Informatica Inc. (INFA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 9, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Unknown Analyst
analystThank you, everyone. I'm [ Shan Taha ] from the Morgan Stanley Investment Banking Group, and I'm delighted to be joined by both Amit and Mike McLaughlin of Informatica. Informatica, it's been at the full front of innovation probably for 25 years.
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd maybe to start with, you've won a lot of awards recently, both in leadership in Gartner and other awards. Give us a bit of the history of what Informatica was, how is transition and what it is today to start us off?
Amit Walia
executiveYes, sure. So a lot of you may or may not know Informatica, but the challenge of a company that has been around 25-plus years is, and that makes a massive transformation is that you have to -- while you talk about where we are and where we are going, you have to sometimes peel the onion of where we were, so that elephantine memory doesn't carry into the future. I'll give you very simple. We were in the old days, actually, we were a public company, went private in 2015, and that was a very innovation-led privatization. And think of it pre-privatization, we were a 1.5 product on-premise licensed software company, doing ETL for data warehouse analytics, I can use through all those words. And we had a fundamental choice to make as to where are we going to go and our sponsors are long-term investors. So we made a very innovation-led journey. I used to be the head of products that time. So I can -- we built everything from scratch. And our thesis was that in the world of digital transformation, which was in its very infancy, there will be a very broad use case for data management. And we believe that we had a good idea of what that can be, and let's go build that. And what we did from there is that we started building not just ETL in the cloud, but many, many more flavors of that, which is ELT, many such things and things like master data management, data governance, data cataloging, they are all not known. And we started building them out. And at that point, the goal was, look, we'll build it out cloud, but customers are not ready to go to cloud. So many of our new products came in the context of, hey, they can be on-prem or cloud, but all subscription. So we killed the license business, went all into subscription. Some of the products had to be on-prem subscription, because customers of data on or ready, but we build out the cloud platform. And where we are now when we went public last year or 2021 rather, we had finished the subscription transformation. But because data has its gravity to go to cloud over a period of time, where we are now is we are in the second mile where we are saying, "Hey, everything new is going to be in the cloud, and we have the IDMC platform that has all of these services on one platform, running at scale industrial scale, 53 trillion transactions a month globally serving the [ Global 10k ] kind of customers. That's philosophically is the front to [indiscernible].
Unknown Analyst
analystWell, that is extremely interesting in the sense that you now have this very fast CLAIRE and Cloud business. You have an installed base that is -- and no one can really rival right now. How do you think customers now view Informatica? Where do you fit in there in the -- we talk a lot about the future of the data landscape and where you fit? How do you think you fit with a new customers' data landscape?
Amit Walia
executiveWe'll begin with some examples. So take a customer like Unilever. So first of all, if you step back, I said like we built out many new capabilities. What people knew Informatica for ETL is less than 25% or less than 20% of us. We built out many flavors of integration, ELT, mass ingestion, so on and so forth, MDM, governance and all. Rough and tough, 50% of our business is non integration. And in integration, we have app integration in many such things. So you can see many of the new franchises we built. And if I took -- give you a few customer examples, a customer like Unilever. They use us to run their supply chain across the globe, 96 countries. What do they do? They use a Master Data Management to run and make sure they can onboard suppliers anytime, anywhere across the globe and manage every product that goes through any supplier in any country. Start around and you go to a CVS Health. But all of us go to CVS and you give our insurance cards and everything. That is a massive data quality problem. And if they actually have wrong data, they can actually be sending wrong data to the insurers and they make it not reimbursed. We save them $200 million a month by actually running data quality at scale. And then on the third side when you come to analytics, which what everybody gravitate towards. There also, there are industrial grade projects where customers are taking us and running Snowflake for data warehousing or Snowflake for ELT. You can click stream data into our warehouse, which is just ingest, do ELT or if I'm connecting to my mission-critical apps, I will do ETL and run. Those are the kind of use cases we run. We focus on the [ Global 10K ]. And our mission has always been wherever there is massive complexity, which exists we basically go in and help customers reduce that. And today, where we are with the cloud platform across the globe, our cloud is now $450 million, we ended last year on ARR, grew 42% last year. And the most important metric to note is that the usage of that platform grew 93% last year, year-over-year to 53 trillion transactions, and it doubles every year at that industrial case. So those are the use cases we see and we partner with all of the hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks. We were the partner of the year with AWS last year. We won those awards with all of them, because ultimately, a customer is in a multi-hybrid world, multi-cloud and ground and cloud. And we through our cloud platform can manage that multi-hybrid, so that's the world we live in.
