Good afternoon. My name is Leah, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Manhattan Associates Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a Q&A period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, 27 October . I would now like to introduce Mr. Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Bauer, sir, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, Leah, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates 2021 Third Quarter Earnings Call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO. During this call, including the Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates. We will caution that these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual results may differ materially from projections contained in our forward-looking statements.
I refer you to the reports Manhattan Associates files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections, particularly our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2020, and the risk factor discussion in that report, as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent Form 10-Qs. We note in particular that uncertainty regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our performance could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We are under no obligation to update these statements. In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors. We have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules.
You'll find reconciliation schedules in the Form 8-K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com. Now I'll turn the call over to Eddie.
Thanks, Mike. Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us as we review our third quarter results, discuss our updated full year 2021 outlook, and provide some very preliminary color on 2022 and beyond. Q3 and year-to-date results were an all-time record for Manhattan Associates. Total revenue increased 13% to $169 million, and adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.71 increased 39%. Both of these metrics exceeded our expectations. Strong cloud and services demand continues to drive revenue outperformance, fueling double-digit top-line growth and strong earnings leverage. Above all, our investments in innovation are paying off. Product differentiation between Manhattan and other supply chain software vendors continues to increase. Moreover, our global teams are performing exceptionally well with a laser focus on customer success.
We delivered record third quarter bookings, with RPO increasing 123% year-over-year and 17% sequentially to $574 million, providing us with excellent future revenue visibility. Additionally, 40% of our Q3 contracted bookings were generated from net new customers, and our pipeline continues to be robust with solid demand across our product suites. Over 90% of the pipeline consists of cloud opportunities, with net new potential customers representing about 35% of that demand. With strong business momentum and our increased visibility, we're providing refreshed guideposts for RPO and cloud revenue through 2024. Dennis will provide more color later in the call, but this includes moving up our milestone of reaching $1 billion in RPO to 2022 from our original target of 2023.
On the sales front, competitive win rates remain strong at about 75% as our innovation is recognized as industry leading. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale drove more than 80% of our bookings for the quarter. Drilling into the sub verticals, they're pretty diverse, including apparel, department stores, grocery, food and beverage, industrial, health services, as well as durable and non-durable goods. Our global services team continues to execute amazingly well, conducting over 100 go lives in Q3. For the quarter, services revenue was up 20% compared with the prior year period. As we mentioned in our Q2 call, the market is extremely competitive for services and technical talent.
While we're well positioned for significant growth, we do expect demand for talent to continue to be strong, with new and existing customers wanting to accomplish more with our solutions and at a faster pace. We're very mindful of the workload that we put on our teams, and we're focused on attracting and retaining talent, which we continue to factor into our operational planning and guidance. On the innovation front, with our R&D spend approaching $90 million annually, we're focused on providing modern cloud-native applications that are architected to unify commerce and supply chain experiences. Manhattan is on the leading edge of removing numerous unnatural silos or artificial boundaries that really don't align with business workflows. Our technology is differentiating and industry-leading, and the Manhattan Active SaaS solutions are scalable, version-less and extensible. This enables our customers to quickly adapt to market changes.
They can, they can improve efficiency and leverage their data in more robust ways, including solving challenges that legacy and silo systems simply cannot. We believe that we're still very early in our cloud journey, but we couldn't be more pleased with the market's enthusiastic response to our Manhattan Active solutions. Let's spend just a few minutes on specific updates on products and customers. We're actually off to a great start with Manhattan Active Transportation Management, the industry's fastest and smartest multimodal transportation optimization engine. Manhattan Active TM is the industry's first self-configuring and self-tuning system. Built on our industry-leading Manhattan application architecture, Manhattan Active TM is joined with Manhattan Active Warehouse Management to form Manhattan Active Supply Chain, the industry's first unified cloud native supply chain execution platform.
