that we have. I've been with NICE for many years, and my expertise up until a few years ago, and as well as many of my colleagues, were to go and do what we call elephant hunting or catering to the Fortune 1,000. We have learned a lot from the acquisition of inContact, and today we play in all segments of the market. You heard some numbers. You don't land new, completely new 500 brands or logos in a year just by playing at the high end of the market, and that's the most obvious evidence. You need a well-oiled machine in order to do that, and we play today in all segments of the market. Also, the audience.
You know, you saw in the room today, there are representative of all the large banks, all the large telcos, all the large insurance, as well as people who have very exciting businesses, but SMB businesses with contact center of 50 and 75 and 100 and 200 seats. Obviously, our margins. Historically, I remember us talking about getting closer to the 20% many years back, and we today have what we define as enterprise software margins. We believe further room for improvement. We are above the 25%, and we're doing that and improving the margins while adding cloud business to the company. We are primarily a direct business. This is not just a mode of operation for sales. It's a philosophy as a company.
It's a mindset of a company. Today we balance, I believe, much better in a much better way between direct and indirect. It was rarely the case for me, for example, back in 2014 to meet partners. I was mainly with customers. Today I can say it's definitely 50/50. I spend a lot of time, as well as the other executives, building our ecosystem. These are the changes. As you can see, it's in multiple dimensions. Now let's talk about the next five years. In the way that we operate in the company and my personal philosophy, it's not just about describing the journey, it's about what is it? What is five years from now? We can talk about three years from now, 10 years from now, let's pick three years from now.
We are constantly trying to evaluate how our markets, what's gonna be our market? What are the key dynamics in our markets when it comes to three years from now, 2024? I'll speak separately on the two markets, but you're going to see some interesting similarities. On the customer engagement space, we believe that if I can describe in a few words what customer engagement will be in 2024, and we see some evidence of that already happening. It's gonna be much more proactive. You heard some of this from Amadeus today, et cetera, but this is really just the beginning. All our customers wanna move to be much more proactive ahead of the curve. Fueled by omnipresent analytics and AI. I think you've heard it from us today.
It's about injecting so much of this analytics and AI into such a dated type of processes, all in the cloud. It really doesn't matter if at that point it will be 40% still on-premise or 30%, et cetera. It is moving to the cloud. It is happening. It's just a matter of how fast some of those enterprises will adopt it. Human-robotics duo. You've seen some of that already today. It's just the beginning. It's really just the beginning. It's about getting the strength of each one of those, either humans and robots, and put them into the mix together with a lot of sophistication and effortless from the consumer side, from the enterprise side, and, and vice versa. Switching into financial crime and compliance. You see that there are certain things over here that are different, but there are some similarities.
In order not to repeat on the analytics and AI and the cloud and the human and robotics, I'll cover the other, actually, you know, the other three. I'll start with the autonomous. If you look on what happened in financial crime and compliance, that market in the last few years, you can see a few things. First of all, for the last 10 years, there is an injection since 2008 of massive manpower into dealing with compliance, fraud, and so on and so forth. This manpower still exists with the large banks, and there is no easier way to say it. They just need to get rid of this manpower in order to improve their financial. The only way to do it is by automation. This automation go to the word autonomous, which Craig will talk about.
The other part is becoming much more predictive than reactive. It's kind of the other way to talk about proactive, much more predictive about both AML and fraud. We believe that the way that the thing operated so far will no longer be acceptable five years from now. The definition of who requires to be as part of this industry or market of what is financial services, this definition keep going and growing for us. You heard us talking in the last two years about alternative currencies. You heard us talking about gaming, MoneyGram, and alike, the MSBs. We starting to see different fintech. Crypto in the last few quarters, you see that we have a lot of wins in this market as well.
We believe that we'll have much more space due to money movement and investment going from the classic traditional financial services into less classic or less traditional financial services. In the cloud, you'll hear Craig talks about, he will talk about that. We see similar trends, but not exactly the same trends. There are different type of adoptions, and we have a different type of upside, which I'll talk about as this market starting to shift into the cloud. I've talked a bit about that. Let's talk about numbers. The customer engagement today for us, the market, the TAM, is $7 billion, and we believe that it will grow into $12 billion in five years.
