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Amplify 2019 Part 1
Sep 10, 2019
So welcome to,
Amplify 2019 in Dallas. We're delighted that you are here and online We are live streaming this today. I'm Stuart Miller, the CFO. And, we've We're gonna start with the obligatory safe harbor language to assuage the concerns of our general counsel. We are going to be making some forward looking statements today.
You're familiar with the disclaimer. So we've got a a great agenda, I think, and it's different from the kind of agenda we've run-in past analyst days We wanted to do a deep dive on our growth drivers. In the first session, we're going to, Marty is going to talk our CEO and co founder, and then he's going to be followed by Will Greg, who's going to give you a deep dive on WDATA. And then second session, which will be after lunch, will be a customer panel on on W Data, with 2 customers telling you how they're using that product. And then the, At 1 o'clock, we start the afternoon later afternoon session.
I'm going to talk briefly about, acquisitions And then, I'm gonna be followed by, Durham Murray who runs, EMEA and, also runs our global statutory reporting. Team. And then, we'll do integrated risk with Tad Feiner and, partnerships with Mike Ross. We're gonna try to, lead time after each speaker, for Q And A, and then we'll have a wrap up Q And A at the end because that was the principal feedback we got from you last time is that you wanted more time for Q And A. So with that, let me hand it off to Mister Doctor Martin Vanderplow, our esteemed CEO and cofounder.
Okay. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?
There we go. Thank you everybody for coming today. It's always great to talk to you all and give you a chance to ask questions. Could, do I is there a clicker here for the slides or Oh, right here. Okay.
There we go. I'm just gonna sort of level set, you know, the what we're trying to do as a company. And I would say that one of the key things that we keep coming across as we're really starting to define our own category. Finding your own category has benefits and, you know, negatives. One is the negative is you're defining your own category, which takes time and effort.
The good news is there's no competitors to speak of. And so we'll talk about that, but I I just really wanted emphasize that in this whole discussion. And, obviously, you know, our our go to market, line now is connected reporting. And with W Data, we sort of completed that story. You can go straight from all different, systems of record.
Into what we sort of refer to as a system of work and, without any manual intervention whatsoever. You know, the classic process that is still pervasive. It's just it's just staggering. Every large organization I've been in has the same thing. We've talked about this in the past.
I just wanted to level set again, but it's all word in Excel and power and emails. It's just and it's no control, no connectivity. Just, it's really a cluster. Obviously where we position ourselves is in that in that position where we take that chaos and put it into an orderly process. Our primary value add there.
1 is the linking of all the numbers, which is the connectivity. This then there's additional ones. 1 is the permissioning, which is a control feature. Lots of certain people do certain things within the ecosystem, the reporting ecosystem. Then there's also the ability to collaborate multiple people and then a really tight audit trail.
Those are really the the 4 primary value add features of our platform. And I also wanna say the platform behaves just like the, you know, the the typical, you know, word Excel, Microsoft type of environment. So there's a learning curve is very, very small. Debunk a couple things. And some of those have come out in our press releases today.
You know, we're in the same, you know, magic quadrant as some of the companies on the left. Some of the companies on the left really report to do some of the things we do. But we really don't see that. We made a partnership with BlackLine, which we used to get the question about, you know, how are you competing with BlackLine. We never compete with BlackLine.
Same thing can be said about Anaplan. A lot of the companies that we're forming partnerships with as we speak, our strategy is to be agnostic, to be, totally independent and really using the Switzerland strategy to get as many partners as possible. The partners squawk about that a little bit, but at the end of the day, they're they're very willing part The, And then, obviously, the value we bring is to, you know, connect everything, orchestrate data from different systems. You'll see that. And if you stop by some of the pods to see what w data does, it's definitely worth that.
Will's gonna show you that as well here. But if you wanna go on a deeper dive, you can W data, as I said, is really sort of the last piece to complete our connected reporting story. It really enables us to have a true total flow of data with no manual touching whatsoever. And we we can we can connect to many, many different systems already. And then, you know, we say reports and, regulatory filings.
I think the one thing I want to emphasize is that, you know, we're known for regulatory filings, but we see more and more of our customers realizing that when you automate this, you can flip a weekly performance report in a week. Or a day. I mean, a weekly performance report you can flip in a day so you can actually have the results in front of you in much less time than when you used to have to do this all manually. So that is one of the biggest value adds, not just the compliance side of it. Just to touch on the TAM at these different areas.
Stewart's talked about this TAM a lot, but this slide sort of just shows that where our TAM is relative to the others. And we've looked at this TAM from a lot of different directions and we feel really comfortable with it. And then just to touch briefly, Make sure I get this number right, Stuart. 16. Is that the right number?
16 different solutions. We currently market and have skews for and sell. There's over a 140 different use cases that customers have have found for the solution, and that number's growing daily. I do wanna mention tech ramp. We, last summer, completed the FedRAMP, the first level FedRAMP light, I think it's called.
And, we that was, announced last summer the moderate process is very close to complete. And, again, that's not only gives us access to the federal government, but it's really a It's really, standard for commercial as well. I mean, if you tell people you have FedRAMP moderate, it's, you know, a lot of the security questions go away. That's on track to have this fall. Actually, we'd have had it by now, but they have 1 or 2 different things.
They just introduced in terms of new requirements. So we're just finishing those 2. And XBRL, you know, this is another piece of the puzzle, frankly. We're seeing a lot of demand being driven by mandates in a number of different countries. And, because EXPAREL is an integrated part of our platform, meaning any report you can tag after you completed the report that, it really suits us well.
We've talked about, you know, esaf and Derma. We'll talk about that later today, but, it really is a driving force to make companies do something and adapt technology like this. You can I'm not gonna read all the bullet points, but you can see there's a 147 mandates, and that number is expected to grow dramatically. There's a bunch of them in the US on the, you know, already in the pipeline that are gonna be coming out over the next few years. So, this is gonna be something that, in addition to the value you get from a connected reporting platform like ours, these mandates even accelerate the adoption.
So it's something that we really view as a growth driver. Here's where those countries where a lot of those are. You see the US has 5, but I know of a number that are already percolating FERC is gonna come out. Some of the states are pushing on CAFerr already, as I mentioned earlier today. So, this is only gonna continue.
