Hello, and welcome to Needham's Virtual Tech Week. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the cloud communications and broadband edge networking sectors at Needham. I'm really pleased to have me today, Kaltura, represented by CEO Ron Yekutiel and CFO Yaron Garmazi. Welcome, gentlemen. How are you?
Wonderful, Ryan. Thank you so much for having us, and thank you all for joining.
Excellent. So, Kaltura is a provider of video platforms for enterprises and service provider streaming applications. And, Ron, why don't you start by providing us with a walkthrough on a quick summary of your September results? What were some of the strengths and weaknesses, and what were some of the puts and takes really across your different segments?
Yeah, happy to do that, Ryan. And let me take a few minutes to level set based on our results and how we see the market. So let's start with the top line. We posted $43.5 million in total revenue, with 6% year-over-year, highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2022. It was also $40.8 million in subscription revenue, which is +8% year-over-year. It was a record-high subscription revenue, it was the fourth quarter in a row of that, and also the highest ratio of subscription revenue, 94% in total revenue, 'cause we're decreasing the number of... or the revenue from PS, which is a good thing. Both total and subscription revenue were ahead of our total and subscription revenue guidance, and we slightly raised our annual revenue guidance for the second consecutive time.
So that's the top line, generally, looking green. Bottom line, we posted adjusted EBITDA of +$300,000. It's the first time that we had positive adjusted EBITDA since 2020, and it's a bit earlier than planned. We thought it was gonna come a bit later, which is great, and we also raised our annual adjusted EBITDA guidance for the second consecutive time, so that's generally green. We also reaffirmed our commitment to posting a positive adjusted EBITDA next year, notwithstanding whatever revenue growth rate comes. If you think about cash flows on the bottom line, then we had +$1.7 million net cash provided by operating activities, which is the highest quarterly result since 2020. And so we closed the quarter with $69 million in cash. We have ample left, and that's both cash and marketable securities.
We also reaffirmed again that we're gonna generate net cash from operating activity in the second half of this year. We said that at the beginning of the year, and that translates, if you run the math, to a maximum loss of $11.5 million from cash flow ops, and that's versus $46.8 million last year. So it's a big improvement from the year before, and we stated that next year, the first half of the year is probably gonna be negative because of seasonality, but in the second half of next year, we expect to be cash flow break even on an ongoing basis from that point on. So generally, we're gonna have enough cash and no issues there from a cash perspective.
Now, a general comment on the bottom line, and we keep on saying that we were adjusted EBITDA on cash flow ops positive in 2019 and in 2020, prior to getting into a sizable investment together with our IPO that expanded our market. So we're coming back to being able to deliver on that, and we are excited about doing that at the same time frame we promised at our IPO. So if you think about the original plan, a few years in, we're gonna be profitable, we're still there. So that's top line, that's bottom line. I think all in all, continuing to do well. Let me give you some perspective on the market trend, demand, bookings, retention, like where is the growth rates going out, and a bit about the products, and we'll wrap up your first question.
So from a trends perspective, repeating what I said on the call, most contribution this quarter came from upsells from the enterprise business unit and from North America. Europe have been hit a bit more. There's continued high demand for our event platform, and specifically addressing external marketing use cases, mainly in conjunction with existing internal ones as well. So there's a lot of need for both. And I gave an example on the earnings call of a seven-digit deal with a new financial services customer that came in to power marketing communication. But to my second point about together, we continue to see consolidation around Kaltura for multiple use cases.
Right, I gave another example of another seven-digit deal, which is a new Fortune 500 tech company that we had closed prior to a year prior, and then they started external, now they added internal, and together it's 2.5x the original contract. I also mentioned that half of our RFPs during the quarter were addressing consolidation use cases. Another important point is that our win rate continues to be high, and it had been high throughout the whole year, better even than the year before, and objectively compared to all years, a very good number. We also saw a continued squeeze on % of booking for professional service, in line with the increased portion of revenue, which is good on the mid- to long-term. Also, good top-of-the-funnel signs.