That's compared to roughly about $2 billion-$2.5 billion before we stepped into the broader stack of technologies when it comes to customer engagement. This is why we believe that there are a ton of upside for us in this market. Financial crime and compliance, for all the reasons that I have described, is also growing. It's a healthy market for us at a $2 billion, and we believe it can double itself to $10 billion five years from today. Given all of that, and we believe that the markets we play in are healthy, and they're gonna be even healthier five years from now. We've done a lot of transformations for the company in the last two years.
We ask ourselves, do we have the right assets in order to be the leaders in the market where we operate in? In a non-objective way, I will say that we believe that we have all of those assets, and we are well-positioned. We're constantly, of course, monitoring are we missing a certain piece, either in the technology, the go-to-market, and so on and so forth. If you look on the four aspects over here, from completeness of offering, I think that what you've seen earlier today, and we heard it yesterday from the market analyst that saw this completeness, this is the most complete contact center and customer engagement offering I've seen, and it's fully connected.
It's part of our strategy, both of the organic development that we've done the last years, but also the different acquisitions that we have done and how they're well connected. We acquired Mattersight just end of Q3 last year, and you already saw it fully integrated into CXone. That was exactly the strategy about Mattersight. It was less about what they have been doing as a company from a go-to market. It's about putting all of those assets into CXone, and we see much more of that coming. We believe that we have the most complete offering, and we'll continue to extend that. We believe that we have a good market coverage, specifically in Americas, and we have a lot of opportunities outside of the Americas.
Market coverage is not just from geographical perspective, it's also from segments perspective, and I'll talk about that in a second. We have an amazing asset, which is our customer base, which is a very engaged customer base. We see it even in this event, the amount of customers who are joining us in this event every year. We have all the different teams in the company to make sure that we are constantly engaged with these customers. Of course, we always like new logos, and we'll go after competitive displacements, and in general, new logos. This customer base has been proven to be a great source of potential upside, upsell and cross-sell for us as a company.
Lastly, which I think was a missing piece for us in the past and is starting to have a significant, positive impact on us, it's ecosystem. It's not just on the reselling side and the go-to-market. It's also about how many technology partners we have as we become a platform of our markets, and we can offer our customers not just our platform, but also the ability to connect to multiple point solutions. It's also, by the way, allowing us to have a very good assessment of what's the best asset out there to acquire potentially in the future. Because in many cases, we'll see those partners, technology partners, going through our platform, and we see much more than the slide where whether they are successful or not and what's getting traction and what's not. This is our strategy.
It's not new for this forum. I believe we talked about it in the past. We basically standardized. We've built two platforms. CXone launched about two years ago, and X-Sight, which is relatively new, but it's following the leads, and there are shared technologies between them and shared expertise. We don't need to go through all the heavy lifting we've done with CXone. Some of it is already fully baked and ready or was already fully baked and ready for X-Sight. There are common things between them. There are some separation between them, but true native open cloud platform, brand new. We don't reuse, or we don't It's not a lift and shift, or it's not hosted. These are not stories. This is brand-new, true native open cloud platform.
Injected with analytics and AI at scale, and that last sentence that I added, at scale, is ultra-important, because many can demonstrate different things, but if you do it at scale and complexity at scale, that's the important thing. Covering all market segments, and that's the beauty in the way that it's architected. It's the same solutions we can offer to the largest enterprises out there and the smallest one out there. Not all of them will take everything, and we have different packages, but it is the same platform. We don't need to split our development efforts. Large and growing ecosystem I talked about, and also these platform are great in terms of both the future organic development, but also in the ability to digest other and tack in technologies into the platform.
Mattersight, as I said, is a great example of that. Let's talk about some of the growth opportunities for each one of those segments, for each one of those platforms. I think what you'll see over here is that our multiple growth opportunities, we plan and we are executing on all of them. If all of them happen, that's phenomenal. Even if just some of them we manage to execute well, this is still tremendous opportunity. Starting with CXone, obviously going up-market. When we decided to step into the CX market, I personally, now I can say I was wrong with one thing, probably multiple things, about the pace of how fast I thought enterprises will adopt it.