And you'll see Europe, by the way, has a lot of this. Which is good. That's part of the reason that we're expanding in Europe so aggressively right now is they do have a lot of mandates. They're ahead of us, and some of the countries are ahead of the US. And then, the other thing that I think is really worth talking about, we Again, if you watch the keynote earlier today, the NextGen platform is really a growth driver for several reasons.
One is increased scale, but also was built to microservices architecture, which lets us really move fast. And the last couple of years, we've really been stuck in the slog of rebuilding the entire platform you know, microservices architecture. And now we're emerging from that. So we'll be able to build specific solutions on that very, very easily. And, you'll see a real acceleration in features and, you know, purpose made solutions for or purpose made products or certain solutions.
Also a big emphasis on APIs. The whole thing was built with APIs, so we can choose when and how to open those up. We're already quite a ways down the road on opening up data APIs. And, And in time, obviously, we'll start we'll start doing, APIs to enable third parties to come in and start to get toward our ultimate goal of of being a platform as a service. And, next generation again has the same typical components and, also, W Data, which should have been on slide, but W data shows the last component of the of the, that, as I mentioned, sort of completed out the whole portfolio to make a fully connected ecosystem.
And again, like I said, this was primarily a just an update of a lot of stuff you've seen, but I really wanna emphasize the fact that that TAM slide, we have a huge amount of white space. Really no legitimate competitors that are trying to sell a platform like we are. We have we have competitors within certain solutions. But not in terms of building a complete platform to do the connected reporting in the way that we do it. So any questions?
Yes,
sir.
Yes, maybe you could give us an update on W. Data in terms of at breakfast, I was definitely talking to a lot of customers and they were talking about it. Partners were talking about it. So maybe an update on W Data in terms of what you're seeing on monetization, how your tax rate of it and new business over the existing customers And is it also helping drive additional use cases when it's being adopted?
Yeah. Happy to comment on that. We're in the early days. Of adoption. But we have seen incredible success.
You'll hear that in the panel. It's incredible success from the people that have adopted it. And, it does drive more use cases. The minute you can put terabytes of data through a database without having to know you know, without having no sequel, and just doing more or less drop and drags, it really enables you to do a lot of things. And so we're definitely seeing, great success when people adopt it, even though we're in the early days and in terms of the number that we've had, but we're seeing a lot of interest and we expect that to accelerate.
Another question right there?
Hey Marty, thanks for having us. I was wondering, let me get into this a little bit more later, but you guys have spoken about the European opportunity quite a bit and You've spoken about the European opportunity quite a bit. I was hoping you could just kind of give an update on your current thoughts on the ESMA mandate. What that can mean for your business. And particularly, with respect to the inline XPRL chart you had, would be really interesting to know how you think about that opportunity versus say how XBRL played out in the United States 6, 7 years ago?
Is it similar? Can it work as fast? Are you as well prepared, maybe take us through the parallels from that. That'd be great. Thanks.
Yeah. Dermot is going to spend some time on that. I'll give you some high level thoughts. Since you're asking. It is, it has a lot of similarities to the US.
We are we will and are prepared for the dates. It's not a heavy lift for us to switch to a different taxonomy, which We've already got working and we do demonstrations already. The the the the the true significant differences that exist is 1, you know, we're dealing with a lot of different jurisdictions. I forget the number, but I think it's 20 some different jurisdictions where we'll have to file. And, typically, they provide a way just to up load a file.
The good news is we were worried that each of the jurisdictions was gonna change, you know, the taxonomy slightly. We haven't seen that. They've I just got an update on that yesterday. We've seen very little any change between the different jurisdictions. So we'll be able to have one taxonomy that customers can use to to tag their data.
It is the the other significant difference is, most of the companies were chasing only filed twice a year instead four times, like in the US. But they still have to do it. And so I don't really see that as an impediment. But it's becoming clear that, it's gonna behave much like the US. They're doing the same thing as a a tiered roll out.
After the first roll out, there'll be chaos. You know, 53100 companies are all trying to find someone to do it. They'll they'll go to all sorts of different providers. And it's the same thing that happened in the US. It was very bifurcated and then slowly all accumulated.
I I'm sure we'll get a nice bite right at the beginning, but it'll be sustained growth just like it'll it'll fall very much the same as the US, pattern. And the beauty of it is we've gone through that one. So we know just what to expect. That's, I mean, we have the playbook, how that works. So We also, the other thing is we have a lot better experience on pricing.
When we first stood the company up, we were selling at a very much lower price just to, you know, to accumulate logos. We don't have to do that this time. We can put a fair price out there and not have to go through that that whole process of of, a lot of early adopters to lower price. So differences, but a lot of similarities. I'm holding it the wrong way.
Marty, I had a thanks for having us. My question was on partnerships. Because you've had, in the past KPMG, I think that was last year or year before. And then this morning with Deloitte, you've been ramping your sales count, but it seems like the partnerships are becoming more of a focus too in the leverage that you guys get from those. Could you just talk about the importance of those partnerships and adding the Deloitte one this morning and what those mean?
Yes, happy to talk about that. I mean, I've talked about this in the past and people might say that we're a little late to the party on doing partnerships. But there were some fundamental issues. First off, we our first solution was so light touch know, it was hard for partners to make much money. It was very easy to put up, but that was part of our secret sauce, frankly, for taking the market.
So quick, we're gonna have that same advantage in ESF, you know, it's it's just you just it's very easy to put up and get people going. But as we've gotten into connected reporting, integrating with a lot of other source systems, integrating with their other, you know, reporting systems, integrating with their BI tools, all the stuff that that Will's gonna talk some more about after I'm done here. It becomes a pretty big lift to put that stuff together. And the, you know, we we also wanted to go slow. We want a demand situation.
I mean, these these large partners that we've been dealing with now, it's really been a pull. They've come to us, and they're seeing demand in the marketplace. They and, you know, the Deloitte opportunity, there was a number of different, totally different use cases that we closed joint business, and that really got their attention at a high level. Some of it was, risk related. Some of it was financial reporting.
