All right. I think we'll get started. Thanks everyone for coming to JPMorgan's 51st annual TMC conference. We're really excited today to be hosting 8x8 CEO, Sam Wilson, as well as CFO, Kevin Kraus. You know, maybe, you know, we can maybe get kick-started with maybe just introducing yourselves and the 8x8 story.
Thank you. My name is Samuel Wilson. I'm the CEO of the company, Kevin, the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Just to level set for everyone in the audience, we deliver communications for the customer obsessed. That's our new tagline. Historically, we've been known as business communications, voice, video, and chat for employee collaboration, and contact center. We sort of broadened it out this last quarter to make it around customer success because we really focus on a few key areas. Enabling the agile workforce, making sure that we empower employees to offer great customer service to, you know, whoever their end customers are. Harness the power of AI and machine learning, all the buzzwords.
We've been in there for a little while because the contact center market, in particular, is an inflection point around these types of technologies. We've been early in trying to build a platform around enabling those technologies to be deployed. I guess I would add a fourth one for this room, which is we try to do this in a very shareholder-friendly way. We are working on reducing our share dilution, paying back debt, and doing all kinds of things to drive more cash flow. Cash flow per share is kind of a key metric that we like to drive. And really the key here is that we offer a set of technologies, Software as a Service, to enable companies to both allow business communications for their employees and for their employees to offer great customer service.
In a real quick summary, that's what I'll say. You may have heard this market a lot about UC and CC, unified communications, traditional voice video and chat, CC, contact center, CPaaS, which is communications platform as a service. Yes, we have products in all those areas, and we do sell all those buckets in various forms or fashions. I think the last thing I'll just say real quickly is, you know, our claim to fame is that we were early in having both unified communications and contact center, all on one single platform. That allows us to offer a high SLA and offers us to enable a bunch of key feature functionality for end customers to be successful. I think this is really important when you think about things like Microsoft Teams. We have a market-leading Microsoft Teams integration.
We allow lots of people to use Microsoft Teams as their front-end interface and add telephony capabilities behind that so you can make phone calls, receive and send SMS messages, and all those kinds of things. It's just like kind of a holistic solution. It's B2B sales for people to communicate.
Got it. That's a great overview. I mean, you spoke a little about your last quarter results. You know, it might be just helpful for the audience if maybe you can just touch on maybe what were some of the key highlights from your last quarter earnings and what has maybe been a more difficult earnings period for just tech in general.
Over the last six months, we've done a lot of work in pivoting really toward more profitable growth. The last couple of quarters, particularly, we've outperformed on our operating margins. Cash flow has been free cash flow, and cash flow rather has been positive for nine quarters in a row, but we're targeting the more profitable growth. We beat on our bottom line margins. Our gross margins came in really strong. We're really, you know, we've really hit on all cylinders from a operational efficiency point of view, and we plan to continue driving that through future time periods. We're continuing to invest in R&D to drive innovation, which we believe is gonna lead to future revenue growth.
That is, you know, something that we'll continue on. We've definitely hit our stride now in operational efficiency, particularly in the sales and marketing area.
Got it. you know, maybe for you, Sam, you know, you've been part of 8x8 for quite a while. There's been a few, you know, management changes over the, you know, the past few years and different product developments as well. I mean, you know, what do you really see as the overall strategy for the company moving forward, and where do you think you can maybe make the most progress?
I think it's a great question. I mentioned earlier in my sort of my quasi-prepared remarks that our core competency is that UC and CC together. I think one of the things that the company has not done well the last few years and we're rectifying is really invest in innovation. I think the company tried to take sometimes the short-term route of investing in digital ad spending or more sales capacity to try to drive revenue growth instead of investing in innovation. I mentioned this earlier, the contact center market, in particular, is at an inflection point with what's going on around it. I mean, for 20 some years, we saw year-on-year decreases in total contact center spending. In the last two years, we've seen increases.