So number of new QBMs, and that's earlier this year, we said the same, continued to grow, and so we had that grow sequentially compared to Q2. Q3 is generally a lower quarter for SDR meetings, but it was better than the year before in the same quarter. So generally, on a year-over-year and sequential basis, we're seeing continued improvement in the top of the funnel, right? Now, at the end, the issue is not that, but that there's the industry headwinds that I also was talking about that are reducing budgets for our customers, that are causing for longer sales cycles, that are causing price pressures. But given all the other data points that I've said, it means that deals are getting delayed, they're not getting lost, 'cause win rate is high, and the top of the funnel is high.
So we have a lot of leads coming in, we have a good amount of leads that are closing to actual close one, and in between it gets elongated. What that translated into is a rather flattish booking over the last few quarters, Q1, Q2, Q3, at a level, as I said in the call, that's about 25% less than the year before. Now, it's interesting because we reduced a third of our sales force ramp sales force. So from a productivity perspective, it's actually better than last year. 25% less booking, but a third less salespeople, but still not where we can be, and I'm of the belief that when market conditions improve, even a base year like a 2019 pre-COVID is much better. We could jump and do materially, materially better from where we are now. A few words about gross retention.
That also came up in the call, and to give a feel for where we stand. So it was another quarter of lower gross retention than usual. It started off, and we said that in the last earnings call, as a subsequent event that happened in July, so we mentioned it last time, a large customer that reduced their activity for strategic reasons, that are beyond Kaltura. But then generally, we fell by a few percentage points. Usually, we're at high 80s%; it went to the mid-80s% on a gross retention level. Now, as I mentioned on the call, most of that was not full terms or departure of customers, but reductions of requirements by customers, and generally, a very small part, 10%, is because of product or services that are not sufficient or they're unhappy.
So the biggest portion is a decision that they can't afford services, they, given the situation, they're gonna use less, et cetera. We're expecting a similar situation this quarter, generally, both by way of churn, maybe booking, but then we expect that to continue to go back up to historical levels. And when you look at the NDR base, when you think about our retention levels, that we posted 101% versus 96% last year, it'll probably be squeezed down a bit, but then come back. We'll still hit the 100% that we said for the year. So that's that. On the product side, there's a bunch of interesting things from AI, but I believe you're gonna wanna talk about that separately.
I'm excited, by the way, from all the different things, how we launched this at Dreamforce, which was one of our great deployments during the year. Salesforce is a new customer from the beginning of the year. We already deployed on Salesforce+ and went live running all of the virtual Dreamforce, which was a 300 sessions together with their, our AI tools, to enable them to repurpose content and create automatic summaries, stuff like that. We'll talk more about that.
Great.
And then kind of if I sum up the whole story, we're delivering this year ahead of our initial top and bottom line guidance. And the growth rates are better than the other players in the field. And so we're outperforming competition. They're showing declining year-over-year rates throughout the year. We've never gotten to declining or any reduction of revenue. It's low single digit or mid-single digit if you think about subscription. But the thing in Kaltura is that we're doing that at the same time that we're hitting our original expected adjusted EBITDA and cash flow ops. So it didn't change our plans for profitability, which is really, really good. And then, we're not immune to the global industry headwinds. You know, there's some pressure on booking, there's some pressure on net retention. It's not worse than we thought before.
We already indicated that there's some impact, but when we looked at that, that's gonna reduce our Q4 revenue. But based on deals that are already closed, we expect that that trend will not continue into the beginning of next year, and we think that we're well positioned to recover. We have historical results that show for that. We have big new customers wins, we have top of the funnel numbers, we got the win rates, we got the growing ARPUs, the consolidation story. We're getting good feedback from our customers, so we believe that it's gonna come back up. We just need to wait and see how fast and how steep the recovery is gonna be. So apologies for the long answer, but-
Ah, it's great.
I wanted to make sure that you see the full picture around what happened last quarter.
Super. Any particular verticals you'd point out as being strong or weak in the broader mix of things?
Well, this quarter, media and telecom grew faster than enterprise, but it's gonna-
Yeah
... turn around in any given... In the past, we've seen that go up and go down.
Yeah.
I think the biggest focus for us continues to be in enterprise-
Yeah
... which we are mostly invested in. We believe it's the largest TAM and the most important one, and we believe that's gonna lead our growth into the future.
That's great. And so this December guide, you're guiding down in revenue, which sounds like some downselling and a large customer that's been anticipated for a while.