Actually, it's going faster than I thought, which is a big plus for us because we are ready to any size of a contact center, and we see it growing tremendously. We see the adoption. I think the question is, there is no longer a question of going to the cloud, it's just about how fast those enterprises will move, but it is happening as we speak. On the opposite side of it, as I said, we have learned a lot from the go-to market of inContact, and we see today all of our WFO and analytics offering actually going down markets. They were predominantly available for the high end of the market, but in the way that we've designed CXone, we now see a very high attachment rate in taking the WFO kind of down market.
By the way, down market is a very exciting opportunity. It may sound kind of, I don't know, sound not exciting. It's very exciting in terms of size the minute you manage to do it at scale and in a very repetitive way. Both due to our own execution, as well as the fact that we acquired companies that decided to be very focused on first dominating the U.S., we are almost in 80% of our revenue, 70, 80, if I'm not mistaken, in Americas. We have great opportunities, which we have started, and we will continue to execute, going to Europe, EMEA, Asia-Pacific and other geographies. That's a tremendous opportunity for us. We see it happening. We talk about it a lot. We talked about it, I think, in the past eight or nine quarters.
Every quarter, it's about a number of competitive displacements. It's a combination of few things. It's legacy players in this market that just don't have the right cloud solution. Personally, I don't believe they will have the right cloud solutions because they didn't invest in the right level of R&D for years, and it's too late to catch up. The other type are players that do not have the complete offering. We have numerous examples that we talked about customers that come to us, decide to take our full suite or full platform, and as a result of that, multiple point solutions are being dropped from, of course, from other vendors. We are going digital big time as a company, NICE, and we're very proud in this roots, in our roots and heritage.
We came from the voice channel. Everything we've done in the voice, and voice is the most complex channels to navigate and to maneuver, is actually going digital. We have today more and more customers that's going full omni-channel. It's not just about adding yet another channel, whether it's a chat or something else. It's about how you orchestrate all of them together. A great benefit that we have is that if you know how to do it in the voice, you'll know how to do it in digital in a much better way. If you come from digital, good luck mastering voice. We're very happy with that, and we believe there is great opportunity over here. Lastly, it is analytics, AI, and automation everywhere. There's no better way to describe it. We see the savviness from our customers.
I've talked last night in the reception party about some customers, and they all talk about it. They are using it. They're looking for use cases. You saw some of those use cases today, for example, from both Macy's and MoneyGram talked about their desire now to go that direction as well. These are, as you can see, six different growth opportunities, and it's not even the complete list. Switching into X-Sight or financial crime and compliance market, let's talk about the opportunities over there. We are starting to see, and let's just understand where we are in this market. In this market, if in the customer engagement market, we operated in the high end of the market, I would say that historically, in financial crime compliance, up until now, we operated in tier zero of the market.
There are tons of still sizable financial services that we haven't even touched, given the way our product was designed and the way we took them to the market. The first one is cloud is starting to go up market in this segment, and we're starting to meet those cloud opportunities, and we are starting to take those cloud opportunities, and we talked about it in the last few earning calls. The second one, which is very exciting for Actimize, and this is doing exactly that, going from what I call Tier 0, Tier 1, further down market. There are at least 2 to 3 tiers in the market that are very, very healthy for our offering with the cloud or without the cloud, but differently cloud allow us to do it in a much more efficient way.
Just to give you the perspective, today, we rarely operate historically, we rarely operated in assets or financial services that have assets between $20 billion-$40 billion. We have those customers, this is not, was not a very, this was not a market we targeted. Today, we are targeting this market, we are starting to gain wins in this market, these are very substantial deals for us. Similarly to what we talked about CXone we have presence outside of the U.S., we have great growth opportunities from geographic expansion perspective. Adjacent markets, the technology that we have and the purpose that we have with Actimize allows us to go in many different directions and to go to other adjacencies.
There are the obvious adjacencies that I talked about, which are tackling classic AML, classic fraud, classic compliance scenarios. There are also further remote one. We're doing it in a very thoughtful way, not to lose our focus. The opportunity is significant when you go outside of the classic financial services market. Everything you've seen with automation, robotics, NEVA, is 100% applicable to financial crime and compliance. We've started to market this technology with certain packaging into those environments. This funny video that you've seen of a copy-paste thing, you go to an AML environment to a compliance team that is trying to fight fraud or trying to fight whatever, they have those 15 application they need to navigate through. We can actually take different processes and completely automate them with our robotics process automation.
