We're on. Clock's already rolling. All right. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'm Brett Klein from the Morgan Stanley Technology Banking team. Thrilled to have OpenText with me here today. I'm hosting the EVP and CFO, Madhu Ranganathan, on stage. Madhu, thank you very much for being here today.
Yeah. Thank you for having us.
So I'm going to start out big picture and maybe just give you a few minutes to frame the OpenText opportunity for investors. So give us OpenText is a big, broad business. Give us some of the framework as you think about the market segments and product areas that you are in as a business today.
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you again for having us, and thank you all for joining. So think information management. We are a global leader in information management, and we say we are a 33-year-old young company. The size of the market is very large. It's about $200 billion in TAM. The way to think about OpenText is we power and protect information. We do business with large enterprises. Over the course of our three decades, we've had multiple opportunities to place our software into their ecosystems and to have the power of their data use our software. We're also experts in not just software and solutions but integrating within these enterprises. That has allowed us to be able to ingest the data, store the data, organize the data, move the data, kind of the full spectrum. We operate in six markets.
That's how we view our business, starting from content management to IT operations management to application development and modernization, and then business network, cybersecurity, and last but not least is AI analytics. As a company, we have a few moving parts. We acquired Micro Focus, and it's been about 15 months of integration and now a divestiture of AMC. But you're really looking at if you look at our fiscal 2026, it's about $6 billion approaching $6 billion in revenue. Cloud has been a decade-long journey for us. We say cloud is our ultimate destination. Cloud bookings growth is top of the house for us and about 15%+ on an annual basis. Upper 30s% in adjusted EBITDA, 20% in free cash flow. Again, we can talk more.
But the broad umbrella of information management, software provider, and with really a mission to not just grow and help enterprises but to stay profitable and generate strong cash flows.
Excellent. That's a great opening. You've already alluded to it, but let's double-click on the business model aspect as well. I heard scale, growth, profitability. But how do you characterize the OpenText business model for investors?
Yeah. The best way to think about the OpenText business model is the size and scale. Perhaps I'll hit one of the important questions we keep getting asked. You were an acquirer until now. Are you shifting your strategy? Look at a $200 billion TAM. We don't need more TAM to grow. The number one aspect of the business model is we are going to lean into organic growth. And organic growth is going to be led by the cloud through the cloud bookings and the cloud revenue I spoke about. The second aspect of the business model is that we are very enterprise-driven, except in cybersecurity, where we cater to enterprise as well as to small and medium-sized businesses. With cloud being kind of the leading driver, over the last 30 years, we also have 75,000+ enterprise-quality customers.
So needless to say, our installed base of customers is very strong. So customer support and maintenance is also a very important stream of revenue. Cloud is a third of our revenue today. And on the other side of AMC, you can think about cloud close to 40% of our revenues. And customer support is 40% of our revenues today. And the other important aspect of our business model is we've left the deployment choice to the customer. We have maintained our licensed business, on-prem or cloud business as we call it. And we haven't cannibalized that to grow in the cloud. The cloud growth I just shared with you at 40% is completely a greenfield opportunity. And we have independent go-to-market teams for that. 80% of our R&D investment is towards the cloud. We have 14%-16% of revenues in R&D.
Last but not least, with all of that put together, license and PS is going to be about 20% of the business.
OK. Great. You've already sort of alluded to this. But do you actively try and drive your customers to the cloud? Or it sounds like you're really giving them choice. It just so happens that cloud bookings has high momentum just given the market trends there.
Right. That's correct. Again, to emphasize, we could be keeping alive a software version from 10 years ago. It is going to cost the customer more. Usually, we don't get pushback on that. It also maintains the health of the customer support business. The large set of opportunities we see in the cloud is what propelled us to build this business model, right? Greenfield opportunities in the cloud. We have over 200 sales reps purely selling in the cloud. The other aspect to keep in mind is we are private cloud and public cloud and SaaS. We're probably one of the largest private cloud instance providers with deep expertise in there. We are ready to stand up a private cloud instance for governments and quasi-governments and financial services. That's also deep expertise for us.
