Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Crexendo first quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Steve Mihaylo, CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.
Okay, thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Steve Mihaylo, Chairman and CEO of Crexendo, and I want to welcome all of you to the Crexendo Q1 2022 conference call. On the call with me today are Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, Ron Vincent , our CFO, Anand Buch, our CSO, and Jeff Korn, our General Counsel. I'm going to ask Jeff to read the safe harbor statement. After that, I will give some brief comments. Ron will provide more detail on the numbers. Doug will provide a business and sales update, and then we will open the call up to questions. Jeff, would you please read the safe harbor statement?
Yes, sir. Thank you, Steve. I want to take this opportunity to remind listeners that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for such forward-looking statements. All statements made in this conference call other than statements of historical fact are, in fact, forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may include terms like expect, believe, anticipate, estimate, will, and other similar statements of expectation identifying forward-looking statements. Failure to add those statements, however, does not prevent them from being forward-looking. Investors should be aware that any forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual material results to differ from those discussed here today.
Risk factors are explained in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, and the Forms 10-Q as filed. Crexendo does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I'd now like to turn the call back to Steve. Steve?
Thank you, Jeff. As everyone is aware, these are challenging times for most companies, our country, our competitors, and the world. We went from dealing with lockdowns, COVID spikes and inflation, interest rate uncertainty, business slowdowns, employment difficulties, stock market corrections, and supply chain issues. Considering all of these issues, I am pleased that we were able to manage a non-GAAP net income of $405,000 for the first quarter of 2022 or $0.02 per basic and diluted common share. I am also pleased that we were able to grow the business 81% year-over-year to $8.2 million for the quarter.
These are solid numbers considering the issues which we were faced with, which also included customers that contracted or closed their business, customers and potential customers spending less and delaying certain capital expenditures due to uncertainty surrounding the economy. The good news is that even with these issues, we managed a non-GAAP profit. The better news is that we believe that these issues affecting buying decisions appear to be subsiding. We continue to do a good job of integrating the two teams, and both our software solutions team and our telecom team are working together with one common goal, providing the top UCaaS services in the market. We see good trends, and we believe that people who deferred purchase option or purchases are now coming back and making the expenditures necessary.
In addition, the companies that have deferred moving to the cloud are now reengaging that process. I'm confident that most everyone will be moving to the cloud due to the substantial efficiencies, the ability to work from anywhere on the planet, and cost savings. Our solution, our software solutions and telecom divisions are geared to take advantage of the migration and provide the best features and products that are available anywhere. Speaking of our software solutions division, our growth continues. I expect within the next couple of weeks that we will be announcing that we reached 2.5 million end users. Our award-winning platform and the continued growth of end users is very dynamic metrics. This is very exciting time for us, and our potential is unlimited. I monitor the company very carefully, and I mean very carefully.
Even with the headwinds that I described earlier, I've not changed my expectations of growing the business by 40%-50% annually. I am convinced we will continue to grow organically, and we will look for appropriate accretive acquisitions. I am as optimistic about the future as I've ever been. As always, I put my money where my mouth is, and I intend to enter into a new 10b5-1 plan once we're out of the current no-trade period. With that, I will turn the call over to Ron. Would you give us a little granularity on the numbers?
Thank you, Steve. Good afternoon, everyone. Total revenue for the quarter increased 81% or $3.7 million to $8.2 million. That's compared to $4.5 million reported for the first quarter of the prior year. Our service revenue for the quarter increased 6% or $259,000 to $4.4 million compared to $4.1 million. Our software solutions revenue for the quarter was $3.3 million. Our product revenue for the quarter increased 34% or $124,000 to $492,000 compared to the $368,000 for the first quarter of the prior year. Consolidated operating expenses for the quarter increased $4.2 million or 79% to $9.6 million compared to $5.3 million for the first quarter of the prior year.
The software solution segment, with no comparable expenses in the prior period, contributed $3.6 million of the increase in operating expenses. The remaining increases were directly related to higher cost of sales and increased spend on sales and marketing. Net loss of $1.2 million or $0.05 loss per basic and diluted common share. That's compared to a net loss of $715,000 or $0.04 per basic and diluted common share for the first quarter of the prior year. On a non-GAAP basis, as Steve mentioned, we reported net income for the quarter of $405,000 or $0.02 per basic and diluted common share. That's compared to non-GAAP net income of $308,000 or $0.02 per basic and diluted common share for the same period of the prior year.
EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of $774,000, compared to a loss of $721,000 for the same period of the prior year. Our Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $302,000. That's compared to earnings of $245,000 for the same period of the prior year. Our cash and cash equivalents balance at March 31 was $5.7 million compared to $7.5 million at December 31, 2021. We used $1.7 million for operating activities for the quarter, primarily resulting from increases in our accounts receivable of $525,000, contract cost increases of $243,000, and $691,000 reduction in our accounts payable and accrued expenses during the period.
We used $34,000 for investing activities, and financing activities provided $3,000 of cash and cash equivalents. I will now turn it over to Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, for additional comments on sales and operations.
Thanks, Ron. Our first quarter results continue the trend of non-GAAP earnings and substantial potential, which shows the benefit of our acquisition of NetSapiens. With 81% year-over-year growth and non-GAAP income of $405,000 or $0.02 a share, we are positioned nicely to continue that growth. Our organic growth of nearly 10%, combined with our software solutions addition, helped us get close to the 2.5 million end user milestone on our award-winning platform. Our backlog continues to grow and is now north of $43.7 million at the end of Q1. Our backlog number now includes the software solutions backlog amounts, as well as our Crexendo direct customers, and represents a 58% increase of our backlog number from Q1 2021. Our backlog increased over $2 million from our backlog number reported at the end of 2021.
We continue to add new UCaaS licensees that utilize our platform to run their businesses, and our pipeline for new licensees is very strong. Our Crexendo licensees are growing with the rapid migration to the cloud, and we benefit from that with additional session purchases as they grow. We continue to develop new applications and new solutions that further monetize these additional services from Crexendo to help drive even more organic growth in the software solution segment. One of these exciting new offerings is our new Crexendo Contact Center as a Service, which is also called CCaaS, with omni-channel customer engagement, chatbots, and automations that are perfectly designed for larger call center applications. We'll be releasing this offering shortly in conjunction with our recently announced partnership with Mavenir, and are very excited about the increased revenue opportunities that could be recognized.
The Mavenir partnership is very exciting and sets us up for further growth, and we also believe we can enter into similar partnerships which will both increase what we offer to our customers and add additional future revenues. Our sessions-not-seats pricing model continues to differentiate ourselves from our two largest competitors, Cisco's BroadSoft and Microsoft's Metaswitch platform's offerings, which are significantly higher priced based on their cost per seat models. We now have over 210 licensees using our platform, and are excited about the prospects we have in front of us with our funnel that continue to add new licensees. We continue to see pipeline and sales growth from our Crexendo agent program that has multiple strong master agent partnerships with groups like Telecom Consulting Group, TCG, as well as other groups like OTG Consulting, and we are very optimistic about the sales growth projections from these partnerships.
Our agent programs highlight our Crexendo VIP offering that has a 100% uptime guarantee, along with a lifetime warranty on our Crexendo phones. We continue to add new and larger agent partners to the program and are excited about the opportunities in the funnel that these new agent partners are bringing to the table. I continue to be pleased with the integrations of our two organizations and the operational benefits and synergies we are seeing and will continue to see, and they are coming together extremely nicely. Our combined engineering teams are focused on releasing our version 43 software at the end of Q2. Our customer support teams are working in unison, and I'm extremely pleased that Crexendo is ranked number one on the world's largest and most trusted tech marketplace website, which is G2.com, in overall customer satisfaction for high performer VoIP providers.
We have a score of 4.8 out of 5 for high performer VoIP providers. This is very important because this is a ranking that is by end user customers and verified that they're end user customers. Our sales teams continue to benefit from the exceptional industry knowledge and experience, and we have great momentum building. We have consolidated all of our accounting personnel and are executing on our plans to maximize efficiencies, productivity, and costs. I'm very pleased with how our two organizations have come together, and I'm very excited about our go-forward plans to continue to grow the organization. As we have previously mentioned, the acquisition costs associated with the merger and amortization of intangible assets have us managing the business based on our non-GAAP earnings.