Well, that was even before. That impacted the third quarter-
Mm-hmm
... because we stated that as a subsequent event in the second quarter. But beyond that, and again, they reduced for reasons that are beyond Kaltura, the booking and churn and everything else that we were discussing is causing some pressure. We have increased, as I mentioned, the annual numbers for both adjusted EBITDA revenue for the second time, so we're gonna do better than we said at the beginning of the year or in the middle of the year.
Yeah.
Q4 will be a slight reduction. As I mentioned earlier, we expect that to turn around and go back up at the beginning of the year.
Got it. Yep. So from a balance sheet perspective, you talked about, you know, confidence in your cash flow next year, being having positive cash flow from operations for the entirety of next year. That's a big step, and moving forward-
Not, not for the entirety of next year. I wanna be very accurate. Adjusted-
Okay
... EBITDA will be positive for the year.
Okay, sure.
And then cash flow is gonna be break even on the second half of the year. For the year, we might not be a positive, but what we said was, the beginning of the year was gonna start negative. The second half of the year, like now, like this year, will be positive.
Yeah, yeah.
The difference is that from that point on, we expect to only be on the positive side, unlike now, that we expect to have a slight negative at the beginning of the year. We didn't give actual number. We're not guiding for numbers.
Got it.
We expect it to be better than this year, and we already gave you a number for this year, which is better than $11.5 million for cash flow ops, versus the $40-some million from last year. So it's going in the right direction, and there'll be-
Yeah
... more than enough cash.
Yeah, it's great. Now, you, you've been executing well through, you know, some OpEx reductions and macro headwinds that have been really tough, so this has been fairly predictable. That's great. And, in general, your visibility, I assume, remains pretty steady here. You're not looking, at this point, as you look into next year, about a major shift, tail or headwind?
We're not. When we're looking at the kind of second derivative, are the headwinds growing or tailwinds growing? We're seeing and we believe that they're going in the right direction.
Yeah.
So some of the headwinds we're having are coming down, in part-
Yeah
... because we've already reduced some of the customers with the price pressure. It's not expected to go even further down.
Yeah.
In part is because of things in the macro that hit more in the rearview mirror. On the positive side, on the flip side, we have all the new products and capabilities and stuff that we've come in. I'll give you an example. When I speak about the marketing and outside sale, use cases for-
Right
... for CMOs, these are things that we gradually added throughout the year. And so at the end of the year, when we took some customers from your competitors that we didn't compete with before, we're now in a position taking many, many more. And also, a comment about consolidation. A lot of the customers, when COVID ended, they said: "Look, we're gonna take a little bit of a breather, and then come back with a more strategic approach, and we believe we could take a consolidator like you to take care of all the different things that are point solutions.
Right.
Then, when the market turned around and went down, they said: "Look, we're gonna wait a bit longer because of the market, and albeit that in the mid to long term, it makes tons of sense to use you because it's cheaper. In the immediate term, you require some people, and time, and risk, and we don't wanna do that." So as you go into that third year, we believe a lot of the projects... And people that have told us, "Look, we wanna move to you," are gonna say, "You know what? It's, it's time to do this because it's a smarter thing to do." Now, we don't know, is it a Q4, a Q1, a Q2? It's, it's hard to tell.
Yeah.
We do believe that as quarters are gonna come by, we're gonna have better. From a visibility on numbers, we have a pretty strong handle on Q4 and Q1, given history.
Yeah
... and where we're at, and it requires less. It will be less impacted by immediate bookings happening now or in the future. But from Q2 of next year, it's still open. It really depends on what we're gonna do in Q4 and in Q1, so it's hard to tell. We're gonna wait. We're gonna guide for next year, obviously, at the end of the quarter.
Sure. Great. So on the product front, can you walk us through some of the kind of major developments in 2023 that you think can really have an impact in 2024 here?
Well, the one thing, and it's important, important to remember, again, what I said about the move to real-time conferencing capabilities together with marketing, together with external, with the recent launch of webinars, virtual events, virtual classroom, these are things that we're just starting to get the benefit from. So at the macro level, we don't need a revolution, we don't even need an evolution-
Yeah
... and now that we're able to also control cost, because most of that investment is in our rearview mirror. Right, I mentioned earlier that when we IPO-ed, and in 2021, following two years of profitability, we came into a big investment cycle, it was a significant investment to get into a new technology, a new product, new size of the market, new go-to-market, low touch.