OK. Great. You've hit on Micro Focus. Let's maybe just unpack that a little bit more for investors. So early 2023, announced the acquisition, $6 billion or so. Then later last year, you announced the divestiture of the application modernization products, the AMC business, which I think is all mainframe-related.
Is all mainframe-related.
OK. And so just maybe what will remain it sounds like we framed it already. But what will be divested ultimately when the divestiture transaction closes?
Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'll just double-click on AMC. But when we bought Micro Focus, the intent was to hold the company as a whole. We did get an inbound call with respect to AMC. AMC is mainframe. It is zero-cloud. So the inbound call was very interesting for us to evaluate and diligence. The sticker shock of AMC is very highly profitable, high profits and cash flows. But it was a flat growth business. And when you think about our cloud initiatives, AMC was the farthest on our cloud product roadmap.
The R&D envelope was distributed across other growth areas where we needed to and where we needed to cloudify. So when you think on the other side of AMC, what is going to be left is going to be IT operations management, application development and modernization. And let's not forget, we can talk no more about AI.
Two out of the three legs of the stool of our AI offering came from Micro Focus. It's that IDOL product and the Vertica product. AI and analytics is going to be very prominent, going to be very prominent for Micro Focus. Last but not least is cybersecurity. We were cybersecurity in the SMB side. Micro Focus is very strong in cybersecurity on the enterprise side. Today, we're sitting at a very large-scale cybersecurity business as scaled as RSA, perhaps. We're looking forward to growing that.
Wow. That's great. I don't know if you've commented yet. But how are you thinking about, at the company level, using the proceeds from AMC that come in when that closes?
Yeah. So we have commented on that. And we have a very clear strategy. The purchase price is about $2.275 billion. The net proceeds will be about $1.9 billion. At the moment, the plan is to use all the proceeds to delever. And the delever will put us slightly less than three times from a net leverage ratio. And if you don't mind, I'll just kind of expand the answer to saying we're eager to put a buyback program in place. And we did do a buyback program back in 2022. But since the acquisition of Micro Focus, we are trapped from a leverage and covenant perspective. So when you think about capital allocation in terms of the three legs of the stool, dividend is definitely in place. And we are eager to put a buyback program in place.
OK. That's excellent. You've commented in recent quarters about opportunities as it relates to Micro Focus's business, including cross-sell and other areas. But what are you seeing so far? And where else do you think you can get further improvement as part of a combined company post-full integration?
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So three areas. One was extremely important. Over 60% of the book of business we bought was renewals. And Micro Focus was operationally very challenged from a renewal perspective. And we made tremendous strides. We brought the renewal rates from 80-ish to high 80s by the end of this fiscal year. And we hope to get it into the low 90s, the OpenText standard, in the next sort of 18 months or so. That's clearly accretive to revenue. And number two, a very important thesis of the Micro Focus transaction was to have a long-range opportunity to cloudify Micro Focus products. So think about our private cloud opportunities, our public cloud opportunities, as we did for OpenText, but maybe faster than we did for OpenText to apply to the Micro Focus products, right? That's, I would say, opportunity number two.
From a cross-sell perspective, the objective is to get entrenched in the respective pillars but go maybe selectively cross-sell. There are plays between the cybersecurity product and our content in a pillar. And that's really where we'll focus on. Last but not least, we are delighted to have Micro Focus play a very key role in the AI. Our Aviator product has the IDOL as well as the Vertica combined with our own analytics of the Magellan. And those two teams have maybe found their purpose in life, right? They're actually very excited.
That's excellent. You've hit on AI a bunch of times. I'm going to jump in now as well to pile on. I haven't asked any questions. We're 10 minutes in. Amazing. But as a broad-based infra management company, OpenText has, you've described the various solutions and markets that you're involved in. Just at a high level again, how do you see the size and opportunity ahead for OpenText in AI? It must be massive.
It is very big. In fact, there was a meeting we had earlier where they said, you say AI 6 to 6 times in 10 minutes. So we did not do that. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, as many companies are probably speaking to you about. But really, to put it in context, our journey in content management has left a very large install base of customers with large amounts of data that they have been working with us already. And that is not the case for many companies. We don't believe in ethical AI. AI has to be ethical. And we've led our relationship with the customer with trust and data privacy and all of the compliance requirements. Now, when you think about AI for the OpenText context, think about the pull-in effect that AI is going to have on our cloud business.