In addition to the acquisition cost and the amortization, stock comp expense increased during the quarter as we invest in our employee retention programs to help ensure that we can keep what I feel is the most talented team in the sector. I'm very pleased that we are able to generate non-GAAP earnings of $0.02 per common, basic common share for the quarter and feel that this is strong proof that our combined organization has been able to quickly leverage the power and opportunity we have to grow and succeed together. I'm very thankful to our fantastic Crexendo team that have come together with a tremendous amount of hard work and effort to make this a successful combination. We believe we will continue to see more efficiencies and cost synergies as we continue our growth.
Finally, as we head into the second half of 2022, I couldn't be more excited about the future direction and opportunity for Crexendo. We have tremendous demand for our product offerings along with great solutions and a disruptive pricing model combined with an amazing talented workforce that has positioned us perfectly for the future. We will continue delivering the best UCaaS offering in the industry to our customers, to our licensees, and to our partners, and are committed to delivering the best returns for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it back over to Steve for any further comments.
Thank you, Doug. I think the only comment I have is based on non-GAAP earnings. I expect GAAP earnings within the fourth quarter or first quarter of next year. Other than that, I agree with you. At this time, John will open it up to questions, and I will be the moderator, and I'll have the appropriate person answer the questions.
Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The floor is open for questions. If you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your touchtone phone. Pressing star two will remove your question to be answered. Lastly, while posing your question, please pick up your handset if you're listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Once again, that's star one on your touchtone phone if you have a question or a comment. The first question is coming from Josh Nichols with B. Riley. Your line is live.
Yeah, thanks for taking my question.
Good afternoon, Josh.
Hey, how's it going, Steve?
I guess we're talking over each other. It's going very well. Thank you.
Great. Good to see the continued backlog growth. I was wondering if you could kind of help provide a little bit more detail on what's going on the software solutions side of the business. That was down, but when is that gonna flip to growth given that the backlog continues to grow?
Well, first of all, I'm going to let our guys handle that, but I would like to make one comment. Our software solutions division is going to see more choppiness in their numbers for the next three or four quarters. What we're doing is two things. We're going to improve margins there, and we're going to improve the subscription, in other words, the continuing revenue there, so that we can better forecast where we're at. As you know, they were a private company, and the way they were doing was, it was perfectly acceptable. Now we're a public company, and our public shareholders expect to have a little bit more clarity, if you will, in what they see. I'm gonna have all three of our guys talk about that, Doug and Jon Brinton and Anand Buch.
Doug, would you like to add some color to that?
Yeah. I'll start with a little bit of color. Josh, as we've talked about in the past, you know, one of the things that we're excited with our platform offering through the software solutions division is the fact that we're offering subscription services. Subscription services means that instead of a lot of upfront costs for somebody to buy into the platform, they have a higher monthly recurring and a very low cost of entry. That obviously gives us a little bit of the choppiness that Steve talked about, because when we look at historical numbers, you know, most folks that have invested in our software solutions platform had to come out of pocket with a fairly large non-recurring one-time upfront cost, and then they'd have a lower monthly.
To get more people involved in the platform and more people onboarding the platform, the subscription services has had great response. We're seeing a lot of new logos coming on board with subscription services. The only challenge with that is that you don't have the one-time upfront cost, and so you will see a little bit of choppiness as we migrate from all NRC-type sales to more of a subscription service-type sales to bring new platform logos on board. I'll have Jon Brinton give a little bit more color on that.
Yeah. Josh, I just expand on that we're real excited about the progress with the platform and new wins with new logos within our customer base. As Doug said, to kinda quantify for bookings in the Q1 period, we saw about a $750,000 increase in subscription revenue. What you're gonna see with that as opposed to CapEx is that continued growth in the backlog, but as Doug said, we won't be recognizing that one-time CapEx revenue upfront.
The great thing about that for this business is it takes and it transitions more of the revenue to a predictable revenue stream over time, and that's where Steve's color on, you know, a few quarters to get to that run rate is, you know, what we're expecting. Because you will be at a longer term, a higher percentage of revenue on a quarterly basis that's already on the books and will be amortized as subscription revenue over time.
Just to reiterate that number, again, $43.75 million in backlog. That's a $2 million increase just from the end of last year. You know, in three months, we increased backlog by $2 million. That's a really, really encouraging sign as we bring more of these subscription models on board, it's gonna increase that ongoing backlog number. Anand, any further color?