Yeah.
And that's now paying back, and we can now step back, even on the investment side, because we made that shift. So the first point I wanna stress is that the tailwinds that we have, from a product strategy perspective, are not dependent on things that-
Yeah
... we're gonna develop today or develop in the future, but they're relying on things that we've been developing over the last three years that are coming to market. That's number one.
Yeah.
Having said that, a lot of what's exciting for us... And by the way, maybe one more comment on that, the same goes to M&T, it's not just CNT. So media and telecom, when we added the front-end application to our back-end infrastructure, and we made a combined solution and sold that for the first time to a multi-country telco that's now deploying them, and for the very first time, Kaltura is not just the back end of Cloud TV offerings, but also-
Yeah
... the front-end application.
Wow!
That's huge and increases our point, enables us to do a lot more across multiple markets. So that's been the case. Now, that said, let's double-click on AI, because I know it's an area of interest, and I mentioned earlier-
Yeah
... how we launched that together with Salesforce, and our intent to do more of that in the days ahead. So the unique thing about Kaltura is that we're sitting on the sandwich, that at the bottom of it, we're integrated into workflows because of our very robust APIs. Remember, the differentiator for Kaltura that makes us the best consolidator of this industry, is that we have 1,000 APIs, like Lego pieces, put together into products, and the products are interoperable. So we run deep by way of integration, but we also run wide by way of a holistic platform.
Sure.
And so when you think about that, the running deep is the first step because we have workflow integration. On top of that, we have the data of our customer that's pulled up, mined by us. So now we have data. Now we're gonna put on top of that layer of AI, on top of the data and the workflow, and then the last piece is the experience layer, the actual engagement, distribution, publishing, interactivity, personalization, which is our layer. We're not a data company, we're an experience company. So if you have all of that together, you're able to enable much greater ROI all the way to the experience layer, and use AI as a mean, not as an end. We're not a LLM.
Yeah.
We're not here to just take out data, but we're here to actually improve the experience layer. So the-
Yeah
... the excitement is that customers could consolidate around Kaltura with a unified system that maximizes values for internal and external using smarts, right? So we spoke about that in this year's Virtually Live!, that just happened now. A week ago, it was in two separate locations, one for Europe and one for the US. We had thousands of registrants. We had amazing keynote speakers from AWS, from VMware, from Adobe, from SAP, from Salesforce. Senior execs, it was great. And we also showcased, during the event itself, our AI-focused product releases, including things like crowd reactions and AI-based content discovery. We also have this new AI-based assistant that streamlines how you set up the webinar and how you provide the users intelligent information.
We're now working on expanding this assistant, not just for the creation of the webinar, but also the actual event itself and after the event. So to enable the organizers and the presenters during the webinar to do the recommendation to the audience, and real-time metrics, and stuff of that nature. So that's gonna happen.... I would mention in our call that we also have a chatbot that we added to our Cloud TV offering that enables folks to have their tailored content suggestion using AI. We call it the TV Genie. And so there's a lot of exciting things, and in a second, I believe, we could talk a bit about the ecosystem, but there's some stuff there as well. So we're excited about that.
In general, I think that if you fast-forward a couple, two, three years forward, and I keep on saying that, the interesting thing is the ability to compress content creation and content consumption and distribution. Because to date, different companies were in charge of different areas of that life cycle of video, right?
Right.
For media and telecom, you have folks that were producers and creators of content, then you have companies that distribute it. But when everything's on the cloud, and everything is automated, and everything AI, you can have the same tool to create and distribute. And the reason that's exciting is because you can have it done, not just automated, but personalized, hyper-personalized.
Right.
Think about learning when you have your own tutor that basically listens to what you wanna learn and creates synthetic video on the fly or repurposes existing one. It's like the historical Khan Academy vision-
Mm
... gone extra hyperbole, because now you could actually have an infinite amount of videos generated for you based on the exact answers you've given to the exam. A mistake that you have, you have a misunderstanding of something, you need somebody to curate and explain it to you in a highly enriched environment with a video, it'll be created five seconds prior to you watching it, and you're the only person in the world that's gonna see this video because it's tailored for you.
