Hello, everyone. My name's George Iwanyc. I'm one of the technology analysts here at Oppenheimer. Thank you for joining the Oppenheimer Technology Conference. Today I have the pleasure of introducing and hosting Ron Yekutiel, the CEO of Kaltura, as well as Yaron Garmazi, the CFO. We'll start off with a bit of an overview of Kaltura and its platform, and then kind of go into various drivers for the growth, the sales initiatives, as well as the financial model. Ron, maybe starting off, can you give us a nice comprehensive overview of what the video experience platform and cloud can do for customers?
Sure, George, and thank you all for joining. We are a leading provider of advanced video solutions for businesses, and we have, as you have named it, a Video Experience Cloud. It includes three elements. The first is a set of solutions for any company of any industry, and that historically started from a Video Content Management System, a digital asset management that you could upload video, manage, distribute, publish. On top of that, we built a video portal, kind of a white label YouTube for organizations, and then an online learning room, which is an elaborate Zoom-like experience, but specifically for corporate and enterprise learning environments. Then a virtual and hybrid event product, which enables you to run virtual events with some elements around hybrid, and a webinar product, which basically includes webinar abilities.
It's a little product that started from internal capabilities for learning, training, knowledge sharing, and then moved to products that are also supportive of customer experience needs for marketing, sales, and customer care. That's the first layer. We have vertical solutions for specific industries, and currently we have solutions for two industries. For the education market, we're powering remote and in-class teaching and learning with our LMS Video, which is the video enablement of learning management systems. We have plugins for Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, Canvas. We also have a lecture capture tool that enables to grab videos from cameras in school and campuses or your PC. In a virtual classroom product like the one in enterprise, but for schools, it's a Zoom on steroids, specialized remote, virtual classroom feel.
For the Media and Telecom world, we provide a Cloud TV Platform that powers live and on-demand over-the-top TV experiences that could be delivered to any device. So it's powering full-on TV, long form and short form, ad-based, subscription-based, for a full living room experience with a clicker, as well as any device beyond. That's the second layer, so it's the vertical market. Underneath both of these offerings is a set of hundreds of open APIs and developer tools from which all of our products are built, and we kinda treat them like LEGO pieces because you could sell a bag of LEGOs, but you could also build all the other products with LEGO. They enable the very high degree of customization, integration, and interoperability of all of our products.
They enable to extend our products, but they're also offered themselves, as I mentioned, as media services, and that's in a VPaaS model, Platform as a Service model, and people build their very own products. People basically choose if they want the horizontal SaaS or the vertical SaaS, or if they wanna have the LEGO pieces and build their own SaaS. Just a few words about the type of customers that are using Kaltura. We have over 1,000 large organizations, including over 30% of the U.S. Fortune 100 companies. We got a wide array of blue-chip customers across all industries. Take, for example, the five largest U.S. banks. We got the Big Four audit firms. We got tech leaders like Amazon, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle.
The education front, we got half of the R1 schools, the major schools in the U.S., and half of the Ivy League schools. On the media telecom front, we got, around the world, big telecos and media companies like Vodafone in Europe, Bouygues Telecom in France, PPF in Eastern Europe, Astro in Malaysia, Mediacorp in Singapore. These are examples. Let me stop here for a second.
Great. Ron, you laid out a pretty wide net there as far as, you know, a lot of products and a lot of verticals that you're exposed to. When you look at Kaltura in the context of video kind of grew up during COVID. You know, it's something that maybe not all of us were aware of how impactful it could be on our lives, but now it's, it's well understood, virtual meetings, telelearning, all the type of video engagement opportunities have kind of come to the front of our lives. When you look at where we are now, what are, like, your organic drivers? Maybe look at it from a enterprise perspective, an education perspective, and then the Media & Telecom.