We see a data consolidation that is helping us and more and more data, and I think that's great for us. We are starting to monetize on this data. Not to reveal too much, I'll tell you that this is an area where we believe that we'll have more investment, good investment that will yield very, very good ROI. Connected to that is the consortium analytics. We launched ActimizeWatch about two years ago. ActimizeWatch is actually us helping the financial service community to join forces on something that is not a competitive differentiator of them. Instead of each and every one of them fighting fraud, for example, separately, it's about them contributing to this consortium, and as a result of that, enjoying a very fast tuning and updates to their models.
When a fraudster, just as an example of one use case, is hitting one bank, obviously, those fraudster, they don't aim at a bank, they aim at the banks. Right now, the banks are dealing with that separately, and it might sound surprise, it takes them up to six months, between three to six months, from the point they actually understand that they have a fraud scenario to the point they update their models. With what we have over here, we can do it in 24 hours. From the minute we detect it with one bank, and all the subscribers enjoy that automatically on the spot. The last two years, we had significant amount of subscription to that, and we believe that there will be great value as we enlarge the community.
As you can see, similarly to CXone, tremendous list of opportunities, growth opportunities for X-Sight as well. I know. To just to summarize, and you'll hear more from the team later on, and we'll have Q&A. If I need to kind of describe what's the next five years, it's about those four pillars. It's about gaining leadership in cloud, gaining leadership in analytics, in digital, and in AI and automation. I'll skip, with your permission, on this. If you can get me to the last slide because Marty gave me the face. Now, how do I go back? Yeah. You'll hear more about it from Beth. Obviously, at the end of the day, we are here to serve our also shareholders, not just our customers and employees.
It has, this strategic plan has implication, we showed in the last earnings calls about kind of a vector of where we believe that plan will lead us. In five years, we believe that we'll be way above the $2 billion mark in terms of revenue. We believe that the right place for us in five years to be with cloud and everything is at operating margin of roughly 30%. Cloud revenue at that point will be way above half of our revenue. With that, I'll hand it over to Craig to discuss more of our financial crime and compliance.
Thanks, Barak. Okay. Well, good morning. My name is Craig Costigan. I joined the company five short months ago as the CEO of Actimize. No worries, I've spent the last 20 years in fintech banking and software, managing risk and compliance and capital markets business, serving the exact same market globally. Secondly, I'm delighted to be part of the Actimize team. Having said that, I'm gonna take 15- 20 minutes and talk really about four different areas. One is the markets that we serve. Two is the solutions and services that we're providing and the benefits to our clients. One are the trends. Barak spoke about some of the use of the sophisticated technology such as AI, machine learning, and robotics, which we're embedding in our core solutions.
Lastly, I'll take a few minutes to summarize about some of our key focus areas and how we're executing our growth plan from 2018 and going forward for the next five years. To kick off, let me also do a look back. If we look back to 2014, Actimize focused primarily on the upper large tier one banks, right? Globally. Secondly, we focused on financial institutions, right? It was our primary target market. Third, our delivery model was on-prem, right? An installed on-prem software solution. It was what we would call human-led. Our large institutions were using our applications in AML, in fraud, and compliance, but many of the tasks were manual. Our transaction or our solutions were geared toward individual transactions. We also had what I would call quite a specific or limited total addressable market. Now let's fast-forward.
Here we are in 2018. We're going to continue to focus on the tier one and top banks, but we're moving to the mid and down market. Number two, we're pursuing adjacent markets, and by that I mean specifically credit unions, insurance companies, crypto, and fintechs such as the Zelle for payment and other payment providers. Third, we are moving to the cloud, and you'll hear more about that in a few moments. It's quite important as part of our strategy as we move mid and down market. We're also moving to what we call a world where it's no longer being led by humans actioning manual tasks, but it's actually shifting to where the machines and the artificial intelligence and those tasks are being automated. We also have moved from a transaction-based review and analysis to entity-based.
