Great! Well, welcome to the 19th Annual Needham Technology and Media Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the CommTech sector here at Needham, which is comprised of cloud communications and broadband networking. Really happy to be pleased, really pleased to be welcoming RingCentral here with us today, who's a leading provider of AI-driven cloud-based business communications, contact center, video, and hybrid event solutions. I'm joined by CFO Sonali Parekh. Welcome, Sonali.
Thank you so much.
Great.
It is a pleasure to be here.
Great. So I'll assume most of you are familiar with recent results, which, you know, may come up in our discussion. But let's start with the really exciting news, which is the your big win in the quarter. I think you turned a lot of heads. Tell us about kinda some of the key reasons, tell us about that deal, and tell us some of the ways that, that you won this biggest deal in the company history.
Yeah. So thank you. Great question to lead with, and it turned my head—I can tell you, when the salesperson first came to me. So yeah, 40,000-seat deal, so making history.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
Pretty awesome. And particularly in the current environment, you know, we were very delighted. But most importantly, you know, the customer chose us, and it was in a Teams environment.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, another thing that's really important to note is that we absolutely not only can succeed, but win in a Teams environment. And, you know, I think that has been, in some ways, the crux of some of the bear case on this sector. And, you know, we've got a couple of big wins now under our belt. So this one, which we're particularly proud of, it's a Fortune 500 retailer-
Mm-hmm
... $20+ billion revenues-
Wow
... highly distributed, global. And, importantly, they chose us because of the features and functionality and differentiation that we offer. And, you know, some of the things that you've heard us talk about in the past are exactly what they pointed to in terms of why they wanted to work with Ring. And we helped them solve some of their pain points that the competition, quite frankly, couldn't touch.
Mm-hmm.
One of them being reliability, five nines, 99.999%.
Yep.
Actually, in the last couple of quarters, it's been six nines, which, you know, what does that mean in the real world? It's less than five minutes of downtime per year, including scheduled maintenance, so always on, basically.
Turns out voice is hard.
Yeah, voice is really hard. And, you know, we've been around for 25 years. We're coming up to our 25-year anniversary, 10 years as a public company, which we celebrated last year. But there's a lot of R&D that's gone into that solution, and that's why it is what it is today. But, you know, they really wanted vertical-specific integrations as well-
Mm-hmm
... which, as you know, and again, you've heard us talk about this, we have thousands of integrations, but specifically in certain verticals, and, like, this was a win in one of our golden verticals, so retail, and particularly a distributed environment. Picture stores, you know, all over the United States, but also globally.
Mm-hmm.
You know, one of the interesting tidbits in terms of why we won, this customer also has a pharmacy within their retail footprint, within the stores, and pharmacies still use fax. Their HR team needed SMS-
Mm-hmm
... integrations. Guess what? We have the best SMS integrations. Another personal favorite of mine was they wanted different hold music depending on the department, and the store, and where the store was located, and that's something that we offered. And again, it was a pain point. It was something they really needed. And so I think taking everything into consideration, you know, they chose us. And again, I, you know, they had come from a Skype environment-
Yeah
... which obviously is a Microsoft environment.
So you beat Microsoft head-to-head and as an incumbent.
Correct. Correct, and I think that's a very, very big point. And, you know, the other thing is, we do feel very strongly that we have a right to win in certain verticals where there's this mission criticality of phone. And in this situation, the customer has actually maintained the Teams ecosystem for video and for messaging.
Wow.
But phone, they absolutely wanted to go with us, and again, landmark deal, record deal, 40,000 seats. You heard me on the call talk about eight-digit contribution to top line.
Amazing. So bunch of other deals out there like this? Closing? I'm kidding you.
Yeah.
But I mean, are there still a lot of enterprises out there that are looking for, you know-
Yeah
... full lift-and-replace phone systems?
Yeah, so a lot of the world is still sitting on-prem-
Yeah
... in legacy systems. It is, it is a bit sticky because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Mm-hmm.
Anybody who's looking to modernize, anybody who's looking to become more efficient, anyone who's looking to automate, and, like, who in this room-
Yeah
... is not looking to automate?
Workforce.
I'm looking to automate.
Right.