Since launch, we've been heartened by the accolades we've received for Manhattan Active Transportation Management from analysts, partners, and customers. Perhaps most encouragingly, several of our Manhattan Active Transportation Management customers are also deploying Manhattan Active WM. In other words, our supply chain unification message and strategy is really resonating with these joint solution customers, realizing the clear benefits of unifying distribution, transportation, labor, and automation within a single application. Manhattan Active WM, the other half of Manhattan Active Supply Chain, continues to experience pretty explosive growth. Consistent with prior quarters, we're seeing a very nice balance between net new customers and existing Manhattan WMS customers choosing to migrate to our next generation of WM platform. In just, what is it?
16 short months, Manhattan Active WMS is live or in the process of being implemented in 11 countries across 16 different industries. A pretty good testament to its cross-vertical and international applicability. A small sampling of either live or currently implementing Manhattan Active WMS customers include a luxury retail department store, a national beverage distributor, a tier zero national grocer outside of the U.S., and several industrial distributors across the globe. Our competitive win rate with WMS has always been pretty high, and Manhattan Active WMS has helped us raise that already high bar. Now turning to our omnichannel applications, we continue to make strides with our Manhattan Active Point of Sale application. This past quarter saw a global apparel and footwear brand activate our Manhattan Active Point of Sale application in two new flagship stores in New York and Las Vegas.
This particular customer also runs Manhattan Active Order Management, and they saw a clear advantage of deploying a unified omnichannel operating platform across their digital and bricks and mortar operations. From a geographical point of view, their plans call for deploying Manhattan Active Point of Sale and order management across the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe. We believe that Manhattan Active Omni is unique in its ability to provide full-featured order management, contact center, and store systems as part of a unified platform across the globe. To close out our product and customer updates this quarter, I'm happy to report that a couple of weeks ago, we were able to host several small customer events in person for the first time in quite some time.
We were pleased to host customers in the U.K., in the Netherlands, and finally in France for some pretty intimate events to discuss their commerce and supply chain strategies, and how Manhattan Active Solutions can help them progress their digital transformations. I got to tell you, it was such a pleasure to connect in person with a group of our strategic customers after such a long break. Well, that concludes my brief business update. Dennis is going to provide you with an update on our financial performance and outlook, and then I close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before we move to Q&A. Dennis?
Thanks, Eddie. Nothing but accolades for our Manhattan global teams. Top to bottom, we continue to raise the bar in a choppy macro, delivering strong growth, profitability, cash flow, and balance sheet metrics. I'll start with a quick recap of the quarter, with growth rates on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated. Total revenue was a record $169 million, up 13%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the compression driven by our cloud transition, our total revenue was up 27%. Notably, 70% of our total revenue is now driven by cloud and services.
Our Q3 operating profit was a record, totaling $53 million, up 20%, with adjusted operating margin of 31.3% and GAAP operating margin of 25.1%. Our performance was driven by strong cloud and services revenue, combined with lower expenses driven by the COVID pandemic. Compared to 2019, we estimate COVID lowered our year-to-date 2021 expenses by about 425 basis points, and year-to-date 2020 by about 325 basis points respectively. Adjusting for COVID, or put another way, assuming these expenses remain unchanged from 2019 levels, adjusted operating margin would be approximately 24% year-to-date, up over 200 basis points compared to year-to-date 2020. Earnings per share was a record $0.71, up 39%.
Our earnings per share did include $0.66 of non-recurring tax benefit associated with expiring tax statutes. Normalized EPS was $0.65, up 27%, either way a record. Our Q3 and year-to-date operating cash flow performance was a record with Q3 totaling $60 million, and year-to-date $145 million, both up 41% on record global cash collections. How about our free cash flow margin? It continues to be strong at 35% for the quarter and 29% year-to-date. EBITDA margin was 32% in the quarter and 29% year-to-date. Our balance sheet continues to be rock solid with $246 million in cash and 0 debt, providing us excellent flexibility to invest for growth. We invested $20 million in share buybacks in the quarter, resulting in $80 million in buybacks year-to-date.
For the fourth quarter and full year, we estimate our diluted shares outstanding to be about 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Also, our board has approved our customary $50 million share repurchase authority. That covers the macros. Now let's drill down a little bit into revenue. Cloud revenue in the quarter totaled $32 million, up 53%, as our new annual contract value continues to accelerate on strong market demand. For Q4, we expect cloud revenue of roughly $33.5 million. As Eddie mentioned, Q3 was a record third quarter with RPO, remaining performance obligation. Our RPO bookings totaled $574 million, up 123% year-over-year, and 17% sequentially.
