Okay. All right. Great. Sorry for being a couple minutes late here. My fault. We're lucky enough here to have the CFO of Appian here and Sri, the head of IR. I'll just jump right in in the interest of time. The fiscal fourth quarter seemed to be some stabilization in cloud subscription, you know, guiding to 20%+ growth in, in 2024. Maybe just kind of walk us through the visibility, you know, how we ended the year here as in, and as we entered 2024 in terms of visibility for that growth in the cloud subscription line.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom. Happy to be here. Appreciate, appreciate all this. I think in Q4, you know, we did have some, some strong results for, as mentioned on the call, we had some linearity, that helped us. It was probably one of our stronger Q4s from a linearity perspective. But it also shows that, you know, our, our product is still very resonant with the market. I think we're happy to have guidance for 2024, that was, like, for example, better than our guidance for Q4 was. So it, it shows that we're confident in our platform, and I think our customers are showing ongoing demand for Appian.
Yeah. I mean, along those lines, NRR also picked up from 117%-119%.
Yeah. NRR was 119, a nice uptick in the past couple of quarters in that metric. If you look at our customer unit economics, not just NRR, but GRR, LTV to CAC, those are all elite levels. And it speaks to the mission criticality of our, our software. Our expansion motion is healthy as ever. That's where we're seeing kind of some more resilience to macro, because customers that use Appian that expand with us, do so because they're confident in what Appian can do. And, looking at our ROI, obviously that resonates even in a tough macro environment when somebody already uses Appian and has built multiple applications, they're likely to expand if it's working and doing great for them, so.
So, what does so walk us through the initial question was about the visibility into.
Yeah.
calendar 2024, with regard to that 20%+ growth in the cloud subscription line. You mentioned expansion. That's an important point, I think. How, you know, walk us through kind of the mechanics of your guide and as it relates to expansion business and offset by, you know, the need for new logo growth.
Yeah. Sri, you wanna talk a little bit more?
Yeah. In any given year, right, you know, when we look at existing versus new, two-thirds of the growth comes from existing customers and one-third comes from new customers. That's been pretty consistent. And.
Okay.
It's the same kind of cadence that we use, as a starting point for the guidance. The second one is if you just look at our gross retention rate, it's been consistently in the 97%-98%. It's never dipped below that. It's, in fact, it's been better in some periods, higher, almost 99%. Then you look at the contribution from, you know, some of the key verticals, right, of federal, healthcare, and financial, those three still remain, you know, almost 70% of the growth comes from those verticals. We are beginning to see contribution from manufacturing and, supply chain management. Those are some of the newer verticals that are beginning to contribute. But otherwise, you know, we've used a similar cadence that we've used in prior years between new versus existing. NRR, we consistently expect between 110-120, but it's been mid, and we've seen some improvement.
but we generally take a conservative view, as you know, Tom, you know, in the past, and we've used the same kind of cadence for this 2024 guidance.
Very helpful. So, and there's a lot of Appian World last year, you, from, in my view anyway, stepped up with the partners a little bit, and there was also some talk with a new CRO. Walk us through in terms of that one-third, what we should expect, or what could be incremental to that one-third in terms of new logo growth related to, you know, extending the solutions business with the CRO, the improvement in the partner program, as we head into 2024.
You know, again, partners are critical to growth, right? You know, we've talked about that at the last in, you know, Appian World and Investor Day. You know, more importantly, what we're beginning to see from partners is higher commitments in terms of them scaling the number of Appian practitioners with the respective firms. You know, some partners have talked about doubling the number of Appian practitioners. You know, earlier this year, we've rolled out a new partner program where we have three different tiers of partner levels. More specifically, what they are focused on is driving new logo growth. Today, partners have specific incentives in terms of bringing in new logos for Appian. So we think this is a mutually beneficial relationship, both for Appian as well as for the partners. And in fact, some partners do like as about it.
The other part in terms of driving new logo growth is our solution strategy, right? We've talked about this quite a bit. The Government Acquisition Management solution has been, you know, a phenomenal success for us. In fact, we've taken some of the modules of that Government Acquisition Management and repurposed for state and local. We've already seen some success about that. We are going to roll out further about that for the commercial sector later this year. We recently launched Case Management solution. That is initially geared towards the federal, but you should expect a similar thing going forward where it'll be taken that to state and local and then towards the commercial sector. The other, you know, solutions we've talked about, the insurance underwriting, but you should expect us to talk more about solutions, you know, this year and going forward.