Yeah, sure. Josh, great question. I think just to echo the sentiment for the team, and just to give you a little bit of background there as well, this is kind of the third full quarter, if you will, post-transaction from a standpoint of getting, you know, the accounting piece in line so we can be more predictable, as Steve pointed out. Just to give you know, the first quarter typically sees some lumpiness from a non-recurring standpoint. Again, as we've expanded also, SaaS product offering, which is an infrastructure as a service solution, we're continuing to see more adoption in that area. Again, that's kind of the challenge between.
You know, we're seeing more and more folks that, in essence are saying, "Okay, you know what? You handle the plumbing, you handle the infrastructure, we want you to manage the service for us, as we continue to build." We've seen a lot of that migration, which, fundamentally is very, very strong, but obviously will impact this from more of a choppy NRC model to a recurring revenue model. But in general, it's promising in terms of the types of logos and the types of folks that we see, and then in general, the migration away from what's going on in the industry with respect to folks like BroadSoft and Microsoft and the wins that we're seeing in that category.
Mm-hmm.
Just to clarify, of the $3.3 million, how much of that was non-recurring versus more traditional subscription revenue in the quarter? Is this like a fair baseline or maybe it'll take another quarter or two to really see the pivot in that model before it starts to grow on a sequential basis?
Well, before Doug or one of the other fellows answer that, Josh. First of all, it's gonna take a little bit longer. Instead of taking two or three quarters, it's probably gonna take 4 or 5 to totally turn the ship around. My expectations are that we'll be on a mostly recurring revenue model within the next three or four quarters. Did you want to add on something there, Ron?
Yeah. Hi, Josh. Yeah, approximately $843,000 of the $3.3 million was one-time revenue.
Great. Last question for me is, I think just regarding the gross margins, I think net-net, they came in a little bit under 60%. Is that gonna improve throughout the year moving forward as you kind of transition more of these customers onto cloud platform?
I expect that to improve gradually for a long time. I wanna get it up to at least the margins of the telecom division, which were 71%. I'd like to see the blended rate go to as high as 75%. That means probably most of it is going to come from the software solutions division. I see Anand shaking his head. Did you have some comments, Anand?
Actually, I was just gonna echo that same thing, I think. Then, you know, Ron can comment on this too. I think part of the exercise, as Steve pointed out earlier, was the notion of making sure that we are putting our systems in place so that we can understand the metrics associated with, you know, capitalized costs and things like that. I'll let Ron touch on the specifics there from a financial perspective, but part of the exercise that we're going through is exactly that. It's, you know, we're now, you know, three-quarters into the integration. Part of the exercise is making sure that we put the systems in place so that we are, you know, allocating things in the right place from a financial perspective.
Ron, I don't know if you wanna touch on that.
Yeah, I'll just add that, you know, we're continuing to work on the process and the rigor of tracking engineering time between maintenance and support-type services and the R&D of the platform itself, future functionality and as we continue to develop the product. As we put the right accounting tracking processes in place, we're gonna be able to properly report the R&D versus combining it with the rest of the cost of service revenue or cost.
Thanks. Last question for me, then, I'll let someone else take a turn at it. Whenever you move these customers over, right, to a more traditional subscription business, is there a significant, I guess, for lack of a better word, call it like an ARPU lift, even though it's not, I know, priced on a per user basis? Like, are you getting more subscription revenue or how are the terms different relative to the upfront? I'm just curious if it'll wind up being a net positive once, you know, you've gone through this transition over the next several quarters.
We haven't made that decision completely yet, Josh, but we will make it in the next 4 or 5 days. I'm going to let Anand talk about that.
Yeah, Josh, fundamentally, as you know, as you start looking at, again, as we start developing more and more of the models so that we can report it appropriately, you know, out to you guys, what you will notice is that effectively the effective per-seat price contribution from an ARPU standpoint effectively is actually increasing, given that most of these additional subscription services that are coming on are not just licensed, but they're managed services with a pretty high margin. It's typically we're seeing a effective average selling price going up over time. Does that answer your question?
It does. Thanks. I'll hop back in the queue.
Okay. John?
Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please indicate so by pressing star one. Up next, we have Chris Sakai with Singular Research. Chris, your line is live.
Chris, good afternoon.
Hi. Hi, yes, good afternoon. Had a question on the Mavenir partnership. Just wanna know, do you guys break that out as far as new business from them? How are things going there this quarter?
Well, as Doug said, it's going very well, but we don't expect to start selling that until probably the end of this quarter. Currently, the sales are gonna be very small, but I'm gonna let Doug and Jon Brinton talk about that so you know exactly where we stand.