What was specific to financial services verticals. They just keep finding more stuff or it applies. So and then the last thing is I you know, the reason I like to wait for that poll is because at the end of the day, you get a better business outcome for both parties when they're sitting on equal ground, you know, in terms of negotiating how you're gonna go to market. So we're really happy with where the partner stuff is going to pull is really strong now. And, you can see from the list of people and the press release we're putting out and that will continue.
And so we're we're very optimistic. It's gonna be a key part of our growth strategy because to deliver at the volume we have to deliver now, we can't do it. We need the partners. And there's opportunity. Some of the early, pricing proposals we've seen there's tons of room for these partners to make money.
And that's what drives them bringing you into account. So when they when they can see the dollars they come
Hey, you talked about the opportunity with the new platform to accelerate new products feature sets, purpose built solutions. Just curious, have any of those come out yet? Where are you in that? And when can we start to see that acceleration show up?
We are just at the early days of that. I mean, we're just finishing up the rebuild of the platform. And we're just starting to transition customers. We've had very good success on a lot of the different components and customers. Some are still, a lot of work to do.
But in terms of developing purpose made features, that'll start late Q4 and we'll really start next year. I mean, to give you just an example, you know, we'll put a team on global stat. It's real interesting when you take our platform and you apply it to a pro a problem. It works well for global stat right now. I mean, it really does.
And we have a number of customers that use it for global statutory reporting. They're they're big numbers of users, so they're nice deal size. But when we look at it, there's usually a handful of features that can take it from a good solution to just, you know, a really dominant solution, you know, that's really world class. And so, we're gonna sign a small team that just works on the plat form and creates those specific features that are needed to take it from really good to world class. And so you'll see most of that starting next year, frankly.
Longer term, I think you've talked about. Longer term, I think you've talked about feeling confident that you can reach, I think, a 150,000, revenue per customer and on an annual basis, which I think is like a doubling or more of sort of your current run rate. Is that
a function of some of
these expanding non SEC use cases, these purpose built functions, W data? Can you just kind of provide some more color as to how you get there?
Yes. It's certainly having expansion in the accounts and the new use cases. It's not going to be based on price optimization. No. It's all about new users, new use cases.
And, and, and we're like I said, we're seeing a lot of, new use cases we're excited about, especially when we get into verticals. When we get into some of the financial services verticals, energy verticals, and as a FERC, mandate coming for EXPAREL and in the energy industry. We see, you know, all of that growth in total, you know, revenue per customer is gonna come from new solutions or the the lion's share, but I should say. Oh, we're out of time. So You want There'll be a
Can we just one more?
I was thinking, is there any kind of I know it's early days with the W data. Is there any kind of early indication of like an uplift some because it seems like a pretty robust solution, like an uplift to, like, an ACV when they actually go to that solution. Or and I guess also, like, is it priced in terms of, as you add more integration points in your, you know, integrating more data into that platform, does the pricing per customer go up with that, or is it just based on the solution?
Well, remember, we use a workspace model. So if they get w data in an SEC reporting workspace, which we're seeing some traction there because they wanna complete the connection. Then typically we have it be a percentage of their spend. It's a significant percentage. I I I really don't wanna say how much, but it's significant.
And then if they wanna use W data for global statutory reporting, that's another workspace. So they have to, again, choose to use it in that workspace, and it's another uptick as a percentage of spend. So, it will be, you know, a a significant increase in ADS per workspace or at or and also per customer in general. So, I mean, it's, it's a big part of, our strategy, for sure.
We're gonna stop question I'm gonna, move on.
I wanna introduce Will. Right? Is that the next thing, Stewart? We gotta get some mics that can transmit through my hand. I wanna introduce Will, Greg.
How long has it been? Well, year and a half?
Yeah. Almost 2. Yeah.
Almost almost what? Almost 2. Almost 2 years ago, we saw the potential of the W data play. And so we we're in the midst of, you know, a very intense replatforming activity on an R and D team. And we figured the only way we could do that effectively was to build a team outside of the current R and D team in let it act more entrepreneurial as sort of a a SWAT team.
And we nicknamed it the scout team. And we built Will lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Glad the hurricane missed that. And so we have a small office there, and I think he has about ten people now. Is that right?
And, he has done a fantastic job of leading that team, not only on, developing the product, but the go to market strategy. And, so I'll let Will take over and do some discussion on W data.
I've got it on.
Oh, you got it on.
That's good.
I'm hands free, man.
That's good. Future. Oh.
Thanks for the introduction, Marty. So, my intent today was just to kind of walk through we've got, about 30 minutes. And I think where I'm going to start is just to try to give everybody, you know, a pileable understanding of kind of where WDA fits, why we pursued it, I think one thing that Marty didn't mention is, I've got sort of an interesting background in some ways similar to a lot of folks that up with the company together, but I have a mechanical engineering background. I was a practicing engineer for a couple of years, but the majority of my career actually selling. And so, and quite a bit of that here at We'll keep it as well.
Worked a lot of our large enterprise customers. And so, when Marty kind of architect a couple of years ago when we saw this opportunity, the opportunity itself presented even earlier than that, right? And it was a lot of those discussions with these large enterprise customers trying to understand not only kind of how we can help them expand, but how they can sort of understand how they expand, themselves. And there was a real, we felt like there was a real opportunity to help in, some areas where we didn't see a lot of products. Kind of in space.
And you guys have seen, I think at some point or another, everybody's seen some version of this slide. You know, we showed 1, it it keynote just a little bit earlier. This is a little, you know, different different coloring, but the piece that's really important is that, you know, the source of all of this information that was on the, on the left side of this, this is where companies have been investing, you know, seeing amounts of money over the years. The challenge is all that piece in the middle is where they're losing all that investment, right? So they're kind of piling money into these systems of record, but they're you know, the efficiency, when we pull that out, it's just, it's just not there.
And if you look at that last piece, you know, largely where Cuba's been very successful kind of capturing this last segment. So how does WDA kind of transform our our go to market strategy and the way our customers adopt our platform. So the first piece is, I think you'll hear a lot about this week. And if you talk to customers, you'll hear a lot about this. But we wanted to start with a comprehensive integration strategy.