We've seen onshoring of contact centers versus offshoring of contact centers as corporations understand that retaining customers is as important as getting new customers. The biggest strategy change at the company is last quarter, we spent 15.4% of non-GAAP revenue on R&D. We're spending in excess of $120 million-$130 million a year, rough and tough. About $100 million of that is going into the contact center space. We started this journey a couple quarters ago, so we've got new innovation hitting the marketplace here. The company's in a bit of a transition, right? It was a UC small business company just a few years ago, and we've been in the contact center business since 2011, but it hadn't been an area of investment.
We're now 57% enterprise. I'm looking at Kate 'cause I'll forget. 57% enterprise, and we're driving with more and more investment in innovation on the contact center side, and we see tremendous opportunity here on a go-forward basis, in that area.
Got it. You know, maybe pivoting a little bit to, you know, what everyone's really talking about now is just generative AI and-
Mm-hmm.
you know, how that's really impacting, you know, pretty much, you know, every company at this point. How do you really, you know, envision generative AI in your space and, you know, what are maybe some of the positive tailwinds or headwinds that comes with it? What are you maybe doing on the R&D front, with respect to generative AI in general?
Sure. generative AI is somewhat applicable directly to our business. There's parts that are very applicable. I'm gonna take a step back and just talk about AI in general. There's really three areas. Number one, when OpenAI came out, the first week they came out of stealth mode, we were already talking to them. We had known about them, and we have already incorporated Whisper technology for transcription, which is what they use their. It's a generative model that ChatGPT is based on. We use that in-house for transcription. We're getting more accurate transcriptions for lower cost, and that's a common service that we provide to us and our ecosystem partners, is those. That's bringing AI technologies onto the platform for use by everybody.
Number two, I think this is super important, is we've developed an API layer and a webhooks layer that allows for next generation MLAI companies to ride on top of our platform for the contact center. Over the last five years, we fundamentally refactored our contact center. This is a company that five years ago would do one software release every 90 days, maybe, et cetera. We now do five releases a day using CI/CD methodology, continuous innovation, continuous deployment methodologies, et cetera. This means five years ago, we might have had a backlog of 100 or 200 customer-found defects. Today, we have zero because if a customer finds a defect today, we can fix it tomorrow. We don't have to wait 90 days. None of those things pile up.
This is super important because now we have a platform that works in an innovation speed that matches, you know, effectively the venture capital community. The venture capital community is funded, I don't know, it depends on which numbers you see, maybe 2,000-3,000 startups, mainly using MLAI, though not all of them, around the contact center space. A lot of that started in 2020. The amount of money that's talked about is about $130 billion in venture capital money has been allocated to the contact center space and next generation solutions. They're not trying to build a contact center. They're trying to build technologies on top of the contact center.
What we've done is we've built that integration layer that allows them to sort of plug into us, and we think this allows us to offer a more tailored solution to a mid-market and enterprise customer. We're not focused on those high-end, JPMorgan Chase, your firm or Bank of America or Capital One. That's not our customer base. Our customer base would be a regional bank, a retailer, those kinds of things, who don't have a large developers in-house and wouldn't benefit from having a large number of sort of fine-tuning customizations to drive that. It's more of a cookie cutter solution. Number three, of course, we use MLAI technologies in-house. I have a bot that scans every contract to make sure that rev rec is done correctly and, you know, those types of technologies. We use them differently.
I think the big thing that differentiates us is really that bucket number two. Most of the competitors in the contact center space are trying to build all the MLAI technologies in-house themselves natively. If you look at their sum total of R&D spending in this area, it's probably less than $1 billion. Meanwhile, we're trying to build a platform that leverages the $130 billion put out by the venture capital community. We think in the end, that will be more successful. It'll take a little bit of time to show through 'cause we're in that transitionary period. We think that absolutely gives us a competitive differential in the contact center space.
Maybe following up with that, you sort of mentioned how, you know, with it, you're able to do more software releases and maybe fix different patches as part of the whole CI/CD pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
How has that, you know, really resonated with your customers, and how has that maybe improved retention levels across your customer base?