That is what you saw with the 63% growth in cloud bookings. We've upped our annual guidance to 25%-30% from an annual growth rate perspective. That's going to give us tremendous visibility into the 7%-9% revenue growth rate in fiscal 2026. We see this in 3 categories. The first is really the large pull-in effect from a cloud bookings perspective that we believe is a long-run way and sustainable. Number 2, AI is in every RFP that the sales team is working on. Layering on of the analytics into a normal RFP is increasing. The last piece is really the pure AI. As I said, we've rolled out our AI products. It's called the Aviator. Aviator is available to every one of the pillars I referred to earlier.
It's early today with respect to customers having POCs, whether it's in the retail industry or pharma or legal or banking. But that is how this wave is going to commence. As the time goes on, you will see the AI revenues pick up and the cloud revenues being more sustainable. Maybe the last comment I'll make is the majority of the customers today are not ready for pure-play AI solutions. And that in itself is an opportunity for a company like OpenText, where we're seeing pipeline acceleration of cloud deals that would be two to four quarters out accelerated to today. And we see that momentum continuing.
Large install base, a lot of data for your customers already in OpenText solutions. You can see the opportunity there.
Maybe if I could just double-click on that, our sales teams agree with us. We're training them to go after our installed base. It's a very large installed base. They don't need to go search for a new logo for AI. For all the reasons we mentioned, our customers do want to work with us first, right?
Absolutely. And I mean, we're in the morning of day one of AI. So are you seeing customers that are still dipping their feet? Or are some of the larger enterprises actually starting to scale up AI deployments across OpenText products that they have installed?
Yeah. So this concept of customers getting ready for AI and preparing for AI is more important today than customers dipping their feet in AI, right? So yes, when it comes to pure play, this is a small ecosystem of customers whose data is perfectly organized. It's vectorized. It is ready for AI to go in. And yes, that pool is small. But I do think for us, especially, the customers preparing for AI, where they have to do consolidation of data, where they have to organize the data, it means more cloud revenue for our products and solutions. And look, if we want to call all of it AI, we can. We are sort of categorizing that as a customer is preparing for AI. And as far as the pure AI wind goes, through our Aviator products, we have a WINGS program we've launched.
We've launched pricing, that's product availability. We're issuing new releases. We're all ready. Today, I think the right characterization is they are dipping into the pure AI time.
Excellent. And then on the last earnings call, you talked about Platform Athena as an internal use AI solution for OpenText engineers to help develop products more easily and quickly. So how are you thinking about the AI opportunity within OpenText to help amplify what you're building for customers and increase your efficiencies?
Yeah. Look, from a CFO perspective, I couldn't be more excited about the productivity and efficiency and just the operating leverage the P&L can get over time. That operating leverage is very real. For us, we're prioritizing two areas. One is the customers, right? If we could internally apply AI to many OpenText functions today, we could. But we'd like our resources to be focused on the customer's priorities first. So that's where we're applying. Internally, the priority is engineering. The Platform Athena is really creating a platform that's AI-driven that's going to improve the efficiency of coding from the engineer's perspective, bug fixes, QA, all of that, how much of automation can actually be there from a platform perspective. The time frame is about the second quarter of 2025. But that's really what we want to call out.
Now, the broader answer to your question is that we will have opportunities in global technical support, in sales operations, and just general customer support. And in the G&A organizations as well, the AI opportunities abound. Maybe the last comment I'll say, the interesting thing with OpenText is the value proposition to the customers are really the value propositions to us, right? And how do we deploy that over a period of time is going to come to prioritization. But we did want to call out Athena for the R&D teams.
Excellent. Well, that's really exciting to hear. I'm going to shift gears again and ask about the macro and spending environment. I know there's going to be a lot of questions this whole week about that. 6,000 customers, a lot in the enterprise, also SMB. But how are you seeing the environment for demand? And then could you speak to differences between the enterprise customer segment and the SMB customers?
