All right, so why don't we go ahead and get started. Look, we're just delighted to have Teradata joining us today at the Citizens JMP Technology Conference in San Francisco. And sitting to my left is the CFO, Claire, who will talk a little bit about your background for anyone who doesn't know. And then I just have a whole bunch of questions. So Claire, where are you from?
I'm originally from England, from the Southeast of England.
And so you've been at Teradata for almost three years, right?
That's right.
Prior to that, you were at HP for 15.
Yeah, almost 15 years.
Yeah. So tell us about when you joined HP and what you were doing, and let's just do a quick career progression through HP.
Sure, no problem at all. So yeah, good morning, and great to be here. So yeah, I started at HP actually originally when I was in the U.K., had a big financial planning and analysis background, but really enjoyed supporting the business. So did a number of roles around Europe, in the U.K., in Geneva, even spent a little bit of time in Germany actually for a while, just supporting the business, supporting the salespeople, really kind of learning the kind of operational foundation of HP. I then had the opportunity to move to the HP head office in California as the corporate head of FP&A across the whole company. And the advantage of doing that is you're running all of the different FP&A functions across all of the businesses, so hardware, software, services, retail, enterprise. So that was a great experience.
And then from there, went to run the retail business, so the PC and printer business, for the whole of EMEA. And at the time, it was about a $15 billion-$16 billion division in EMEA. So went to run that and then went back again to California. So moved around a lot to be the corporate controller of HP. And that kind of gave me the because I do have an accounting background. I've been into accounting, believe it or not, since the age of 14. It's quite nerdy, isn't it, to say that I've wanted to be an accountant.
Yeah, I added a question to my list here. Okay.
So I'm a little bit nerdy saying that I wanted to do accounting from the age of 14. So I have an accounting background, but that accounting kind of technology background combined with supporting the business, helping the operations, and then being the corporate controller, looking at it from a kind of corporate strategy standpoint, was really exciting and great experience for me.
Yeah. So how big was HP's revenue footprint when you were the global controller?
At the time.
This is post the split, right?
No, this was pre-split.
Oh, it is.
Yeah, it was pre-split. So it was like $120 billion. I mean, it was huge.
Holy cow.
Yeah. And then it split. So that was pre-split. And then at the split, that's when I moved back to Switzerland to run now the HPQ EMEA division.
Wow. All right. So before we go to Teradata, so why were you doing accounting at age 14? Was it a family business or something? Was there no?
No, I decided for some reason at the age of 14, I wanted to go to college and study accounting and financial management. And so at the school I was at, they had kind of after-school programs to help you kind of in additional interests. So the business studies teacher there, we kind of had an economics and business studies teacher at my high school who had a big interest in financial management and accounting. So we used to do a little bit together at school before I went to study accounting and financial management at university.
I forget whose kid it is, but today, if you don't have a one-on-one and you're around at 3:00 PM, we have something called The World of Gen Z. You know about this?
Oh, no.
It's my favorite panel. It's basically teenagers teaching portfolio managers how they use social media.
Love it.
Oh, it's great. It's great.
Love it.
One of the participants on the panel, I forget which one, when their parent was explaining why they should be on the panel, said that she had used social media to advertise her summer camp. I was like, well, that makes sense. What was the summer camp? The summer camp was financial literacy.
Wow. There we go.
Personal finance. She's 14.
That's impressive.
She's teaching her classmates about financial literacy. Okay. What led you to go from HP to Teradata?
Yeah. So I'll be honest, I didn't know a huge ton about Teradata before someone reached out about the opportunity. But I did a lot of research, as you would expect.
This is mid-2021, right?
Yes. Yes. So did a lot of research about the company and whether I was speaking to people that work there or customers of Teradata. And what clearly became apparent is that Teradata is extremely well-known for its technology and client base and customer service to its clients. But there was clearly also an opportunity for transformation. We needed to have more focus on moving to the cloud. We needed to revitalize the go-to-market organization to be more focused less on direct and more on partnerships. And one of my roles at HP was to support the channel business, as well as the direct sales team. So that was kind of interesting to me. So the technology, the customer base, the transformation journey the company was on all seemed like a great opportunity, an exciting opportunity.