And that means, you know, in kind of today's terms, a couple of things. It means have to integrate with on cloud and, or, sorry, cloud and, on prem systems, right? So we've got these hybrid infrastructures. A lot of what we see is systems of record ERPs, GLs, reconciliation consolidation. Obviously, those are systems that a lot of our companies have, a lot of our customers have invested heavily in.
What we also see is a lot of legacy architecture, right? So in that, That prior slide is kind of middle area. It's interesting the number of people that will go out and hire a consultant to go build some custom database. Right. We'll spend a huge amount of money.
And the person who built it leaves, we talked to him 2 years later and there's this system that's kind of lingering on life support and we really understand how to use it or how to get value out of we see a ton of that, right? And it doesn't matter the level of, you know, the size of the company or sophistication of company, we see it across the board. And so Connector strategy is great. That's what, that's going to help us kind of plug into best of breed products. We're going to be able to do that really quickly and in a very times way.
I'll actually show you a little bit of that. APIs, that probably read a lot recently or may have read a lot recently, but that's kind of the that's the future of SaaS, right, is, you know, that's the skeleton key for integration. It's got the best way to describe it. So, we'll actually in the customer panel, in a couple of hours where I actually hear from Scott Pash from City of Missoula. And, their integration strategy was just using the API because they had a legacy system that was kind of on life support.
And, and clearly, no one's going to invest in building a connector that legacy system. And so, using our APIs, we were able to really quickly get up and running. So it complements our connector strategy. And the last piece is tabular data, which we'd all like to pretend it doesn't exist, but the reality is it's prolific, right? I mean, the slide Marty showed that had kind of the diagram of all the disconnected things floating around.
That's a huge part of that still is just spreadsheet data. It's tabular. Generally, this slide reads left to right, but you'll notice some things that are kind of interesting like we've got W. Spreadsheets of the source, right? And that, that there's some really valuable kind of workflows.
So I just want to kind of help everybody understand that This can go both ways, right? So we can kind of pull information back up into those source systems and there's a lot of customers that have asked us to do that. We can pull it out and kind of loop through these processes, you know, to kind of, to support whatever the business need is. This Connected database, that really is, you know, that's the W data experience, right? That's where you're going to work in, in, in build reports, you're going to catch those, you're going to break and synthesize all the source data.
And the way that that happens is pretty simple, right? So if you kind of read this again, left right? The data from those connectors, is almost all tabular, right? So pretty much all of these sources of record are some database, right? Most of them are relational in nature.
The data is really simple. It's tabular data as it comes out. We pull it in and we load it into these tables and these tables are set up to support fast volumes. And we've got, customers that wants to do 50,000,000 records a day, right? They want to load that.
Because they're going to cut that out into, you know, 200 entities and they want to see, you know, they want to be able to kind of automate that flow of bringing all that data and cutting it out and distributing it to their teams. The next little piece of that, those kind of those hashes that sort of represents that, the report building kind of query experience, it's where we take all of that data and we blend it together. We filter it we turn it into just kind of a random assortment of transactions into things that are valuable, for the people who want to understand it. And then ultimately, what we've got is a really clean connection into our spreadsheet player, which is if you think about if we kind of think about this from a persona perspective, the left side This is going to be kind of IT and data governance. These are the new audience for us to talk to.
They're really their role in this is that they've got to be responsible for helping the in business users capture that information, but doing it in a way that's secure, doing it in a way where, you know, it's governed well. Everybody's sort of afraid of the wild, wild west of data. And so we have a lot of controls in place to make sure that everything is audible and every attract and kind of our legacy of the company, has really been fully implemented here as well. This middle layer, right, these business analysts, I imagine that actually quite a number of you guys have had experiences doing these types of things, right, where you're going to have probably a spreadsheet model somewhere, or lots of them that are going to fit together. My guess is some of that's going to be sourced from conversations like this or from reading a board deck or from, going to analysts say and some of that's probably going to be sourced from companies like Bloomberg and other financial information services.
That comes together in the intersection of those 2 things creates context, right? And that's how you make decisions. Our customers are no different. It's just a different set of sources and syncs and data that they care about. The last piece is, you know, I want to, I want to be kind of clear here that, you know, we own reporting, right?
I mean, this is kind of the space that I think we dominate in the enterprise, but We also have to compliment other products. And that's kind of part of our maturity of the company is making sure that, we do what we do extraordinarily well, but we also, can fit that into other products that our customers, use and like, things like Anaplan, for planning, or things like black line for reconciliation, right? And so there's other products that exist adjacent to what we do. And the better we can integrate and work with those products, the more value we can deliver to our customers. Okay.
And that really is that last layer, I think, just again, so everybody's sort of clear, that's really the where most of Workiva's users are today. And so one of the challenges here is kind of just having that conversation with a different audience. And so we're starting to as Marty talked about, kind of the adoption rate and things like that, part of that is just learning at half of this conversation, learning at a help the IT and data governance people, you know, be comfortable with what we're advocating for the business. And the analysts kind of sit in the middle and help orchestrate that process. So it's something that we're obviously very excited about.
And it seems very sensible. I mean, I think at my observation, over the years interacting with lots of clients, I mean, 100100 of meetings in the field, is that, this is largely unsolved, right? I mean, it's crazy, given the amount of money that goes into these other systems, but this area is still just it's the Wild West. So I think this is a great opportunity there for us. I'm going to show you a quick demo.
Again, I'm not going to go into a vast amount of detail on this demo. But what I wanna do is kinda this can seem a little esoteric, maybe, when you look at the slide. And so I just wanna kinda help everybody understand
Oh,
line of business. Thank you, Tuber. Yes. So this is just line of business reporting. So is your typical these people kind of live out, you know, we've got a whole bunch of them at at Warkiva.
And even someone like myself, right? There's, I've got the business reporting that I have to do and we use the tool ourselves. So this is just kind of our classic users. Thanks Stewart.
All
right. Maybe just a sec here to get plugged in. And this is not going to be telecast, right? I mean, it's
Yeah. So, the, there are people watching on the website right now. We're gonna do a live demo that's not gonna be able to patch it to our slides. So We'll if you can just listen in and and we'll describe it, but, unfortunately, we're not able to physically show that on the webcast, and we'll be moving the slides forward as soon as we are.
