Integrated Research Limited (IRI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2022 Annual General Meeting for Integrated Research Limited. My name is Peter Lloyd, and I'm the Chairman of the company. To start the proceedings, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are presenting, the Gadigal people from the Eora Nation, and to recognize their continued connection to land, waters and culture. We pay respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Today's meeting is being held both in person and online by the Computershare meeting platform. This allows shareholders, proxies and guests to attend the meeting virtually. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting. And in addition, shareholders and proxies have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. For voting, shareholders attending in person, upon registration, you will receive a green color voting card. Online attendees can submit questions at any time. [Operator Instructions] Please note that while you can submit questions at any time, I will not address them until the relevant time in the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated or, if we receive multiple questions on the same topic, amalgamated together. [Operator Instructions] Voting today will be conducted by way of a poll on all items of business. I will shortly open voting for all resolutions. If you are eligible to vote, once the voting opens, press the vote icon, and all resolutions will be activated with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There is no need to hit submit or enter button as the vote is automatically recorded. You will receive a vote notification in your screen, and you can change your vote up until the time that I declare voting closed. I now declare voting open on all items of business. We will now commence the proceedings. I have determined that a quorum is present. And as it's past 10:00 a.m., I declare the meeting open. I'm pleased to extend a welcome to all shareholders who are present and also to guests representing brokers and analysts who are also present, either in person or online. I would like to introduce my fellow directors who join me today. Mr. John Ruthven, CEO and Managing Director; Cathy Aston, Anne Myers; Allan Brackin; James Scott; and also Matthew Walton, the interim CFO; and Will Witherow, the Company Secretary. I also welcome representative from the company auditors, Ernst & Young, represented here today by partner, Mr. Julian O'Brien, who is joining. And now to the formalities. A number of validly signed and completed proxies have been received by the Company Secretary and the voting of each resolution will be disclosed prior to the resolutions being put to shareholders. I will now deal with the items of business in the order in which they appear in the 2020 AGM Notice of Meeting. I will take that Notice of Meeting as being read. I advise that the minutes of the previous AGM were signed as a true record at a subsequent meeting of directors. A copy of the 2021 AGM minutes is with the Company Secretary. I also table the following documents for consideration by members: financial statements, the remuneration report, the auditor's report, directors' statement and directors' report. These documents are available for inspection and are held by the Company Secretary, also in the annual report. Presentations will now be given by myself, Matthew Walton and John Ruthven. Questions will be addressed after all presentations have been given. I will now give the Chair's address. So once again, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to IR's 2022 Annual General Meeting. We are delighted to be here today and meet many of the shareholders in person. What started as a one-man organization in Australia today has a staff of about 200 team members, with 5 direct sales offices globally. Currently, we work with over 600 organizations directly, and more than 25% of which are global Fortune 500 companies. I am very proud of how far we have come and believe that the best use of the organization are ahead of us. However, the journey has not been easy. For the last couple of years, we have faced multiple headwinds, including cost pressures, changing markets and other global factors, which has primarily led to our customers delaying their buying decisions. Internally, we have dealt with challenges in executing our strategy. And while we did well in maintaining a strong cash balance, we quickly realized we had to implement other corrective measures. So we realigned the business and have now considerably strengthened our leadership team. We have continuously refined our business strategy and are strongly focused on achieving our goals. John will talk more of this in his CEO presentation today. As a group, we are laser focused on delivering 2 very key themes which are underscored during the pandemic, hybrid working and the rise of cashless payments. With the increased adoption in hybrid working, organizations will rely on specialized services like ours for monitoring and managing the proliferation of devices, in an increasingly complex world of communications. Gartner currently projects that the strong demand for solutions, that monitor Unified-Communications-as-a-Service, will grow at the same rate as demand for UCaaS solutions themselves. In the world of payments, cashless transactions have become the new normal. Globally, governments are mandating and the modernization of payment systems to create a common language for payments worldwide. Our products and solutions in this space are well-suited to meet these dynamic requirements. The team at IR is working hard to create second-generation cloud-based products and solutions, which we believe will make us an ideal partner for large enterprises as they transition to new ways of working. While we rely on renewals from existing customers, we are also working to gain traction among new customers. Our recently strengthened leadership team has several key objectives, including establishing a better model for forecasting pipeline, improved cross-sell and partner and channel strategy uplift. We are working closely with existing partners to deepen our relationships with them and are getting new partners on board to access new markets. Our sales teams are spending more time with customers and working closely with our product and engineering teams to ensure our products are fit-for-purpose. I want to remind you that we've also embraced additional metrics to measure the success of the business. With the increased adoption of SaaS services, we have moved to a subscription-based pricing model. This brings into picture metrics such as total contract value, annual recurring revenue and pro forma revenues, which our interim CFO, Matthew Walton, will be outlining shortly. In line with investor interest. We are further developing our approach to Environmental, Social and Governance matters. You'll hear more from us in this regard in the coming year. Given the lens on security and cyber-related matters recently, I'm pleased to inform that IR is now ISO 2701:2013 (sic) [ 27001:2013 ] certified. This is a significant milestone in our information security program and one that enables us to guarantee clients, customers and partners that we have implemented best-practice information security methodology. Turning now to the Board. I'd like to call out the extensive support of my fellow directors, Allan Brackin, Anne Myers, Cathy Aston and James Scott. Their commitment and dedication to the organization is second to none. The Board believes that IR continues to be well-served by having John Ruthven as lead, as the CEO, along with a strong support and executive leadership team. I'm sincerely grateful for all the hard work from the team over the past year when the environment has been difficult and challenging. I also thank our customers for their confidence in our products and solutions. Last, but definitely not least, thank you to all our shareholders for your ongoing trust and support. I believe we are well-placed to deliver on our strategy and build a bright future for all. Thank you. I'll now invite our Interim CFO, Matthew Walton, to present IR's financial performance. Matthew?