Absolutely. So I think it's a question of when, not if. But yeah, we think there's a lot more to go for. And remember, we also have this partnership with Avaya-
Mm-hmm
... which holds the largest base of on-prem seats in the market today. That is exclusive. So if those seats are moving to the cloud, it's through RingCentral-
Yeah
... if Avaya is moving those seats over. So, I can't talk on a forward basis, naturally, and none of you would want me to. But, if you look at the cadence of wins over the last couple of quarters, we also had some big wins in Q4. You know, thousands of seats. We had a very, very large insurance broker, which we talked about. We talked about a waste management company, the quarter before that. So yes, these sort of whales are-
Mm-hmm.
You know, there's been a nice regular cadence, and I always like to have at least one a quarter, you know, and definitely let my enterprise sales guy know about it.
Yeah.
And the other thing is, this is interesting as a CFO. I get pulled into these larger deals often, and it's a really fun part of the job because it's always a privilege speaking to a customer, but it's like, it has to be about what the customer wants. It has to be about solving the customer's pain point, and it's really great to hear them talk about the value we bring. And so, yeah, you know, I'm being pulled into more and more.
That's exciting. So enterprise sounding better, really stabilized here. I mean, last couple of quarters, I think you've been tooling along in the low teens, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, and, you know, you'll probably talk about financials and guidance a little bit later, but, you know, a few investors on the callbacks were asking like: What gave you the confidence to raise guidance? And I think, you know, you hit the nail on the head. It's this stabilization into the enterprise business, and that's ARR growth of 13% plus for the fourth consecutive quarter. And, you know, the nice thing about being a recurring revenue business is the visibility is fairly good. Now, you're probably gonna ask me about macro as well. Everything I say is based on the macro that we're seeing today in front of us.
Mm-hmm.
It does not incorporate any improvement. It doesn't incorporate any deterioration. You know, on the enterprise side, I do feel that, we have momentum when we look at the pipe, you know, it's, it's very, very healthy. And our new customer acquisition has been incredibly strong. And you've heard me talk about this in the last couple of calls, and I think we've even talked about it in callbacks, is, you know, what has been a bit more challenged is that upsell-
Right
... motion.
Renewals on the-
Yeah, and kind of that land and expand. So say you're a customer and you buy RingCentral for a department.
Right.
But then you're like, you think, "Oh, I'd like to roll this out across more departments." That was, you know, our classic sales motion. And I think in the current macro, when customers have been optimizing for head count-
Mm-hmm
... and seat count, and, you know, and we're doing the same, by the way, when, when-
Sure
... renewals come my way, that has had an impact. So, you know, what did we do? How did we address that? And we saw this, this has been over a year now-
Mm
... that we've seen this, phenomenon.
Right.
We felt really strongly, even when we were doing, you know, the efficiency actions that we took at the end of 2022 and in 2023 to drive that margin improvement, which I hope you ask me about.
Okay.
No pressure. You know, we felt it was really important to keep investing in R&D, product, and technology. It is, innovation is the lifeblood of this company. You know, Vlad is a P&T guy through and through. You know him well. And the important thing is, we now have more products to sell into this, you know, fairly sticky, extremely large install base, right? Like close to $2.4 billion ARR, over 400,000 customers. What more can we sell into them? What more cool stuff? And when you think about enterprise, in particular, where, you know, the upsell has been more challenging, that is how we are addressing that. So we have this, you know, 13% plus stabilized growth in enterprise, and now more interesting-
Yeah
... products to sell into them.
Exciting. And on the SMB front, a little more challenging there, would you say?
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And I mean, you saw it in the numbers.
Mm-hmm.
We are clearly not alone, and I would say we more than held our own. You know, in terms of end user demand and pipeline and actually customer acquisition, we're seeing, like, new customer acquisition, we're actually seeing quite a bit of strength in SMB, but it's growing below enterprise. Because I think SMBs in general have been more impacted by the macro, and also this whole, you know, inflation has been a lot more persistent than people had expected, rates staying higher for longer. Look, we all read the same papers and economic reports.
Yeah.