Trying to understand, is that person or entity trying to commit fraud or anti-money laundering, a person or an entity, which is quite unique. Our TAM, which is also quite good and which was mentioned a moment ago, is what we believe is about $2 billion today, doubling over the next five years to $4 billion plus. Our TAM is financial crime management. What's happening in the market? We see a shift, as I mentioned, moving from manual tasks to automated tasks. If I take one example, meeting with a large institution several weeks ago, we were talking about their SAR reporting, the suspicious activity reporting. This particular bank had 200 staff, of which they estimated up to 35% of the tasks they were doing were manual.
We're working with the bank to eliminate those tasks so they can shift those costs from those manual compliance tasks to other parts of their business. We're also, as I mentioned, embedding robotics, RPA, and AI across all three vectors that we serve. What is our portfolio? We're really covering five separate areas. The 1st is compliance. We have our financial compliance solution. We're covering market surveillance, communication surveillance, trade reconstruction, and suitability of investments. I actually believe that's quite unique for Actimize. If we're working with a buy side or what I refer to as the trading book, we can work with those firms in providing them with really three things: the transaction monitoring of the trade, the communication surveillance, and also the case management as an integrated suite of solutions. Secondly, we're providing fraud solutions for digital payments, credit card fraud, check fraud, and employee fraud.
Third is our AML, which was mentioned a little bit earlier today, but our AML solutions for transaction monitoring, KYC or know your customer, and client onboarding, or you'll hear us refer to our solution CDD, and sanctions and PEP screening, and also suspicious activity reporting or SAR reporting that I just mentioned. Lastly, sitting on top of all of our solutions is our case management solution called ActOne, and this allows our customers to look at each instance and investigate and manage and monitor whether it's AML or a fraud instance with our ActOne solution. As I said earlier, if you look at the bottom, we're embedding each of these core solutions with ML and artificial intelligence. As Barak had mentioned last year, Actimize launched X-Sight, right? X-Sight is our cloud platform or our platform as a service for compliance.
With the cloud platform, it's really providing three things. It's allowing us to provide our services in the cloud. It's allowing us to build a marketplace, which I'll speak about in a moment, and it's allowing us to cloudify and build native solutions which we can provide to the Tier 1, but also the Tier 2 and 3 banks and the buy side as well. What does it mean to our customers? It really means three things. When we launched X-Sight, and over the past 12 months, we've launched two specific solutions. First, not only ActimizeWatch as an on-prem solution, but we've launched ActimizeWatch in the cloud. Also we've launched X-Sight Studio or do it yourself solutions. That allows our on-prem clients globally to do two things. It provides them with choice. What does that mean? I like to call it doubling down.
It means they have the benefit of using Actimize's analytics and services and data sciences, but also to leverage their analytics and their models, right? Secondly, we have moved these two solutions and developed them and put them into the cloud. The cloud is elastic, it's on-demand, and it's secure. The conversation, even as little as five years ago, used to be, "Are you moving to the cloud?" That conversation is very rare today. The conversation now is, "How quickly are you moving to the cloud?" For obvious reasons. Third, because our clients are moving to the cloud, we're creating what I would call a repository of data which allows us to provide collective intelligence. What does that mean? It means we can use the data from a very, very large user base and create better models and better tools for our clients.
Lastly, in terms of the cloud, is the marketplace. This is pretty exciting. We're building a marketplace based on providing and developing open APIs. What does this mean? It means that the marketplace will be a place where not only Actimize solutions can be used, but our customers' solutions can be used, Actimize solutions can be used, and our partners' solutions can be used. What does that mean for our customers? It means they will benefit from a much broader ecosystem from end to end. The journey to the cloud. As I talked about, we've launched Essentials, our first offering in the cloud, and what that did, it allowed us to move down market.
There is a substantial difference between the large tier banks and even broker-dealers because the mid and small banks do either, A, do not have the capital or do not have the data center, if you would, assets to host or use solutions that were wide and enterprise and costly. By launching a cloud solution, we were, A, able to move mid and down market to do at a lower price point and to bring them on very quickly. What I call time to market, and time to market matters. Secondly, as we move toward our journey in the cloud, we're augmenting our solutions. I spoke about two solutions that we developed and have launched in the cloud, ActimizeWatch and you do it yourself or X-Sight Studio.