Thank you, Peter. We're on Slide 6. The company achieved annual profit after tax of $1.5 million, which was at the upper end of the guidance provided to the ASX in early July. Statutory revenue for the year was $62.9 million, down 20% over the prior year. The decline in performance was the consequence of external trading conditions, market disruption, delays in new product traction and sales execution. Typically, the fourth quarter of the financial year is the company's strongest period for sales. However, the deteriorating macroeconomic environment caused by geopolitical unrest and inflationary pressures resulted in customers delaying or canceling purchasing decisions. Sales execution risk was much higher in FY '22, due to the lower renewal volume compared to preceding years. Cash receipts from customers totaled $75.5 million, down 4% over the prior year. The company continues to benefit from term-based noncancelable license contracts with a high-quality customer base. This, together with other revenues, has yielded an improvement in net cash of $12.3 million, up from $5.5 million the previous year. We're now on Slide 7. As communicated at last year's AGM and the half-year results release, total contract value, or TCV, is a core measure of IR's performance. TCV represents the total value of a revenue-generating contract written in the year. It includes software license and related maintenance, cloud bookings, testing bookings and consulting services. TCV for FY '22 was $56.7 million, down 25% over the prior year for reasons that were highlighted earlier. You will see we have reported annual recurring revenue for the first time. Annual recurring revenue as at 30 June 2022 was $68.1 million, up 3% over the prior year, supported by long-dated noncancelable contracts. As provided in previous investor updates, we continue to report revenue on a pro forma subscription basis, which we believe is more reflective of the underlying performance of the business. Subscription revenues for the year were $68.4 million, down 2% and represent 86% of total pro forma revenue, which also includes revenue from testing solutions and services. Our cash conversion rate for the year ended 30 June was 95% and shows the close alignment of this revenue series to cash receipts. We move to Slide 8. Slide 8 shows the linkage between total contract value, statutory revenue, pro forma revenue and annual recurring revenue. It's worth unpicking this for a moment. Total contract value, TCV, the top black line is the total value of revenue-generating contract written in the period of performance. This includes software license and related maintenance, cloud, testing and consulting services revenue. TCV is a function of the term of the contract and the annual value of the contract. For example, client TCV can reduce significantly if the term is reduced even though the annual value of the license subscription has increased. Statutory revenue. The red line is revenue recognized per the accounting standard. This has strong upfront revenue recognition with less revenue recognized over the life of the contract. As a consequence, there is strong alignment with TCV. Pro forma subscription revenue, the middle blue bar, is the license and maintenance revenue from the contract spread over the life of the contract. It's a nonstatutory and unaudited view that better represents the recurring nature of contracted revenue streams. Pro forma revenue, the blue bar -- sorry, the purple bar on the left, is pro forma subscription revenue plus other nonrecurring revenue streams, typically professional services and onetime-through testing services. Annual recurring revenue, the white bar, is the annualized and end-of-period subscription revenue and best represents the ongoing recurring value of the revenue stream. This chart highlights that, while there is more volatility in TCV and statutory revenue, there is more consistency in the revenue streams over time as represented by pro forma and annual recurring revenue. We're now on Slide 9. Slide 9 represents our TCV, statutory revenue, pro forma subscription revenue and annual recurring revenue by geographic region and by product set. The Asia Pacific chart clearly shows the volatility of TCV and statutory revenue and the more stable reflection of pro forma and ARR, similarly with the transaction below it. We're on Slide 10. This slide represents pro forma subscription revenue for both the geographic product sets, geographic and product sets. For simplicity, we've combined Transact and Infrastructure in the geographic set and Europe and APAC in the product set. These charts provide more insight than the previous -- provided in previous presentations. To be clear, these charts are not to be confused with either the TCV charts on prior slides or the statutory revenue shown in the financial report. Pro forma revenue is a trailing measure of performance and the result of historic TCV achieved. The numbers represent recurring revenue based on an amortized license fees, maintenance and SaaS revenue for the year. What do we glean from these charts? For each region, we can see that the makeup of a product and whether the product set is growing or declining. For instance, APAC has higher subscription revenue from Transact and Infrastructure compared to Collaborate. It's also showing growth across both product sets with Collaborate growing at a faster rate. If we take Transact from the bottom row, we see that it has an equal distribution between the Americas and rest of the world, with the Americas growing more strongly. Turning to Slide 11, operating costs. We finished the FY '22 financial year with 202 staff compared to 240 at the start of the year. The decline in staff numbers reflects the realignment of the business to the changing market environment. Our innovation agenda remains unchanged as illustrated by the left-hand chart. The jump in product and technology expenditure primarily reflects the amortization of new cloud platforms and the release of new products to market. Our sales and marketing spend pulled back during COVID with less travel and trade shows. This trend will slowly reverse as customer face-to-face meetings and market events return. FY '22 represents the first year where we incentivized the sales team on TCV, will continue with TCV to be the key metric to drive FY '23 performance. Slide 12 highlights that our R&D innovation agenda remains firm. Across the last 2 years, we've enhanced our cloud platform and brought new solutions to market for both Collaborate and Transact. We've continued our investment into on-premise solutions and combination of all these investors have facilitated a capability to serve on-premises, hybrid and pure cloud environments. This means we can flex with the market and support our customers on their individual journeys. I'll now pass to John for the rest of the presentation.