I think that's impacted the SMB business, but our win rates, very, very consistent. You know, who we're going... Our at bats, very, very consistent. Who we're going up against, very, very consistent. The reason that our customers are choosing us, and you know, our background really is SMB. Like, we now have this amazing $1.02 billion enterprise business-
Yeah
... but our roots, you know, I, I just said our roots are in innovation, and but our roots are also in SMB, and we have proof points that we have a true right to win there, and I think it's because we are so mission-critical to those customers and what we offer. That has not changed. So we're gonna double down our efforts to try and accelerate things there. I think we've done a great job doing that in enterprise, and, you know, now a lot of focus and a lot of Vlad's focus and my focus will be on SMB.
But again, looking across the piece, as I see enterprise software companies report, and you probably look at them more than me, running all of TMT, but, you know, I, I think we did, you know, we, we were almost an outlier in being fairly stable.
Yeah, for sure.... competitively in the enterprise, is there a big difference in SMB as well? I assume enterprise is just a couple competitors there, really, right?
Yeah.
It's Microsoft and maybe Zoom to some degree.
Yeah, that, that's a very fair statement. So who we're seeing out there competitively has not changed in any meaningful way. Again, the win rates stable, actually both in enterprise and in SMB. You know, people sometimes ask, "Oh, is it a more disciplined environment today-
Mm-hmm.
in terms of how you work with the channel?" And, you know, this notion of spiffs in the, in the industry, in the category. You know, it's, it's been fairly stable there, but I never get too comfortable.
Mm-hmm
... because there's always the possibility that somebody breaks rank, and then you do have to respond, in a certain way. But I would say, overall, the competitive landscape has not changed meaningfully. Maybe on the UCaaS side, there's one competitor that seems to be investing less in R&D and UCaaS right now, and that is a deliberate strategy by them.
Sure.
You know, I don't wanna
Sure
... rubbish the competition, like, we all work hard, and but I think it's a deliberate strategy, and we're seeing that in terms of our win rates. And-
Yeah
... another win you didn't ask me about, but, I spent a lot of time living in the U.K., and we won Rotherham Council in the U.K., and that was a win against one of our competitors that's more deeply rooted in the U.K..
Mm-hmm.
I think that's hopefully a sign of things to come.
Great. Now, the U.K. has been a real changing market. Let's shift to the new product front, and you've got RingCX, RingSense for Sales, RingCentral Events. How do you think about that growth, and what kind of timeframe do we start to see some material contributions from that cohort?
Yeah, okay. Material contributions. Let me see. You know, when you're $2.4 billion ARR, material, it's, it's... that's harder.
Fair. Fair.
I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to answer that one, but what I can tell you is, look, we felt very confident to reiterate the $100 million ARR by 2025. You know, customers and salespeople are saying, you know, they love the RingCX product. We gave you some customer numbers to update you, and we will. We're trying to figure out the right cadence in terms-
Mm-hmm
... of updating you on new products, because we wanna give you updates when it's meaningful.
Yeah.
But in terms of customer numbers, if you think about what I said, and, and Vlad said at earnings, you know, we're now at above more than 200 customers for RingCX. The last time we had updated you, we were at about 160 customers. We're now well above 200 customers naturally, 'cause we're, in the middle of May.
Sure.
But if you look at Q1 on Q4, it was a nearly doubling. You know, what I can tell you is that customers love the value proposition of RingCX.
Yeah.
Customers love the disruptive price point, so it's $65 per seat per month. That is significantly, significantly below the competition. It is a slightly different use case. It's for more simple to use, simple to deploy, quick to deploy, low professional services, lift, things like that. So, you know, we have our other contact center business, which is for the kind of more complex use cases.
Sure.
Distinct swim lanes there, and you may ask me about that partnership.
Let's go.
Look, what we're seeing is very, very good traction. You know, there are strong reasons for customers to wanna work with us, and they love that UC+CC
Mm-hmm
... combined proposition. And, you know, we saw that with our NICE partnership with RCCC, and RingCX is no different.
It's kind of a contact center lite?
Contact center lite, yeah. And, and it can be a little-
Less known? Less known.
But, you know, contact center lite, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a small company. And what I'm gonna say here is that, like, we've won some large companies, enterprise-style companies-
Mm-hmm
... but sometimes their contact center needs, in particular areas or divisions, can be actually quite small. And it's the ratio is often 10 to one. So if you're 5,000 employees, you have a 500-person contact center.