Great. If we go back, sorry to keep going back. I wanna go forward here eventually. But if you go back, you know, 2023 saw a lot of customers. There was vendor consolidation themes. There was cost optimization themes. Cutting costs seemed to be the major theme in terms of spend. Your million-dollar-plus ARR cohort has been driving results of late. And I guess the question there is, do you expect that to continue in 2025? And from a resiliency perspective of spend perspective, what, what, why do you think what are the key one or two things that is driving that resiliency at, at Appian?
Yeah. I mean, we've been really impressed with that. When you stratify our ARR levels, our customer ARR levels, it's the million-dollar-plus ARR customer level that I think is the most impressive. It speaks a little bit to what I talked about earlier. You know, the more you use Appian, the more you want Appian, right? You have financial services companies, banks, insurance companies that have built multiple applications. They're all robust, you know, mission-critical applications, and they see a return, and they wanna buy more. I think if you slice it even more for 2023, some of the success we've had that's been macroagnostic has been in the federal government. There's a little bit more ability to have, you know, budgets that are independent of whatever's on the headlines of The Wall Street Journal. The government's still spending.
We have really, really, solid use cases, not just in procurement, but in broader use cases in the federal government. So, you know, we provide a return, because we save companies time and money. And, you know, when a customer has seen that and isn't just looking at marketing materials, when they've actually proven it through an application, they wanna buy more applications. And some of our most prolific customers have 30, 40 applications that they build with us. We actually don't think those are tapped out either. Like, these are huge, you know, name-brand enterprises that have IT budgets that start with a B. So it's not an area where we're like, "Oh, you know, we already have 30 apps there.
Let's go somewhere else." It's music to our ears when they have applications that they've built, and the more, the better.
And is there an embedded growth aspect to that in terms of how are these deals priced in terms of those processes? Is it by app, or does it grow with usage of that app?
Yeah. Generally, it's by app and however many users is in an app.
By users in an app.
So, like, it's, you know, we sell an application license, and we price it out by how many users. So maybe if a bank has a mortgage origination app, and they have, you know, 5,000 mortgage originators, we'll give them a price for that. Then they wanna do an app for Know Your Customer or institutional onboarding or, you know, for their bank tellers. That's a different app, different number of users. We'll price that, you know, per user, per month for that app.
So multiple vectors, mostly processes and apps, but multiple vectors expanding NRR.
Yeah.
If we shift in 2024, going into 2025 calendar, to more of a digital transformation, walk us through, like, kind of what, where Appian was experiencing back, like, in, say, 2021 when there was a little bit more free spending or even prior to that versus the kind of focus on ROI and saving money.
I mean, certainly, we had, you know, much of the 2021 boom was outside of Appian. Appian certainly had a step up in demand, but we weren't a, you know, a Zoom or something where we took off and had bookings go through the floor through the roof because of some COVID need or post-COVID recovery. It was more of a step up overall, because CIOs out there knew they had to be front-footed, knew they had to no longer be passive if you were a passive CIO. And so sure, we did a little bit more on the, you know, the front office, I would say, in 2021. And there were, you know, more customer-facing type applications that we were building across all industries, but a lot of it was our bread and butter, to be honest.
I think the uptick there was welcomed just from a mind shift and from a realization that we needed, you know, to be nimble and unique in software, to be successful in the post-COVID era.
So let's maybe use that as a segue in terms of expanded scope of spend and then in the topic du jour of AI. Appian has a, you know, a unique view, I believe. That's my words, not yours. In terms of Private AI, your founder and CEO has expanded on that with your unique Data Fabric. Just maybe talk about initial uptake of that and where, you know, the company expands to try to, you know, plans to monetize that unique, you know, architecture. And maybe explain it first for the audience. Maybe that'll be helpful.
Yeah. So I mean, I think if you look at Data Fabric, it's something we've patented. It's a technology that we have that we believe we're the best at. And if you couple that with AI, you realize that AI is only as good as the data, right? And so data is the lifeblood of AI. So being able to feed AI data from multiple sources, as much data as possible, from internal databases, but perhaps external databases or hard-to-reach databases, that's become a forte for us. And so customers can then look towards Appian as a way to build applications using AI and tapping into all their data seamlessly, easily through our Data Fabric technology. We've seen use cases in the federal government, in our government acquisitions management suite, in Award Management specifically in that module.