Happy to do that. Up until 2020, we sold in the enterprise market only products that utilized video on demand and live video broadcast. We didn't do any of what we're doing here, which is conferencing. They served mainly internal use cases that were managed by CIOs, heads of learning and development, so it was mainly learning, training, internal. That market is still underpenetrated. We're still continuing to sell new customers. We're upselling to existing ones, so there's still dynamics that are happening in that market. In 2020, we added real-time conferencing capabilities. By the way, it was right before COVID hit. We launched a set of new products that harnessed that alongside VOD and Live, so it's not separate, but together, integrated.
These products in the list that I said earlier include the virtual hybrid events, webinars, and online learning rooms for enterprises. Now, these still power products like the ones we did before for CIOs and head of L&D for internal events and meetings and stuff, but for the very first time, we've also moved on to power CMOs and marketing use cases. Specifically in that expansion in the education space, we also got into the virtual classroom product, which provides a full real-time online classroom experience. Now, we're upselling these new offerings to existing customers, all of which started with the internal stuff that was VOD and Live, and now they have the additional stuff, and that's giving us a lot of wind forward. They all appreciate the unique ability that we provide to converge around Kaltura.
You have a single platform for all your video needs, so you avoid silos, you avoid disjointed workflows, you reduce complexities, you reduce costs. Based on that, our ARPU and the average customer size has grown steadily over the years 'cause now they're consuming more as we introduce more products. By the way, in the ideal filing, we mentioned that half of our customers have 3-plus products, so it was already a thing that people use many, many products. We've since added a lot more, and that creates a lot of stickiness and a strong remote for Kaltura. Our real-time conferencing powered products also enable us to start going downmarket to the SME market because we were the large enterprises. Now we can go down.
They also enable us not just to sell through the outside sales team that we had earlier, but also through a commercial inside sales team, and even the webinars is complete self-serve. Part of the trends that are pushing us forward in these markets are not just the expansion externally and the addition of RTC, but the way that we go downmarket. As I switch quickly to Media & Telecom, we expanded the platform in the last year to move from just the back-end side of managing TV to the front-end user interface, how it actually looks on TV. That increases our ARPU, increases stickiness, creates a moat that expands the market from just large telcos and broadcasters to smaller-sized media company. You asked about the big opportunity.
We see the TAM as it was $11 billion in 2019 before we started all this change, and now it's $27 billion, with additional use cases, with a bigger wallet share, with more target customer expansion. I'm just gonna sum up that at the very high level, every organization in the world needs to harness advanced video experiences to drive ROI, right? The, the video conferencing has been here for a long time, and COVID, that you mentioned, drove that use. That's video as an end, not as a mean. Just let's run video, let's talk to each other. The demand is now to use video as a mean integrated into the workflows, tightly integrated, and that's a big jump to video for organizations, video for learning, video for marketing, video for sales. That's really, really exciting.
The opportunity has been large, and it's growing.
Yeah. Maybe looking at video as a means, there are a lot of secular trends that appear to be pretty important for video use and enterprise engagement with their customers: cloud, digitization, mobility. There's a lot of dynamics around, you know, the workforce, you know, either work from home, hybrid work, as well as changes around the way we engage with our apps. How has that changed where your customers want to use video, how quickly they go from either a single product use to a platform use, and has it changed where they typically land with Kaltura?
Let's first set the, the, the trends that you mentioned. And, and to be clear, insofar as the different markets, the media is about 30% of our business, and the rest is about 70% of our business as we continue this discussion. We don't report separately between education enterprise. There's a lot of synergies 'cause there is learning and training in each. In the ENT drivers, the biggest driver there has been digital transformation, right? It's the move from physical experiences into virtual experiences. It's always been there, and it's been fueled by mobility, it's been fueled by cloud, and I did say that, yeah, the moving from video as an end to video as a mean, but also the consolidation that I mentioned earlier, that gradually had more and more customers say, "I don't wanna have a long slew of point solutions.