Got it.
But sometimes it can be as small as 50. And, you know, our sweet spot with RingCX is in that smaller seat category.
Mm-hmm.
Again, you're probably not in... You know, it wouldn't be suitable if you wanted 10 languages in 140 countries. That would not work. But you know, you asked an important question about growth, or you asked about contribution, and then you asked about growth, and those are two different questions, right? So when is it really gonna contribute? It's a baby today.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you'll see the $100 million, or at least a $100 million by next year. And then, you know, that will continue to accelerate. But the growth itself, off of this small base, is significantly above our corporate growth, our overall growth, and significantly, significantly above, you know, even what, RCCC, which-
Yeah
... the last we updated you, we told you it was a $350 million+ business. So this is high growth stuff, RingCX and RingSense and RingCentral Events. It's just that it's off a lower base.
Yeah.
So, so-
Great upsell, though. Great upsell.
Great upsell, and that's exactly right, and that was kind of the point I was making earlier about, you know, even when we were doing those efficiency measures, we felt it was really important to maintain the R&D spend, the product and technology spend, and like, you know, even the marketing and ... because some of these products, you're marketing to a different customer base.
The buyer?
Different buyer.
That's right.
So different persona-
Mm-hmm.
different demand gen motion. And so these are all things that one require time, but also investment.
Mm. Got it. How about RingSense?
Yeah, so Ring-
Any notes?
RingSense customers. So we announced 600 customers at the end of Q1. Today would be higher as well. That more than doubled from Q4. Seeing strong demand, and you know, the use case is amazing. Like, it truly does elevate what the salesperson can actually achieve when they're doing their work. You know, the worst thing as a salesperson, I think, is making a sales call, being all excited, and then having to, like, go and do all this admin stuff of like-
Yeah
... writing, you know, typing things in-
Right
... and, you know, this is, you know, live, automated, live transcription. It's also giving you feedback on, you know, keywords that the customer is saying, like, true insights. And I think, you know, what salesperson doesn't love to know more about their customer? What salesperson doesn't love to know where they should be doubling down with that customer? And then, also, it frees them up to, like, instead of doing all the admin side of things, they can go and pick up the phone to the next customer.
It's a productivity gain.
It's a productivity gain, and, you know, we are seeing very, very good feedback. The price point is accretive to our overall ARPU. And, you know, our salespeople are excited about it as well. They use it themselves. Like, you know, we eat our own dog food. It's really important. And we're a large company, so it's like it ends up being-
Yeah
... significant getting the feedback from the salespeople.
Sure.
We were using a competing product-
Mm-hmm
... and so we were really able to-
Competitor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the feedback was, you know, we were clearly much better. And, like, make no mistake, salespeople are very capable of complaining when they don't like things. And that was not the case with RingSense. And the other thing is, like, with RingSense for RingSense AI, that's the first product, like RingSense for sales. We're then gonna have new motions in RingSense, you know, verticalize RingSense. Like-
Yeah
... we see a big-
Yeah
... opportunity here.
I was gonna ask you on the vertical side there, are there particular verticals you're seeing some low-hanging fruit for RingSense initially here?
Yeah, yeah.
Early traction?
So definitely, and you've heard us speak, more hopefully in the last kinda quarter or two, probably two quarters, about these golden verticals, where we have a proven right to win, where we are very mission-critical to the customer, and our customer reaching their end customer. And, you know, healthcare is one you've heard us talk about, and-
Sure
... and we won a big trauma center, not this quarter, but I think it was last quarter. And again, it's, you know, if you're a trauma center, you want that reliability. And we're doing more and more focused marketing around-
So great
... those golden verticals, and it's been great. Like, the most amazing thing as a CFO-
Walk us through those verticals. They're-
So, it is healthcare, distributed retail, financial services, professional services, and public sector.
Awesome.
But what I was gonna say is, like, you know, you're a CFO, this is what you love, where you can actually be more focused with your demand gen dollars. Actually, the guy who did this work for us is sitting in the audience here, who works with me. Hi, Devang. But you, you can be more disciplined with your dollars and actually get better outcomes. Like, I spent less, we spent less, and we got better pipe, and, like, what could be better than that? And I think that verticalization was really important, and expect to see more of that from us.