Yeah, absolutely. Look, from a macro perspective, the best way to think about OpenText is just the breadth of our portfolio. It provides built-in resilience within the portfolio, right? And from a macro standpoint, during the pandemic and later, there was certainly some volatility in supply chain and industrial. So our business network volume could go kind of up and down. But the broader macro aspect that we just talked about in terms of the CIO, the CISOs, the chief data officers, all of their budgets, whether it's increasing or not, it is being channeled towards going more to the cloud, towards organizing the data, towards storing and analyzing the data, all of that. That is exactly where OpenText plays. So I would say the macro aspect, we do have built-in resilience. But we have built-in opportunities as well. And that's from an enterprise perspective.
To emphasize, with the Micro Focus acquisition, the number of decision makers we can actually touch in the enterprise has increased, the sheer number of decision makers. With the cybersecurity pillar, we are now squarely with the CISOs, right? So that's from a macro perspective on the enterprise side. On the SMB side, we did call out some headwinds. This is really tied to our sort of Carbonite, to Webroot, and the Zix business association with Microsoft. The global PC shipment data that you've been seeing is what is impacting us. But we do think in a couple quarters from now, that can actually turn around.
OK, great. And then maybe a similar question, but just ask you to comment, Madhu, on any customer verticals and markets that your customers are in or geographies where you're seeing better spending or weaker spending?
Yeah. So the Americas has been strong for us, very strong. The U.S. has been very strong for us. So 60% of our business is the Americas. And if you look at spend in the future, we do see that continue. OpenText was always strong in Europe with Micro Focus. We've become even stronger. From the partner standpoint, Asia-Pac and Europe remains very strong for us. I mean, the broad partner network, although we anchor on SAP and the hyperscalers, we have strong partnerships with those. And I would say from a vertical perspective, the financial services is very strong for us. Pharma and industrial are also equally strong. And the government sector is actually very interesting. I say government in a broad sense, government, quasi-government, counties, all of that. We were very strong. And Micro Focus is equally strong. So that's also an area.
But again, back to the cloud and data organization, there are some very big players, very big plays there.
Excellent. You've commented on the pillars, 6 pillars that you're in. Just big company, how do you organize the go-to-market operation for landing new customers across these pillars and cross-selling or upselling over time, whether it's within a pillar itself expanding or selling products across pillars into your customers?
Great. I mean, it's a great question. So I'll actually share a few thoughts around this. So when you think about the six markets, our sales force is really focused on the markets, right? So for example, the content sales team is part of the enterprise. And they can sell content. They can sell business network. So again, the six markets are intersected with the enterprise and the SMB. Another aspect of go-to-market is direct and partners. On the direct side, for where we sit in a $6 billion software company, we probably have the strongest enterprise software sales force for our company, our scale. And given the size of our customers, Brett, you mentioned new logos. Our installed base is still very large. There's a lot of wallet share to claim with installed base.
We have something called the GAM program, the Global Account Management, which on the direct side, the top 100 or 150 customers of OpenText have a pod that ranges from half a dozen to a dozen, right? That's actually on the direct side. The partner network, we call it the force multiplier. Again, at the top of the house is SAP. We are SAP's strongest and largest provider from an Extended ECM perspective and all other aspects integrated with the ERP. Now, the three hyperscalers, we have varying degrees of partnership. I would put Google at the top. And I would put AWS second. And actually, with Microsoft, it's growing. And then you have the system integrators at all different levels, our partners. Again, they become force multipliers. On the SMB side, it's entirely partner-driven, right? And we have about 23,000 partners.
So, I would think six markets: enterprise, SMB, and direct and partners.
This may be very hard to answer in light of that answer. But how do you think about the competitive landscape as it market by market, as you somewhat defined it?
Yeah. So I would say at the top of the house is what OpenText has been doing for our enterprises, right? We have a very tight, sticky, and large relationship with our enterprises. And I think that's a very important point before we entered into the competitive landscape. When you park that, IBM probably is the single biggest competitor that can do everything I described as well or larger than we can do, ranging from private cloud and public cloud and document management, all of that. And then we get into kind of the smaller players in business network, for example. We do see SPS Commerce from a mid-market perspective. We see Veeva from a life science standpoint. And I do think the cybersecurity play is filled with sort of the competitive landscape. But I want to go back to the type of relationship we have with our customers.