Great question. Our retention level is the highest they've ever, you know, been. We've got really good data going back on five, six, seven years. You correct me if I'm wrong. We've got, you know... Like, it's the highest it's been for at least the last four or five years. A lot of that's driven by the fact that our uptime is higher, our customer-found defects get resolved the next day, those kinds of things, or within a week. I think that's super important to understand that we have refactored our underlying contact center and overall our whole platform to a microservice, agile CI/CD environment.
I talk about CI/CD a lot, and I know it's a nuance, but it's really important to understand that that's like how Facebook or Google or those types of companies, it's the underlying methodology that they use to rapidly innovate on software. A lot of us who are in the contact center space. The contact center is a funny beast, right? We got into the business in 2011. Talkdesk, I think, was founded in 2010. I may get a couple of these wrong, but, you know, NICE is like, they were on the on-prem world, so they're like in the 1900s. Five9 is like 2005, right?
You're talking about it takes 10+ years of investment to get good at the contact center space, and then you end up with a lot of monolithic code that's hard to innovate on at these market shifts. We have bitten the bullet the last five years and really fundamentally refactored our original architecture. That's about a quarter away from being done. I mean, this is a 5-year journey. It's about a quarter away from being done. That's why we're talking more and more about innovation and where we're trying to drive the company on a go-forward basis.
No. Got it. That's a great overview. Maybe if, you know, we pivot a little bit just to the macro environment. You know, I'm sure you've been speaking to your customers and partners at length about it and how it's sort of impacting your business. You know, what is your sense on the current demand environment? What are you seeing? You know, how is that sort of being baked into maybe, you know, your guidance for next year?
Well, I'll let Kevin talk about the guidance. Look, I would say we're a $750 million a year software company, which, you know, puts us in the top 5% of all software companies. In the world of telecom, where you're talking about Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen and BT, we're a flea, right? I mean, I struggle. It's a fair question. Trust me, I struggle, but I'm gonna answer the question two ways. Number one is, in terms of deal cycles, we see a small elongation of deal cycles, and I'm, you know, like, usually our deal cycles are anywhere from 6-12 months, and maybe we see an extra week on average as we double-check the TCO numbers or those kinds of things. We're still seeing. You know, we've had great pipeline numbers, great bookings numbers.
We're all, you know, above plan recently. I'm not seeing anything on that side. During the pandemic, when I was CFO, I could really see when government subsidies and those things, when the installed base was under distress, because we would see a surge in collections issues and a surge in credit card default rates. As you can see, our DSOs, they're great. We're having no issues with collections at all, and our credit card default rates are at, you know, right on par where they're supposed to be. Our retention rates, as I mentioned earlier, are very high. We're not seeing really any distress in the installed base.
Mm-hmm.
When I mean retention rates, those are dollar-based retention rates, so downsells, customer shrinking, all that is factored into that. I think we're doing great on that side. I think there's just a little bit of CFOs and CIOs just wanting to go sure before they stand in front of the board to do typically, you know, for an enterprise deal, it could be a $5 million TCV deal. They just wanna make sure the I's are dotted and T's are crossed before placing the order.
Got it.
Anything you wanna add about guidance?
On guidance, I mean, we, you know, really as I mentioned before, we have really good retention rates. We've done some investment in that area too over the last two years. It's been a really great ROI for us. We've done it in smart ways. It's a lot cheaper, obviously, to keep a customer than go and get a new one. In terms of guidance, you know, there's no new product releases baked into the guidance or anything like that. A little bit of a rebound in the second half on some of our usage-based business. Generally speaking, it's a, you know, steady net new type of guidance for our growth for the year.