With RPO continuing to compound positively, our visibility into future subscription revenue continues to strengthen, giving us confidence in our forward visibility and guide, guidepost projections. Services revenue was $88 million, up 20% as our cloud momentum continues to fuel our services revenue growth. Americas and Europe are running at double-digit growth with APAC demand improving. For Q4 retail peak season, it's starting earlier than normal, given supply chain constraints. We are forecasting services revenue to be about $82 million, with year-over-year growth of 16%. As a reminder to most of you, the sequential revenue decline from Q3 represents our traditional retail peak seasonality as customers slow implementations to meet their customers' demand.
Our consolidated subscription, maintenance, and services margin for the quarter was 56.8%, up over 380 basis points compared to the year ago period, and was predominantly driven by revenue performance and cloud operating leverage. Accounting for retail peak season and growth investments, we expect Q4 margin to be about 50.2%, resulting in full year 2021 margin of 53.5%, up 190 basis points over the prior year. License revenue was $8 million, down 36%, and maintenance revenue was $34 million, down 8%, primarily on cash collection timing. One final revenue call-out. Our hardware team is in the double-digit growth game, up 25% year-to-date. Good job, guys. Transitioning to guidance.
Barring any major global macro setbacks, our full year 2021 guidance and preliminary 2022 outlook puts us on track to deliver consecutive record revenue years. Our overarching objective, obviously, is to deliver sustainable double-digit top-line growth and top quartile operating margins benchmarked annually against enterprise SaaS comps. For 2021, we are raising our total revenue guidance to $653 million-$655 million, up from our prior range of $643 million-$650 million. Our underlying total 2021 revenue growth, ex license and maintenance, which removes the revenue compression from our cloud transition, is targeted to be 19% at the midpoint. For Q4, we expect total revenue of $161 million-$163 million.
Full-year operating margin is expected to be 25.8%-26%, factoring in retail peak season revenue impact and including $10 million in special performance-based compensation and retention investments. We expect full-year adjusted earnings per share to be $2.12-$2.14, up from our prior range of $2-$2.06. For GAAP EPS, our guidance range is $1.61-$1.63, with a midpoint of $1.62, up 6% from our previous midpoint of $1.53. For Q4, we expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of $0.37-$0.39. For full-year 2021, our cloud revenue estimate is increasing to $121 million, representing 51% growth.
Given our strong performance in Q3 and year to date, we are also increasing our RPO outlook to a range of $675 million-$700 million, up from our prior outlook range of $550 million-$600 million. The $688 million midpoint is up over 75% from our initial RPO target provided on our Q3 2020 earnings call. For full year 2021, license and maintenance revenue continues to positively attrit on increasing demand for our cloud solutions. We expect license to be about $30 million-$33 million and maintenance roughly $143 million. For Q4, we expect license to be about $7.5 million and maintenance roughly $35 million. Our CapEx estimate for 2021 is $3 million-$4 million.
For full year 2021, we expect an adjusted tax rate of about 19.5% and a GAAP tax rate of approximately 17.5%. That covers the quarter and our 2021 outlook. Let's cover some 2022 preliminary targets and guideposts. We are in our budget cycle currently, so we will firm up our parameters on our Q4 call. Please note, though, to facilitate a review for you all, we have added a supplemental schedule, item number nine, last page, in today's earnings release, providing a comparison of our original guidepost metrics and our current updated guideposts. As the schedule shows, we are moving all our guideposts for cloud revenue and RPO materially higher. In addition, our adjusted operating margins are improved from our initial color provided in February.
Please note, year-over-year growth rates are based on the midpoint of our 2021 guidance. Our preliminary estimate of 2022 total revenue is $695 million-$715 million, excluding license and maintenance attrition at 16% growth. All in, our initial growth target is 8%. Our full year 2022 adjusted EPS range is $1.90-$2.10. For 2022 cloud revenue, we are targeting $160 million-$165 million in revenue, representing 35% growth at the midpoint. Exiting 2021, including ramp transactions, we expect to achieve a three-year 2022 to 2024 compounded annual growth rate of 40% at the midpoint of our cloud revenue targets.