Unknown Analyst
analystSo let's talk a bit about partnerships, because I would love to make it even clearer to the audience, which is the value you drive to these partners, because you're adding -- when someone can get more value out of the data, they should drive more cloud consumption or they should drive more usage of their platform. Is that the major use case you do for them? Any ideas of how much you're doing for these customers? And what else you add value for them?
Amit Walia
executiveSo that's exactly why they partnered with us. It's a bidirectional partnership. They need us as much as we need them. Now these are large companies. So we work very closely with them. So we drive consumption for them. It's -- and I'll take an example of Kroger. Kroger is a large customer and Kroger uses Azure and GCP and Snowflake. And basically, in that case, they are using us to bring a lot of real-time point-of-sale data to drive warehouse stocking real-time decisions. And for that, they're using GCP BigQuery, but for the analytics that goes to the CEO, CFO, which like somebody like a Mike and we will make decisions, that goes into Azure. All of them are getting consumption by putting more and more data into it, but you can see multiple clouds used for different purposes. So that's what delights us. And by the way, we are available on all other marketplaces as well. So they actively put in front of the customers that they can draw down their commits for AWS, Azure or GCP by drawing down Informatica. And we just don't have a go-to-market partnership. We have deep product partnerships. So we just won the design partner of the year with AWS, why? Because we are natively integrated in things like SageMaker or a Redshift or a Synapse or a Snowflake. So those become very easy to use for customers. So it's not just draw-down credit, but I can just whip up a data warehouse or a data lake house, and I can just start using Informatica from that console. So that's how we think of those partnerships. And you can look at our conference. In the last 3, 4 years, you can see all of them have landed up at our conference. We had got 3 last year. We've add Alicom. We have all of -- [indiscernible], why? Because our customers end up being very [ good ].
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd one part of it is on the partnership side, where you've done great product partnerships as well as go to market. The other is the work you've done is becoming sort of a centerpiece for integrations for connectors, do you want to talk a little bit about what that's done in terms of the network effect you build, the scale and the advantage that gives you against competitors and anyone else out there in the market?
Amit Walia
executiveYes. I mean I think -- so it's a great question. If you think of our market for a minute, we are the only 1x case. If you turn around and look at the competitive dynamic, you will see everybody -- if you take -- by the way, we have 7 product categories. If you go to our page, you'll see IDMC as data integration, app integration, data quality, MDM, catalog, governance, data marketplace. Even that little box of data integration has 30 people running around trying to outcompete each other, of that, maybe 5 of them are at relatively at any scale. And there's no one that can bring it all together. Running on the other beauty is that one single cloud native platform with a single consumption-based pricing mechanism, we sell IPUs. Customers can draw down anything. So like I give you an example. I'm doing ELT on Snowflake. And now I want to actually do ETL, sure, and I want to add data quality, sure. And I want to put governance and talk, sure, you don't have to come by, you just keep consuming our IPUs. So the centerpiece becomes that, a, it's a multi-cloud world. We don't see a single cloud world. It's also a multi-hybrid as in customers are going to be -- large customers are going to be ground in cloud. Morgan Stanley is not putting all the metadata in the cloud. Goldman Sachs is not doing that. But they want to put some metadata over there, some on the ground, and we can connect the 2 by keeping our cloud in the cloud. And also, we can take our cloud and put it behind your firewall. So that creates that centerpiece, nucleus for us and a bit of our network of [indiscernible]. We can connect the dots in us generally for Global 5 to 10k, a complex architecture.
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd what about on the -- I want to double click a little bit on the integration part, because you see a lot of startups coming up. They've got X amount of connectors, and X amount of sort of -- you'll have 5 trend coming in with saying what they've done. What advantage do you think that you have by, a, connecting all these products which you mentioned, but also within each product, the time of the history you've had to build multiple hundreds and hundreds of connectors out there?