Just so everybody understands, 'cause, you know, it's kind of a group forum here, so I can kinda take a step back, right? We made a decision about 18 months ago, a year ago, to forgo revenue growth, shift to this innovation model, cut some of our inefficient growth angles, right? We were, you know, I was witnessing situations where we were spending money. The misnomer is, for some reason, we as a company can't grow. I can grow next quarter if I wanted to. All I have to do is call up Google and spend money. It's just gonna drive down my op income. It's not efficient, it's not great growth, it's not smart growth, but I can do it. I think that's the part the company's changed philosophically. We wanna be a smart, durable grower.
When you invest in R&D, you get durable growth. What durable growth means, if I cut my spending in R&D, I could still keep selling that product into perpetuity. If I go buy a bunch of Google Ads or go spend a, you know, a bunch of money on channel SPIFFs, the minute I stop doing that, my growth rate plummets. My growth rate plummets, and that's the part I'm trying to avoid. I think that's the Our industry got caught in this land grab mentality, and I think we were the first company to really take a step back and say, "This is foolish. I will forgo some revenue growth as I transition." Then we've got a bunch of new products in beta, a bunch of new products coming out in beta next quarter. Those are not factored into the model. They're in beta.
We'll know whether they meet market criteria to go to general availability here shortly. It's not a time-based thing. It's a function-based thing. Hopefully that reignites revenue growth, which I think is absolutely doable.
Got it. I mean, you mentioned a pretty interesting point. You know, you're really heavily invested in, you know, the R&D area to really drive that durable growth. Just curious, you know, what would you say now or are you know, hoping to maybe in the future as well, you know, be your competitive advantage? You know, maybe to that point, you know, what are you really seeing from a competitive front? You know, who are you typically bumping up against, you know, both in maybe the small business but also in the mid-market as well?
Sure. look, our competitive differential is we offer UC and CC together as a combined one single platform. That enables five nines SLA. We're the only ones with a five nines SLA. lower, you know, lower total cost of ownership because it's one vendor, one throat to choke, and some capabilities across two platforms. Let me give you a really simple example. everyone's interested in artificial intelligence and customer experience, but if you have your contact center on one vendor, then the bot gets trained on that, and then you have your unified communications on a different vendor, then it's a whole series of different datasets that you need to go train your bots and your artificial intelligence on.
Because we're on one platform, we have one single architecture, we have all our transcriptions, all our call recordings, all those things in one unified area, it's very easy to train your bots. Now, if 100% of your customer engagement came through your contact center, be like, "Yeah, so what? Doesn't matter." The reality is almost all businesses, half of their, roughly half of their customer engagement comes through the contact center, and the other half comes through UC users who are interfacing with customers, inside sales reps in general, billing, cancellations, you know, accounts payable, receivable, all those kinds of areas. They're generally not on a contact center solution 'cause they're not agents, they're not waiting in queues, they're not doing those things.
One of our differentials on a big picture for the future is that we have that single platform that allows you then to innovate on top of for these next-generation technologies. That's really. Like, I see a time within a year where we walk into a customer, us and a channel partner walk into a customer or a prospect even better, and say, "What exactly is your use case? What is your business? How are you trying to differentiate your customer experience to drive higher retention rates for your business?" Then we mix and match off-the-shelf technologies that are secure, efficient, et cetera, for that end user. The business across the street may need a different set of capabilities.
As I said earlier, most of my competitors in the contact center space and in the UC space are trying to build all this in-house. They wanna do everything. They wanna be the Walmart of business communications. Historically, if you look at tech, that strategy does not work, right? Salesforce doesn't do everything, Microsoft doesn't do everything, IBM doesn't do everything. No large company tech. There's Force.com, there's Marketo, there's Azure, right? You have to integrate with other pieces of the software stack, of technology stack inside of a business to offer a complete solution to a customer. That's really what we're focused on, is being that glue layer inside of business communications, which plays such a pivotal role in customer experience.
Yeah. With that, I mean, you kinda mentioned about, you know, the channel a little bit. You know, how critical is the channel at this point to really augment growth? You know, what are you sort of, you know, seeing within the channel at this point?