For RPO, we are targeting a three-year CAGR of 35% at the midpoint of our targets of $1 billion in 2022, growing to $1.7 billion in 2024. Those are big numbers. In 2022, we are also targeting services revenue of $362 million-$370 million, which represents 9% growth, license revenue of $13 million-$15 million, and maintenance revenue of $137 million-$140 million as we continue to expect a longer attrition tail for maintenance.
Our consolidated subscription, maintenance, and services margin is expected to be about 54%, and we are pegging 2022 operating margins at 22.5%-24% and are targeting an annual 75-125 basis point expansion annually starting in 2023. The factors impacting the inherent leverage in our model and driving the 2022 year-over-year decline in operating margin include license attrition of 57% to $14 million, with maintenance revenue attrition at 4% as customers shift to cloud, totaling about 200 basis points of margin impact. Wage inflation and labor market trends accounting for about 200 basis points in margin investment. As we've previously discussed, demand for technical talent is high, and we expect the labor market to continue to be very competitive through 2022.
Continued investment across our company fueled by customer demand, we are investing in R&D, services, and sales and marketing. The continued return of COVID impact expenses such as travel, our annual Momentum customer conference, employee appreciation events, contractors, et c., total about 100 basis points. We also expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 22%, and our diluted share count will be approximately 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Lastly, I'll summarize our 2023 and 2024 guideposts that should better assist investors' assessment of our future cloud growth and earnings trajectory. Remember, comparison of our guideposts versus historicals are located in our earnings release. For 2023, we are targeting RPO of $1.25 billion-$1.4 billion, representing 33% growth at the midpoint.
Cloud revenue of $220 million-$240 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint. Introducing 2024, for RPO, we are targeting $1.6 billion-$1.8 billion, representing 28% growth at the midpoint. Cloud revenue, we're targeting $310 million-$345 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint. That covers the financial update. Thank you very much, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.
Good report, Dennis. Thank you. We're very pleased with that strong third quarter and year-to-date results. While we continue to operate in a pretty turbulent global macro environment, business momentum is very positive, and of course, we're very encouraged by our accelerating RPO and associated revenue growth. As we look forward, we're confident in our ability to deliver success for our customers and help them drive their digital transformation. As a result, we anticipate long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth for Manhattan Associates. With that, Leah, we'd be happy to take any questions.
All right. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my questions, and congrats, exceptional results. I guess maybe, and hi, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike. Sorry, should have said that to begin with. Maybe Eddie, I'll ask you a question. Congrats on the hiring of a new CMO. I'm curious, I know it's probably still early days, but what kind of impact do you see her in terms of having on the branding, marketing, and just continuing to evolve go-to-market activities?
Yeah. It's early, Terry, but without putting too much pressure on Ann, we're obviously very pleased to have her on board. At the end of the day, we think, frankly, as well as we've done, we've still got some of the industry's best-kept secrets, and we're anxious to be able to get that message out. You know, I think we have the opportunity to share our stories with a broader community, drive awareness, particularly for our newer products, and just overall, frankly, get the message out that we're here to do business and help our customers in the industry with digital transformation.
Understood. Well, maybe some healthy pressure is good though for Ann. Maybe there's somewhere in the middle there, but okay. That's great. It was great to see the 40% contracted bookings from new logos. This kind of like closes the loop 'cause you had been building the pipeline in terms of new logo activity had been picking up. Now you see the conversion going on. What I'm curious about is it something with certain of the active cloud products that is getting you into parts of the retail or the e-commerce-oriented markets that you hadn't been before, whether it's D2C or just other types of kind of micro segments? I'm just kinda curious 'cause it is a striking number. Any more color you can provide there?