Thank you, Matthew. Now on Slide 14. IR was founded more than 30 years ago. We have over 600 customers across our global enterprise customer base, including more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies. We serve customers in more than 60 countries through offices in the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Australia via a global channel-driven distribution network. We had strong growth in users on our SaaS platform for our cloud and hybrid solutions over the prior year. These customers rely on our solutions for performance and experience management of their core mission-critical systems. Moving to Slide 15. Over 25% of Fortune 500 companies are customers as well as the top U.S. banks and telcos. And although 95% of our revenue is outside of Australia, 6 of the top 20 Australian companies by market capitalization are customers. Key to our go-to-market, our partners and service providers, companies like NTT, CDW and Verizon embed our solutions into their managed services that they on-sell to their customers. Slide 16 details our multi-year phased transition: innovation, execution and scale. The innovation phase kicked off with the launch of our SaaS platform as the foundation for a range of new products. This innovation is ongoing, and the launch of new and enhanced products will continue to meet current and emerging customer use cases. We're deep in the execution phase. And whilst it's taking longer than we anticipated, we are confident that our go-to-market strategy is right and the return to face-to-face engagement like trade shows will assist our demand generation. We're evolving our first-generation new products with our customers and partners to better position ourselves and grow. As we transition to scale in the future, we will move from contracting upfront revenues to better-quality subscription revenues with higher levels of annual recurring revenues. Now on Slide 17. The past couple of years have been difficult -- a difficult trading environment for IR. Our performance has been impacted by both internal and external factors. This slide looks to provide some insight to the key challenges. In the Collaborate product line, [ by ] TCV and revenue have been negatively impacted by shorter contract lengths. This has been driven by customers evaluating their future requirements, be that on-premises, hybrid and Unified-Communications-as-a-Service, or UCaaS, think of Teams or Zoom. In H1 FY '22, average contract length dropped to a low of 2.3 years from above 4 years pre-pandemic. Our Collaborate customers are large. The average number of users per customer is greater than 25,000. These organizations go through a rigorous evaluation process when selecting new solutions. We've launched a flex license to assist customers in using our solutions, on-premises, SaaS or hybrid, but with limited take-up. We have experienced a time lag as customers first assess vendor tools. Our value proposition is anchored on mission-critical environments with use cases that are real-time, high volume and high complexity. As enterprise customers respond to the demands of hybrid working, new use cases are emerging. For example, being able to troubleshoot an employee's home network. Customers are grappling with new challenges, which results in significant pressure on our product and engineering teams to respond in a dynamic market. The Transact and Infrastructure product portfolio have different challenges. Our investment in new solutions for real-time and high-value payments is taking time to get market traction. New payment schemes are continuing to be rolled out across the world, but this is often a slow stop-start process. However, we are well positioned to support both central banks and scheme participants as they come online. We've made investments in new products like payment analytics. These new products to Generation 1 and are highly innovative. That said, the sales cycles are complex with major payment processes and financial institutions. We've messaged for some years that our Infrastructure product is impacted by some customers moving off HPE nonstop. Our solution is specific to this hardware platform. As we assess our operational performance, sales execution and performance has not been at par. The environment over the last 2 years has been challenging. However, we did not respond to some of those changes quickly enough and have been impacted as a result. Similarly, the pressure on our product and engineering teams has been heightened to bring new products to market, to address new use cases and new competitors. Anticipating the market as well as increasing our speed to market has had its challenges. Like all businesses, particularly in the technology sector, the last couple of years has seen much higher levels of employee turnover and cost pressure. We are not immune, and we have witnessed it across all functions of our business. The loss of experienced employees has been particularly challenging. Now on Slide 18. As we work hard to return the business to growth, there are 5 broad areas where I would like to provide an update. Clearly, our principal focus is on sales execution and performance. We've refreshed our senior sales leadership, focused on experienced business builders, Rodney Foreman is now 4 months into running the Americas and is creating real momentum. Jason Barker, a successful operator at IR, took on expanded responsibility to run EMEA and APAC, relocating back to London. Again, there is a clear plan to good momentum with improved sales discipline and customer engagement. We've reinvigorated some key partnerships working with ACI. Their sales organization will now take our new Transact products to market. We are close to finalizing a reseller agreement with HPE for our Infrastructure products for their sales organization to sell our products. We have several key renewals with service providers in this half pipeline. Leveraging the return of travel, we have invested in getting back to face-to-face engagements, leveraging trade shows and customers willing to meet in person is both improving our demand generation, and our end customer commitment to progress opportunities. There is a strong renewal portfolio in H1 to leverage both the renewal and up-sell. We've also increased prices by 7% across our product portfolios. Turning to product and matching our resources to the opportunity, we have made some tweaks. As we anticipate the market and emerging use cases, we are working closely with key enterprise customers in a co-innovation-type model. A recent win with a large U.S. health insurer is a good example, where we are developing a solution for a Genesis cloud contact center environment to support their 18,000 agents. At the same time, we're seeing a momentum shift with new payment schemes, particularly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, a proof point being a new real-time customer win this year with a Middle East Central Bank and the opportunity to extend to their participant banks. In support