Just the culture, I'll be perfectly honest, Teradata is a great company to work for. Steve McMillan and the rest of the leadership team, we've driven a really strong, trusted culture. I think we do it from a personal culture standpoint, but then we also feed that through in the sense of we have a trusted culture at Teradata, and we have to have trusted data. We bring that through into our strategy as well in terms of we pride ourselves on providing companies with trusted information, which I think in the current AI and generative AI environment is becoming more and more important. Because if you can't trust your data, you don't know whether the insights that it's giving you can be trusted as well.
Slight aside, so Tom Siebel sat in that chair a couple of sessions before. Last week, he told me to get this book.
Okay. What is ChatGPT, though?
Yeah. What is ChatGPT, and why does it work? It's 100 pages. I'm on page two, right? But already on page 2, I have learned what temperature is with LLMs, which I totally didn't understand before. You work at an AI company, so I'm sure you understand. But highly recommended. Plain English. Okay. So I guess we should, well, let's just launch into it. Let's start with big picture. How's business? What would you say?
So yeah, we just finished our 2023 fiscal year at the end of December. Lots of highlights. We're now over $500 million of Cloud ARR, which I think if anyone had thought about that, Teradata being in that position four years ago, I think they would have struggled to predict it. That was for the year a 48% growth rate, strong profitability, and free cash flow generation. So we were generating $355 million of cash, growing total ARR as well in the mid-single digits. So lots of highlights. I would say we're really pleased with the transformation journey that we're on. But we did have some surprises at the end of Q4, which we were disappointed with. And we saw a handful of deals slip out from 2023 into 2024 and just due to kind of deal elongation cycles.
So just taking a bit longer than we had anticipated. So we're disappointed that we didn't see that earlier. We are very historically and today, we have a lot of our growth that comes in the last month of the year, in the last few weeks of the year, very much driven by kind of historical behavior at Teradata. So our linearity is very H2-heavy. And so unfortunately, we did have those surprises at the end of the year. I think the good news, though, is to look at the silver lining, is that we haven't lost any of those deals. So it's very much it's not a competitive issue. It's specific things happening at those customers.
We do pride ourselves at Teradata for working closely with the customers on their timeline, not kind of giving extra pricing or pushing them into a corner to make decisions that don't work for them. So disappointed that we got some surprises and a handful of our cloud deals slipped, which meant that we slightly missed the Cloud ARR guide that I had given at the beginning of the year. But the rest of the P&L, the cash flow, the profitability was all in line with the guide I had given at the beginning of the year. And as I said, 48% growth in Cloud ARR and being over $500 million was a good outcome.
I mean, from my perspective, that alone is worth more than the market cap of the firm. But so that's the kind of bizarre dynamic about Teradata, right?
I would agree with you.
Yeah. That's the odd thing about Teradata. Okay. But let's talk a little bit more about the slip deals. First of all, have any of them closed?
We have. Yeah. We've closed one of them in Q1 already. Obviously, Q1 ends at the end of March. So we've still got another month to go. But one of those handful of deals have already closed. We're trying to be prudent as I gave my 2024 outlook. So we've assumed that the majority closed throughout the year. But it was good to see one of them closing Q1.
Yeah. You didn't necessarily assume they would close at the beginning of the year. So that's nice, right?
Yeah. That was good. Yeah.
Can you maybe take one of the deals and walk us through an example or just maybe give some idea of what happened?
Yeah. I'll give you a couple of examples. So one of the larger ones in particular was actually corporate development. So one of them we did actually see coming at the beginning of December. And I talked about it at a conference at the beginning of December. And that's kind of M&A type activity that was happening at that customer. As a result, they wanted to they kind of pretty much put all other projects on hold so they could manage through that. And again, we're anticipating that deal to close in the first half is my current assumption, but that very much beyond our control but made sense for the customer at the time. Another one, for example, they.