We'll continue on this path with our product roadmap, and we'll continue to move our portfolio in the cloud, and that's what I mean by augmenting our solutions. Third, ultimately, we'll provide our core solutions in the cloud for the mid and down market, but secondly, also for the large institutions. Quite frankly, some of the larger banks are not ready, right? They're making choices, and they're moving to the cloud, and they're prioritizing this. The plus side of the strategy is it will allow these large institutions and our clients in the Americas and in Europe and in APAC to move at their own speed. They will not only have choice, they'll have the cloud, but they'll able to move upon the cloud journey at their own pace. Now just a little bit about our growth strategy.
I really put it into four key areas. We're growing a number of ways. Number one, it's about new solutions and products. If we think about X-Sight, we're taking our solutions and what really we're doing is we're providing a new delivery mechanism. As I said before, it isn't a matter of if and when, it's how quickly. Secondly, we're upselling. We're looking and we have re-looked, if you will, at all of our core solutions. We're enhancing those core solutions in a number of ways, in their workflow, in their user interface, and in their integration, and we're upselling to our existing client base in + 1 sales. Third, we're going mid and down market, as I spoke about. We're also moving internationally. We're in the international markets.
We're focusing on specific countries that have a high focus on adhering to regulatory compliance and protecting their customer assets, such as Japan or the U.K. as two examples. Third, we're leveraging the data or what I like to call data and smart analytics, which now that we have more data being used and also we will be able to leverage by clients coming to the cloud, we'll be able to not only provide the tools we're providing today, but move into more, and I would call it advanced areas such as trend analysis or predictive analytics. Let's look forward, use that analytics to predict what is gonna occur weeks and months out. By using all of these five different areas, we are automating the market. I like to use the analogy of a driverless car, right?
With a driverless car, you can see the pace and the speed that's occurring. It's happening the same in the financial crime and compliance market. It's happening actually very rapidly, and Actimize, I think, is uniquely positioned to automate this industry and this market. With that said, I'll turn over the mic to our CFO, Beth Gaspich. Beth?
Thank you. How do I move forward?
Just this way.
Thank you, Craig, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm very happy to be here with you today. As you've just heard from both Barak and Craig, we're really at a point of reflection at NICE. We're looking back on the last five years and the success we've achieved across the organization, and looking forward to the next five years, we're really even more excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us. Over the next 15-20 minutes, I'm going to share with you that same view of a look back as well as a look forward, but more from a financial perspective.
A look back, sharing with you, some of the key success we've achieved in achieving our financial goals, as well as a look forward to really help explain the financial pillars that are core to our foundation at NICE that'll help us really secure our financial future. Starting with just a general overview, at NICE today, we are already the clear leader in both of our markets, and I'll share some specific analyst reports with you in a few moments. In addition, we have continuously delivered strong growth in both of our revenue and our profitability. It's important to highlight that our philosophy to growth is to deliver growth in a balanced way.
What I mean by that is that we're always seeking to take advantage of the operating leverage in our model, and we're always looking, and we've been successful consistently at driving our profitability at a rate of return even higher than our revenue growth. We are in a position that's unique with differentiating cloud platforms in both of our business, in customer engagement with CXone, as well as financial crime and compliance with our X-Sight platform. We're really in a position where we're helping revolutionize our markets as we take our journey with our customers into the cloud. What's important to note is that we take that journey to the cloud.
With that, the impact to NICE is that what we're seeing is that our total return and our total growth and our revenue is growing at an accelerated rate, and that's a direct result of the fact that our cloud revenue is becoming the majority of our revenue. This is the five-year look back that I mentioned in terms of really the key financial figures that I wanted to share with you. You can see the high growth we've experienced in our total revenue, growing from $873 million in 2014 to just under $1.5 billion in 2018. Our top line growth has really been propelled by that shift that we've seen in our cloud business.
If you look at cloud in 2014, you'll see that it was at $39 million, which represented about 4% of our total revenue at that time. If you move to 2018, cloud revenue was $469 million, which represented about 1/3 of our business. Again, a dramatic shift over the last five years. With respect to our margins, the gross margin and operating margin, you can see the philosophy that I was talking about of delivering in a balanced way, meaning that we've had very nice growth, growing both of our margins, gross and our operating margins, as well as carrying that through to our EPS, which grew from $2.72 in 2014 to $4.75 in 2018.