of this, we're embedding R&D resources into the field on secondment-type engagements. This brings us closer to the customer and shortens the innovation cycle as the feedback is almost real-time. Our development process has been revamped and to break releases into smaller increments. This adds velocity to the release cycle and drives a stronger focus on value in each deliverable. Combined with this, we have refactored the product road map to be more closely aligned to near-term opportunities. Tied to my earlier co-innovation point, the voice of the customer is stronger in this working model. We've realigned our cost base to our strategy in the execution phase that we are in. This has resulted in a 10% reduction in workforce and realignment of our organizational model, including streamlining our sales regions into 2, bringing product and engineering together and combining our services and support organizations. Research and development spend has increased rigor, as already referenced, to nearer-term opportunity. There's been a significant increase in employee remuneration in our industry, and we are not immune. We have responded from both a cash and equity standpoint. We have moved to a simpler, more aligned organizational model and are focused on providing career opportunities like overseas secondments to attract and retain key employees. Receivables management is a key focus to bring down our days sales outstanding, or DSO. Cash receipts is now more closely aligned to our forma revenue, and there has been no debtor factoring in the preceding year. Moving to Slide 19. IR's target market is 590 million seats across telephony and cloud conference, with a heavy emphasis on those 172 million sophisticated conferencing users. Today, we have 5.8 million users or around 3% share. The addressable market is growing at over 6% CAGR, driving the requirement for specialized tools to manage these complex environments is the increase in remote working and the user expectation that they should be able to do their work seamlessly. The CIO's challenge is balancing user experience and expectations with increasing complexity of managing these environments and the proliferation of devices. Now on Slide 20. The uptake of remote working was accelerated by the pandemic. At the same time, the conferencing and unified communications market is moving rapidly to cloud, led by Microsoft Teams. The mix of cloud, on-premises and hybrid solutions increases complexity. And managing this complexity is core to IR's value proposition. We support existing on-premises solutions as well as hybrid and cloud solutions, effectively supporting a customer's digital transformation journey. User experience is key, which comes with the expectation that their collaboration and UC environment, just works. When they don't, support staff are under pressure to quickly identify and resolve the source of the issue. Slide 21 highlights the opportunity for Transact -- or highlights the opportunity for Transact is significant, with IR currently monitoring approximately 600 million transactions a day and a global payment CAGR of 18.6% forecast in FY '23. This growth has been brought about by the rapid rate of change in the payment sector over the last couple of years and the overwhelming shift to cashless payments. Moving to Slide 22. We continue to see a massive shift in consumers and businesses moving to noncash payment methods. In support of this is the expansion of payment types and channels, increasing use of debit and credit cards as well as real-time payments, displacing legacy batch systems. With all of this comes increasing complexity, additional systems, applications and the greater risk of issues and failure. In response to this, we have launched new products and continue to enhance existing ones to upsell to existing customers and win new ones. User expectations continue to increase around a seamless experience. At the same time, payments providers are looking to monetize their data to acquire new customers, grow revenues and optimize costs. Now on Slide 23. We're in the execution phase of our strategy. We have a firm foundation from which to grow and have clear priorities for the year ahead. Critical to our return to growth is the Americas and Europe. We've made leadership changes; enhanced our go-to-market model to balance requirements of retention, up-sell and winning new business. Getting new products, we have launched into the hands of our customers and prospects is a critical focus. We've had some early wins, and the focus is now to accelerate the adoption and take-up with customers. We have clear line of sight to our customers' renewals where they may be at risk as well as our customers' plans for their unified communications and payment platforms. Whilst we can't influence their migration decisions, we have optimized our go-to-market to maximize our retention opportunity. Our phased strategy kicked off with bringing a SaaS platform and products to market. In modern software development, this implies moving quickly to get generation one product in market. Focused work is ongoing with customers to bring generation two products to enhance performance, add new capabilities and reduce cost of running the platform. We've realigned the company to be more efficient and retain a strong balance sheet to support our self-funding model of innovation and growth. Moving to Slide 24. Whilst we're not providing specific guidance, we will provide insights to the first 4 months of this fiscal year via a trading update. As has been the case in prior periods, many of our contracts closed in December. Some of this is driven by the renewal portfolio where the contract renewal date falls in December. Year-to-date, up until 31st of October this year, we have been pleased to see contract length continue to trend back from a low point of 2.3 years in H1 FY '22 to 3.2 years. This is positive as customers demonstrate confidence in a longer-term commitment to IR's solutions, and it drives higher TCV. ARR is trending in line with the same time last year, and we have added 10 new customers. Based on the AUD-to-USD exchange rate, we anticipate a foreign exchange tailwind for TCV whilst U.S.-denominated expenses will go the other way. Senior field leadership observed that there does not appear to be an impact to customer IT budgets or projects despite rising inflation and a more uncertain economic environment. The leadership changes made to our field operations are showing early positive signs. There's been an uptick in momentum, greater discipline in deal management, an increased level of engagement with decision-makers and improving forecast accuracy. As we head into December, greater than 75% of the remaining pipeline to close is made up of renewals. This is a positive as our renewal rates continue to be close to 90%, and we are working to get this back above 90%. We remain confident that the company is well-positioned to self-fund innovation and long-term growth. Thank you. I'll now hand back to Peter.