Our loss register that I look at is not very long. Why? Because where we play, we tend to win. We do that because we approach the sale as a suite selling, not as a point player. We train our sales teams that way. You asked a question about cross-sell. We are very selective about the cross-sell. But what's important is that within a pillar, there are multiple products a customer is using, right? Getting more and more of the share of wallet from the customer is important. That is how we train our sales team.
OK, excellent. Let me pause here and just see if there's any questions in the room for Madhu from the team at OpenText. And I still have a few more to go. Don't worry.
Yeah. Hi, I'm Chris from FutureNow Capital from Australia. Do you see your ECM business transforming from kind of a compliance, a bit of risk management, people have to do it because I have to do it, where with AI, you need quality data? The more data you put in there, the accuracy of the results actually go down. You actually want to have less data, but higher quality data. Given a lot of your ECM products, tag the metadata, understand what's in the documents. It's just not in the database. You can actually unlock what's in the documents itself to see the fields in the documents. Do you see that being now moving into a value add because I can start preparing my data, have high-quality data for the AI to be able to be useful?
Yeah. So the short answer is a big yes. But I would also say that we saw that trend even before the AI wave started, right, moving from pure compliance-oriented to gaining value from the content and the various aspects of the content, the organization, the storage, the security, all of that stuff. Now, clearly, with AI, right, the objective to gain value from all of that is much higher. But I would say that the path to gaining more value beyond compliance in our content business was already growing. It's just getting more accentuated with the whole AI wave. For any of you who were at our OpenText World in Las Vegas last year, we talked about a hospitality industry and a hotel manager who actually gets a query about our conference room availability.
And with content management and the ability to query our Aviator through all the documents, right, you can get to your answer in 30 minutes. And somebody says, why not 3 minutes? But let's pause. You've just eliminated the need for 3 facility staff and 2 weeks of meetings. And EA actually is supporting this. I'll give you another example. An apparel manufacturer is going through 1 million invoices, right, actually to gain more insights and analytics and not just for compliance, right? So I would say the trend was already there. It's really accentuated by AI. But the compliance trend will continue. That's very good business for us.
Another one in the audience? Thank you.
Thanks. Just two questions around Micro Focus. So one, you mentioned when you bought the asset, it had kind of low 80s renewal rates, which for an enterprise software company, I guess I'm a little surprised it was that low. I'm just curious, what was driving that? And then you moving into the low 90s, obviously, this tremendous uplift. How did you kind of make that happen? Or how are you making that happen? And then just one second question is around, are the teams integrated? In other words, is the same sales for selling now traditional OpenText and Micro Focus? Or is it different customer, different kind of product teams? So you have to keep them somewhat separated?
Yeah.
Thanks.
Two great questions. I'll pick a second one first, if you don't mind. The teams are very well integrated. So since we closed the transaction, we called out these six pillars. And it's one OpenText that operates in these actually six pillars: sales leadership, sales compensation plan, territory management, all of that. The teams are integrated right upon the close of the transaction, right? Same thing with partners and customers. So thank you for that question. That part is very important. Now, back to Micro Focus renewals. Look, I think the best way to describe it is the company had way too many priorities that were not operationally equipped to manage. And the type of acquisitions they did and the type of leverage that they had to secure and the system complexities, it was just like too much.
Where they were really focused on was more to divest and get cash in order to deal with the leverage. So what was missed in this, I would say, is the product focus and the customer focus. Those two are very, very important from the renewal business. Two other aspects, more structural, I'll mention: given their HP legacy, right, HP was very partner-oriented. A lot of the renewals was done by the partners. That is not how you do software renewals. So we had to bring the renewals in-house. The renewals were distributed. They had business units. Different business units did renew. Our philosophy has always been, it's one renewal organization, always in source, so that you can drive excellence into the renewal business. It's a play we've had for many, many years.
It was not hard for us to put the play onto the Micro Focus business. That's what we did. Number one was sort of bringing it from the partners to the actually in-house piece. If you ask what else did the partners get in Quid Pro Quo, we actually brought them into selling many of the OpenText and the Micro Focus products. The partners didn't really lose much. We gained a lot, right?