Alright. Let's see if I can do this. I'll break anything. No. I'm okay.
Okay. Still a little awkward, but I don't think the court's going to reach. Okay. So, if you kind of recall back that slide I showed, right, we're moving left to right system of record, connected data, reporting, stakeholder. Okay.
So we're going to walk through this thing and kind of in that order so we can understand how the pieces fit together. Before we do that, I just want to start with, you know, a typical representation of something that a customer might do in Wdesk, right? And so this is, closed deck, monthly closed performance deck, that synthesizing data from a bunch of different sources. In this particular case, we've got actual forecast. We've got some Anaplan forecast data coming in.
We've got some Anaplan budget data coming in. We've got some reconciliation data because we will look at closed performance. So that's going to actually be coming from BlackLine. And then we've got information coming out of directly out of Oracle, which in this case, to start consolidated GL. One interesting thing, and this is also very common, is, in this case, APAC, so our, our APAC division is, you know, in this case, an acquisition.
And they actually don't run our consolidated. They're not on our consolidated GL, so we haven't integrated them yet. So they have their own. So we're going to be pulling their fat particular set financials from a completely different, source of record. And then we're going to bring all that together to create this final report.
Hopefully, that makes sense. We'll have some time for questions at the end. So we're we want to start with this new experience, right? And this is something that we just released. Marty talked about it in keynote.
This is really a huge part of, I think our transformation of the company is the ability to now connect directly, to these systems of record and do it in a really modern user friendly way. I mean, it's important to point out, I think when we looked at what was the right way to, to solve this problem? There's a lot of companies in this space. There are companies that you guys are probably aware of, right? I mean, I as defined sectors.
So there's defined, categories. You've got companies like Informatica, Boomi, and MuleSoft, bunch of companies in this space. What's interesting for us is for us to go to market effectively with our customer base, their preference is that we not introduce a third party, right? Because they come to trust Fortiva. They trust our infrastructure, our mass returns and services, all the that we've built this trust with them over the years.
And so one of the things we really wanted to do, if possible, was actually try to, OEM a product into our solution that would get us to value quickly, allow us to kind of put a lot of capability in our customer's hands, but not be spread so thin on our vision for the product, right? So we can have kind of a team who's very capable who wakes up every morning and eats, sleeps, and breathes, connectivity. And we can think about how we take take advantage of that capability. Through our reporting platform. And so, if you, you know, some of you may have seen a press release that went out about a 1 cloud partnership, That's kind of the engine that powers us underneath.
But again, we've fully oriented that. So it's running in our infrastructure. It's covered by our RM, our REM, right? All of the the trust that, Warkiva's built is, you know, kind of covers this product. This is just a chain, right, which is just a series of little actions that we build.
And, it's really simple to do this. So I think one of the things I wanted to point out is that for our users, this is the goal is not for this to be a business user. But the goal is for this to be an incredibly lightweight, rapid delivery capability for an IT function, right, or for financial systems analyst. The support function to the business that's more technical. And so it doesn't require code, right?
It doesn't require writing any scripts or anything like that. I mean, it's very much, you know, little building blocks that build on one another. Go grab data from here. Go load data to here. Go query that data, go deliver that to a sheet, right?
It's just the sequence of events that all fit together in a very simple, understandable way. And they're and you can interrogate them. Right? So one of the things that's nice about that is we can go back and we can look at every single run. That ever that this chain ever went through, we can see when it was successful and when it failed and why it failed.
And we can, again, interrogate all that stuff and set up alerting and all those wonderful things. So really, really simple. So what we're going to do actually is we're going to run this little, this little chain and I'll kind of kick it off and then, we'll talk through some other pieces while this is running. So this thing is going to start It's gonna trigger that, that call. It's gonna reach out to Anaplan, go grab some data, load it up to W data.
It's gonna go grab some HFM data, load it up W data, While it's doing that, one of the things I want to also point is how easy it is to establish a connection. So, yeah, a lot of our customers will we'll say, well, how do we connect to or can you connect to X Y Z? It's a pretty comprehensive list, right? And again, focused on this system is a record that our customers care about most today. You can see we've got planning and analytics packages.
We've got, virtually the entire Oracle act, right? That's basically all the way down. So we've got tons of connectivity there. You know, great SAP support. ServiceNow, right?
Tableau products that again exist kind of in our periphery, they're really important for our customers. And so now we have the ability to seamlessly orchestrate that information both ways. So grab data out of one of those tools, for example, Anaplan. And then if we do some work, we can send it back, right? And so that's that's kind of the value of how this works.
If we go look at that chain, we can see it's still running. We can see it's kind of just slowly sequencing through all those operations. And where that's going to land is here in W. Data, and we're just going to look at this budget table. And again, don't get mired in the details here.
But the piece I want to point out is that this is just a table, right? And you could see the preview at the bottom, just tabular data that's being fed in. Each one of those files on the right hand side is a load. So that's, you can see, you know, they're, they're time stamped. We can see exactly when they came in.
In this case, we used our connection process. We have kind of a user, a bot, if you will, that's actually running that, that process every, 2 hours. There's a sequence of them that was running last night just to kind of populate some data. So that's what the tabular data looks like. And then what we do is we build from that table, we build these These queries or these reports, and they just compose the data together.
And it's really, really simple. So the left hand side is effectively like the dictionary of all of the data that we have at our disposal to report on. Each of those little pills, those are just items that are parts of these tables. So again, if I were to look at maybe that APAC GL data, there's all the dimensions of data that were loaded in that, APAC GL. And as you look through on the right hand side, all you're seeing is little pills drag on to a report.
Each one of those pills is going to represent a column in the final report. And at the bottom, that's where a lot of horsepower comes in. That's what that's doing. That's like joining the disparate data sets. So it's bringing together things.
And in this case, like the, you'll see, where is it? APAC mapping, sort of in the bottom right. In this case, remember, the story is that APAC was an acquisition, Right? And so we actually don't have the same account hierarchy for our H. Simmons as we do for our institutional consolidated financials.