Yeah. I don't think there's any specific, you know, micro verticals or sub verticals, Terry, but I do think that, you know, there has been some a little bit of, you know, pent-up demand with the industry waiting for, you know, the real next generation of cloud native or next generation of solutions to emerge. Those, in this case, being cloud native, very innovative, access to new innovation on a regular basis. You know, we're definitely seeing some uptick out there from customers that we haven't done business with before. We're fortunately seeing some, you know, nice takeaways from some of the older competitors that are out there. It's quite broad and not focused on any given, you know, any given industry.
Got it. Just my final question, and I appreciate, Dennis and Michael, the figure there at the end, that helps us a lot in terms of the guidepost. I had a question actually on cash flow, Dennis. The cash flow was strong in the quarter, a lot stronger than expected. You know, as you think about 2022, I know you don't usually guide on cash flow, but could we see a similar pattern whereby free cash flow margins are higher than operating margins? Just anything else you can call out on any one-time things or CapEx things into 2022, and just thinking about, you know, free cash flow. Thank you.
Yeah, no, one-time items, great quality of earnings and quality of cash flow. I'd expect we're gonna post up another record free cash flow year next year, this upcoming year. Yes, definitely the potential to surpass EBITDA margin as well as potentially operating margin.
Got it. Thanks. Congrats.
Thank you, Terry. Hello?
Operator, we'll take the next question, please.
Anybody there?
Operator?
Did you kick the board underneath?
Operator, we'll take the next question.
What's her name? Leah. Hello.
Leah, are you there? Leah, can you hear us, Leah? Everybody on the call, the operator just told us that she's having some technical issues, so stand by.
Once again, we have a question in queue from Joe with Baird. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.
Great. Can you hear me okay?
We can, Joe. Apologies to everybody for the short break there. There appeared to be a little technical challenge with the call service. Please fire away. Fire away, Joe.
Okay. Great. I'm wondering, when customers are making a commitment to WMS, are you seeing any changes in interest going along with the WMS and integrating other of your solutions within the same engagement? Are WMS deals carrying over in the order management or TMS in a bigger way? I'm curious if that's the case, you know, are the deal sizes getting bigger? I'd imagine RPO there's a good quantity of activity, but is the size of what you're winning also going up?
Yeah. Great question. Well, you know, just overall, clearly our strategy is to partner with our customers to develop, you know, a digital transformation roadmap. Frankly, whether it starts with transportation, inventory, warehouse management, omni solutions and so forth, you know, we really don't care where we get started. We certainly are seeing some multi-product implementations. You know, we launched Manhattan Active Transportation Management just a few months ago. Now we've got several customers, and half of them are implementing Manhattan Active WM as well. It's great to see Manhattan Active TM and Manhattan Active WM coming together to provide that unified solution for, you know, for our customers.
I think across the board, when you look at our order management system customers, our WM customers, and our transportation customers, they are all great prospects for, you know, the other solutions for upsell and cross-sell. As we've said, you know, historically, across the approximate 20 products that we have in our portfolio, the average number of products that any one customer owns is about three or four. So we've got, you know, a lot of cross-sell and upsell potential. As far as, you know, your question around, you know, larger RPO opportunities for multi-product, yes, is the answer to that.
Just bear in mind, though, that, you know, when you implement either a WMS program, a TMS program, an order management program, an inventory program, they're pretty big, and customers can only bite off so much at once. They tend to be a bit more serial than in parallel. We certainly are seeing some joint unified programs.
That's good color. Eddie, I think the win rate disclosure you typically made this quarter, it went up relative to what the win rates have been trending at. I'm just wondering if you can kinda carve out where you're seeing the improvements and maybe if one of the things that was noticeable during the quarter is the geographic breadth of where the announcements are coming from. You know, it's not so much Americas or Europe, it's global, and you know, you mentioned your global teams a number of times on the call. I'm wondering if there's maybe anything new happening in the sales activity that can help explain kind of the improvements in what you're seeing.
I think, you know, I think it's the continued investment in innovation that's really driving the win rate, Joe, when it comes right down to it. You know, we will see that bounce around a little bit. I think, when we look at, when we talk to our prospects that have turned into customers about why they chose us and so forth, I mean, it tends to be because of the innovation that we brought to the market. Certainly, you know, the great experience we've got across our teams is all the other things, the attributes that we bring, play a role. The innovation in our product delivery, I think, is number one.