Yeah, there's two portions of that relationship because it's a very symbiotic relationship. Mavenir is going to be selling our UCaaS platform as their own platform to their end users. They're deploying that as we speak, so we'll start seeing revenue stream coming in off of that. That's just gonna be another licensee relationship, so it won't be
Any way, shape, or form. On the CCaaS, it's exciting because, as we roll out the CCaaS, as Steve said, at the end of this quarter, beginning of Q3, we'll see a real nice monetization on that. I'll have Jon explain how we'll start seeing a nice uptick on that because contact center seats really drive a much higher price per seat type revenue.
Thanks, Doug. Chris, as Doug stated, Mavenir begins to sell and propose our UCaaS that we've reflected in our software solutions revenue, along with other clients. For the CCaaS opportunity, the exciting thing about that is that, you know, while contact center customer experience workers are a small percentage of the overall workforce, the average revenue per user in our retail offering under the Crexendo VIP brand would be about 4x the revenue that we would get from a UCaaS user. There's a lot of opportunity for expanded share of wallet there.
Our intent with that partnership for CCaaS is also to offer that to our NetSapiens platform licensees so that they can incorporate that into their offers as well, and that would be a substantial increase in the average revenue per user we receive there. It's a great opportunity to expand share of wallet. It's also a great opportunity to bring capabilities and functionality to our customers that otherwise we wouldn't be able to deliver.
Great. Okay, thanks. Oh, was there something else there?
Well, no. I was just gonna ask if that answered your question, Chris.
Yeah. Yeah, that helped. Also, I just wanted to ask about the backlog. It seems like a good growing number. Just for how much of that is for 2022, and how much is that for 2023, if you have that number?
Well, if you know the way our backlog works, it's on a 36-60-month contract. So part of it is going to be immediately recognized, and the rest of it will probably be over a blended rate of 40-42 months.
Yeah, we do break that down in the 10-Q, Ron's pulling it up right now, so it'll give you a kind of an idea. We break that down on an annual basis so that you can see that snapshot. We're just pulling it up right now, and we'll have that for you momentarily. The backlog increase is exciting because again, as Steve highlighted, you know, that's a revenue stream that's locked and loaded. Just to reiterate, that's contracted revenue that we haven't recognized yet. In our 10-Q, we break that out as to how much of that backlog revenue is in this year, next year, the following year, and so on. That $43.75 million breaks down in this format.
For 2022 remainder, it's approximately $16.9 million. 2023 is $13.4 million. There's a table in our footnote too that breaks it down by year for a five-year schedule.
In other words, it's kinda like a diminishing lease. As time goes by, it's front loaded, and as time goes by, a little bit lower on the back end. But as you know, the backlog's been increasing.
Right. Okay, great. Thanks for that, and thanks for the answer.
Thanks, Chris.
Okay. The next question is coming from Ronald Saul, investor. Ronald, your line is live.
I was just wondering if the company is considering giving any earnings guidance going forward, and then also a little more insight on the non-GAAP earnings by the fourth quarter or first quarter of next year?
Let me tell you something. It's a two-edged sword to give out guidance, if you will. If you make it or beat it's positive. If you miss it, and there's a lot of reasons why you might miss it's negative. The one thing that I have said is we expect, or I expect that our sales will increase 40%-50%. If you just look at that based on where we are, we should hit north of $40 million this year. I expect I'll be disappointed if it's just $40 million. Right now, that's higher than any analyst has us at. I think there might be a couple that are right at $40 million. Think about it.
If you take the current quarter and just put normal growth on that, we're gonna have about $34 million or $35 million in revenue. You take the fact that we're going to be charging a little bit more for our products, so we can do more for our customers. These are mostly our licensees, but that should add $2.5 million-$3 million in revenue. Now you're up to $34 million, $36 million, $37 million in revenue. We are continuing to kick the bushes real hard, and one of the reasons why we wanted to bring NetSapiens into the fold is because of all of their licensees, their potential acquisitions, so I'd be surprised if we don't have an acquisition by the end of this year. Let's just use $10 million as a number that they're doing.