I think the channel is super important to us. Over, you know, over half of our new bookings comes from channel, through channels of some sort. In particular, in international markets, we're very channel-centric. In places like Australia, New Zealand, France, those kinds of places, we're a channel-only model. In some of the U.S., U.K. markets, we'll run a hybrid model with the majority still being channel. The channel itself, it's interesting, it's a completely fair question, but I have to break it apart in two pieces. The channel outside the United States in the telecom space and the channel inside the United States work radically differently. Outside the United States, they work much more analogous to a traditional IT channel. We have great partnerships, great business, great relationships, Virgin, Softcat in the U.K., these types of places.
Okay, inside the U.S., it's totally different because of the regulatory environment. The business that we're in, business communications, phone numbers, phone calls, all those kinds of things, are really governed by a very set of very specific taxing rules governed by the FCC. Universal service fee, you know, 25% of every phone bill, you know, E-rate, California telecommunications tax, the other one is 911 services and wiretapping. Those have to be provided by the taxing authorities and to us. Our channel model looks very hybrid-y, very different. It's a little less VAR. There's a master sub-agent, there's a couple different components to this.
I think one of the areas that we've done well in the channel, we're known as a major player in the channel, but there's a lot more on the operational side we could do to unlock more of the on-prem world. Remember, in the UC side of the house, maybe 20%-25% of the world is in cloud, and 75% is still on-prem. In the contact center side, the number is probably 10%-15% is in the cloud, the rest is on-prem. Because this is a late adopter to cloud for a whole host of technology reasons: jitter, latency, time sensitivity, bandwidth, compute, et cetera. The thing that's changing for all the cloud vendors and contact center is no longer are we going after just the on-prem to cloud. Maybe it's $12 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion on-prem going to cloud.
With MLAI technologies, we're now going after the $220 billion labor market around contact centers. That's McKinsey's number, it's not mine. I have no idea if it's accurate or not. I just plagiarized it from them. You know, footnote, asterisk, et cetera. With MLAI technologies, that's what technology does the best. That's historically what it's done the best, is replace human labor, particularly, high volume, repetitive labor with robots, for lack of a better word, steam engines, whatever you wanna call them. That's, I think, absolutely what will occur again.
Got it. That's really helpful. Maybe we can, you know, touch a little bit about, you know, the, you know, Fuze a little bit.
Yeah.
It's been a little over a year since the Fuze acquisition and, you know, last quarter, you know, you started, you know, mentioning that you're upgrading more of the Fuze customers to the 8x8 platform. You know, how has this transition been going? You know, what are you really seeing with that customer cohort?
I'll let Kevin talk about the financial numbers. I just wanna highlight one thing. Fuze is really the second time we've done a major UC migration, and upgrade, right? We upgraded our legacy base to X Series, so we had to go through kind of a replatforming of our UC base. We started that in 2018 and finished it in 2021. We built a set of tools. With Fuze, we did a great transaction. I would love to do another Fuze in the future. We're also building a whole set of tools. That's why there's a delay. We bought the company, and now we've started accelerating the upgrades, 'cause they get more to the 8x8 platform.
We've built an entire set of tooling around that to make it much easier for them to stay in-house. Things like automated provisioning, automated line of reporting, automated configuration, automated user management, bulk changes, et cetera, are all done now, so it makes it really simplistic. One of the things that I've mandated around this is the tools that we're building are somewhat general purpose. As I said earlier, I'd like to do another Fuze at some point in the future. It's been wildly successful, and Kevin will give you some of the financials. We wanna build a set of tools, so next time we don't have to wait a year to start the migration, we can start it sooner.
Yeah. On the financial front, I mean, it's really exceeded our expectations quite a bit. We built our original model during our diligence period. We've exceeded the customer retention on that side of the business as well. Been a true success. Our scale also relative to Fuze helped us enhance the gross margins quite substantially, you know, many points, because we're able to integrate things like our telephony customer support and things like that. That's really elevated and lifted the margins on that side of the business. We had a bunch of great engineers with that acquisition. We integrated, you know, some of our G&A functions, we got synergies out of that. We got synergies out of sales and marketing as well.
you know, the company, inherently, you know, basically went from a pretty substantial negative operating margin and cash flow to a very, very positive Op margin and cash flow for us pretty much immediately. We were able to really integrate that one very, very quickly and get the benefits from that acquisition financially very, very quickly.