I wanna have it everything integrated." From that perspective, the changes that have happened are just the acceleration of the original trends, but also the fact that people are replacing systems. Regardless if they came in from the outside or came in from the inside, the biggest change is that people have that interest to have a single platform that will do it all. That's something that we've seen that materially improved. Now, in the post-COVID world, there's also hybrid workforce, as you mentioned, remote work, and that makes for a more sustainable planet, so there's more demand for video. The financial downturn, by the way, is causing for there to be even more need for virtual experiences rather than travel costs. AI now is also disrupting the need for employee reskilling and introducing new customer experiences. All of them are expected to be video-first experiences.
I think all these trends are causing video to be in greater demand, the appreciation that there could be a lot more creation and consumption of video, that it's much more important financially to have video solutions to reduce cost and complexities and to have a horizontal platform. The biggest, biggest shift in that whole process is stopping to look at video as just, "Here's my video player. Here's my video conferencing," rather than, "How do I learn better? How do I teach better? How do I market better? How do I sell better using video?" That's been the biggest, biggest shift. In M&T, look, we're in long cycles, and it's been, for a long time, replacing legacy cable and satellite TV for years. Historically, all the systems were hardware, on-prem and connected and separated.
People wanna have something that's cloud-based, that's device-friendly, that's agile and scalable, that's more economic, that's far more engaging, that's interactive, that's insightful, even more so now with the advent of AI. Moving to a system like a Kaltura from the likes of Ericsson and Cisco is a shoo-in. The only difference is, again, given the tight markets, not always the ideal time for some companies to have done it in this or that quarter, but they're coming back to that, and that trend exists.
Okay, just so everyone that's in the audience, if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat box, I will relay them. We did get a question already, it, it's in the context of stock performance, but I'll, you know, I'll ask it from a broader perspective as far as the platform and the technology goes. What growth drivers, what changes in the company do you expect to move the dial this year? When you look at this year versus last year, what are some of the biggest changes?
First of all, we don't need an evolution or a revolution to bring growth back. We've been investing a lot in this move towards external use case and RTC, which I've spoken a lot about, and the fact that there's consolidation of people are buying both. We also spent a lot on going to more simply deploy products that are more product-like growth that do not require a lot of services around that. What we're seeing now is a benefit coming from that. We've, you know, we've landed recently great new logos, big names, that are some of them coming with events and moving through consolidation into content management, and have some enter through content management, moving through events. We don't need to generate something completely new to have things pick up.
We've also stated that we're seeing top of the funnel react and start growing, and we're seeing bottom of the funnel, win rates maintain high. It's just that the middle of the funnel is getting clogged a bit because in the last year, and we've seen that across the entire industry, budgets are lower, there's more price competition, and deals are taking longer. I think that the biggest change is just that macro opening up. We've established the fact that this is a better product that many people wanna switch to. They see the value, they see the economic value. They even see the economic value in a time like this, hence we're doing better than most of our competitors that are guiding down, that have been executing on a declining revenue, and we're still growing and accelerating growth.
We believe that's gonna be fine. I wouldn't say that the difference between this and that year had been that we've shifted a direction. It's just matured the process of moving into these new markets and executing on consolidation at the same time that we're coming down to more product-led growth and more low touch. We've seen the impact with our, like, product-led growth and low touch and declining non-recurring revenue that's weighted on us, right? The non-subscription, the professional services, that's gonna come to an asymptote. At a certain point, the total revenue growth is gonna pick up on where subscription growth is, and it's been at the middle, you know, about 5% level, not at the 2% level. Obviously, that's not where we wanna get to.
Ultimately, we believe the markets are gonna come back to the decent numbers that they grew before, but that's a big change. I'm putting aside the whole profitability, which we can talk about later. Obviously, we've made a good strides into coming back to being profitable. We can talk about that separately.
Yeah. So maybe putting that in context of your expansion rate. You know, historically, you've had an expansion rate well into, you know, the low 108%-110% kind of level, and more recently it's been around 100%, you know. When you look at moving forward, how do you get existing customers to expand? Is it mostly new greenfield uses, displacing other vendors? Is it driving multi-product use? Like, how should we evaluate the expansion opportunity over the next 12-24 months?