We've had successes at certain universities that are using AI to bring in all the databases from a student profile perspective to help with their counseling of students. You know, you might need to bring transcripts in. You might need to bring billing information in, if they're late on a tuition bill, all that to one person, one dashboard so they could have a productive discussion. And so of course, it's early days in terms of the power of AI in an enterprise setting, but there's more and more use cases popping up. And I think in our space, you know, our bread and butter industries, financial services, insurance, there's gonna be a lot there, right? Think about insurance companies, and all the data they have. And then our, our ability to segregate the data by role is also a really big competitive advantage.
I mean, you might have the data all in AI for an insurance company, but you don't want your claims adjuster necessarily knowing all the billing information of the customer, right? So being able to parse the data and have it meet security profiles, that's another inherently, awesome thing that Appian can do.
Who is Appian? A lot of people in the audience maybe don't know that some of you often quote one of your core competitors as, like, ServiceNow. And there's other companies in the that you can quote as competitors. But who do you look at as in terms of a competitor with this Private AI, this Data Fabric product?
You'll take that Sri? .
You know, I think it's still early, Tom. Like, you know, one of the things the Data Fabric, right, you know, as Matt and Mark has described, is just a virtual data layer, right? It makes it easier for customers to collect that information that's there at different places, whereas, you know, and saves them time and money. From a competitive perspective, right, we still think it's gonna be the same set of folks that we have seen before. You know, we've talked about ServiceNow. We've talked about Pegasystems. Then there are some private players. You know, we really don't see Microsoft, but whenever we see, it's mostly at the low end where we really don't go after those use cases. But I think it's still the same thing.
The one thing that we've seen is there are other, you know, software vendors that are out there that offer somewhat similar feature on a standalone basis. But when customers are using Data Fabric, they're using it in the context of the workflow or in the context of AI features that they want to roll out within their IT stack, right? If somebody were to do it unless it doesn't really resonate with them.
So the Data Fabric doesn't expand your buying personas inside organizations that you're selling to, you know, trip into, like, Snowflake or Databricks or other kind of data aggregators?
I just wanna make sure, you know, Snowflake is more like a data warehouse, right? It collects data, whereas Data Fabric connects data. Those are two different things, right? So it's not like I'm going and replacing Snowflake. Data Fabric works in conjunction with Snowflake.
So it'd be complementary, not substitutive. That's a very.
Yeah.
Any questions from the audience before we again maybe shift over to the business model? No? Okay. You know, again, maybe educated for the audience here, but Appian has very high margins in their recurring business, over 90%. Tell me if I'm wrong. But walk us through the puts and takes with the professional services business that, you know, maybe over 20% of revenue still. You know, what could move gross margins up or down here? And where are you expecting them to move in the next year or so?
Sure. Yeah. So our, our services, you know, they're a very important part of our business. We haven't been focused on growing our services revenue, and you can see that through the evolution of our revenue mix, right? At IPO, we were close to 50/50, services and software. And I think in our most recent quarter, we were 80/20, software and services. And so that's emblematic of our strategy, obviously. We're a software company. We're growing our ARR. But we do have a, a critical function in our services, and that is to have customer success. And in, in some ways, that manifests as a delivery that's led by Appian services. But a lot of the time and increasingly, we're there to support partners and to make sure that the customer has Appian services in the background, able to assist and architect along with partners for a successful outcome.
We have services packages that are set up for that. I think over time, you know, we continue to expect that mix shift to occur. We have every intention of having more and more of our mix be software. Now, within services itself, the services margins have been in the 20% range, sometimes in the low 30s. You know, a lot of that is investments that we're making with our services folks, to make sure, you know, our customers are getting the right outcomes. Sometimes there's customer success managers that are working on a non-billable basis, trying out new technologies. We have a really good feedback loop back to engineering. There's things like incubation and, you know, the latest technologies that we're trying to put out there that we might pilot with the customer.
We expect that to be innovative and ultimately beneficial to our growth, but it may impact margins in the short term. So, we wouldn't be surprised to see margins dip a few percentage points as we invest in those areas.
I think that that's embedded.
In our guidance, yeah.
In our guidance, yeah.
That's services margins.
Services.
Services margins. Yeah.
Yeah.