Thank you, John and Matthew. The first item of business is the consideration of the company's FY '22 financial statements and reports. There's no formal vote required on this item of business, so I now invite shareholders to ask questions or make comment on those financial statements and reports and on the operations and management of the company. Please remember that shareholders and proxies can submit their questions at any time during the meeting when logged on to the Computershare meeting platform. Will Witherow, Company Secretary, will act as moderator today. And our webcast will moderate audio questions via the phone line. Moderator, are there any presubmitted questions from shareholders on this item?

Mr. Chairman, there are 2 presubmitted questions. The first is, will the Board give consideration to amending the remuneration structure to include an EPS growth rate?

Our long-term incentive program over the years has been varied based on both tenure and on specific hurdles that need to be met. Our current LTI program is based on hurdles around share price, not so much EPS, but based around meeting a specific share price hurdles over that period of time. This is laid out in the rem report.

The second question is, will we give consideration to adopt a minimum shareholding requirement for the executive team and the Board of Integrated Research?

Yes, this question came up a couple of years ago actually. And at the time we took it on board from our shareholders, we went to a third-party organization outside the company that did a peer review on what other organizations -- listed organizations of our size were doing in this regard. And as a result of that, we developed a share purchase program for directors and senior executives. That share purchase policy is available on our website, if anyone would like to look at it.

That's all for presubmitted.

Okay. I now invite shareholders in person to ask questions. Are there any questions for those in attendance in person on this particular item?

I'm just wondering if you could comment on where you see the most opportunities in terms of geography. Is it Asia, Europe or America?

I'll pass that over to John, I think, because he's closer to the geographies than I am. So John, maybe you could cover that.

Yes. I don't think there's a concentration by geography. As some of my comments referenced, for example, in our Transact portfolio, our new real-time payments product is better suited right now in Southeast Asia and the Middle East because those sovereign governments are rolling out real-time payment network or rails. So that drives a better demand. The U.S., by contrast, is slower on the adoption of real-time. I think in terms of where the businesses have performed over the last couple of years, I would expect to see a stronger rebound in the U.S. I gave some green-shoots commentary around an uptick in momentum, certainly an impact of new sales leadership and a better sales cadence. And then in Europe, similarly, I think that, based on the last couple of trading years, I would expect that there's certainly latent opportunity in the market that we'll benefit from.