Right.
And so you're gonna see this personalized experience of learning. In the same way-
Wow!
... you can have a personalized experience of marketing, right? You come into a website, and you have this concierge and an avatar that can speak to you, but also take you through enriched information, whether it's customer care, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales. So that's the vision-
Yeah
... and that's where we wanna go, and we control a lot of that layer. We're already inside with these big customers. We're gonna add that component, and that's exciting from my perspective.
That's impressive. That the whole education system is still in its kind of infancy here, and-
We're in half of the R1 schools.
... exciting.
in the U.S. We're in most of the Ivy League schools in the U.S. We're the vendor of choice. We're right there. So we're-
Yeah
... you know, from a strategy perspective, we're already inside.
Yeah, it feels like, it feels like the educational applications have moved the traditional learning model online, and now the next step is, now that you're online, look at all the tools you can apply, since it's all just data.
100%.
Very exciting.
So, it becomes smart, it becomes hyper-personalized, and by the way, the next step after that, it'll become immersive, in the sense that-
Right
... it won't be just 2D video, it'll be VR, XR, virtual reality. But again, I'm not talking about the next, you know, one, two, three years, 'cause it's gonna take time for the form factors. But when you ultimately think about this, everything is gonna be highly enriched. And again, even at that point, you're gonna go to the companies that have been providing the immersive experiences, which is today's video experiences for these companies, to improve learning and to improve marketing, and we're there.
Right.
So we can see the next few generations of value coming in. We just need to get out of this funk of the last couple of years in this industry, and obviously, video is still in the seventh inning. There's so much more to do.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's been a rough couple of years for everybody.
You can see the applications, too, extending beyond traditional education to marketing, as you said, and internal education, and, you know, it just keeps going. That's... It becomes a huge-
A unified system that does all of that is really powerful, and the reason is, they're not separated. They're not separated because the same video you're creating internally for training is used externally to train your partners, and then ultimately to train your customers.
Right
... and to inform them.
Right.
You can have different metadata structure. Even across different, seemingly different verticals, media, enterprise... Like I said, what is National Geographic? Is it education? Is it media? What's Red Bull? Is it marketing? Is it media? Every company is a media company.
Right.
To be able to come in with this infrastructure that supports horizontally and proven to do so, because we've been able to be in the biggest media companies, the biggest enterprise, the biggest banks, the biggest tech companies.
Yeah.
Then, as we move into events, to land AWS re:Invent during the heart of COVID, with 600,000 registrants, 300,000 participants. So, you know, we have all this hole-in-one, which is not because we're just hardworking, it's because it is a platformic requirement.
Yeah.
We've been building towards this in the last more than 10 years, more than a decade.
Yeah, it's been the vision. And this trend toward low touch with professional services, business rolling off, is this just kind of a steady Eddie flow toward lower touch that we're seeing? Can you kind of walk us through that dynamic just a little bit on the business?
Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned at the beginning of the year, this is a general direction for us. It is all, at this point, gravy in the sense that we don't require this in order to come back to grow at, for sure, double-digit, hopefully 20. Whatever it is that we are hopefully gonna come back to do that we've done prior to COVID, because we have tons of market to get into, and even with the last addition, into external and events in real time, there's enough. But our view is that as you move into the type of products that we've recently launched around webinars, around events, in real time, it warrants and it enables the opportunity to come to mid-market, to the SME market, not the SMB, but the SME.
The reason being is that if you think about the content management, the large kind of crunching of big videos, if you're a small company, you don't necessarily wanna buy that.
Mm.
If you're looking at video portals, again, depends. If you're looking at the historical products of the Kaltura, they're more for the larger companies. We've done really good, better than all the other companies in our industry, and robust video products for big companies. Some are arguing they're trying to do that, they've failed. We have years and years and years of the right product, and the right go-to-market, the right experience, and the right channels to be able to do that. But then our vision was that when you think about Lego, you know, initially people bought a bag of Legos, and just the very advanced people used it, but then people use that-
Yeah
... for planes and cars out of LEGO, where everybody buys it. So the fact that it's modular doesn't mean that it can't be simple. It's just simple and modular. So we're starting to come into these better, simpler products.
Yeah.