So what this lets us do is that it actually lets us kind of mimic a roll up in our consolidated financials just by doing this kind of ad hoc and and assigning the GL data to this table. So again, lots kind of fold these disparate systems into one single consolidated, set of data. And then what we can do from this data is we can actually interrogate it, right? So, in this case, you know, we've loaded up some data from Anaplan. You can see we've built a quick, very simple pivot.
Imagine quite a few of you are familiar with how that works. And you can see we can just kind of drill through. We can interrogate this information. One of the things that I use quite a bit actually is the ability to do this in visual form. So we can kind of look and we can see, oh, in North America, that's great.
What's in North America? I can unpack that and I can see all the elements exist within North America, right, to keep sort of drilling through and interrogating that data. And we can rebuild it all live. So for you to move any of these you can see on the right hand side, that's kind of a classic pivot experience. So it's not just the ability to kind of bring that data in, and ship it off to WDS, but it's also the ability to come back when things maybe don't make sense to us in WDS.
I mean, we got a consolidated number that we don't quite trust. Don't quite understand how it got there. Maybe, you know, maybe it looks like it got, miskeyed or something. We can kind of come back in and we can use some of these kind of quick ad hoc analytics tools to figure out what's actually going on there. Once it leaves W data, again, kind of following kind of recall that slide left and right, once it leaves W data, it's going to typically land in spreadsheets.
And for us, spreadsheets are kind of the Everybody works in spreadsheets, right? I mean, that's, that's, that's the reality. That's the reason why that connected, you know, mess exists I think the value, obviously, our key to the spreadsheets is we bring those from an uncontrolled environment into a tightly, highly controlled auditable environment. So we can give people a similar experience, but we can do it, you know, while reducing a tremendous amount of risk that would exist if they did that, outside of Fortiva. And so it's really cool here.
And this is, again, I don't, you know, I'm not aware of anybody who does this, the way that we do it, you know, in the cloud this way, but Every single one of these little elements on the right hand side, these W data connections, you can see these little pills. Each of those connect to a query and W data. And so real quickly, I could go run, you know, that, that, that chain, for example, you know, if you want to look at one of these, we loaded that data set up goal with that beginning. We can see that completed successfully. Okay?
I'm gonna close these out. I just wanna show you how that data loaded. Then what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna show kind of how that flows all the way through to that, that final report. We're just gonna go grab grab this table data. And you can see right here on the right hand side, 10%, 10:34 a.
M. It's a lot smaller on mine. My screen, you guys probably see it better. That was that low we just did, right? So when we hit that button and it's kind of running in the background, it's just triggering around information to flow into W data.
So now what's cool is because all that reporting is built in an automated way, and it's all clumped up to our spreadsheet, only thing that the spreadsheet user has to do is hit one button. They just come over here and they hit refresh all. And so what that did is that triggered every report and w data to run recomposed all that information, ship all that back to the spreadsheet, and then all of the links, right, that feed all of our reporting is derived from that one master set of data, all just got updated, right? So I think in this case, it's about 1050 data elements. With a single click, right?
It just updated. So, it gives us the ability to really highly automate a lot of this activity. And as we look through here, once that data loads up, right, we can, we can publish those links and ship them all the way back through to that reporting layer. Without going into great detail, we have a lot of tooling as well to be able to walk that back. So if I see a number, kind of quick example would be maybe a number here.
In a chart, and I can view that chart series data. And I can see that that data, is linked. And so if I follow those linked properties, I can actually walk that back and see the source, right? So I know that originated in this Europe section of that spreadsheet. Click it takes me right there.
So kind of up and down the ability to walk that information through. And now the, I think the piece that's really powerful for us and for our customers is From the time the data lee leaves that system of record or that, that origin system, to the time it gets to that final report, it never leaves our ecosystem. Entirely controlled from start to finish. It takes very little time. Yeah.
So just one thing I wanted to add. The, you know, you set up all these connections ahead of time. So you can have a whole set of reports set up and every time the source data changes, and you can update it every 2 hours, every day. You can update it on a poll only. If you don't wanna push happening, and you can get the reports, immediately as soon as you upload the new data.
So This allows you to do weekly performance reports or quarterly or any time interval reports and literally have them the very next day. Where in the past, it's a several day process of people manually doing this. So
It's Marty brings up a really good point. You know, one of the other pieces when we were kind of trying to design this is that we knew The people that live in spreadsheets are not the people. It's not the same skill set. It's not the same, you know, kind of archetype of person that's going to live and deviate and do all those transformations, right? Those are the types of people, generally a financial analyst or senior financial analyst, their next promotion hinges on a special project delivery, right?
And, and I think, again, folks in the room, that's probably not an unfamiliar thing. And those folks really understand how all the pieces fit together. And so they live in W. Data. They compose a lot of the kind of data architecture for these downstream teams to consume.
We wanted to be able to do for the downstream teams, though, is without any complexity at all, have them be able to kind of modify the datasets kind of suit their reporting needs. So if we edit this connection, we can see like in this case, you know, this is a really simple one. But we've actually passed through some parameters from that, that report that allow the end user in the spreadsheet to roll this forward simply by changing that date. They just change it from 9:30 to December 31st, hit refresh, it's done. Right?
So each user has the ability to kind of configure the reporting depending on how we, you know, design it so that, everything's controlled.
And it it is worth noting too that of the of the, transactions we've had around this half tend to be in the category we'll just mention, which is know, financial analysts sort of stretching our legs out into FPNA. The other half have been SCC people just wanting a direct connection. So we see not only the ability to go to our current customers and have success moving this this capability. We also see it allowing us to, you know, move into FP and A over time. So it it not only enhances our current customer, but also extends the customer base.
I'll actually fill this and plug back in because there's An interesting, piece of what Marty just said too. You know, when we talk to customers, the thing that's interesting is and it's kind of obvious when you think about it, right? But the supply of information sort of creates demand for our reporting platform, which is really interesting. So the more information we can get into that connected layer from different sources, right, where, again, this is in, in a typical enterprise, there's not really a great way to do this or there isn't one single location. Companies may have an EDW, it's not accessible, doesn't have a reporting layer, hard to get at, right, tightly governed.