Got it. I mean, you mentioned you'd like to do another Fuze deal as well. I mean, I sort of have to ask, but what, you know, is really your, you know, capital allocation, you know, philosophy maybe going forward? Are there any maybe product gaps or, you know, anything that you can maybe just provide an overview?
Nothing on the product gaps. Right, in my number one capital allocation is, you know, you can do five things with capital, right? Number one is invest in R&D. Number two is return to share investors. We paid off $58 million in debt, so we paid off over 10% of our debt over the last four quarters. We wanna continue to pay off debt, and then we'll look at doing, you know, share buybacks or other things at that point. I'd like to have the company debt-free in a number of years and then opportunistically use debt for acquisitions and then repay it relatively quickly. It's a tried and true method in the telecom space, if you have any questions, ask me afterwards. From a capital allocation standpoint, I believe greatly in that.
The key with, like right now, I wouldn't do another Fuze. My stock price is low, the best acquisition I can think of is 8x8 trades on the Nasdaq every day in New York. Like, that's a great equity to acquire if I was acquiring equities. That comes right behind paying off debt. In our last earnings call, we said we'd return $250 million to investors over the next three years. We started with $25 million payoff on our term loans, and we'll continue to be aggressive on that front.
Well, I think I'll just, you know, take a quick pause here just to see if anyone has any questions. We do have a microphone going around. If you want to ask a question, you can just raise your hand and someone will come to you.
Silence is-
No questions?
I like that. Everyone's a buyer.
Okay. Well, I'll just keep going then. I guess, you know, so maybe coming back to the guidance a little bit. The 2024 guidance, you know, it implies about, I think 2% revenue growth year-over-year, pro forma operating margins in the low teens. You know, what are, you know, at least for the margin side of the things, you know, what are some of maybe the other levers you can kinda pull on the expense side to really, you know, achieve that target? You know, what are you sort of embedding within that guidance?
I'll let Kevin cover the details on the guidance. I just want to give two philosophical things. Number one, there's no reason structurally we can't grow faster. We're in the midst of a transition of investing in R&D. When you invest in R&D, it takes about six- eight quarters before it shows up in the income statement. It takes about four quarters for the development teams to build the product, one to two quarters of beta, and then it starts to show up in the income statement in increased sales if you built the right things. There's no reason. Right now, we're in the midst of a transition that started about halfway through last calendar year, excuse me, on that topic. I want to make sure that it's clear. Now, look, as I said earlier, we could grow faster inefficiently.
The key is to grow faster efficiently, and that's really driven by the product innovation. In the short term, there's that. The other thing is I'm not like right now, we're at 13.5% op margins. I'm not looking at growing my op margins even more via cutting. I really wanna grow my op margins from this point via revenue growth. Kevin with the guidance.
On the guidance, it's low single digits. It implies a flatter first half with a bit of acceleration in the second half, particularly around our net new business kinda compounding quarter-over-quarter, plus the increase in the usage business. The other thing I'll mention, guided 12%-13% op margins for the year, a little bit higher in Q1. We have decided as a company to be more cash focused on our compensation rather than equity focused for a majority of our employees, there's a natural headwind built into that starting in our Q2, our fiscal Q2. The year-over-year increase is actually impacted by the headwinds. We still have really good growth on a year-over-year basis.
The reason why we're doing the cash-heavy comp is because we're gonna be reducing our stock-based comp over time. You could see that in our stock-based comp that we just had in our last quarter, 'cause we wanna obviously reduce the shareholder dilution over time. I think it's an important factor to understand in our expense guidance as well.