By the way, the big part of that is gonna be not just to move to low-touch and self-serve pro sales, which we're getting into, and we're perfecting product market fits, and we're advancing and looking good, but also more channels.
Yeah.
I did mention that in this last quarter, there were two very interesting channels that moved from competitors to use Kaltura and to try to promote us. We expect that over the next few quarters, there'll be some good business coming from them. That's more than usual. In the last quarter, we had more than typical % of bookings coming from channels. Again, still less than kind of 20%, but usually it's less than 10%, kind of single digit. So we're going in the right direction there as well.
That's great. Following that theme around channels, any other kind of moves in the broader ecosystem for you there as you think about technology partners? You talked about Dreamforce. You know, as you think about where you are now and where you wanna be, like, a year from now, any major work, any major kind of goals there?
So we're very channel-friendly. You know, Kaltura is gibberish for culture. That's the name of the company. We picked it when we decided that the culture that we're gonna have is one of openness, flexibility, and collaboration. And it is the culture that actually helped us form the strategy, which is to build a very open, flexible platform. But I'm saying that because to start, the platform, which is modular and extendable, allows itself to connect to other developments. We've also released a fair bit of what we've developed under the open source, an Affero GPL license, but also that the philosophy is one of very much partnership. And so we have more than 120 third-party tech companies that have built plugins around Kaltura, and then we let our customers enjoy the integration. And maybe a good example is how we attacked AI.
So in parallel to starting to build their own stuff, we started launching, what we call the AI Accelerator.
Mm.
In this quarter, we're already working with 15 pioneering GenAI startups, and they're specializing in a lot of different fields. It's video creation, video editing, video repurposing, analysis, a lot of different things. And what we are doing is not only enabling the integration, but exposing them to our customers because we have this amazing roster of very large customers. So 10 large customers already are in a program that is geared towards connecting them directly together-
Mm
... with us, with these partners, to formulate an offering that would go, together. And so we're excited about that in the months ahead. So yeah, that's, that's-
In the future there, do you think about kind of an app store type model where people can-
Yep
... pull in partners and say, "Hey, I wanna, you know, integrate this capability," and-
Yeah, and regardless if it's a, an app store that's a low touch, no touch, you click, and you have the plugin and/or that you have an available plugin that we could sell and co-sell, and whether it is that the partner could go ahead and promote, and then people could use Kaltura, or we could sell. Regardless of the duration of the sales cycle and integration and deployment cycle-
Yeah
... it's still something that will be readily available for people to do. And again, we've been doing this for many, many, many years. In all facets of Kaltura, we're coming in, and we're integrated to a lot of different things, and this is why it's so powerful. Back to Lego, it's extendable, and people could connect it because video is not an application. Video is a data type, and when you run it in a lot of different settings, it needs to connect to a lot of different things. And there's so many different points out there, and innovation is remarkable, and no single company could own the whole thing. And so what you wanna do is be that bus that people connect to, that central-
Yeah
... system that people could tie into. And by the way, as we think about the future of this industry and further consolidation, which will happen, Kaltura is an ideal consolidator. Because not only are we running horizontally at a point that we could address multiple markets, multiple products, the largest TAM, but we're also that kind of company that could become that 900-pound gorilla that will enable innovation around it to continue to thrive.
Yeah.
Other point solutions don't make sense, and they're also not supportive of the ecosystem. They're trying to compete, and we've proven in the past that we're able to do that. Our vision for the next, you know, few years is to gradually help consolidate this industry-
Yeah
... and it'll be interesting to see what happens.
That's great. Great, great, great place to be. As far as the competitive landscape, any real changes there? Some of your competitors you mentioned are definitely struggling, seeing declines. This is, I'm sure, impacting pricing at some levels of the market. Can you walk us through an insider's perspective there on what you're seeing, you'd like to share?
Yeah, we followed all the earnings calls, and we keep on looking at the folks. Seems like all the other public video companies are down year-over-year. Last one to have joined them was Zoom, that in the last guidance have come down from slight, slight increase to a year-over-year decrease.
Mm.
We're still posting an increase and have increased our guidance twice. I'm gonna put the parentheses is that we do have kind of a that shallowing at the end of the year. We expect it to come back up, and so nobody's immune to it, but so far, again, most of these companies last year have lost year-over-year, this year, losing a year-over-year. We're not in that position. We're in a better position-
Mm-hmm
... because we're stickier, because we run deep, because we're not in the SMB trap.