Excellent. And Events is the last child.
Yeah, so events, sorry. Yeah. Oh, gosh, you can't love one child more than another. Oh! So events, absolutely. We had a very big win last quarter with Harvard University. And the events business grew 25% in terms of new logos, sequentially, quarter-over-quarter.
Wow.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Really pleased about that.
Great. And maybe circling back to your relationship with NICE and how CX complements what you, what you've been doing with NICE, so successfully for so long?
Yeah. So it has been a long time. We were just calculating in one of our one-on-ones, it's been nine years. I said seven, but time flies. I've been in my seat for two years now, which is why seven became nine. Luckily, I have a head of IR who fact-checks me. So nine years, you know, that partnership has been extremely successful. You know, $350 million+ business when we last updated you, which was not Q1, but Q4. Growing above the overall contact center market, which itself is growing 15%+. And, you know, the other thing I would say is there is no other joint solution where you have a Gartner Magic Quadrant top right for UC and CC, and customers love that combined value proposition, one throat to choke-
Yep
... single bill, all of those things. And then there's also very, very strong UC pull-through from that partnership. And look, we see it as very distinct swim lanes. So UC, sorry, RCCC, so RingCentral Contact Center, which is via the OEM with NICE, is really for those much more complex use cases-
Right
... larger seat count, typically.
Yep.
Geographic, you know, dispersed-
Got it
... geographically dispersed. You know, like, it's a different need. It's catering to something a lot more complex.
Right.
RingCX is really much more focused towards those-... I don't know if down market's the right word, but, you know, smaller.
Smaller.
Smaller, exactly. And naturally, sometimes there can be a little bit of tension in the field, but that happens with any kind of partnership. We see it very, very distinct, and we see RingCX as being much more greenfield. And, you know, we listen to our customers, and our customers were asking for this. They needed this simple product.
Mm-hmm.
It's like my mom having-- she does have an iPhone, actually, but she doesn't use many of the features on it.
Yeah.
Like, she just needs to know how to make calls, and that's good enough for her. It's kind of like that. It's the more simple use case that some people just really need, and they don't need to pay for all the extra stuff either.
Sure.
You know, we're all a lot more cost-conscious. And, like, even if this macro cloud that is over, I don't mean RingCentral, but the world, if that lifts, I think, like, there's this new realization that even if you're super high growth, like, you need to be efficient about your growth. Like, that I don't think is gonna change, and we help people be more efficient and more productive.
Yeah, great. Let's move to the soup and nuts here with guidance. You guys have some confidence you're carrying forward to raise guidance a bit on the year coming out of Q1?
We did.
Pretty awesome.
We did indeed. Yes, thank you. So, and just to put that into context, like, we carried through the beat that we had in Q1, but then we also faced an incremental $10 million headwind from FX.
Right.
In spite of that, we still carried the beat, so the implied upgrade is even more.
Right.
For those who haven't necessarily looked at the FX, I look at the FX all the time because I have a house still in the United Kingdom, so.
Yeah.
Yeah, but, you know, what gives us the confidence? I think I'm gonna come back to the, what, what you said about stability and stabilization, and I think that's a really important notion, and particularly around that enterprise business. And, you know, being able to post consecutive quarters of 13%+ in ARR in that business. Also, you know, if you look at SMB, although the growth slowed, we still maintained our win rates, and our pipeline main remains very healthy. So I think-
More saturated there, I'm sure, the market.
Absolutely. And although, like, you know, still a big growth opportunity, but we didn't see... And I think, you know, a couple of other enterprise software companies kind of saw the-
Mm-hmm
... you know, shoe drop on SMB.
Big time.
big time, and we didn't see that. I think, like, you know, CFOs love stability. We love predictability, and the beauty of these recurring revenue model businesses is that predictability. When you see that kind of bottoming out or that stabilization, it gives you confidence. Naturally, I had said this if you remember when I guided for the full year; there was a degree of conservatism.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I felt like being a little less conservative. Although don't worry, like, you know, any good CFO keeps a little bit of conservatism no matter what. But, you know, we felt like that visibility had improved. And, you know, the other thing I would say is these new products, like, you never quite know.
Mm-hmm. Yeah
... what the customer's gonna say.