We're trying to strike that balance between, you know, kind of control, flexibility and usability, kind of sit right in the middle. But I think, you know, there's obviously the play for W Data by itself and then how that, you know, is kind of an add on and then how that fits in with Wdesk is, is pretty interesting because we see, you know, folks go, wow. Now that I have all this information, you know, there's value in in maybe up to another team as well.
Thanks for that. And, you might have mentioned this during your walk through, but, kind of what's the technology that powers all of those integrations and W data? Is it something Warkiva, proprietary built, or is it something in MuleSoft or information?
No. The connections are actually powered by One cloud. So that's the technology partner we use, to, to kind of support that, that change building experience. And then the, kind of underpinning of WD itself is actually like a distributed query engine, really high scale. So we could put loads and loads of information in there.
So so the W Data Technology Excel is our technology. The connectors we showed you were our 3rd party that we've integrated right into our actual build process. So it's, they run on our cloud. Their containers actually delivered to us. So that way, you know, it's covered under all of our security regimes, and, authentication and all that is in one environment.
So it's just seamless to the end customer.
Yeah. The, again, when you hear from Scott later, what's interesting is if you, if you kind of just took out that top left box, on the slide, everything else we've been doing since we launched, in July of last year. That connector piece, though, for ease of use for our customers and ease of deployment, that's such a critical piece and frankly for partners, when we talk about, really getting hooks into those systems that matter so that we can, we can aggregate all that information, we really wanted to make that easier. And so you think about, you know, if you, if you took that little top left connector piece off the slide, everything else is 100 percent Warkiva owned and developed, right? And that one little connector piece is kind of our partnership.
Hey, Will, can you just kind of go through the monetization strategy and how you get customers to pay for this? In other words, a lot of different ways to go about it, in terms of number of connectors, number of seats. How have customers embraced what you've brought to market and perhaps you could just kind of talk about that monetization strategy. Thanks.
Stewart, do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, I'll I'll I'll start the conversation. Let Stuart chime in too. You know, in terms of again, how we're monetizing this is, again, a percentage of, you know, what the current spend is And like I said, it's a pretty substantial percentage, and we have not seen an impediment to that at all in terms of getting the transaction done. The value is very, very apparent to the customer. And, we can go in and we can before we even go to sell this, we'll set up a simple example with their actual data.
And so the selling friction has been has been fairly low. The the the issue is always getting the right person in the room as always, because to Will's point, you know, Most of our SEC reporting customers will have some other person that's either on their team or very close to their team that would help set this up. You know, they have more of a background and databases and things like that. But we haven't really seen friction in terms of monetization. The value is very, very apparent.
I mean, I think that covered it other than to just say it's always an add on sale, right? I mean, it's always an upgrade. It's an upsell. Enhances the value of the Wdesk platform. So, Terry?
Yes, I
was just going to ask about in the large enterprise market, they do have IT people and they do like writing lines of code keeps them employed. So has there been any inertia on the large enterprise side? Well, we could do this And then secondly, I just wanted to ask, I always have multiple parts questions, by the way. With your 16 solution sets, is W data available for that and all 16 of those workspaces or is there still more work to do for the applicability? Thank you.
So I'll answer your last question first. The answer is yes, available for all of those solutions. The first question is interesting because you're, you're, you're right. The way I describe it to people right now is we see kind of both, and I don't know what the split is. I couldn't tell you in percentage terms, but we see 2, kind of interesting cultures around IT.
We see one culture is very much kind of siloed institutional. We own it. No one else touches it. The, the kind of newer school, more modern approach to IT is kind of they support the business And that is their customer. And so I think they kind of wake up every morning and say, well, can I make my business more successful?
That second category of person is someone who we really good resonance with, right? Because I think what you talk about what do they do every day? Remember, they've got huge multimillion or multi $100,000,000 deployments technology that they're doing and managing all the time, you know, do they want to manage an integration to plan? Probably not, right? And so for them, This is a way to empower the business with some oversight and control.
But, but not in such a way that, that, requires work or effort for them. They've got other things that they want to prioritize. So if we can kind of come in quickly clear that obstacle, yep, we can connect, yep, it's easy. It's been a really positive discussion in most. I mean, even surprisingly so in some cases, I expected a lot more friction early that we've seen there?
It's it there's hello? There we go. There's all different, bifurcations of that experience. First off, you can write as complex as SQL query as you want in this tool just by going to the advanced part. And so we see some very gnarly queries put together that but also we have a higher level language for sort of the simpler stuff that, you know, an accounting team would use.
We find that oftentimes, even in accounting, there'll be one person there that knows enough about data to set this up very easily. So we don't even get to IT many times. And then to, you know, and then just to what Will is saying, we're seeing a trend of IT going from, you know, don't touch my house to wanna make my customer happy. And if this is the quickest and best way to do it and the customer already is using this tool for other things, let's just plug this in and go. And so it's definitely a trend where I see less and less of that IT impediment I think IT teams are realizing they have to reinvent themselves as well, getting SaaS cloud stuff going and becoming just very good at that.
And and building their value to the organization through supporting that. So it's not something we run into that. Once in a while, we have someone that has their database at they say everything has to go into, and we're not gonna have any other databases around, but it's very rare nowadays.
And Terry, for those who don't want to reinvent, the argument is, this lets you this enhances the investment you've already made. Right? You don't have to change anything. This will let you have a longer life with that ERP that costs you $30,000,000. That's the argument.
Have a little bit of
time for more questions. Anyone else's question in the room?
You mentioned
about half thus far, about half the sales going to sort of a new, group, the FP and A group, talk about the challenges and opportunities of sort of getting the right person in the room as it relates to those new customers?
Yes. So it's just
Well, you,
I was going to say it's kind of interesting the way a lot of the dialogue starts. I mean, you talk to people, here to amplify them are going to be accounting users, right? And so their whole life is going to be spent in that top right box. And, what they know is that they want the data exists on that top left. They just don't know really how to get it.