Amit Walia
executiveSo 2-part answer. First of all, we have 50,000 plus connectors. And a connector is a connector is a connector until it is not the same connector, because the word connector is [indiscernible]. When we -- so we have -- first of all, the scale is really close to us. Number two is that our connector is our metadata way. I'll give you 1 line. There is going to be no single system of record for data in any enterprise ever. However, given the fragmentation of the enterprise, there is a very strategic situation that's playing out, and you can watch it for the next couple of years, it will happen. What we are placing our platform in the middle is to be a system of record for metadata. The data wherever it is, but we understand your entire metadata. So whether you're a customer data sitting in Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, Salesforce, we understand wherever it is. Move what you want to move when you want to. So our goal has been to do that. So it's -- connectors is one thing, but the richness of the capability is another one. And the third one is -- for [ Global 5, 10K ], are you going to take 20 products and stitch them all together to do 1 simple workflow? Or you're going to basically at me choose something which is not only a single unified platform. But as you said, best of breed by any Gartner Magic Quadrant we see. That's a decision customers are making. And there's always growth, it's just a broad market. Somebody can -- a data engineer can swipe a card by a 300,000 transformation product. That's fine. We just launched our free version. Our belief is in the next couple of years, we'll commoditize that. We'll give it away for free. I'm more interested in that the [ Global 10K ] have tremendous amount of complexity. How do I reduce that for them. While as we launch the Free and PayGo, we're going to go after our competitors and commoditize, their entire base is built on that, which they think they have monetized, we're going to commoditize.
Unknown Analyst
analystWell, let's go -- let's talk more about that. Let's talk about go-to-market. So you have the enterprise over there and you have the free business product going up -- free product growing. How do you think that's going to evolve over time? How do you go to market today? Is it in, a, focused on the top customers, and it's very much a value-based sell and the cross-sell motion as well? It will be super interesting.
Amit Walia
executiveSo today, we definitely have a -- we're a direct-sell company, and we have deep partnership, the GSIs and the cloud hyperscalers and in a lot of cases, we go together. We just had 3 customers [ EDC ] this week, where we brought in for 1 customer, we brought in Snowflake on day 1, AWS on day 2 because to the joint customers, so we do that. That's our primary go-to go-to-market motion. And partners obviously bringing a bunch of deals to us. And obviously, we can draw down marketplaces. Of course, digital has played a big role for us. And we have grown -- cloud has allowed us to go down to the commercial segment a fair bit. And we were good with that. And at $1.6 billion revenue, we have -- we add more ARR in 1 year than some of them have in their lifetime. I mean we guided to $600 million of cloud ARR. All the names you talked about, you add their entire ARR, they don't add up to that. And it's going to grow 35% is what we've guided. Now what our goal is now that the cloud is fully ready. We basically said now we're going to go completely downstream. So we launched our Free version and our PayGo version before customers can even buy the consumption-based version for anybody to be able to swipe a card and just go begin. And our goal is that, for the other ones, who have build their empires on $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 deals, we're going to go out and actually absolutely commoditized, because I am not dependent on those to drive my business. They are dependent on those to drive up business. So we've been very thoughtful of making sure we capture the enterprise then go down and not dilute our focus, trying to do everything at the same time. Now we can do it.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveMay I add something on the partner front. Don't forget that their partners are not just the cloud service providers, but we also have really productive and important partnerships with the global service providers, Accenture, Capgemini, Wipro, and we've got hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of local and regional VARs and systems integrators that have Informatica practices that give us tremendous leverage, both on the sale of our product and the implementation of our product. And that is a chicken and egg business or it's a scale benefiting business is that if you're small like some of the competitors you mentioned, not big enough for Accenture to build a practice of that. We are big enough and it's just a supply wheel that just keeps going.
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd Mike, maybe turning to you a little bit, you've had a successful career as a CFO of a public company as well as technology investment banking, what attracted you to Informatica? And what got you excited here?
Michael McLaughlin
executiveIt was a multitude of things. The first being simply put data. Data as a theme in the technology landscape is a great place to be. There are other great places to be like e-commerce and AI and what have you, but data is the lifeblood of our economy. It's the lifeblood of the digital transformation that's going on, being a part of that was appealing. The second thing was where Informatica plays in that data theme. We sit between as the largest player as the independent player that connects the producers of data, the Oracles and the sales force and the Workdays, the places where you store and secure and curate data, the Snowflakes, AWS, the Teradata is the world and the analytical tools that use that data and create insight out of it. Every good day for any 1 of those 3 folks or categories of that universe is a good day for Informatica, which is super appealing. The third part is the product, as Amit mentioned, when Informatica went private in 2015, it wasn't a cut costs and raise price, go private. It was invest in the product while you're not without the spotlight of public quarterly reporting on you, so that you can make the investments that you need to do the hard decisions that are going to take some lead time to develop. So the products that we are now in the marketplace with are modern architected, they're fresh, they're best in class. And you can see that from the Gartner and other third-party research. And then I think the final bit of it is just the transformation itself. I mean it is a complicated story to understand the subscription, the license to subscription transformation is done, but the on-prem to cloud transformation is in flight and with a lot of products. And there's a lot of value to be created for that. And particularly as a finance professional being able to use the tools of finance to help accelerate and create value out of that transformation is also really compelling.