They were being acquired, or they're acquiring?
Acquiring.
They're acquiring something. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Another example I would give, which is very interesting, I think, in the current dynamic and macro environment. So one of the customers was still deciding which CSP to use. So that decision took a little bit longer than we anticipated. And naturally, I mean, we can offer our software on all CSPs. So it doesn't matter which one they choose, but they do need to make a decision. So the decision-making in that, for example, got pushed out. So therefore, our discussions with the customer got pushed out as well. So there's kind of a couple of examples of what we're seeing.
Okay. And so these are typically your clients are big, right? So this person, this is a big company, I'm guessing, right?
Yes. Yes.
They're trying to decide, should we use Amazon, Google, or Microsoft?
Yes.
You would think they would have already made that decision. So I'm curious, how did that you know what I mean?
Yeah. No. I mean, some have already made the decision. Some are using more than one, which is interesting. And I think a lot of what we've seen at the moment in the sense of who a lot of the Microsoft in terms of the AI capabilities and things like that, I think a lot of customers are kind of they're not reconsidering, but they're kind of taking another look at their long-term path and making sure that they as well as usual pricing and capabilities. So some have already decided. Some tend to use more than one. I think the good news is, and for people to be aware of, is quite often our customers, and to your point, they're global 10,000, global 1,000 customers, they tend to make commitments to the CSPs. And then they can use Teradata spend as credits toward their spend commitments.
So I think that's a big incentive as well in the sense of, okay, who are you going to do this deal with, and what commitments are you going to offset?
Okay. Have these guys decided on their CSP?
I believe they have. So yeah, I should be able to continue to move forward.
Yeah. And so are they an existing Teradata customer, and they're trying to decide whether to?
Yeah. Most of the deals that slipped are existing customers that are migrating and expanding. So one of the things that we do see as companies migrate to the cloud with us is that at the point of migration, we see an expansion. So it impacts our Cloud ARR, but it also has a bit of an impact on our total ARR as well. And that's great because I remember when I first joined, as you say, nearly three years ago, when we were modeling out assumptions in terms of expansion and migrations, we were fairly conservative in the sense of, should there would you see an uplift at the point of migration? And initially, we thought that we wouldn't see much of an uplift and that people would want to migrate kind of dollar for dollar and then expand over time. And actually, we've seen both.
And I think that's one of the things that make me excited and confident about our kind of path to $1 billion in 2025 is the fact that we're seeing expansion at the point of migration. And once the customer has been with us for 12 months, we're then seeing an expansion rate of above 120%. We're currently running trailing 12 months net expansion rate, for example, is 124% right now. So yeah, we tend to.
We're going to come back to that.
That's good that we're kind of seeing those different points of expansion. We still have over $1 billion in on-premise business, which is future opportunity for migrations and expansions over time.
Yeah. I'll come back to that too. So I just want to complete this thought. So if you're an existing customer, you were using Teradata on-prem, you're ready to go to VantageCloud. Is that what you would then be going to?
Yeah. We have two offerings. We have VantageCloud Enterprise and VantageCloud Lake. VantageCloud Lake is our native cloud offering. VantageCloud Enterprise has the same capabilities, but it's not native to the cloud.
Okay. So you were going to go to VantageCloud Lake, but you have to decide at that time if you wanted to run on top of Microsoft, Google, or that's super interesting. Do they all work equally well?
So for VantageCloud, they do. They all work equally well. So let me just get the yes in there that we're at different points of GA, though. So AWS went GA at the beginning of 2023. With Microsoft Azure, it was in the middle of 2023. And Google is in the first half of 2024.
Okay. So Google's the most that's super interesting. Okay. So how happy were you with the performance of the sales organization at the end of Q4? And benefit of 2020 hindsight, what could they be doing better?