Can you just give us a bit more information about Asia and exactly what you mean by Asia, where the focus is? I know your office is in Singapore but...

Yes, so we -- our office is in Singapore, but we have a field organization that, again, because travel has come back, travel quite extensively. I referenced in my comments a recent win with a central bank in the Middle East. So we do reasonably well with financial services in Middle East and Africa. And that win was tied to a sovereign government, essentially putting in real-time payment rails. We see the same activity in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, but that's in our Transact portfolio. We continue to see good demand for our Collaborate portfolio across all of our Southeast Asian countries. So that hopefully answers your question.

Yes. My question is around the valuation. I'm a longtime shareholder, and I've been buying recently. What I don't understand in terms of the valuation, it's trading. If you look at it, it's trading at 30% below book value and an enterprise value to cash, it's 2.8x. Compare that to say, WiseTech, which is critical software, WiseTech is 54x EBITDA and 14x book. The company is sitting on $12 million in cash. One of the best investments you can make is probably buy back the shares. Is there any -- has the Board ever considered share buyback?

Not at this stage, we haven't. No. We continually look at all options, obviously, but we haven't seriously considered a share buyback program at this stage.

It just seems a shame. I mean I agree with all those new metrics, but the other metrics I use, the market just doesn't appreciate it at this stage. I'd say I'm a big fan, but it's just the market doesn't...

One of our priorities at the moment for our cash, obviously, is to continue with our development of our product. We feel that there's a need to create new use cases for the market and increase our value to the market. So we're going to continue to push dollars into product development. I think it's important for us as a company to maintain our development momentum and continue to bring new products to market.

Maybe just a bit more color. I know this is a lot of money spent on R&D. Is that stay-in-business R&D or new-product R&D?

It's a bit of both. Obviously, with our existing products, we have to keep up to date with compliance with the other products that we use within our product set, databases, et cetera. We also have to add additional functionality as required by our customers and requested by our customers to our existing product. But at the same time, we need to innovate and bring new product to market so that we can enter new markets. Now a good example of that is the win that we recently had in the Middle East for real-time payments, with a new product development over and above our existing Transact payment products. So we will continue to do that, invest in new products. John, do you have anything to add to that?

Yes. I think our R&D spend has been skewed in the last couple of years to new product, which is also tied to the launch of our new SaaS platform. And from a particularly Collaborate perspective, the take-up we're seeing is not so much fewer SaaS, but it's actually leveraging the SaaS component in a hybrid manner. So our biggest win last year was with a large -- in fact, I think we've referenced them as Procter & Gamble, and we won that business through HCL, the large Indian service provider. I think it's 165,000 seats. They are a large Cisco environment on-premise, but they've also rolled out in the process of rolling out teams globally. So they are using our team's collector to essentially pull the data in from a team's environment so that their operations teams can provide user experience and performance of that system, but still working in the on-premise environment. So we're trying to balance that spend. Our working model in R&D is -- it's a term that I've learned in the last year or so. I think we call it wagile. So it's a combination of waterfall and agile. So we still do our 2 primary releases a year, which is principally tied to our on-premise capability. And then a lot of our newer technology is more on a dynamic basis as those sections and I referenced in my commentary that we've reduced the size of increments of those deliverables so that we can get them into them much faster.

So the last question, I was just watching the company's promotional video on the transition to Collaborate. And they're saying they're offering 30% discounts for people to transition. When are those discounts recognized? Upfront or at the end of the contracts?

If there's a discount, that wouldn't be negotiated at the front end of the contract.

Any other questions?

John and Peter, it seems from what we hear that there's substantial opportunity in the Transact part of the business, yet I see that only 6% of development spend has gone towards that area. Firstly, what percentage of sales expense is going towards the Transact area of the business? And what are you doing to look to capitalize on the opportunities in that space?

I'll start with an answer, and I'll get John to follow up, perhaps, Matt, if we get into numbers. When we say the development over the last couple of years, only 6% has gone to Transact. A lot of development over the last 2 years has been on our base cloud platform. And that platform, when we first did the implementation for it and created use spaces was targeted at the collaborate market. But our Transact payments analytics product is a SaaS-based product that sits on top of that same platform. So a lot of the development effort and dollars that we're spending is for both product lines rather than specifically one or the other. Our plan for this year is to ramp up our Transact development, now that we've got the platform stable. John?