That's $5 million for the second half of the year. Now you're up to about $42-$43 million in revenue. We are continuing to work on expenses. We measure everything around here. We're continuing to get our revenue a little more streamlined so it's more predictable and all of that is gonna get us GAAP earnings. You know, if people don't agree with that, they can you know, move their money. If they agree with it, they can buy more. I'm not soliciting anybody to do anything here. I'm just pointing this out to you, Ronald.
Mm-hmm.
I hope you agree with me.
Yeah. No, no, I agree with you, but this path to GAAP earnings seems to have stretched out a little longer in respect to the NetSapiens merger.
I told you, and I agree, and that's one of the reasons why I've been looking at and putting most of my effort on the software division. We, and Anand agrees with me, we need to get lesser expenses, more margins, and higher predictable revenue stream there.
I would highlight, Ronald, that if you look at our numbers, I mean, for the quarter, we had over $1 million worth of stock comp expense and $600,000 of intangible asset amortization. Those are big numbers. When you think about the size of our organization, you know, those two numbers, you know, are the headwind to get to GAAP. That's why we've been highlighting non-GAAP profitability, 'cause when you take those numbers out, you know, we're in much stronger position. But you know that the amortization of intangible assets, and that'll be on the books for some time.
Let me just tell you the headwinds one more time. We've had lockdowns, we've had COVID spikes, we've had inflation, we've had interest rate uncertainty, we've had business slowdowns, employment difficulties, and the stock market is in a mess right now. We've had supply chain issues. Who knows? Maybe next quarter we'll be in a recession. I hope not, but we could be. You take all of that, and I'm very proud of our managers for managing in spite of everything that I've said. I'm sorry to get a little excited here, Ronald Saul.
Any follow-up, Ronald?
No, that's, you know, I think the stock and the market is looking for net GAAP earnings, and I think that's what's gonna really drive the stock.
Yep.
Agreed.
Well, in this market, you're probably right. The days of emotional stock purchases are, you know, based on top line are probably behind us. The marketplace is, as it becomes more and more rational, right now you're seeing irrational further on the downside. I think in the next quarter or so, it's gonna be more rational and people are looking for GAAP earnings. Absolutely.
Okay. Well, that answers my questions.
Thanks, Ronald.
Thank you. Good questions.
Up next, we have Chris Tom with Alpine Capital. Your line is live.
Good afternoon, Chris.
Hey, guys. How you doing?
Good. Good.
Good. Thank you. Maybe just to follow up on the acquisition strategy and maybe more detail on the pipeline, and then also maybe because of the current environment, are you seeing any need to change the strategy on the acquisition front, multiples paid, things like that, based on what's going on right now?
First of all, we're going to get revenue, at least half of it, of the 40%-50% from acquisitions and half of it, approximately from organic growth. I'm gonna let Doug, who's a little closer to that than I am, answer that question.
Yeah. Obviously, Chris, there's lots of opportunities out there. We're very selective in what we're looking for that is gonna be a good fit. Obviously it's gonna be accretive in anything that we look at doing. I think with the current market environment, you know, there's lots of opportunities out there. You know, we have lots of opportunities that we're considering. And as Steve said, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we have an opportunity closed before the end of the year. You know, when we look at our acquisition strategy, it's revenue, it's accretive revenue and synergies.
We've really got a lot of opportunities that I think fit the bill and, you know, we'll be excited to get the next one under our belt.
By the way, this goes back to Ronald's question, Chris. They gotta be cash flow positive or, you know, with that in mind, they need to have a plan to get to cash flow and, preferably GAAP positive.
Got it. Thanks.
Okay, up next we have Damon Finaldi with TeleCloud.
I'm sorry, who?
I got it, yeah.
Oh, okay. Damon, how are you?
Hi, guys. Nice, nice to hear from you. My question was on backlog. You already answered it earlier. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Take care.
Okay, we have Rafe Quinn with BARC Partners. Your line is live.
Hey, guys. How are you?
Okay.
Hey, Rafe. Great. How are you?
We're doing well. Thank you, Rafe.
Hey, I have a few questions, if you don't mind. Starting with the software solutions segment, NetSapiens. You just reported $3.3 million in the quarter, and it sounds like some sort of the shortfall versus where expectations were was because really more of an accounting change, where you guys are pushing more of the SaaS approach versus the traditional perpetual. You know, we saw if you look back in the business, I don't know, 10 years ago and beyond, when a lot of software companies made that transition, one of the things that they did was provide a bookings metric for the previous period and in the current period. You know, in this case, it'd be the first quarter of last year versus what you guys just reported.