First of all, prior to COVID, it was 107%. The big jumps historically were as we added more sets of technologies and products, and we have yet to have reaped the rewards of this latest big addition of the multi-year move because we got stuck in this terrible time. COVID went up because of COVID. It was because of consumption, not so much because of all these new products. I think that the big jump because of all these new products is still ahead of us. The correction that we've seen now is a post-COVID correction, followed by a tough economical time corrections, which has taken us to the 100%. We do believe it should come to, at the very least, 2019 standards of 107 and up.
Insofar as greenfield versus consolidation displacement, I'd say that most entry points replace some sort of in-house or purchased solution, but then quite often extend into use cases that were not addressed before because we run deep into the workflows and can enable that. I'll give you an example. A bank that would replace us as a point solution, they would, let's say, use before a Video Content Management that's different, and now they use us. Then they start saying, "Okay, let's use the portal using... because we're already with Kaltura," and then maybe later they're gonna replace a different vendor that, that they had for webcasting or for events. Gradually, we'll be replacing other things, and they're ultimately getting into areas that they have not touched on at all. I'll give you the example of banks.
Merrill Lynch said, "We wanna power all of our wealth managers with a video tool." We were able, with not a lot of effort, to be able to extend that offering that we have to be specifically fit for the compliance that wealth managers need for banks, and that's a nice addition to that contract. Now we can resell that to a lot of other banks, and there's a lot of interest around that. We're able to come in through classic examples, whether through external or internal, and grow and replace other vendors. Recently, at our Connect event, the folks from VMware were there, and they openly said, and it's recorded and out there, that they had six different vendors, and they replaced all of them with Kaltura. 12 different instances of video in the company, and it's not unique.
This is just on record. There's a lot of cases like that. That's, for your question, there are a fair amount of solutions out there. It's a very fragmented market. We are replacing one and then moving to replace the others, and then adding stuff that people didn't have.
Yeah, when, you know, the, the Connect events, I'm actually interested in digging into that a little bit. What was the type of feedback that you got from the customers? Were these, you know, large existing customers that you're trying to expand, or are you trying to reach a new user group?
We held five VIP events this time. We sometimes have, had this very big event, collaborative and physicals, and sometimes complete virtual, like we have virtual tonight that's gonna come up. This was a physical event in five cities in the U.S. and Europe, and we had great speakers, Salesforce, AWS, SAP, Google, IBM, Adobe, Twilio, I mentioned VMware earlier, Accenture, EY. A lot of great speakers, and then a lot of other folks came in. The target was hundreds of people. I mean, at the end, the total registration was less than 1,000 across these events, but it was very, very specific for either existing customers or top prospects that we're talking to. The main themes that were discussed there, I mean, people did double down on convergence, that I just mentioned earlier with the VMware example.
People did talk a lot about the importance of virtual events, because a lot of folks are seeing the return from virtual events into physical. Then the question was, "Well, there's still a need for large virtual event?" The answer was, the virtual event, and people highlighted that, is a great solution for the small events or the very large events, because it could get to a lot of reach, and because it's less costly and there's a lot of data that comes out. The physical events, now these are recommended mainly for the mid-size gatherings, where it's more personal, there's more interaction. Not the tiny ones, not the very big ones. Even then, the recommendation is, as you go through these events, to have them... or make them hybrid.
There-- it's not just broadcast and that's it, but to really have something much more interesting that's done with that. Everybody highlighted that an event is just a station in the continuous employee and customer experience. I think one a quote that I, that I enjoyed, or a statement that I enjoyed, was from the EVP brand marketing of Salesforce, again, a customer of ours, and he was talking about how they use Salesforce+, which we power, to bring 100 members of 115 countries to their events, where it used to have been 20 countries when it was just in person. I think the thing people understand is virtual is really, really important, whether it's as a standalone virtual in more cases, or whether it is adding to the physical.