And so it's sort of been an interesting, experience, again, we're kind of learning through that process as well, just how to kind of have those discussions and walk that back, how to get the right people in the room when we're having dialogue. A lot of times to Marty's point, we do have a relationship there. So finance is nearly adjacent enough to accounting that we typically have a couple of people that or kind of crossover users and understand what we do and where we fit. If we've got champions in the organization, from a technical perspective. And again, often times we do, they, they kind of understand this.
So it's, you know, we're we're getting better at it.
I I think traditionally, we are able to get to FPNA pretty easily through the accounting team. You know, that it's sort of like a good reference. You know, they the accounting team tends not to wanna, you know, go around and endorse things, but they've they've been a a a way for us to get there. You know, 100% transparency. When we went there without W data, we had limited success.
We did. We just didn't have what they wanted. And we actually got a lot of feedback on what they did want, this ability to pivot these big tables of data, and pull out all sorts of different reports that actually speak to the performance of the business, more so than what you're looking at historically. So, I think that, you know, having gone through quite a few FPNA meetings, learning what we needed to build help build this. And I think that we'll be able to, you know, get back to those people pretty in a pretty good clip, you know.
Yeah. I mean, that's a challenging job too when you're in it, right? Because a lot of your success in the role is the accessibility of the information you need to report on. I mean, that's we talk to people who who spend a lot of time trying to figure that out.
So We have, one minute left. Oh, wait a question.
Oh, sorry. Your hiding. Thanks.
Could you just remind us when you guys started selling W Data? And, how much customer adoption have you seen so far?
Yeah. I'll take that one. We we actually started, you know, it's it's an interesting process you go through. You start selling it before it's ready, you know, That's always what you do. You call it MVP 1 or whatever.
And you're really going out to let the product teams understand what's going on with the product in use. And so, you know, we started, what, July was it? Will last year.
July of last year.
July of last year, and we put in some installations and learned. And, that's really what and Will and his team would visit a lot of those customers. In terms of adoption, we've seen some customers put up I don't know, some of the larger financial institutions, multiple instances of this, right, in terms of without saying customer names, but tens of instances In some of the uses, we've let them just use it at will, and it's sort of spread throughout the org. And then we go back and and start to talk to him about pricing and things. And so we had success doing that and a couple things that led to really nice deals for us.
So I think the adoption is is gonna be, I mean, we're very optimistic about the adoption. Again, it's early days. For me, from my point of view, that's a good thing. We have a lot of, white space in which to grow the company. Marty, I think you mentioned there's still a lot of work to be done on the platform as a whole.
And I guess in that context, how should we think about where you are in the overall R and D investments in terms of reaching your longer term and goal for a truly open platform? That's a good question. You know, the, as you all know, our R and D spend is higher than the typical SaaS company. Stuart reminds me daily of that. Daily, I get a email or a club over the head or something.
But I will say this. You know, we value every part of our organization, product marketing. We value our sales team. We're getting better at all those functions every day. But 1st and foremost, we're a product company.
That's what we are. And we're not gonna change our identity and our culture. And, we will try to get that number down, but it's gonna take time. We have a lot to build and it's not stuff we're building for fun. We just see a lot of business opportunities.
And we're gonna keep that investment going. Like I mentioned on Global Stat and other large verticals where there's large potential for us, we're going to keep that R and D investment going to build world class products on our platform for those, you know, when we learned with the SCC, when you build a world class product, we just took that market so fast, almost too fast. Because it was so much better than any other product out there. So I guess with the not not not Steve Jobs personality, but I certainly endorse his mantra of, you know, build the very best product and the company will be fine. And so, you know, long answer, I should have just said that, you know, we expect it to the R and D spent a decline over time, but it's gonna take a while just because we see opportunity, not because we feel we have to make everything the same as the first form or not, not that we're just chronic builders of software.
We're very methodical in building stuff that adds value and we can charge money for. This is a business. So
Yes. The, regarding the openness question, it's not binary. I mean, the cool thing is, as Marty mentioned, we started this, not more than 24 months ago. So, the ability for us to kind of have foresight to know, okay, when we build this piece, it's going to be wide open from the outset and we did that, right? So this piece is kind of ready for prime time from an openness perspective.
And you'll start to see that kind of cascade through things, but W8 is wide open, spreadsheets are open. So there's a lot of that progress has already been made.
And I and the rate of speed at which we can develop stuff will over the course of of, 2020 accelerate just because, you know, more and more of the core functionality is done and more of those people will be pivoted to purpose built solutions. And on top of that, building on this platform, they can build purpose built solutions much, much faster than our old platform, which was not microservices based. So I'm excited about our R and D spend. I know the investment community isn't always excited about it. I know Stewart's not excited about it.
I'm very excited about it because that's that's what builds future revenue growth. Just when I look at companies, they have a low R and D spend. I'm not an investor. It's just that simple. That's my own, 2¢ philosophy.
Well, since there wasn't a quick question, I wanna just introduce someone in the oh, there was. I'm sorry. Go ahead. And then I'm gonna introduce someone in the bag. Oh, well, perfect timing.
Julie, could you stand up, please? And, Julie is our new chief operating officer. She starts in October 1st, and she just came here to get immersed in this. So, do not, attack her with questions because she knows nothing. No offense, Julie.
I'm just trying to make sure that they know you know nothing. And, we're very excited. She's has a lot of experience in building large scale platforms. And true to our, you know, our character. She's she's her background's in product.
And we have very, very good leadership in all parts of the company, but as we start to, you know, build her operational skills in the other parts of the business, which I'm sure we'll go fine. I just love to have the strong product underpinning there. So we're very excited to have Julie on board. We very picky about executives we bring on. So we vetted her every which way from Sunday, and, she's the real deal.
So we're very excited about that. And leave her alone. Okay. So we're
gonna take a, what? Click you can click forward.
Oh,
yeah. Sorry. I should click forward. You have the No. Thank you.
You got it. There we go. So we're gonna be back in this room at noon, for a customer panel on W data, and then, we'll kick off the third session, at 1 o'clock. So, in the interim, please go visit the expo, talk to customers, talk to partners, and sponsors, and grab some lunch.
Oh, okay.
Speakers.
He's
and they're the same thing that they were supervisor.