I realize NetSapiens was, you know, private back then. You didn't own them yet, so I'm not sure what the data looks like. I guess the point being that a lot of the negative response, you know, from the market, sort of you can look through that and just focus instead on the underlying economics of what's happening. I was wondering if you guys can sort of share any metric around what bookings look like this quarter versus a year ago, for that specific division.
Well, let me answer that, and then I'm gonna have both Jeff Korn and Anand and Doug Gaylor and all the rest of the guys answer it. First of all, if we have metrics, that's gonna be forward looking, and it's probably guessing at what we're doing, and I don't like to guess at anything. I like to have information that we can feel, touch, smell, measure. And if we get there, Rafe, you'll be the first one to know.
With everybody else, by the way, just to be clear.
Yeah, we don't wanna give you insider information. We want to get to a point where our business is more predictable so that everyone understands where we've been and where we're going. That includes you, Rafe. I like the idea of a matrix. That's a good point, but we're not in a position to do that just yet.
Yeah, I would tell you, Rafe, that, you know, if we look at it from the information that we do have, bookings are up. But again, when we look at the bookings, subscription services bookings are probably almost double or 100% of what they were previously because we weren't doing subscription services January of last year. I'll have Anand give a little bit more color on that, but I think that we've traditionally quarter-over-quarter seen increase after increase after increase in the software solution bookings.
Yeah. Rafe, I think that's a great question, and I think one of the things that we're doing on the software solution side is working very closely with Ron and also working very closely here with John on the revenue side to actually figure out exactly what metrics we want to provide to you for that reason, to make things that much more predictable. You know, we can dig in historically, but Ron, you know, Ron made a very good point in terms of how the measurements were being done as a private organization versus as a public organization are very different. You know, giving you just kind of some ballpark number would probably be inaccurate or you know, not appropriate.
As we develop those, we absolutely want to do it because we need those to obviously manage the business as well. What we're seeing is significant increases in kind of total contract value on the subscription side. As we you know dig into the models of how to model the business as we go forward, you know, we'll be happy to share those with you. Ron, I don't know if you wanna add.
Okay. I'm sorry.
Go ahead, Ron. I didn't mean to talk over you.
Oh, no, you're fine. He covered it, so I didn't really need to add anything else to it.
Yeah. I guess the point is just trying to understand the noise from accounting versus the underlying economics. To the extent that the market gets that, it can, you know, reduce sort of the response here from what happened. I guess the second question on a related point is, you know, you had mentioned that about $800,000 of the software solutions business was one-time, which would imply about $2.5 million was sort of the recurring. Is that sort of a decent baseline that we should go off of for sort of a quarterly basis going forward there? A bit of a reset to that line item and then just, you know, kind of layer on top of that.
Yeah, using history as a proxy for the future, yeah. I would say that that's a fair assessment with growth on top of that.
Okay, excellent. Just with respect to, I guess the final point here on the M&A side, which is great if you guys find opportunities. You know, looking at cash on the balance sheet, it looked like you guys had about $6 million at the end of the quarter. Would you plan to finance that through sort of stock deals combined with cash? How would you think about that in the current environment?
Yeah, as I said, Rafe, we've got lots of deals in the hopper, and so all of them have different components that make up how we would do those acquisitions. Yeah, I would say that probably all considerations are on the table depending on the opportunity, but a combination of cash, stock and financing are probably all on the table for any of the deals that we're looking at this moment.
There's-
Great.
Basically, there's no set formula.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Those are all my questions.
Yeah.
Thanks for your time.
Okay, John. Next question.
All right. Up next, we have Michael Kaufman, Private Investor. Michael, your line's live.
Good afternoon, Michael.
How are you doing, Steve? I wanna congratulate you and Doug and the team for very good progress in spite of the economic headwinds that everybody is facing.
Well, thank you. It was my management team. I do very little except complain about everything around here.
See, one of the things that really excites me about the opportunity is you basically have an exciting low-cost pricing strategy, where you can go after the larger players, the entrenched players, and offer a much better cost because they have a large installed base. So if they try to equal you in terms of pricing, they have a huge hit, and they have a very large infrastructure with high salaries and big corporate overhead. So there's a real opportunity to get very big, very fast.
Yes.
With competitive pricing.