Finally, cash flow from operations really demonstrates the strength in our business, and you can see we've actually more than doubled our cash flow from operations over the last 5 years, moving from $182 million that we delivered in cash flow from operations in the course of 2014 to just under $400 million in 2018. I mentioned we're the leader in both of our business segments. What this slide is showing you is on your left-hand side, you'll see this is the customer engagement side of our business where we're the leaders in the far right quadrant, rated by Gartner, both for the customer engagement business and CCaaS.
Similarly, looking at the right-hand, your right-hand side of the slide, this represents our financial crime and compliance business, where again, from key market analysts, IDC, and Forrester, we're being rated as leaders very clearly in both of our primary spaces in the financial crime and compliance business of enterprise fraud management as well as AML. Looking at our overall revenue trend, we've had a very strong growth of 14% compounded over the last five years, and both of our business segments operate with very healthy end markets. We operate today in a highly diversified set of customer base. Our industries of our customers range anywhere from telcos to financial institutions and financial services, insurance, healthcare, and many others.
In addition, it's important to note that we don't have one single client that represents more than 5% of our total revenue. Again, well-diversified. You heard both Barak and Craig talking earlier about that our total addressable market has really ballooned over the last five years. What that means is that we have great opportunity to really capitalize and continue to capture that growth as we're looking forward. In the last 2 years, primarily, we've seen that cloud is the key driver of our total revenue growth. You can see the compounded growth rate is 28% from the third quarter of 2016 to the most recent quarter of Q4 in 2018.
That cloud growth has been driven both through our acquisition of inContact, through our CXone cloud platform that we've integrated and developed together with NICE and inContact, as well as the financial crime and compliance business that is more in the earlier stages of their cloud development. You can see in every single quarter, we have sequentially increased our cloud revenue. In 2018 alone, we added more than 550 new customer logos coming from sales of our CXone platform. With this transformation into the cloud, we're really in the very early stages of the transformation. In both our markets, it's highly under-penetrated, and we have a great opportunity to continue to grow and capture more of the market in the cloud.
One of the major impacts from the shift to the cloud is that we've had a very noticeable increase in our recurring revenue. Looking back to 2014, if you look on the blue line, less than half of our total revenue was recurring at that point. Looking at 2018, the most recent fiscal year, you'll see that 70% of our revenue was recurring. Having this visibility into our recurring revenue really gives us greater confidence in being able to look forward and accurately predict our revenue. It also means that as we go into each consecutive year, we have a higher volume of revenue that's already under contract as we enter each year. With our recurring revenue business, this is capturing both cloud and maintenance. In both aspects of our business, we have enterprise-grade renewal rates.
Our business is highly sticky, and we have very strong customer relationships. In addition, as we've started moving upmarket with the sales of CXone to larger and larger customers with thousands of agents, one of the impacts of that is that we see that the customer lifetime value across those customers is also continually increasing. The other major impact that we've seen as a result of our shift to the cloud is the timing of our revenues. If you look back to 2014, at that point, in our life cycle, we were predominantly on-premise. For the on-premise business, it was typical that we would see an uptick in the fourth quarter of each year with our licensed sales, which is very common in enterprise software companies.
What we've seen is that now that we've shifted to the cloud, we have a more balanced contribution of our revenue being recognized throughout the course of the year. You can see that visualized here by looking at the last three years that we've experienced with more and more of our revenue that is being realized and recognized in the first half of the year. That's a trend that we will continue to expect to see that more consistent shift and balanced recognition of revenue throughout the year. Both our markets are again operating in a very healthy with healthy end users. You can see that we experience double-digit growth rates in both of our markets.
With 15% compounded growth over the last 5 years in our customer engagement business and 10% growth in our financial crime and compliance business. Again, as I talked about earlier, with that TAM that is growing, we've seen that we have the ability and we are really taking advantage of that to grow horizontally, both in coverage of the large enterprise and moving into the SMB, as well as vertically as we move into more adjacent markets. From a geographic perspective, Barak highlighted earlier as well, that just under 80% of our revenue today is coming from the Americas. This is really an opportunity for us that CXone to date has really been launched predominantly here in the Americas. We have now set up the ability to sell in both EMEA and APAC.
