Thanks for joining us, are you? Let's start briefly. You know, like a much, much larger business, you know?
Yeah.
Million dollar business. Talk a little bit about like, you know, how do you think about it? There's a lot of kind of parts to it now, like, how do you think about competing? Like, about the products you're gonna bring out, where you're gonna compete, how you wanna compete out? What's your guidepost there?
In some sense. But first of all, thanks for having OpenText-
Yeah.
Thanks for the time. And look, the best way to think about OpenText is we are singularly focused on information management.
Yeah.
With the new acquisition we did about a year ago, we believe information management. Well, it's a $200 billion TAM. It's very unique. The pillars in there, as you rightly pointed out, as together, is content management, it's business network, it's cybersecurity, business management, AI analytics. We call out AI analytics separately, but it's kind of spreads the fabric, just cuts through all the other pillars. But the pain points from a customer perspective are several. Data sprawl, complexities in information processing and very well protected then in terms of information data at the core, where storing information, organizing information, securing information, processing information, and of course, AI analysis, insight into offering all of that in our cloud journey. We can talk more about it.
Offering all of that in the cloud and, you know, meeting the kind, the customer's needs, which we believe we are very unique in, you know, in, in what we do. And the $200 billion TAM, again, near $6 billion of revenue.
Yeah.
Right? The opportunity for us to keep growing within information management, having each one of these pillars that are today sizable, but be truly sizable, and set, you know, you know, like, you know, several growth points in each of those pillars, and that's really where we are.
Yeah. And then how do you think, and, and as part of that, how do you think about organic versus M&A?
Yeah.
What's your guidepost there then going forward?
Yep, it's actually a very important question, and in our last call, we came out with some statements about leaning into organic growth, more than we do on M&A. And maybe let me just clarify. Again, as a near $6 billion technology company, M&A will always be part of our strategy.
Yeah.
But the 30+ year history of OpenText has been built on a pool of M&A. When I come back to you, it just leaves us with a large addressable market, and there are plenty of opportunities to grow within the addressable market. We don't need more to grow into the TAM.
Yeah.
This is not an overnight solution, as you can appreciate. If you look at our R&D investments that are leading up to it, we're about 14%-16%. We were about 11% just, you know, five years ago. Our go-to-market distribution engine is truly like none other at our scale. We probably have the strongest direct sales force, and we have a very strong unified partner network with large names like SAP, et cetera. So when you combine the innovation capabilities and the go-to-market engine in this large addressable market, we absolutely make sense to unlock value in terms of flow rate of the product solutions within that. That's really the big message, right?
Yeah.
As I said, M&A is never out of the realm for technology software companies, but we are really gonna lead with organic growth to unlock the value. And maybe a last comment I'd say is, like, we should look to the ROI of R&D investment first.
Yeah.
The best ROI is actually organic growth. At one point, we wouldn't be able to be here if we didn't build it.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
You mentioned organic, like, obviously a big number out there for FY 2026, and it's like the 7%-9%.
Yeah.
Organic growth file. Like, what's your framework to get to that number?
Yeah, absolutely. So we, you know, have it in an investment deck, and I'd really urge us to think about OpenText of the future as it starts with a team. Right? We said even two years ago, that 80% of the R&D investment will be directed towards cloud, and the cloud is the ultimate destination. So the starting point here is really the 15% cloud booking growth that we've been talking about. And for fiscal 2023, which is June, we did about $530 million. So the starting point is really that. And our cloud is a sort of a multi-cloud. It's very complex, innovative cloud. It's private cloud, it's public cloud and SaaS, right? So the next number to look to is organic growth of cloud revenue, organic growth of 75%.
Now, we did 4% in fiscal 2023, and you give us about three years, and the cloud bookings of 15% is the path that we're going to get to the 7%-9% growth. Now, within that, if you, we talk about which is a leading growth driver, Content is going to lead the growth. Absolutely. Content has been leading the bookings growth. It's just a testament of all the product innovation that has gone into the on-prem of Documentum and Content to where it's a very clear cloud platform solution provider. And Business Network is a very close second. And the most important opportunity, you know, we can talk about Micro Focus. We did not buy Micro Focus just for the licensing customer support. We bought Micro Focus for the potential to be able to modify many of their products.