Another topic that came up, obviously, was AI. A lot of people were talking about the importance of AI and how they're looking forward to adding stuff with video. There was good discussion about diversity, equality, and inclusion, and how video is a driver of that, and how it could introduce additional viewpoints and information and democratize media in the company. In their initiatives, that's also a factor for using video. Lastly, it all came into ROI, and basically everybody's saying: "Look, it's a year that you gotta do more with less, and be more productive, and save costs and travel," and that video is that. Even in the tough economy, it's still something that people are trying to do. These are some of the themes that came up.
Sure. And maybe tying that into your comments from your recent earnings call, you talked about your pipeline and your RFP lead generation being at some of the strongest levels ever for the company. When you think about tying the direct outreach you're doing with the Connect events, the Virtually Live! event that you had, you know, six, seven months ago, and revisiting those customers, driving deeper engagements, can you give us some perspective on how long it takes to have the conversation on the platform to when customers start to move with the platform?
It varies, and different years are different. I mean, it could take a year. It was interesting 'cause we were-- 'cause I was getting some data from some other large companies out there. It turns out that when their cycles are ridiculously long, much more than that even nowadays, and the large enterprise cycles are extremely long. I'd say that, yes we have seen, and I've said that earlier, I'm gonna say that again, an influx in the top of the funnel insofar as the number of interests that are coming into the company. Compared to what it was in the second half of last year when it went down, it went back up and is growing sequential and year-over-year, and we're seeing that by QBRs.
We're also seeing that by way of, as I mentioned earlier, SDR meetings and RFP submissions. All the KPIs are seen to be showing that it's nice. ARPU is growing, in part because there's more products. By the way, the RFPs are fueled with our newer products, more so than before, so they're bigger and they're more around consolidation, and the win rates have helped. All that together, you know, the only backdrop is what you had mentioned, which is how long it takes. It, it, it takes a while. Some of these guys, they come, they listen, they say, "We want it, but it's just a bit early for us.
Great. When you think about the sales cycle with respect to your sales productivity, how are you measuring your sales force production at this point? What are the, the key things that you're trying to either teach them to engage with the customer? Is it a, a platform-selling approach? Is it keep going deeper in the verticals and addressing, you know, the needs that way? Do you have any special overlay sales initiatives that you're, you're deploying as well?
First of all, our sales force is divided between enterprise, education, media, and telecom. They're different people, and they sell whatever they need to sell within these different verticals. We generally have CSMs and sales, so kind of account executives versus sales, so some are farmers and some are more hunters. Insofar as what they're out there trying to sell, you know, what we teach them, what we focus, a lot of what we've done in recent couple of years was to move them from the tower of internal collaboration, productivity, learning, to the marketing CMO sale. It's a different buyer, it's a different mentality, it's a different way of selling.
We've done a good job in training them and starting to win more as that product started to build up, that product being events or webinars or whatever else we're offering them. Now they're really in a position that they're, you know, able to do both, because quite often it is converged, and the CIO's tasked with selling to the CMO as the owner of part of the budget, and their internal use is part of the budget, and they need to be able to do both. We do have some overlay elements, but historically, the whole real time was overlay, and that's now become completely part of what salespeople know how to do. We don't treat that as a specialized knowledge anymore. Any enterprise salesperson knows now how to do both, how to sell both, how to sell the consolidation story.
They do have SDRs that are helping them run through, lead generation on the top of the, of the funnel, but they know how to land and get the deal done. Just the types of deals and the type of logos, that we bring are really some of the brightest and best companies out there that we're able to land in competitive settings, and people appreciate this is the best product.
Yeah. Ron, maybe one more question for you before I switch to Yaron for a little bit. When you look at generative AI, and you know, what AI and ML could do for Kaltura, both from a internal perspective, you know, managing costs, you know, maintaining customer engagement, as well as from, you know, the platform and all the content is there, you know, how disruptive of a event do you believe this will be for Kaltura?