Thanks, Peter. I think you're poking the bear a little bit. It sounds like you're in our internal meetings where we're arguing over allocation of R&D budget. Our CTO is in the room as well. So he's on the front line of that. In terms of our go-to-market, about 25% of our field organization would be oriented to Transact and Infrastructure. Bear in mind that the average deal size in that part of our business is higher than in our Collaborate business. So we're doing larger deals. And I think, several years ago, I think the largest customer we have, which is JPMC, the transaction was over $10 million. So that tends to be larger transactions, so individuals can carry a larger individual quota. Following on from what Peter has already shared around the R&D spend, it's healthy tension inside the business, having brought new products for payment analytics, real-time payments and high-value, we think we're getting it right. But in the current phase, we've probably moved to leave it back a little bit more to Transact and Infrastructure not so much. I mean that's more a product that we continue to just make sure that we're current with HPE's versions and as customers upgrade.

And one more from me. You have repeatedly spoken about delays in purchasing decisions. How do you differentiate between a delay in purchasing decision and actually missing out on a sale? Those comments seem to have been fairly elongated in terms of time frames.

Again, I'll get John to give you detail. But at the Board level, on a regular basis, we receive a win/loss report, when we look at each deal that hasn't come through against forecast. And it comes from the field. They do an evaluation of whether that deal is a deal that slipped, whether it has gone away entirely, they're not doing anything. Whether it's been delayed or whether we've actually lost it to a competitor. So we understand the metrics behind each deal that we don't specifically get. There are a lot of deals that either the customer will defer the decision because of their own internal machinations and what they're deciding, and some deals just go away totally. So John, do you have anything to add on?

Yes, it's important to think of our portfolio in the context of renewals and new business, and we break new business into 2 categories, new to existing and net new. On the renewal side, I think over the last couple of years, we've tightened the cadence with which we run that renewal portfolio. I referenced in my comments that we've also taken a general pricing increase across the portfolio of 7%. So we are in the process of negotiating renewals that include that uptick in pricing. And we're reasonably pleased. As I did reference in my closing remarks, we would like to get our renewal rate back up into the 90s again. It's tracking very close. In terms of yields delaying and pushing, it's more likely, obviously, in the new part of our business, particularly net new customers, because you don't have an existing relationship to leverage. I think, in our August earnings, we referenced that our results were impacted by 16 significant opportunities pushing outside of the year. We've subsequently closed some of those. But in an environment that we're currently in, I would say that sales cycles have elongated on the basis that customers are very diligent around where they will and won't spend their money. And lastly, in my trading update comments, the pleasing factors that our 2 senior sales leaders and certainly prior -- in preparation for today's meeting, I'd quiz them pretty hard on what they were seeing in terms of market sentiment. And their indication was that they didn't feel that there was a predominant feeling that there was a retraction on spending. That doesn't mean that won't change, but that's our current view.

Any other questions from the floor?

[ Adam Beasley ] from Smarter Capital. Thank you to the Board and Peter, and all for today. Just a quick question is probably John's wheelhouse. Slide 24, I think there's some very positive information on that from an update perspective. I was surprised at that substantial uplift in the contract term, as you say, from a 2.3 years to back to 3.2. Could you just give us a little bit of color around what sort of duration of contracts being written to have caused that significant increase?

Thanks, Adam. So if you take our -- if I say that we've got 2 broad product groups, if I combine Transact and Infrastructure, that part of our portfolio has an average weighted life of contract closer to 5 years. And in fact, that's largely customer-driven. So large financial processes, financial institutions, they generally value known costs. So they want to lock in a contract, known cost for a longer period. Where we've seen the volatility has been in the collaborate portfolio. And we've messaged previously that some of that was driven by customers who are in the process of deciding, "Do I continue to sweat the asset of my Cisco or Avaya environment?" or "Do I make a bigger investment and move to Teams, Zoom, et cetera?" And so what is happening in those buying decisions was that they might say, "Look, we're just going to renew for a year, and then we'll check point next year." Our sales organization, I think, has become much more diligent in saying, "Well, that's fine. If you renew for a year, the price point is much more different than if you commit to us for 3 or 5 years. So the major change in the 2.3 pulling back to just over 3, I think, is in the Collaborate portfolio. And I'll share an example. So one of the major states in the U.S. just renewed their unified communications contract with us. It was previously a 3-year agreement. It's a large Avaya environment. And they, in fact, pushed us for a 5-year deal. So they wanted to lock in costs, et cetera. So I think there is a growing confidence in the market coming out of large enterprises evaluating, "Are we going to continue to sweat the asset of our on-premise?" Large organizations, I think, are getting more comfortable with the fact that the foreseeable future, they will be in a hybrid environment, and they'll continue to invest in their on-premises.

I just have a question on the next slide [indiscernible] I think that just in terms of continued [indiscernible] have contracted, we see an impact from those filings in this [indiscernible] are they still being integrated?

So from a customer booking standpoint, we have a committed signed contract with those 10 new customers, and that's up until the 31st of October. We will see a booking impact on our statutory results, so you'll see upfront revenue recognized because that's our model. You'll also see them reflected in our TCV and, ultimately, our ARR, which will be a trailing measure that will also reflect those contract wins.