International expansion is one of the key ways and the key drivers that we'll continue to capitalize on during 2019 and the years to come that will help us further drive that revenue growth. If you look in particular, on this slide in the middle row there, you'll see that this is representing the execution. We executed well across each of our regions last year with high single-digit growth between 7%-8% across the globe. Within NICE, our management team is always extremely focused on delivering the best experience to our customers and how we deliver our products and services. Simultaneously, we're also driving processes which are highly efficient and that are really streamlined to drive the operating leverage into our model. You can see that we've had very nice growth over the past five years, 19% at compounded growth.
I'd like to highlight, if you look on 2014, we had operating profit of $192 million, and that has actually doubled to the $384 million we delivered during the course of 2018. The other thing that is really important to note here is that, if you recall, we acquired inContact in the fourth quarter of 2016. At the point we acquired inContact, it was really just over break even in terms of profitability. At NICE, we have been really laser-focused collectively in driving and executing against our post-merger integration model. That's resulted that within that two-year timeframe, we've been able to effectively move back to the same level of operating margin from prior to the acquisition.
We did that simultaneously at the same time, while also integrating other smaller acquisitions we made and continuing to invest significantly in our growth initiatives at NICE. This slide really brings the full picture together and shows three of our key financial metrics, looking at our total revenue growth, our gross profit, both of which grew at a compounded rate of 14% over the last three years, and then really demonstrates the operating leverage in our model that I highlighted earlier about growth in a balanced way with growth of 19%. As I highlighted a few minutes ago, during this period, we've really gone through a significant amount of transformations. We divested our security business. We transformed into an enterprise, a software company. We further transformed into a cloud company.
We've gone through multiple acquisitions and again, continued to invest significantly through innovating throughout all of this time. You can see if you're looking back on 2014 versus 2018, the significant level of investment we've made in our business. We feel that given the operating margin, the leverage we have in model, it's extremely important that we continue to span and foster the innovation that we're putting into both of our cloud platforms and our business overall. You can see that on a percent of revenue basis overall, that we're really doing that in a very consistent way. As a percent of revenue, it's highly consistent over the last several years.
For R&D in particular, really the benchmark we're looking at is to really maintain greater than 14% of total revenue in R&D to continue to, as I said, to really foster and drive that innovation, which is really critical. In our earnings per share growth, we have grown 15%. You can see the impact of the operating profit growth coming down into earnings per share. This 15% growth is really even more remarkable because during this time, we were actually operating in a very challenging tax environment. Our tax rate increased 500 basis points between 2014 and 2018. It was just around 16% in 2014 and is at 21% today. Still, we've shown a 15% growth in compounded rate of return.
Our cash flow from operations is one of our areas that I'm most proud of. I think it's a symbol of strength that really shows the core strength of our business overall, as well as the really strong relationships that we have with our customers. Our cash flow from operations has grown at a compounded rate of 21% over the last five years. You can see that, as I highlighted earlier, the cash flow from operations has more than doubled in the five years, as well as being just under $400 million of cash generated in the last two years. If you look on the cash flow generated, we actually outpaced our cash flow from generation, from generated from our business versus our actual operating profit in the last two years.
It's a key symbol, as I said, of really the strength in our business. When we look at the results of our P&L and balance sheet, we see that we can see the success through the P&L all the way into the bank. You heard Barak and Craig both talk a lot about why NICE. We're really at a very exciting time in our history of our company, really unique in terms of our position. We're at a point where our TAM is large, it's expanding. We have two very differentiated offerings with our open cloud platform, CXone and X-Sight. We have all of this underpinned by a very strong foundation of our financial pillars with the strength of our balance sheet, the leverage that we have in our model, and the execution we've been able to demonstrate.
That includes the fact that we have also integrated and acquired several new companies over this period very successfully. As Barak highlighted earlier, we've executed very well against our targets over the last five years, and we're very proud of what we've accomplished. As we look forward to the future, we're really even more excited about the opportunities that are ahead of us. We know that we'll take the execution that's made us successful in the last five years and bring that into ensuring we can achieve our targets to actually exceed in the next few years $2 billion in revenue, really having cloud expand to becoming the majority of our total revenue and having our operating margin get to the 30% mark and above. We're looking forward to sharing that journey with all of you in the next several years. Thank you.