In terms of, you know, seeing an improvement in both EMEA and APAC this quarter, there's no question we've seen EMEA and APAC lag just a little bit in terms of, I guess we'll call it the COVID recovery. And we're seeing a good bit more movement and momentum in Europe, number one, and then followed closely behind in APAC. You know, feel good about bringing a bit of balance back to the performance.
Joe, we are having some nice cross sell, upsell, deal closures as well, about $60 million of bookings impact in the quarter.
Oh, okay. Thanks, Dennis. I'll leave it there. Thank you.
Okay, very good. Thank you, Joe.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on a really strong quarter. Two for me. You know, obviously we're seeing the guidepost gets raised. You know, I'm curious if we had to think about, you know, the, I guess, nine to 12 months ago, obviously you're outperforming your expectations. If we had to kind of stack order rank what drove that from like a product or market perspective, what would you say are the top one or two key drivers?
I think we have been pleasantly surprised by the uptick of Manhattan Active WMS, you know, number one. I think certainly it's early days, but the momentum we're seeing around Manhattan Active Transportation Management. And then thirdly, the bounce back of Manhattan Active Omni. You know, we saw some, you know, subdued, shall we say, activity in Manhattan Active Omni, and that's back to picking back up. That would be the top three I think on my roster, Brian.
Okay. I'll follow up then on the WMS side, Eddie. You know, we're 16 months in to Active WMS. Obviously I think we're hearing the win rates are good, the performance, everything sounds really encouraging. I'm curious, you know, the cloud or referability, is that a friction point for some customers? To the extent that you have customers up and running, does that actually make the next 16 months look, like, a lot brighter than the first 16 months? I'm just curious to get your thoughts there.
We hope so. We've certainly got great implementation activity going on, good referenceability and so forth. I'll tell you that, you know, the friction or the resistance to being early or an early adopter or new, whatever you wanna call it, you know, hasn't really been there. Now, as you know, we had a beta customer when we launched. We already had a customer live, very successful, already been through, you know, a bunch of kind of versionless updates and so forth. We had a great reference point to, you know, get us started, and didn't see a lot of friction. You know, no question, success breeds success.
As we continue to drive across verticals, across geographies and get more referencability across all those dimensions, I think, you know, we certainly have the opportunity to continue to see success.
Great. Thanks, Eddie.
Thank you, Brian.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel from Loop Capital. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions, and, good job on the quarter. Congrats on that. Eddie, starting with you, just wanna revisit your prepared remarks around the hiring environment, for your professional services team. Just wonder if you could just give us a sense of where you're at with respect to your hiring plan for this year. Are you on plan for the most part, a little bit behind plan? Maybe just give us a little color there.
Yeah, we're a little bit behind, Mark, where we'd like to be, frankly. You know, it's tough sledding out there from a talent acquisition perspective. But we've obviously got a great success story here. We've got a fantastic culture in the company. No question that people like to be associated with a successful company that's doing meaningful work for tier one companies around the globe. You know, we're doing pretty good on that front. But you know, if I could wave my magic wand, there's no question we'd be a little further ahead with a hiring trajectory than where we are.
So would.
Primarily, obviously that's, you know, driven by demand.
Thank you for that. With that said, you know, given that demand is tight, and as you said earlier, you expect it to continue to be tight for talent. Is that changing the way that maybe you're approaching R&D as far as prioritizing certain projects? In other words, maybe putting in some features and capabilities in your products that just make them a little bit easier to install, and doesn't require as much professional services time.
Yeah. We're always focused on that, Mark, frankly, trying to make it. You know, we're trying to drive down always the total cost of ownership for our products. You know, we wanna be feature-rich, we wanna be able to provide the greatest innovation to our customers. By the same token, we've got to continue to focus on total cost of ownership, speed of implementation, cost of support, and so forth. We've always been focused on that. I'll be honest, I wouldn't say that we've taken any particularly specific steps to focus on that, you know, in the last six months or so. We remain focused on driving total cost of ownership down.