Yeah.
So that will happen very systematically. About 5-7 products are in the official cloud roadmap, are already showing results in cloud bookings. Those are really where the biggest strength is gonna come from. The more SaaS we are able to get the products to, that's kind of the next phase that's gonna add to the growth. And last but not least, I would say the AI opportunities are not accidental, as we're talking about. We will report them as we see it, but really, we're gonna have the standalone AI opportunities. But keep in mind that all customers and enterprises are ready for AI, and there's gonna be a fair amount of pull-in effect for cloud bookings.
that come from customers who want to get their unstructured data ready to be automated and then for AI, and you'll see that sort of put in a second as well. So that's sort of the hierarchy of how we see this growth here.
Yeah. Okay, perfect. And then, checking here a little bit, you have, like, a corporate news last week.
Sure thing. Yeah.
Like, maybe update us on kind of what you're doing here and the rationale is.
Yeah. Absolutely. So it is AMC, which stands for Application Modernization Connectivity. It was a business unit within the Micro Focus. When we announced the deal of Micro Focus, we did not envision AMC. I want to be very clear on that.
Yeah.
We intended to keep the company as a whole. AMC is also the COBOL, the mainframe, aspect of, of their, I mean, of their business. So we got an inbound call, and as we diligently called, a few things really came to mind. AMC is all cloud. So in our product roadmap for the cloud, AMC, in our own internal roadmap, was the farthest in terms of when you define-
Yeah.
Cloud investment. I mean, to the left are many products and solutions with a higher domain growth rate that we had clearly allocated, the, you know, product investment in terms of cloudifying them. AMC is about a $500 million business with 55% adjusted EBITDA, so clearly very profitable. But also AMC is a flattish growth rates, and, in our own internal models, we had modeled it at very low, you know, low single digits. So with all of that, it made sense that this would afford us more bandwidth investment into cloud. We check that box in a big way. What AMC is going to Rocket Software, and this is sort of their bread and butter.
Right.
They have made investments into modernity, modernization, into hybrid, and it would be a great home for asset like AMC. We are, we are experts in acquiring, and we do want to do the best job when we divest a company. So that criteria also played. And last but not least, I would say at $2.27 billion, and we get to delever almost $2 billion, about three quarters earlier than we expected.
Mm-hmm.
At levels of delever also much higher than we anticipated, and that's going to give us capital and allocation flexibility, and so we... That sort of closed out the decision.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To this. But I would say the key driver is the off-cloud nature of AMC, the flattish growth, you know, DNA of AMC and what it can do for cloud and AI opportunities in OpenText, and.
In a way, it, like, should help you, because, like, the way investors-
Yeah.
view, they want more cloud from you.
Absolutely.
But if you have something like AMC, where it's going to be tough to get that on cloud.
Right.
So it should help you in the overall mix in terms of bringing quicken the cloud and, or having more cloud in the total revenue, correct?
Yeah. And very much so. Our CTO is focused, our engineering team is focused, and all of that back into more cloud and AI, and AI. And AMC is a very meaningful about people, right?
Yeah.
$500 million. That was, as I said, the first check box for us, that yes, this is gonna allow us to focus more on cloud and AI. In terms of the mix itself, as Ramo, as you know, Ramo was speaking about, ARR, Annual Recurring Revenue, is a very important metric for us, and divesting AMC will get it up to 78%.
Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what... Yeah, yeah. Okay. You mentioned those people already, like, what does it do to leverage ratios, et cetera?
Yeah.
Because like, you know, deleveraging with that obviously much quicker than-
Yeah.
Expected. Yeah.
We are in the high threes right now.
Yeah.
As we complete the AMC divestiture, which will be about 90 days from close, and close to be in June 2024, it brings the leverage down below 3. Again, that will be about 6 quarters earlier than we anticipated.