Unknown Analyst
analystGreat. Let's talk more about the model here. You've got this incredibly fast-growing cloud business. It grew at 42% and at scale at $450 million ARR. You've got a bigger revenue base, well over $1 billion and going on more. As a result, I think guidance is coming up to 5% roughly for next year. Help us unpack that and the complexities of this business model because we've got this incredible story right now, which is disrupting everyone and going to the biggest customers, but the model is not as easy to understand.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveYes. Thanks for the question. It's an important one. And I think there are some lack of understanding amongst the investor community about what the pieces are and why the great story that we feel as though we have looks like a middling story, if you just look at the total ARR growth rate, which is 5% as our guide next year. Think of about $1.5 billion, roughly at $1.6 billion, $1.5 billion of ARR into 3 buckets. 1/3 of it is maintenance. It's the power center maintenance from the products that we have sold over the last 20-plus years. That is super profitable, it's incredibly sticky, but we're not selling any more of it. And so it's going to decline at a steady rate forever at a pretty slow rate with a really, really admirable renewal rate, I would add, but it's not growing. It is a pool for some upside in our growth in the future as that converts, and I'll talk about that in a second. The other $1 billion, so 2/3 of our business is the modern product. It's the stuff that was developed while Informatica was private. It's what we've been actively selling for the last of 5, 6, 7 years. That's about half and half on-prem and cloud. What we've been seeing in that mix, the half on-prem, the half cloud, is that our new business over the last 2 years has been shifting more and more to cloud. In 2021, it was roughly 40% of cloud, 60% on-prem in terms of new bookings. In 2022, it was roughly 70% cloud, 30% on-prem in new bookings. What we're doing this year and what is obvious from our cloud-only consumption-driven strategy is we're essentially ceasing to sell the on-prem by choice and focus exclusively on the cloud. We will sell it if the customer insists on it, and we're not end of sailing, we're not end of supporting or doing anything dramatic to abandon those customers. But because of the operating leverage, because of the present value of a cloud sale versus an on-prem sale, we're all in on cloud. So that 1/3 of our business is also declining at a renewal rate of roughly 92%, 93%. And again, that's very good, but it's going to be declining, because we're focusing all of our attention. So where we're actually putting our sales attention where the future of Informatica is, is in that $451 million of cloud ARR that we've guided is going to be $600 million by the end of the year at 35% growth rate. You add all that up and it ends up being a 5% ARR growth rate at the top, which doesn't sound all that exciting. But the pieces, the new business, which is the $1 billion, that grew at 19% last year, which is probably faster than what the overall market would grow. At least Gartner would tell you that data management is growing kind of mid-teens. We grew at 19% if you include the on-prem subscription and the cloud subscription. And going forward, with the focus on cloud, we think that's going to continue to grow at market beating rates. And as that mix becomes bigger, our total ARR growth rate will get into the high single digits, low double digits, mid-double digits and potentially beyond.
Amit Walia
executiveNo, I think that that's -- and I would not forget that what it allowed us to do is, at the same time, we went to cloud only to all the things Mike said, create tremendous amount of operating leverage this year. We were able to simplify the business model. Obviously, we had multiple things running around to sell the new products on-prem, new products cloud, we could simplify the go-to-market, simplified a lot of stuff and you see the amount of operating leverage we created this year that the guide that we gave for non-GAAP OpInc and cash flows of the world. So while we are not selling net new on-prem, which is our [ 606 ] hit on the revenue line, we are improving the profitability under the covers without degrading gross margins that are still at 80%. That's a pretty impressive P&L to run. And I think that, to Mike's point, just gets lost sometimes, because just -- people just grab it towards maybe 1 bucket and just get stuck on that point. And we have -- what we're not factoring into all of this stuff is the massive opportunity of migration. We have the on-prem to cloud migration on maintenance, still in its infancy. 3.6% of our [ management ] has gone to cloud, and it has gone at north of 2x multiple, a dollar of maintenance is converting to more than $2 of club. That is an immaterial part to our story so far, and we definitely believe that over the long term, we'll actually grow faster, and that will be more accretive to the overall.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveBut there's one very, very important follow-on, on this comment is our 35% growth in our cloud business is not cannibalization, it's not migration of that maintenance base. There's a small portion of a single-digit percentage of the 100% of the growth that we're seeing is anticipated migration of the maintenance base to our cloud product, it's immaterial. The faster that moves, the more upside there is but that's not the core of our growth. The core of our growth in our cloud business is new customers, new workloads.