Yeah.
As great as a product is, you also need to get a lot of other things right. You need to get the marketing right, you know, the demand gen right. You need to get your sellers to care about making the sale.
Yeah.
You need to get the commission structure right. So all of those things needed to align, and I think we feel good about that.
Yeah.
And that was what really gave us the confidence. But I think if you asked me, like, one thing, like, what was the driving force in upgrading the guide, it was that stabilization.
Mm-hmm. Great. You just mentioned sales and marketing efficiencies. You guys have made some great progress there, and at one point, it was north of 45%, I think.
Yes, 46.
46% SMB, and so, where are we at now? Where do you think that can get to? Do you think there's gonna be further efficiencies as you continue to power that top line up?
Yeah, yeah. So we're really proud of what we've done there, and you're right, it was 46. When I arrived, I think it was 40.2 in the last quarter, still too high.
Mm-hmm.
You're hearing me say it here.
Mm.
But, you know, if you look at our overall margin structure, we are really proud of what we did there, like 700 basis points of margin improvement year-over-year in 2023.
Mm-hmm.
This year I've guided to 21%, so it's about a 200 basis point improvement, so not nearly the same quantum-
Sure
... because, exactly as you say-
Big move
... you need to balance. Big move-
Mm-hmm
... and you need to balance the two. You know, we want to be able to have the flexibility to invest in that growth.
Yeah.
The new products do require investment because it is a different buyer, you know, that those different personas. And again, I wanna have a few levers in terms of being flexible around investing for the opportunity. That being said, sales and marketing needs to go lower. It needs to be below 40. We don't specifically guide on line items, but I've got my eye on that one. And the only other thing I'd say there is, you know, when you think about our margin structure, and particularly at that sales and marketing and OP level, we have a portion of that sales and marketing spend that is in some ways recurring and related to past deals.
Oh.
And then we have a portion of it that's more controllable. And what I will tell you is that the controllable part of that cost has come down significantly, even more than the 46 to 40.... if you will, you know, even more than 600 basis points. So that is where I am focusing my energy. You know, Vlad is very focused on bringing down, you know, cost per dollar of pipe, you know, customer acquisition costs, how we work with the channel. But we have 15,000 sellers, so it takes time for those - even if we make structural changes-
Yeah
... it takes time for those to make their way through the P&L. And the other thing I'm gonna say, you didn't ask me about cash flow, but this is like-
Yeah.
Now, now I'm gonna hijack.
Yeah, go for it.
You know, we also made huge strides in terms of our free cash flow.
Certainly.
If you look at where we're guiding, on an unlevered adjusted basis, it's 18.5% free cash flow margins. We've seen those operating margin and free cash flow margins truly converge.
Yep.
But it gets even better. Wait for it. We're also bringing down SBC-
Mm-hmm
... hard and fast.
Yeah.
And we're not done there by any means. And, you know, this year we've guided to our share count, our share count actually declining-
Coming down
... falling, coming down.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's really important because if you judge us on free cash flow per share, and I think this is something that truly resonated with the market when we did our last earnings, you know, the stabilization and the enterprise 13% growth, but also this notion of: look at the free cash flow per share growth that we have generated, and that, you know, based on where I guided, we are gonna generate. You know, it's upwards of 30% growth. I don't think there are many software companies out there that offer that.
Yeah.
I think, you know, hopefully to an equity investor, that's, you know, very compelling.
Yeah. With respect to your maturities coming up, how do you think about parlaying that cash?
Yeah. So you know, we have two converts outstanding. So we have the 25s that are due March 31st, 2025, and have gone current. It's $161 million that we have left on that maturity. And then we have the 26s, which is about $600 million-ish. And for the 2025 maturities, which are obviously much more on my radar right now, we will use probably a mix of our own cash flow, because we do wanna delever-
Mm-hmm
... as well as drawing down on some of our facilities. We have a delayed draw Term Loan A that's still outstanding, and we don't draw on it before, like, much before maturity because we like the 0% coupon. And I think what we've shown, I mean, you and, you know, I think broadly, you know, our lenders, the financial profile we have today, like, we are a very different-looking company than we were a year ago and certainly two years ago.
Yep.