Generative AI is, is really disruptive in general. We started using stuff internally, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot , across department, sales, marketing, et cetera. The change there is not gonna be different than any other company. It'll be approved, but I don't wanna go there because the bigger question is how that's being used in our products, as opposed to how it's used for operation. It is definitely something that we're starting to do. Broadly, there's 3 buckets, and I've spoken about that in the earnings call. One is where AI is used for video analysis and metadata enrichment. This is not the video itself, but stuff around the video, so AI-based ASR, automatic speech recognition, textual summarizations, keyword identification, what's called diarization, which is listening and knowing who's talking what, OCR, stuff of that nature, titling, chaptering.
That's one bucket. The second bucket is a lot more interesting, which is to create the videos themselves. Whether it is you start off with a video, and you, and you then split it, that's what's called cut, the redoing of videos, repurposing of videos. That's one application, but the other one is to build it from scratch. How do you create a video from text and from audio? The big opportunity there is to do that in a way that's hyper-personalized and hyper-interactive because the two things that are connected nowadays are production of video and distribution and engagement of video. They used to have been two separate things, for sure in the world of media, but everywhere else as well.
If you could have a system that creates the videos on the fly in the right context and the right content for the right person and the right time, and delivers that personalized, then you could beef completely how people learn and train and market and sell. The whole experience of a DXP and LXP changes. Our view is that the more we add these capabilities, not just surrounding the video, but then the video itself, then that could be kind of a next-gen video-first, AI-enabled DXP or LXP type of an experience. The third layer is surrounding that, and that is that we have experiences like our events, that we wanna have automated creation of events. You, you basically set a topic, and it helps you build the agenda, helps you book the speakers, help you write the email, help you do the segmentation.
These are also gonna be supported. I think that the panacea, the Mount Everest, is the ultimate, the ability to deliver the video. Now, why Kaltura? I mean, there's other companies out there building a lot of different things, but the unique element that we have is, A, we're sitting on the data itself, the analytics, the information from all the customers, but we're not gonna share them one with the other. For each customer, the prompts are gonna come from the data that we have, from the users, from the context, from the content, and we have that. We can prompt the system with the user-specific data and customer data, which is really valuable. The second thing is that we have deep integration into workflows, 'cause it's not just doing AI, but what do you do with it?
Inserting it into the workflows. The third is that we also manage the actual experience layer. We're not just the system of record, we're also the system of engagement. By being able to add AI, specifically creation and distribution, compressed, hyper-personalized, with data, with the workflow integration, and in the context of the experience that we offer, then I believe it's, it's gonna drive a lot more video usage, a lot of video consumption. It's gonna drive our system up.
When you look at that, do you see opportunities for new products that you can monetize separately? How quickly should we look at it rolling into your overall feature set? Is this a one,two-quarter thing, or is it, like, the next two, three- years?
I think that first, the beauty about Kaltura, we've always been able to work with partners as well and integrate that deeply and quickly into what we do and launch. That's no, no different here. We definitely have done this. We're working on this accelerator as well that's gonna bring more partners and put them in direct touch with our customers, which there's a lot that are interested. We started running some pilots with our customers. Some of it is gonna be around the corner, gradually it's gonna accelerate. When I look at it, it's a multi-year strategic shift. It's not a one-quarter, bang, you're done. Just like the last multi-year, we're about expanding into real-time conferencing and about moving from internal to external, now it's about adding the smarts.
By the way, it's not something that suddenly popped when ChatGPT suddenly broke out. We knew we were gonna do AI years ago. It was just a matter of the timing. It was just one after the other and possibility. If we didn't... If the year, last year and a half wouldn't have looked like they did, we would've already done this or started engaging in it or doing stuff with it earlier. Given the constraints of spend and everything else, we just need to do it gradually. It's absolutely, building the smart video grid that we've built, driving ROI... just begs for the next step to make it hyper smart. As it were, we have all the analytics and everything that already make it smarter than most systems, but now driving it with AI makes it even more so.