Great. Thank you. Any other questions from the audience? All right. I'll keep going with a few here. Madhu, you did comment on this. I think it's important. I want to come back and just put a finer point on it. OpenText has been fairly acquisitive over the years. But has now reached a significant revenue scale, customer scale, global reach. It sounds like from the growth algorithm going forward, it's shifting maybe to one from inorganic acquired growth to more organic growth. Yeah, is that the right way to think about OpenText? Then a follow-on part would be, what are the types of acquisitions you think OpenText will continue to look at in the future?
Yeah. No, great question. So at a $200 billion TAM with the markets we have, we do not need more distribution centers. We do not need more pillars or geographies. And we do have a lot of opportunities within these markets to grow. As some of you may know, the Micro Focus products were not all growing. A lot of them were churning, right? So the objective to bring from the decline to the flat and the flat to the grow, it just leaves a lot of opportunities for organic growth. And at this size, yes, 100% we're leaning towards organic growth. Look, we have a lot of muscle memory on M&A, which is not going to go away. And we will definitely acquire on the other side of AMC.
But to your great question about the lens on the M&A, in the past, our lens was more financial, right, profitability and cash flows. As we look ahead, our lens is going to be driven also by organic growth. Cloud-based assets are going to be a big focus for us. But we're not going to lose the lens of a very strong P&L. And what do I mean by that? You will not find OpenText paying very high multiples for companies. Maybe we pay a turn or more than we did in the past. And we don't subscribe to those companies that have galactic growth rates, perhaps, and an entitlement to make losses and not produce cash flows. That's not who we are. But certainly, our lens is going to shift towards these assets have to continue to organically grow.
Now, in terms of size, there is no reason or appetite for a transformative acquisition at this point at this level of scale. So I would say expect small, medium type of acquisitions. We did do one that was called KineMatik. It was more of a tuck-in. It was very specialized from a solution partner perspective, right? So that's really where we are focused on. But if you don't mind, I'll just bring the question back to our capital allocation, which is on the other side of AMC. We are eager to put a buyback program in place.
Excellent. I was going to go there. You hit my second to last question already. In light of these shifts and what you see, but what are some of the financial metrics or KPIs investors should focus on or that you, as the management team, track? You've referenced enterprise cloud bookings through this discussion as well. Help frame the key performance indicators that you look at for OpenText going forward.
Yeah, absolutely. And look, we recognize that we've had some moving parts. We had the Micro Focus acquisition. Now, we have the AMC divest. So what we're really marching towards is fiscal 2026, which is on the other side of AMC and a full year, right? To start at the very top, we are calling out 15% year-over-year growth in cloud bookings. Should there be opportunities to move that number up over time, you will absolutely see us do that. Now, the cloud revenue growth, just to maybe clarify a point here, given the complexity, which is a good thing, and the stickiness of our cloud long-term nature, it takes multiple years for a booking to become revenue. So if you ask us, why is cloud revenue not 15% as well, that's the reason. So look for cloud revenue. We called out organic growth at 7%-9%.
Customer support is a very important line for us. That gives us the ARR at 78%-80%. The combined growth on the ARR would be 2%-4%. Upper 30s, 36%-38% on an adjusted EBITDA and 20% free cash flow, 20% to revenue. That's actually an important metric. We have $5.7 billion-$5.9 billion in revenues in fiscal 2026. Yeah, I would say look to fiscal 2026.
OK, excellent. Let me pause one more time. Any other questions from the audience? All right. Sounds like no. One last one for me. And then we can wrap up. Madhu, how do you see OpenText in 5-10 years? And I realize it's hard or hard to look out in technology 10 years. But what will the company look like then?
Bigger in information management, more cloud, more AI, and continue to be very strong in profitability, cash flows, and capital allocation. With more revenue, you're looking at a company that's going to sort of proportionately increase profits and cash flows, right, that's built into the model. Look for that to size and scale in the next 5-10 years.
Well, excellent. Thank you very much, Madhu, for being here.
Thank you.
Really appreciate the time on stage with you.
Excellent. Yeah, thank you all.
Thank you, everybody, for coming.