We can support that quantum of debt. Today, or at the end of the quarter, our leverage was 2.5x .
Mm-hmm.
Like, significant deleveraging over the last 12 months. And if you look based on the guidance, where we're gonna end this year, it's, like, two and change.
Mm-hmm.
We're a very strong double B credit. You know, we have a lot of demand for our, our, our paper, so I feel like we have a lot of options around that-
Certainly, yeah
... without like, you know, being specific or prescriptive around what we're gonna do with the 26s. I think, you know, there's still internal discussion around it, but you may ask me about capital allocation, I don't know, but-
Carry on
... I'm just gonna throw it in there. You know, we talk about our capital allocation being dynamic. You saw that we were actually opportunistic in terms of buying back our own stock-
Mm
... in the last quarter. We bought back $80 million. And we also announced a new authorization for an incremental $250 million. So we have $375 million remaining in our authorization around, or that's certainly what it was, at the... When we had our earnings. We balanced buying back stock versus paying down debt. Most importantly, and number one, is making the organic investments we need to make in the business to drive growth.
Yeah.
And, you know, we started off our conversation about, like, why did you win that deal? Well, it's 'cause of product differentiation. So we need to make sure our product stays, you know, that Gartner Magic Quadrant top right, we need to maintain that reliability. That all, you know, requires organic investment. But, you know, when I think about capital allocation, we will balance share buyback, debt paydown.
Yeah
... and organic investments. Then, you know, pepper it with a little bit of M&A. You saw us do the Hopin deal, rebranded RingCentral Events. You know, we love that deal. It was great because our customers love the product.
Mm.
I think it really kind of amped up our video offering.
Yeah.
It's a brilliant product. Like, the customers we have on RingCentral Events, it's like a who's who.
Mm.
It literally is.
Wow!
The logos are... I don't know which ones I'm allowed to mention or not, and my head of IR is shaking his head here- ... but it's, like, literally a who's who. Think, like, the largest enterprise customers that you can imagine.
Right.
If there were more Hopins to go after, we would. You know, we paid $15 million for it, and-
Yeah
... they had put hundreds of millions of R&D into it.
Uh-huh.
Like, we're on the lookout for those. But, you know, if we do M&A, it needs to make sense for our customers, it needs to make sense for our investors-
Yeah
... it needs to be strategically relevant, all those things.
Great. Sonali, that was great. We have time for maybe one quick question from the audience. Anybody wanna lob one up? Yes, sir.
Sorry.
Can you talk a little bit more about Avaya?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going great. How? How is that possible?
Oh, did I say it's going great?
I think you did.
The question was about Avaya and,
And your
The relationship
relationship with Avaya.
Yeah.
Not Avaya.
... Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was like, 'cause I, I, like, we do see their financials, but like, like... So Vlad today is not here because he's actually at the Avaya Engage, I guess, their their customer event. So look, we feel like we call it Avaya 2.0, but, you know, Avaya post emerging from bankruptcy-
Mm-hmm.
We got what we wanted out of that, and we think it's superior. Like, i.e., we preserved our exclusivity, and we also baked in minimum commits, and which we didn't have in the last iteration. And then the other thing is, you know, we feel like we're now aligned with Avaya in terms of we both make money when seats are moved over, and I think in the last iteration, because of the way it's structured, that wasn't the case. So, you know, having partners aligned in any kind of commercial agreement, I think is like a basic premise, and we're now aligned. We're also working much more closely together on product. Actually, we just announced, I guess it was yesterday-
Saw that.
Yeah, that even if you're an Avaya on-prem customer, and you wanna stay on-prem, you can actually work with RingCentral for video and messaging. And, you know, eventually, we hope that those customers move to the cloud, but in the meantime, we can also continue to add value to the Avaya base. And they still are the largest base, right, of on-prem seats. So we actively want to move those seats. And, you know, as you can imagine, when a company comes out of bankruptcy, like it's not like a switch flicks. There's a ramp-up period, and we baked that ramp into the minimum commits that we negotiated, but also into how we expect the business to perform. And we are seeing that ramp.
That their minimum commitment by them, correct?
Correct.
Yeah. Well, great, Sonali. Really appreciate everyone joining today, and thank you, Sonali, for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you all for joining.