As we pay off debt and as we reduce shareholder dilution and as we do all those things, the key metric for me as CEO is cash from operations or free cash flow per share. That's the number I'd like to substantially grow over time over the next few years. If I pay off my debt, I get my interest back. That can be a sizable number. If I stop diluting shareholders via heavy equity compensation, that helps my... If I can just drive more cash flow per share, I think over time, I drive more equity returns, and then I can use that for other things to continue to compound.
Got it. Maybe we can talk just, you know, briefly, and maybe just we have two more questions left, but, maybe you can elaborate a little bit on the partnership you do have with Microsoft...
Yeah
How that's going and you know, what is really driving the momentum there with that side of the partnership.
Microsoft announced Teams, I think, originally 2017, 2018, but really put an emphasis starting in it with the pandemic in 2020, right? Zoom came along, Microsoft Teams came along. Microsoft's been innovating really heavily. Microsoft is kind of disintegrating the UC stack. UC, it used to be voice, video and chat as a single bundled product. Now it's kind of video and chat on one side and voice on the other side. What we did starting early on is build a direct routing integration to Microsoft Teams. If you wanna provide voice to a Microsoft Teams seat, I think we have the single best integration in the world. Our leading customer is running it flawlessly in 35 countries. It's amazing.
If they wanted to do that same thing under Operator Connect, they would need six different operators, six different contracts, et cetera. None of our UC competitors can do what we can do in that space, because we invested early and we invested heavily in it. You see our Teams business growing around 100% year- over- year. Depends on the quarter. It could be over, it could be under, et cetera. It continues to be very fast growth. The key there is I'm trying to stay out of the real commodity parts of Teams. I just wanna sell Teams in conjunction with Contact Center. 'Cause if you sell Microsoft, if you sell UC, even if it's got Teams connected, et cetera, and Contact Center, you get a lot of value and special functionality. Microsoft, number one, is a partner.
I don't view them as a competitor. Number two is we've got a great relationship with them. We've asked them to make adjustments to APIs or build APIs for us. They have. Number three is we do a, you know, just arguably a ton of business with Microsoft Teams. Like, we like it, and we think it's probably a winner over that company that starts with a Z and ends with an M.
Fair. you know, last question from my end. you know, maybe, you know, at a high level, but in your discussions with investors, you know, where do you really see people underappreciating, overappreciating, or just failing to completely grasp the fundamentals for 8x8?
Yeah, I think that's a completely fair question. I mean, look, I was an equity analyst one time in my career, right? Consensus estimates are like $0.50 this year for non-GAAP. So we trade at, what? eight times earnings, eight times EBITDA. It's like, you know, the valuations are low because people, if you look at our industry, we're down, RingCentral is down, Five9 is down, whatever. There's this narrative that somehow the industry is imploding, right? And I would just ask everybody to look at our financial statements. What did Kevin say? nine quarters in a row of cash flow positive. Our gross margins have gone from the high 50s to the low 70s over the last two, three years. I mean, all the telltale signs of an industry imploding aren't occurring. It's this counterfactual dragon that we've...
You know, when we sit down with investors and we say, "Hey, like, why is our stock trading so cheaply?" The answer is always, "Well, Microsoft and Zoom are gonna kill your industry." I'm like, "Yeah, but they're not. Microsoft's a partner of ours." They say, "Yeah, but they will." That's the part we've struggled with, and I don't know if anybody in the room could tell me the magic narrative words to make the light bulbs go off. This is still a market that's measured in tens of billions. There's a monster market opportunity. We believe we have competitive barriers to entry. We have a large patent portfolio. We've got 20 years of experience.
We have tremendous amount of investment in leading-edge software, and we're profitable, cash flow positive, we're growing, all those things, and I think we're on a path to grow faster in the future. I would say that the number one thing is just spend some time and actually take a step back and look at who we are, not the, I don't know, not the clickbait around the industry.
Well, I think that's all the time we have for today, but, I mean, thanks so much for joining us today, and we really appreciate the time, guys.
once again, thank you to JPMorgan.
Thank you. Yes. Thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Bye.