It's a multi-year, but we will see first signs over the, over the next few quarters.
Great. maybe shifting to you, Yaron. could you tie together, you know, the, the platform and the organic growth drivers that Ron shared with where the market dynamics are most fluid, and how you built that into your guidance?
Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. I think that, first of all, when we tried to build our guidance for this year and the rough guidance that we provided for next year, we took everything into consideration, but we tried to be very cautious. We tried to be very cautious because from one end, we believe that we can be one of the best winners when we get out of the pressure that we see from the market. We do believe that when the market dynamics will change a bit, we will be probably one of the first winners, based on the fact that we have such a robust platform that can be the first to win in this type of market.
Therefore, we believe that we'll be able to get very, very fast with growth rates that we had before COVID. Just to remind us all, before COVID, we were a profitable company that was growing nicely between 10%-20%, at least on an annual basis. We took into consideration both most of the dynamics that Ron mentioned, and we guided for numbers that is still showing a small decline on a sequential based on the second part of the year, but which is better than all the other companies in the video space around us. We believe that we will be probably one of the first to win back and to get accelerated growth rate going into next year.
Yeah, and maybe tie together, you know, the, that growth rate, 'cause you, you did highlight a fairly large customer changing their buyer behavior. I think it was a $7 million impact. When you isolate for that, how is the rest of the business performing over the next couple quarters, you know, from an expansion standpoint?
Yeah. First of all, even this customer, the only reason that we mentioned it, because it will have some impact on the RPO number for, for this quarter, for Q3, as it an event that happened in Q3. By the end of the day, it's a $7 million for the next three years, decline in the commitment, overall commitment that they did for us. By the way, this customer is continued to be a high six-digit customer, so the actual net impact on an annual basis, it's even less than $2.4 million. I would call it $1.6 million, $1.7 million, which is not a dramatic impact on the business of the company. We decided to mention it in the call just because it's will impact the RPO in Q3.
By the way, if you get to our official 10-Q filings, you will see that we also have a very large decrease in our own commitment to a very large cloud provider, which actually we reduced the commitment by $35 million. I cannot get into details, but both of are connected. The bottom line for this specific customer is that it's still a meaningful customer. The only thing that they did because of their business change, is to reduce the actual commitment that they have to us, not the actual business that they are doing with us. Even if we isolate this specific one, that, as I mentioned, it's not dramatically and not material to our business, before COVID, we had a net dollar retention rate of between 100%-110% in most of the cases.
During COVID, it's went all the way to the close to 120. Right now, if you look on the expansion rate at this point, taking into consideration this customer, it's in the 100 range. We don't believe that in the near future it's going to go significantly or in any case, below this number. The bottom line is that the expansion rate are still relevant, even despite of the fact, despite of the fact that we mentioned that there is some pressure on gross retention rate, which is not. It's just a short term. To make a long story short, this customer is not material for the future growth of the company. We still see a stable net dollar retention rate, even with the pressure of the gross retention, that there is some pressure out there in the market.
Maybe shifting a little bit, when you look at driving profitable growth and investing in the channel, in your sales force, how are you balancing, you know, your goal to be, you know, positive cash flow in the second half of the year, getting to positive adjusted EBITDA next year? you know, put me through the, how you're balancing the long-term growth objectives with the, the near-term drive to take it back to profitability?
Yeah. Most of the cost reduction that we did earlier this year and the end of last year, we did it in areas that we believe for the short term, will not impact so much the top line of the company, and will allow us down the road to continue to get back to acceleration of the top line, but still being profitable. Just to take us one year earlier, we did a significant investment, and mostly in R&D, in order to get to the real-time part of the business, which was new to the company, to be prepared for the next products around events, platform around webinar. Therefore, when we did the reduction, we took a very balanced approach in terms of when we are reducing based on the investment that we already did in our new products.