Yeah. Okay, perfect. And then the good few things happen. Like, you know, the market is so fluid at the moment with kind of new share price movements, et cetera. Like, to ground up for the next part of our conversation, just talk a little bit about, like, your kind of recently reported results-
Yeah.
To kind of get it on the same level, and I have a couple of follow-ups there.
Yeah, absolutely. We had a very strong Q1.
Mm-hmm.
Cloud did very well. It was our 11 consecutive quarters with cloud organic growth rate in constant currency, as well as ARR. And clearly, we announced from a strategy perspective, a more solid AI strategy coming out of the initiative in August, and we just completed in October the OpenText World and a full-blown availability of our Aviator solution. We can talk more about it as, I mean, as well as, you know, pricing, et cetera. And we also spoke about what we see in Q2, which is higher than our annualized rate for cloud bookings.
We see Q2 cloud bookings at around 20%, and that's, that's building up from the momentum of content in the cloud and business network in the cloud, and AI will have a contribution in there, but certainly speaks to the overall, overall, I mean, like, overall momentum. Couple of the very interesting points in the continued theme of Micro Focus, you know, we actually announced during the call, Paul Duggan, our head of customer success, was on the call.
Yeah.
One of the key metrics for the Micro Focus is getting their renewal rate, which again, was 65% of the book of business we acquired into the high 80s in this fiscal year, and we showed positive momentum there. And lastly, from a profitability perspective, we are able to get Micro Focus to a 36%-38% EBITDA in this fiscal year. That's also about six months earlier than anticipated. And all of these really point to the return to organic growth for Micro Focus as definitely a very strong milestone we expect in 2024.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, that's really correct. On that note, what are you guys seeing on end demand? Like, you know, it's kind of uneven. Some vendors-
Yeah.
Like, having a good time, others, like, not so good. Like, where are you guys kind of putting there?
Yeah. So I'd say a couple things. The macro demand environment, and we read all the, all the earnings of other companies as you do as well. It's a little uneven. I think for OpenText, I think a few things to keep in mind. The secular drivers of what creates demand remains very strong, right?
Mm.
And we see that from our customers across. We did call out more driven the SMB side, we did call out it's more related to Microsoft pricing and the release there. But broadly speaking, the macro environment has the drivers that are very positive to the OpenText products and solutions. And more importantly, keep in mind that the breadth of the portfolio has a built-in resilience. And what do I mean by that, right? If there are slowdowns in supply chain or industrial on business network, content is doing very well.
So we do have, given the breadth of the portfolio and the variety of optionality we have in terms of the cloud offerings and the growth to the cloud, it has sort of some business, we believe, from a macro perspective. And last, I'll say that Micro Focus customers, very eager to receive and adopt the cloud offerings that we would have, that they have been waiting for, right?
Mm.
And that includes products like Value Add. It includes products like the service management back. So I think, I think, Ramo, the macro environment is uneven for other companies. We do have built-in resilience from the breadth of the portfolio and also from the initiatives-
Yeah
We are taking within the portfolio.
And then, I wanted to hear, and you mentioned AI already a few times. In theory, like, if I think about it, like, you know, in a lot of the conversations we had here so far-
Yeah.
What comes out is that data is one of the powering, you know, input factors into a good AI model into AI future. You guys, you're the steward of a lot of the corporate data.
Yeah.
Like, talk a little bit about your AI strategy, what you're doing with Aviator?
Sure.
and you know, how you see kind of your role going forward.
Yeah, absolutely. So here's where the 22-year young company of OpenText comes into play.
Yeah.
Yeah, given our history, what we have done with respect to information and content, we are sitting on a lot of data for our customers. For our customers looking for GenAI capabilities, OpenText is a logical place to go to, right? So I'll mention a few different points here. You know, first of all, we do not need to partner with other companies for providing solutions.
Sure.