That's true, and we're winning deals against BroadSoft and Metaswitch and others out there. All of what you're saying is true. Let's face it, they have to be competitive in the marketplace. You know, they're gonna charge so much for their to the end user. It's all about cost in this business. If they can get the cost down, that's money in their pockets or more money they can pay their employees with, et cetera, et cetera.
The market is so huge that if you offer.
Absolutely.
A compelling price.
We think it's at least a $500 billion or a trillion-dollar market worldwide.
For areas of activity, if you offer a compelling price point, you can go under their umbrella, which is hard to lower because they have big corporate overheads.
Bingo. You hit the nail on the head.
You know, in addition to great product and everything else you do, there's a real opportunity that the market may not know about. I know that it's no longer a foo-foo game like we had in the past with people like RingCentral was at 30x revenue or some cuckoo number. You know, those days may be behind us for a while, and it's real blocking and tackling, which you guys are used to. I think-
Well, getting back to Ronald's question or his comments, I think the market is gonna be more rational, and they're gonna look at metrics versus pie in the sky.
You know, one of the things that you had spoken of at the last meeting is that because it's gonna take longer to do this really strategically and, you know, blow this out as a big profitable company, that you were thinking of, you know, allowing patient investors to have some small reward with a small dividend. Is that still on the table? Or, because of all the other issues, you're moving away from that?
I'm gonna let Jeff Korn answer that.
Well, there's a couple of moving parts, Michael. First of all, we have to announce through Nasdaq before we announce a dividend, so I wouldn't do it on the call anyway. We have a board meeting to discuss that a little later in the week. We wanted to see some additional numbers. I expect you'll hear something from us next week.
Okay. I guess the other thing is that because the market has, you know, in general collapsed for smaller technology companies, it's harder for people to buy the stock that is, you know, below $3 a share. Hopefully, that's gonna quickly get resolved because I think you have a really promising long-term business opportunity. I've been a continued supporter, and I believe the team will do very good.
Thank you very much.
With that, I wish you well, too.
Thank you.
Thank you. If there are any remaining questions, please press star one on your touch tone phone. Up next, we have Ron Samet, Private Investor. Ron, your line's live.
Hi, you guys.
How are you?
Good. We're having a nice day. I was just wondering, Doug, how your virtual conference with Oppenheimer went, the other day. What was the flavor of that in general?
It went extremely well. We had, I think, 6 individual one-on-one meetings and all of them with fairly decent size institutional or family offices. I think we had overall just great comments on our growth and the potential. I think the institutions and the investors that we met with feel as we do that our stock is very undervalued and feel like it's a tremendous opportunity based on where we have the opportunity to take this. You know, when we highlight the opportunities ahead, we highlight where we are from a growth perspective. We highlight the opportunities in the sector. We highlight the opportunities from an acquisition perspective.
We highlight the fact that this isn't our first rodeo and the fact that we've done this in our previous history and we know what we're trying to accomplish. They like the fact that we are very diligent and that we've met all of the commitments that we've made in the past. When we do these investor presentations, we're highlighting on the fact that, you know, we have been successful and the fact that we stated we were gonna uplist to the Nasdaq, we did that. We stated that we were going to do a successful raise, we did that. We stated we were going to get the GAAP profitability, we did that. We stated we were gonna go do an acquisition, we did that.
We said we were gonna get on one of the major indexes with the Russell Microcap funds. We did that. You know, we continue to execute on that. We're gonna continue to execute on all the things we've committed to on this call. The bankers and the institutions and the family offices that we've talked to love that message. You know, what they do with that is yet to be seen, but we feel like there's tremendous opportunity where we sit today.
Nice. That's all I had. Thank you.
Okay. You're welcome. Thanks.
Bye, Ron.
Okay. We have no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the floor back to Steve Mihaylo for closing remarks.
My closing remarks are everyone is working very, very hard here at Crexendo, and we'll continue to work hard. This is not like a one and it's done. It's a process, and we're going to work hard to make sure the process delivers a nice return to our shareholders. Everyone in this room is a shareholder, and we've all got a lot of skin in the game, either sweat equity, actual dollars, or just the fact that we hate losing. We want to win, and we will win. With that, I'm gonna wish everyone a good summer, and we'll be back after we have Q2 numbers. You're gonna see a little bit of improvement in the Q2 numbers.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.