Yeah. I think I mean, Steve will say Steve McMillan, our CEO, will say the sales results are the enterprise scorecard. So we all take accountability. So it's not just about the sales team. It's about how we as a company are performing. And as I mentioned, a lot of highlights. I mean, 48% growth from cloud ARR standpoint. But we got surprised at the end of the year. So we all jointly took accountability for that. We all looked at as a leadership team and beyond, what can we do to prevent those kind of surprises? And what we have realized that we've done is just a continual assessment and challenging of the pipeline conversion assumptions. I mean, people had been talking about deal elongation all the way through 2023. We hadn't seen it.
But we did then see for a few of these larger deals at the end of the year, we did see those deals, as I mentioned, slip into 2024. So we've analyzed that, looked at that, factored that into our outlook for 2024 rather than just assuming that we will catch up and everything will continue as it was. We've factored that in as we've done our outlook for 2024 to ensure that we'll be able to absorb that deal elongation trend that we've seen towards the end of 2023 into 2024.
Okay. How conservative would you say your 2024 guidance is?
So we take very seriously that we do what we said we'll do. So I would say we take a bottoms-up view. We take a top-down view. We add some conservatism on top with a view that we should be able to meet or beat our 2024 outlook.
Is it the same level of conservatism you had for last year?
I would say it's a similar level of conservatism, but some of the base assumptions have changed, as I mentioned, with regards to deal elongation assumptions and things like that. So what proportion of our pipeline will convert, how long it will take us to convert that pipeline, those base assumptions have been updated for 2024. So that naturally builds in more conservatism and different assumptions in 2024 than in 2023.
Okay. All right. And so then the other thing which came up was this idea of on-premise erosion, right? So that was a new term for me, on-premise erosion. So what is on-premise erosion?
Yeah. Let me tell you about what erosion is. We talk about erosions because quite often, we have people, have customers that if they're going to leave Teradata, they don't necessarily leave completely. They don't switch everything off. An erosion is the fact that their spend with us has reduced. The total ARR has eroded down. We talk about erosion. Sometimes it can be a full erosion, and the customer leaves us. But quite often, it's kind of a partial erosion. That's why we talk about erosion. And to your point, we have seen over the years, I would say, normal levels of on-prem erosion that we've been able to incorporate into our outlook.
We did see an impact in Q1 specifically with regards to a couple of, I would say, large on-prem erosion customers, which had been talking about leaving us for a number of years but had found that very difficult. Decisions made, I think, even before Steve joined Teradata, which was over 3, nearly 3.5 years ago, because they were looking for cloud products, cloud-native products at the time. They were looking for cloud-native products. We didn't have that until the beginning of 2023. And quite often, some customers will say, "I don't just want a cloud-native product. I want it to have been GA for 12 months," for example. So there's a couple of customers that are leaving Teradata at the beginning of Q1. It wasn't a surprise to us.
We've been obviously working with those customers, trying to win them back over the past couple of years, showing them our new product introductions. Some customers, we've been successful in terms of winning them back. But there is a couple of large customers that are leaving Teradata at the beginning of Q1. But that's kind of it was anticipated from a kind of a long-range plan standpoint but wasn't anticipated in terms of the exact timing because it's super difficult to predict because they kind of wait until everything's been set up in the parallel system. And then they kind of say, "Right, we're ready to turn it off." So you don't get necessarily much advance notice on that.
Yeah. And what was the parallel system?
They're a competitive system. So I think one of them was definitely, at least one of them was Snowflake. And I think potentially one of them I don't know what the other one was, actually. I need to check. But I think Snowflake was definitely one of them. I think one of them was BigQuery. I do know. One of them was BigQuery. One of them was Snowflake. And we see, I mean, we see in customers, as all software companies, you have a certain level of churn. You have certain numbers. I think we've seen very stable levels at Teradata, both on-premise and in the cloud, which we're very happy with. Yes, we see a slight elevation in Q1 of 2024. But we are very confident that that will smooth out as we move through the year and definitely in 2025 and 2026.