What we call the OpenText Aviator, it's coming together of IDOL from Micro Focus, of Vertica, which is a vectorization database, crucial, the second leg of this tool in AI solution, and OpenText had a proprietary AI analytics, Magellan, as well. So with these three coming together, we call the OpenText Aviator. It is very much injected into all of our business clouds.
Yeah.
So this Aviator can be applied to the content, can be applied to the business network, all of that. The second most important point is that we believe there's no AI without information management. Information management is a prerequisite. It's not a self-serving statement. I think, I think it's a statement that is being proven by everything that we're seeing there. Information management is a prerequisite to AI, and in our slide deck, we have a comment about how it kind of flows, you know, which is really we're agnostic to the language model.
Mm.
In the last 48 hours, with Google and Amazon announce, and what we would say is that our strategy has taken a position to be agnostic to the language model and not in the language model. Aviator is gonna apply, I mean, then it's going to perform at the application level.
Yeah.
So you can keep Vertex with Gemini as strong as it needs to be, but Aviator is gonna apply at the application layer. And more importantly, a customer's data is not our product, but we're building the Aviator with all of the security, the governance, the privacy, and all of the requirements as the customers are gonna kind of stream data into that. And last but not least, we announced what we call Get Your Wings program, and which is really for $350,000, you have sort of 1 million documents in there, and you can test, you the customer, can test the hypothesis. And if the hypothesis works, then yes, you go ahead and do a full-blown ingestion of information.
Yeah.
So I would say that we are very strategic about it. Things are moving fast, obviously, and we're very practical and methodical about it, and look for Aviator in all of our business channels, and that's the approach we're taking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, sorry, pricing. Many of what I'm talking about are being released in this month, in the month of December.
Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's more coming at the early part of next year.
So you're moving fast. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Last couple of minutes, I wanted to spend on marginal profitability. So,
Sure.
You know, you mentioned already the one big part for Micro Focus to make them more profitable-
Yeah
-was around the support and maintenance situation. Can you talk a little bit about the cost takeout and, you know, like the, or the synergy capture, I think, is the right word?
Yeah
that, where you are on that journey?
Yeah. I think a few different aspects there. Ex AMC, we had 38%-40%. With AMC, just a simple math, we are targeting at 36%-38% for this fiscal year. Now, with Micro Focus, we had announced about $200 million of cost, but two of them have already been actioned. So that's to be complete fiscal 2024. When you think about workforce reduction, we're done with about, and it's a good zone for us to take it forward. Now, let's break the margin into a few different pieces, right? You talk about customer support. OpenText runs at about 91%+. As Micro Focus renewal rates improve, we will get Micro Focus also to our sort of growth margin standards of the customer support.
We are absolutely investing in the cloud, but as you get to fiscal 2025 and 2026, we should see acceleration in cloud of gross margin as well, given many of the things we talked about in terms of the top five and some efficiencies that we are gonna get. R&D at 14%-16% is a good place to be. Sales and marketing at 16%-18% is a good place to be. And R&D also, we should keep in mind, that it's so much driven by people, innovation, and products. It's about 10,000 people worldwide who are actually, you know, performing innovation. So more beyond the 36%-38%, I would just say stay tuned for that as we actually wrap up this year.
There's a lot of dialogue for us, not yet mobile arms, which is OpenText Aviator. How do you bring it in-house to our operating model? As we talk about developer productivity for our customers, how do you bring that in-house? So all of those discussions are in play, and certainly, we have some positives to the long-term operating.
Yeah. And then last question, because our time is almost up, cash flow-
Yeah.
And the cash flow situation for Micro Focus. There's a lot of work that you could do there. Like, where are you on that journey?
Yes. So we are calling out $800 million-$900 million for 2024.
Yeah.
I would say that Micro Focus working capital is strong.
Sure.
Fundamentally strong. This is gonna take some time for us as part of the integration to get them to higher standard than OpenText. But, but for fiscal 2026, with ex AMC, we're talking about $1.2 billion-$1.3 billion. And again, low 20s to mid-20s in terms of FCF to revenue is really good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. That's a good summary. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Well, thank you, Ramo.
Thank you.
Thank you all as well.