You know, obviously you bring up a corollary point there in that with such a tight labor market, you know, for distribution centers, truck drivers and, you know, and so forth, certainly the capabilities that we bring to market, focus on blending, you know, automation, robotics, and people in the warehouse and so forth, certainly is very helpful for, you know, for our customers.
Okay, great. Just pointing back to your earlier comments around the bounce back that you're seeing in your Active Omni business and product. Maybe just talk a little bit about what you think is driving that so-called bounce back.
I mean, stores were closed, right, for a couple of quarters, you know, number one. The acceleration of, you know, the digital transformation that we're all seeing personally and professionally. We're seeing a combination of, you know, the stores reopening and the need for store systems and very strategic omnichannel initiatives that are driving growth for our retail and wholesale customers alike.
Great. Thank you. That's all for me. Thanks.
Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Pfau from William Blair. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Wanted to first start out on the supply chain challenges that, I'm sure many of your customers are having. How is that impacting your business, if at all? 'Cause I imagine it could drive demand as well as perhaps with customers or prospects.
Yeah, yeah. You know, honestly, it's dry. I would say it's got a slight positive to it, Matt. You know, we're obviously involved largely in the finished goods side. You know, on the import side of things and all those boats sitting off the Port of Long Beach and everywhere else, you know, we're not necessarily managing that sequencing and so forth. But when the finished goods hit shore, there is a great need to accelerate the movement of that inventory, have the inventory in the right place at the right time, and then get that inventory in the hands of the consumers in a timely fashion.
Of course, you know, again, our solutions are creating that speed and that dexterity and that agility for our customers to be able to manage through these or help manage through these very, you know, very tough times and the need to be able to manage inventory at very high levels.
Got it. Great. Any update on the point-of-sale solution?
You know, I put a few comments in my prepared remarks about Point of Sale. We, you know, we've seen a couple of terrific go lives in recent weeks and recent months. In terms of closures, you know, another couple of nice, real important wins for us in the quarter. Continuing to see that forward momentum, frankly. You know, looking forward to getting more and more and more referenceable customers there. As you know, Brian from RayJay mentioned, you know, the more referenceable customers that you've got, the less friction there might be in the sales cycle. These couple of go lives we had in the quarter are important to us and as are the new sales and new bookings that we've seen in the quarter too.
Great. Last one for me, just in terms of the dynamic of RPO growth and cloud revenue growth, maybe you can just remind us again about the timing differences between the two. Now that you've given us this helpful multi-year outlook, we can kind of see how cloud revenue growth, you know, accelerates and then RPO growth, you know, comes down a little bit off its high. How do we sort of think about the timing differences and how long those discrepancies take to resolve?
Well, I mean, I don't know. One of the reasons for providing those supplemental schedules and, you know, the guideposts and so forth, was so that you can see how that dynamic shapes up. If you were to kind of pin me down on, you know, how long it takes for those things to normalize, it'd probably be the 18-24 months timeframe. Now, of course, by the same token, we're gonna continue to drive new RPO. It'll have the same dynamic built into it. You know, I think, you know, 18-24 months before you see that kind of really normalize.
Okay. I you know I guess maybe another way to look at it is with the Active WM implementations, which I think are the main things you know driving that discrepancy with the implementation roll-outs. What would the typical rollout for your Active WM deployments be? Because if I understand correctly, that's the primary driver of sort of the timing differences between those two items.
Yeah. Well, so the thing to really be aware of there is a lot of this ramp, as we call it, is driven by multi-site roll-outs. You know, the average duration, typical duration to get an Active WMS site up and running, let's say the six-month kind of timeframe. When you're dealing with a global 10, 20, 30 distribution centers or more distribution centers around the globe, that's what takes time to move through. You know, that deer moving through the snake.
Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Certainly, Matt.
Your final question comes from the line of Mark Zgutowicz from Rosenblatt Securities. I'm sorry, but the question was withdrawn. Please go ahead, [inaudible].
Okay, very good. If that's all of the questions for today, we'll say thank you very much for everybody's time, your support, and we'll look forward to seeing you or, excuse me, talking to you on our Q4 call in about 90 days or so. Thanks again. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now all disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.