Yeah.
We've never sold to SMBs, and we're always been the large enterprise company, because we have a very clear way to upsell with our platformic horizontal advantage. So our net dollar retention is better situated, and because we've now added all these new things over the last three years that enable us to grow. So no-
Yeah
... we're not seeing more pressure, if any, we're seeing... And I mentioned our win rates that continue to be historically high, and we're taking away key customers from key competitors. So we're not seeing any way in which we're being in a lesser position. We are seeing some of them in greater pain. And like I said earlier, I do believe that there will be some consolidation across these markets. So let's see where things go.
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I think the SMB market's probably where Zoom is feeling the most pain here. They had a massive gain there through the pandemic, and as we kind of return to some kind of normal, it's, they're definitely feeling it.
It's easy come, easy go, and we, from the get-go, basically said that our interest is to provide advanced video products. The reason was, we knew that we're not fighting against Zoom or Teams in the core market of, that they're in, because the productivity stack, video as an end, not as a means, video for watching video is not a market for us. But everything around that, where video is a means for learning, training, marketing, recruiting, sales, vertical solutions, this is where the big guys don't even wanna go, because it's complex video products with on-demand, live, real-time together, integration, longer sales cycles, not just, you know, complete self-serve. This is where we shine, given the technology capabilities and everything else. And this is a market where, there's less of an SMB focus. And it's not easy come, easy go.
Yeah.
It's much more entrenched, and it's much better, better positioned.
Yeah.
So we're, we like that.
Yeah. How about Yaron? You're awfully quiet there, Yaron. Can you, Yaron, share a little thoughts around kinda margins going forward and how investors should think about margins, you know, over the next few quarters here?
Yeah. As we mentioned on the call, when you look on the gross margin, it's probably going to stay in the same range that we are facing right now. I would call it low- to mid-60s.
Yeah.
We did say before that, that at some point, for the long term, we are definitely shooting for the 70%, and we believe that we will start to see it going this direction, especially in the media and telecom, that will pull it up-
Right
... in the next few years. But at least for the short term, also based on what we see in the market, it's not going to go down, it's going to improve. And as we committed, if you go below the gross margin, we are strongly committed to the, at least to a break-even situation next year from adjusted EBITDA.
Yeah.
Down the road, we definitely plan to take it higher, the bottom line.
That's great. You guys are executing real well in a really challenging market right now, and, you know, the technology stack really just seems like it has no peer at all out there. So keep up the hard work. And wrapping up here, Ron, anything you wanted to add to close it out?
Nope. Like you said, I think there's a lot of growth engines that are ahead, but, you know, in a year like this, it's a show me, don't tell me market. We're trying to keep it honest, we're trying to keep it straight. You know, we're sharing all the good, the bad, and the ugly that's happening to the entire industry and to us within. You know, in 2019, way before COVID ever hit, we were already kind of a rule of 20, going on rule of 30 company, and we're a far cry from that. I think this whole market is off completely, and, you know, when the blood is in the streets, that's the time to invest. So I think that there'll be a turnaround.
It's not necessarily as good for the industry as the top of the heyday during COVID, but it's definitely not as bad as it is right now. Obviously, there's less appetite for a mid-cap where things are, but-
Mm-hmm
... I believe that things are gonna turn around, and the opportunity will, will come back. And the first thing for us is to make sure that we're masters of our own future, and so from a profitability perspective, we're back to what we have been in the past, profitable. And like I said, given that we don't need a revolution or an evolution, and everything else that we've built is already set for us to gradually do better, all we need to see is how long it's gonna take for things to start turning around. And we don't need to do phenomenally well to do much, much better than we're doing right now, both operationally and from a valuation perspective. And last not least, I think that the big opportunity here is to consolidate this industry.
When you add up all the different companies and revenues, there's a big operational leverage that could kick in, and it can be that much more interesting and effective, and we believe we are the fitted company to do that.
Yeah. Excellent. Great. Appreciate both of you joining me today. Nice to see you, as always.
Thank you for your support, and thank everybody for joining us today.
Yeah. Thanks, Ron.