I think one of the things that Steve has done, he brought in a new Chief Customer Officer. We have a very, I would say, data-driven, detailed early warning system so that we don't get surprises in terms of the customer health, whether they're what the risks are, multiple different metrics that we use. So we weren't surprised about the customer being at risk, just very difficult to predict the exact timing.
Yeah. I don't know how you figure that out. It's like you need someone on the IT team who's going to tell you, "We're almost ready.
Yes. On that customer. Yeah. Exactly.
Okay. Why don't we see if we have any questions from our audience? Mr. Suttle.
One quick question. I'm tempted to ask about the deal slippage that you spent enough time on that. But what's maybe more interesting is I'll catch you later on that one. What about competition? How are you doing with companies who are you competing with? Are there some old legacy competitors or new up-and-coming?
Yeah. So I think a lot of the competition that we see tends to be from a cloud standpoint. I mean, naturally, we do have on-premise competition. But just given the legacy and the foothold we have in the on-premise market, it's less competitive on-premise. So it's very much the competitive environment is more aggressive and more difficult from a cloud standpoint. I think what we see Snowflake. We see Databricks. We see BigQuery kind of as, I would say, the top three competitors. And I think historically, because our products are fairly new to the market, one of the things that we've been doing over the last couple of years is educating, educating our existing customers, educating the market about the lake-native products that we now have on the market and its capabilities.
I think what we've been able to do is bring a lot of the technology benefits from on-premise into the cloud. Performance at scale, for example, when you scale up and scale out with Teradata, you can get a really, really competitive total cost of ownership. We know from external benchmarks that we have the lowest cost per query, which makes a huge difference as customers, Global 10,000, Global 1,000 customers, as they scale with the amount of data and queries and users that they're doing, that best and lowest cost per query is extremely important. I think other things that we've heard great feedback on as we've moved forward is having a governance and operations dashboard.
So embedded into our software, although departmental workload can be spun up locally, the IT department or the people that are running kind of data and analytics across these large enterprises have some had bad experiences about costs getting out of control and not having full visibility of the kind of consumption, billing, and spend. And we have embedded kind of governance, operations dashboard to have really good governance around that and controls. I think finally, the other thing I'd say is our ClearScape Analytics, what we have embedded also in our software with regards to AI, ML, and some new offerings that we have in private preview. Kind of, for example, one I'm super excited about is our AI Unlimited offering. That's in private preview right now. It's going to be embedded into Microsoft Fabric.
That's all about serverless, self-serve, being able to run data and analytics really, really easily. I think historically, Teradata, in terms of self-service, serverless, ease of use, they're all the things that we weren't necessarily known for in the past. I think so from a competitive standpoint, we've really kind of closed that ground and closed that gaps that we've had historically to be able to be competitive, not just at scale, but also in new logos and in smaller workloads as well.
Okay. So the bear case is competition and the erosions and things slipping. How confident are you in getting to your $1 billion in cloud ARR?
Yeah. I mean, I think maybe just quickly to explain, the assumption that we need to get to the $1 billion and the path to a $1 billion is to maintain an approximate 120% expansion rate. We're running at 124% now. But if you assume 120%, and then you only need kind of a reasonable amount, kind of $100 million plus minus, to be able to migrate and expand at the point of migration and new logos per year to get to the $1 billion. So I think if you believe in the 120% that we've seen consistently moving forward, you have good confidence to be able to deliver that path up to $1 billion.
Yeah. And right now, we're less than a $4 billion market cap. And you're looking at a billion-dollar cloud business.
Exactly that.
In a year or two.
Exactly. We're profitable. That's the other thing.
They're profitable.
We're strongly profitable. We've got strong operating income percentage. We generated $355 million. I'm anticipating at least $360 million in free cash flow in 2024. So it's strong profitable generation, strong free cash flow, and good growth.
Awesome. Well, Claire, thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
It was great to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it.