The total, you know, that's very strong. And it's a segue, obviously, to a question that I get asked from investors a lot about what these are—these are strong gross margins for Appian, and especially as professional services decreases as percentage of revenue over time. What's unique about the Appian business model as it relates to, you know, the company's still operating at a loss. Sales and marketing is still 40% of total revenue. You know, that's—you know, if understanding the, you know, kind of what's embedded and what's unique about the Appian model could kind of help us understand where that's going over time.
Yeah. I mean, we've been on a glide path here, to improve our adjusted EBITDA margins. We had a significant improvement in 2023 versus 2022. We improved them by more than 50%. Then we had our first positive EBITDA in Q4, adjusted EBITDA, I should say. So the trajectory is there. I think we're continuing that. This year, we're planning on reaching our breakeven point next year, improving upon that with some adjusted EBITDA profit. We're doing all of this not through cost cutting, right? We're just monitoring our OPEX. In our R&D space, we're using our development center in Chennai, India.
We're working on sales efficiency, and we're taking a magnifying glass to incremental investments in G&A, to making sure that there's an ROI, and pacing it out so that we don't, you know, have OPEX growing faster than revenue, obviously. But it's not a, you know, cut-your-way-to-profitability motion. I think we're trying to preserve our top line, and our sales and marketing machine because we think this is early innings for Appian. We don't have any sort of view that it's all gonna start slowing down and we better start making this a cash cow. We're still growing. We think there's a lot of growth ahead, and we're gonna do so responsibly. And there certainly will be margin expansion with that.
but because that revenue is such a high-quality revenue stream with such good, durable, renewals and all those customer unit economics that we mentioned, we're not in a place to pull back from that investment.
And maybe talk about what the long-term model would be then. You know, it's such a durable revenue stream. You know, we won't give a nominal number in terms of what scale would be, but I'm sure you maybe have one in mind.
Well, you guys should stay tuned to our Appian Investor Day in April. We'll talk more about that stuff. I think, Sri, you wanna go over the actual model right now?
Yeah. Yeah. The last time we gave was the 20%+ operating margin. We still think it's a realistic goal. But as the mix of subscription becomes bigger and bigger, you know, there are some levers on the gross margin front, plus, you know, again, each and every OPEX line, we see substantial levers. You know, some of them come just with the scale benefits. But more importantly, we are also focused intensely on getting the ROI, whether it's in sales and marketing, G&A, or something.
Very helpful. Does AI lend a hand there? I mean, you know, we talk about the selling of AI or AI-related solutions. What about internally? I mean, you are coders, after all.
It's a little early. I think AI, you know, promises to help development of software. It's really early. I don't think we're seeing any massive shift right now.
That's not conclusive.
certainly.
Sri was just talking about.
Yeah. Certainly, there's some tools and stuff. But in terms of, you know, the actual R&D function, we're seeing more leverage from the geographical savings, right now. But I'm certain that we'll start to see some AI improvements over time as well.
Okay. And, you know, maybe as a final question, if there's nothing from the audience, just maybe give you the opportunity here to, maybe give any, the investors what they should be expecting in terms of milestones or timeline with related to the, outstanding litigation with.
Oh, yeah. I think you're talking about the federal litigation.
Yes. Yes.
Okay. So that one, yeah, we're in the process of waiting for the result from the initial.
Recently appealed in November.
Appeal approval. Yeah. The appellate court had its hearings, and now we're waiting for that initial result. But I think the reality is there's a multiple-step process that might take one, two, perhaps three more years because anything that comes out of this will also be appealed. And of course, there's a Virginia Supreme Court level and then even a potential U.S. Supreme Court level. But all that's to say that it's not gonna resolve this year. Now, we'll remind everybody that we do have judgment preservation Insurance in place, which is a $500 million policy. I think it's a good thing to have in case things go south. We're not saying that they, that we'll need it, but it's good to have insurance just like insurance is, right? That's why people have insurance.
For the audience, that was purchased. That's already paid for.
It's already paid for. It was a one-time premium.
You can get a minimum.
Yeah. Minimum payout of $500 million. So if we lose everything, we still get a $500 million check from the insurance company. So that's a,
No expiration date on that.
No expiration. We just have to go through, obviously, a good fight. And of course, we, we maintain the upside. So if we if we win the $2 billion verdict, we still win the $2 billion verdict. We just had to pay a premium to put a floor at $500 million.
Well, great. Thank you so much for the quick overview there, Mark and Sri. Thank you for your time.
Thank you.