Therefore, the places that we cut in sales and marketing are places that we believe that, on the short term, will not have a material impact on the growth of the business and then will allow us to get back to acceleration. If and when, it's not so much if, we believe it's when we will get back to re-acceleration, we will be able to quickly to invest back in sales and marketing in order to even accelerate the growth. The overall story is that the places that we believe will enable us to get back to growth rates that we had before COVID, while being profitable, are places that we didn't touch dramatically, so we believe it will enable us to balance between growth and profitability and to get back both of them into the financials.
Thanks. Ron, maybe finishing up with a couple of questions for you. When you look at Kaltura's opportunity for the next year, what are the maybe two or three things that you would point investors to focus on from a platform or go-to-market perspective? Then, you know, when you have those laid out, what are the metrics we should use, as, you know, analysts and investors judging the progress there? What are the key metrics you'd focus on, us on?
Well, I think that first and foremost, as a company, that the first thing, regardless of platform or go-to-market, from a financial results, we, we need to get to the profitability that we said that we would and to the cash position we said we would. I know people were worried, you know, a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, a year ago, we said, look, we were profitable several times in the past. There was a very structured reduction, you know of profitability in order to accelerate growth. Then, at that point, we wanted to stick the landing into this migration, into the external use case real time.
Had we pulled quickly and stopped early, it would have potentially hurt our ability in the future to grow, and we wanted to do this in the right way, in the right shape. We said we're gonna still have enough money, and which is still the case. I think we've executed on that, but we should keep the eyes on over the next few quarters just to make sure this is done and there's no worry around cash nor profitability. I think that then even before, again, speaking about the platform and go-to-market, we then need to deliver on acceleration of revenue. It's definitely the intent to be double-digit growth, definitely the intent to get to 20, whatever it is that we can deliver.
We believe it should, can get there together with the profit, with being a profitable company, we need to see how it's done. Again, we don't think that there is a need for an evolution, definitely not a revolution, because we've done a lot of what we needed to have done. It, it grew our wallet share, grew our addressable market, train our people how to sell things across, have gone down market, et cetera, et cetera. From a platform perspective, you know, it'll be good to continue to see the wins that are coming in this consolidation and together with the new products coming in. You know, at the end, booking, because we don't necessarily report directly on booking, do turn into RPO, and at the end, RPO will need to ...
pick up ahead of revenue picking up. For sure, 12 months RPO, well, it's, it doesn't take a genius, I mean, this is what we'll tell you ahead of time where things are going. In our specific case, ARR is just an elaborate subscription revenue because we built it in a conservative way, so that doesn't give a lot of leading indicator. RPO would ultimately do that, so we expect to see that start climbing up, and people will be able to see you also here, as we speak now, just about top of funnel. We'll talk about bookings, we'll talk about acceleration of bookings, and this is what I wanna hear, this is what we all wanna hear, as it pertains to, to growth.
What's required from a platform perspective to get that done is more along the lines of what we've already done. It'll be nice, it'll be great to add sizzle on the steak, to add this extra excitement layer of AI, which we are planning to do, and hearing more about that and how that's embraced and how that's impacting and taking us forward is great, as much as there could be other additional stuff that we're gonna continue to add. From both product and go-to-market, we don't need to do a huge material change. I'll add a last one: The self-service out of our business as well, complete self-service webinar, is another nice thing that we hope to add, and that in itself could be really interesting.
That's also an icing on the cake, 'cause that's way beyond, are we gonna jump into reasonable growth rates that we've been discussing now? This is, how can we get to much faster growth rates? I wouldn't necessarily wait for that to, quote-unquote, "save us." I would wait for the core business, as communicated, as discussed, as executed in the last couple of years, to bring to fruition more bookings and to see things grow.
Great. Well, Ron and Yaron, thank you very much for the time today and the perspective.
Thank you, for the great questions, for your continued support, and to everybody who's listening here today.