Unknown Analyst
analystGreat. So you've got a cloud business that's growing extremely quickly. You've got a renewal business that's still incredibly high renewal rates, while also giving you access to all the enterprise clients that you can go sell your cloud business into and massive operating leverage coming with high gross margins. It's a pretty powerful financial model. The model is probably going to evolve as the mix shift determines. How do you think maybe within that model, pricing will evolve and expansion rates within cloud might evolve over time as well?
Amit Walia
executiveSo I think one of the biggest changes in the cloud that has allowed us in pricing. So we -- when you have many products in the world of on-prem, pricing is a bar. You have multiple metrics and you basically try to maximize all of it and you know customers like it or don't like it. In the world of cloud, that does a simplification of cloud, 1 single pricing metric if consumption is IPUs. Now our consumption is slightly different, and Mike can elaborate on that one later. But IPUs, you buy IPUs, you draw down by using any capability of the [ plant ]. You don't have to come back and get into another sales cycle. So simplification of that is very easy. The discussion -- imagine the selling cycle becomes easy and the discussion is more about how do we get to devalue, not how do you come back and keep buying more. Second is cloud, we said that the net retention rate of cloud, we shared the subscription net retention rate last year. And we started seeing as more and more was going to cloud and less was going towards self-managed. Our cloud net retention rate inside the cover is higher than self-managed. We are not paying attention to self, because self finance does not have the natural accretiveness of more upsell cross-sell. So that degrades. We've talked about this year, sharing with the investment community, our cloud NRR, that's the number we're going to anchor ourselves because that has the natural upsell cross-sell metrics. That is higher than our self-management. So one of the reasons why our NRR for subscription was flattish or slightly degraded, because as cloud was growing off a small base and self-managed was not accreting of a big base, that number looked weird, we say, why is it going down? It's not going down, under the covers cloud is growing off a small base, and that has a higher metric. So we'll unpack that. And that allows us to kind of do a lot more of cross-sell, upsell upon in a much easier way and create more operating leverage than adding more selling capacity.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveSo let me address the consumption-driven part of it. So if you ask any Informatica employee, what's 2023 about? They'll say, cloud-only consumption driven, COCD, it's the mantra. Our consumption driven, though, is a little different than what you at some of the other more, what I would call, direct drive consumption companies where consumption can go up 1 month and it can go down 1 month. It can go up 1 day, it can go down 1 day. That's not how our IPU consumption model works. When you contract with Informatica for IPUs, the IPUs is basically like a subway token. And it takes a certain amount of subway tokens to go to Coney Island and a certain amount to go to South Station and certain amount to go to Grand Central. So you can use those tokens for data integration, for data ingestion, for governance, for catalog at a certain rate. You buy a minimum amount of IPUs that you get to use over the multiyear contract 2, 3, sometimes longer. We build those customers upfront for that minimum in advance, a year in advance, and we recognize that revenue ratably monthly as we go along. The only way the consumption changes our P&L, our revenue or ARR is if they go over, they buy more. If they go under, they don't pay us any less. So it's 1 directional in that respect and a renewal. And if they get to the end of the 3-year deal and they need more IPUs to meet their needs, they're going to buy more. If they decide they need less, then we got a -- we had to convince them that there's other use cases or whatever or they downsell themselves. So we do not have a direct drive consumption model that's going to move our P&L in the short term at all. And then beyond that, we've introduced the Flex IPU model, which is a new -- announced 2 weeks ago, which gives the customer even more flexibility on how to use their IPUs and when. But again, that's a minimum plus overage model, not a direct drive up and down month-to-month model.
Unknown Analyst
analystSo one of the questions, some of the points we touched upon was some of the stuff investors have misunderstood around the story. Other stuff do you think investors have misunderstood that's worth clarifying.
Amit Walia
executiveI think there are maybe 3 buckets. There's a business model, which I think we covered quite a bit that might give great details. I think the second one that I touched very early, but I think people get lost on that one is that is ETL, that's Informatica. And if ETL gets commoditized, it's all over and so on and so forth. And I first said ETL is less than 1/5 of our business. There is data integration, which has ELT mass industrial. So that's one. Second is a good part, both 50% of business is MDM and data governor that's growing handsomely by the way that -- there is nothing to do with Snowflake, nothing to do with Databricks, nothing to do with the data warehouse. That's like, as I said, the Chief Supply Chain Officer of Unilever deciding that I need a supply of 360. Here you go. Or the CDO of VMware deciding that I need to understand my customers better and I need to find a way to cross-sell, upsell better, I need a MDM. It's not a warehouse that I can dump data. It's a very complex analytical app and data governance. And the third one is that somehow basically in the world of cloud that the new business versus just moving from left pocket to right pocket, as Mike said, 95%, 97% of our cloud business has just come from net new workloads. And if I really zoom back and ask everybody in this room a single question, 2015 we went private, 2015 fall, pick 2016 as the time frame. 2016 to 2022 is what, how many years? 7 years roughly? In 7 years, we built out these new products, like any start-up that started, you have to do product market fit and everything. So I presume that was also happening. And in that period, we created $1 billion of subscription ARR and $450 million of Cloud ARR. These are all net new workloads. This was not maintenance moving over here. This was all maintenance was just turning down. That's what we did. And I think it gets lost sometimes because there's multiple things, people who are like, oh, somehow left pocket moving to none of that stuff. Maintenance migration is a massive new journey. But -- so these are the 3 things that are unique, distinct and just sometimes get lost.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveCan I add one other thing that I think is getting lost. And you referred to it earlier, but a little bit quickly, and so let me just emphasize it again. You may have heard at other presentations around the conference about the importance of the hybrid world and how the Global 2000 is a hybrid now on-prem workloads are going to be there for a long time. They're not going away. And some companies are being proud about the fact that they embrace the hybrid world. They're not just cloud, which sounds a little different than our cloud-only strategy, right? And so one could take from that, that we're leaving behind this big part of the market. In fact, we embrace the hybrid world, and we work with the hybrid world just as well as anybody. We actually do it better now because we work with the hybrid world from our cloud platform. So we're not controlling the hybrid world from an on-prem platform and a cloud platform. We can control and integrate with your Salesforce, your Oracle, your Teradata using our cloud-based metadata platform. So we're not leaving on-prem behind per se. We're just pulling it all together into a unified cloud platform. So we're there for any type of workload that the existing base needs.
Unknown Analyst
analystAny questions from the audience? Okay. The one other one I wanted to bring up was what about priorities for the next year. And especially, the other big topic beyond the hybrid [ wall ] is also growth and profitability. So priorities for next year and how you think about the famous growth and profitability question?
Amit Walia
executiveI'll give you the business priorities, and I think they take that. Look, first of all, we have an incredible opportunity in forefront of us from an innovation point of view to continue to scale it out. There's a tremendous amount of work to do for the IDMC platform for each individual service. I think I can spend hours on that one, but continue to out-innovate anybody else. There's tremendous amount of good work. And we launched our AI by the way, back in 2018,CLAIRE. Looking up. I [indiscernible] it in 2018, we spent 2 years on the labs to own it. We have -- it's already running at a pretty significant amount of scale like -- and now you will -- if you get this Informatica, we'll share with you a Generative AI can go with CLAIRE also. So that's like innovation and making sure we can drive huge -- more growth in our adoption and usage of the cloud platform and the consumption part. That trickles into what we want to say, look, we want to have a balanced growth company. We're [ at scale ] company. So while we grow our top line, especially focused on cloud, this being the year where we decided that it's the right thing to do take 1 shot in ripping the band-aid or self-managed take up mid-single-digit ARR growth, but allows us to set us up on the multiyear growth that Mike talked about. But get to the next-generation profitability curve. That is a big step function and then we can take it from there. And we're going to manage both. And we feel pretty good about our stickiness with our customers our great partnerships. Our own drone engine working very well. We just have -- we just -- those are our key priorities, and I think we're right there executing against.
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd the growth and profitability piece for you like?
Michael McLaughlin
executiveWell, obviously, important -- that's my background in terms of what I did as a banker, that's what my old company was all about. And given the setup that Amit described so well, for me, it's all about execution. And this is a really well-run company. I inherited a great team from my predecessor. We have got really good informatics about the business and telemetry about how it's going and focusing on using that to execute and meet the expectations as my #1 priority.
Unknown Analyst
analystAmazing. Well, I know we're short of time. So thank you guys for both being here.
Amit Walia
executiveThanks.
Michael McLaughlin
executiveThanks.
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