Okay. There are no more questions from the floor. I ask the phone moderator. Are there any audio questions on the phone?

Mr. Chairman, there are no phone questions on these matters.

Thank you. And our moderator, Will, are there any text questions on this item?

Yes, there currently are 4 text questions. I'll read them off. The first is, given the low share price, has there been any takeover interest?

Given the share -- low share price, we often have tire kickers come along and have a look at the company and talk to us about opportunities, and we deal with them as they come up. Nothing concrete at this stage.

The next question is, if clients are moving off HPE non-stop, why can't IR develop products for whatever form our clients are moving to?

With years, we've had a product in the market that can provide similar capability for distributed systems, et cetera. We have not prioritized that as an area of investment. And in fact, at the moment, for HPE, I referenced that we're very close to finalizing a reseller agreement. We believe that our efforts are best focused from a go-to-market perspective to actually win more of the existing HPE noncustomers. When we talk about attrition, it's low single digit of customers moving off that environment. And we are -- HPE continues to release new operating system versions for that program or hardware environment. So we don't see that there's a short tail on that environment.

Okay. The next question is, how long do you expect it will be before the company will be sufficiently profitable in order that it can resume paying dividends?

That's a very good question, but a very difficult question. This next year, FY '23, I think, is going to be a year of building the business and getting the business back on track. I can't predict when we would be at a point where we would pay revenues -- pay dividends, I'm sorry. We continue -- as I said, continually looking at reinvesting our cash back into the organization and back into development. So at this stage, it would be very difficult to say when we'll be going back to a dividend base.

The last question is, does the company use any financing or factoring of receivables throughout any part of the financial year?

I think that was covered in the presentation from Matthew. But I know in the last fiscal year, we've done no factoring at all.

Thank you. That is all the text questions on this item.

Okay. Mr. Julian O'Brien, partner of Ernst & Young, is available to answer any questions relevant to the conduct of the audit or in preparation for the audit and the content of their report. Are there any questions from those in attendance in person for the auditors? No? Phone moderator, are there any audio questions for the auditors?

Mr. Chairman, there are no questions on the telephone at the moment.

Thank you. Will, Mr. Moderator, are there any text questions for the auditors?

There are no text questions for the auditors.

Okay. Thank you, Julian. You get off a bit easier. I advise that directors have not declared an interim or a final dividend during the fiscal year. And now we move on to resolutions. So there are 4 separate resolutions before the meeting. A number of proxy votes have been received prior to the meeting for each of the 4 resolutions. A summary of the proxy votes received shown on the slide on the screen. Yes. Okay. As previously advised, voting on all resolutions is being conducted by poll, as a means of providing transparency on all voted capital. This is in line with best governance practices. Voting will remain open until all the resolutions have been put before the meeting for consideration. I appoint representatives of Computershare to act as returning officers for the poll. Results of the poll will be announced to the ASX as soon as practicable, following conclusion of the meeting. Resolution 1 is an advisory resolution to adopt the Remuneration Report. In accordance with Section 250R of the Corporations Act, the company must put to the vote a resolution that the Remuneration Report be adopted. The full remuneration report is contained in the company's 2022 annual report. I remind members that this is an advisory resolution and refer you to the explanatory notes accompanying the notice of meeting. The motion to be voted on by shareholders and proxies present is that the Remuneration Report for the company for the financial year ended 30 June 2022, forming part of the 2022 annual report, is adopted. There are a number of proxies cast, which are displayed on the screen for resolution 1. As Chair, it is my intention to vote all open proxies given to me in favor of Resolution 1. Are there any questions from shareholders in attendance, in the audience, in person for Resolution 1? Phone moderator, are there any audio questions for Resolution 1?

Mr. Chairman, there are no questions from the phone at the moment.

Thank you. Moderator, are there any text questions for resolution 1?

Mr. Chairman, there are no text questions on this item.

Resolution 2. Resolution 2 is the issue of performance rights for Mr. John Ruthven. As required by ASX Listing Rule 10.14, shareholder approval is required before issuing any securities to a Director under an employee incentive scheme. I refer members to the explanatory notes accompanying the Notice of Meeting. I can confirm that Mr. Ruthven may not vote on this resolution. Sorry, John. The motion to be voted on by shareholders and proxies present is that for the purposes of ASX Listing Rules 10.14 and for all other purposes, approval is given for the company to grant up to 700,000 performance rights over ordinary shares in the company to its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, John Ruthven; and the acquisition of up to 700,000 ordinary shares in the company by John Ruthven, on vesting of the performance rights, in accordance with the Integrated Research rights and option plans on the terms set out in the explanatory notes accompanying the Notice of Meeting. There are a number of proxies cast, which are displayed on the screen for Resolution 2. As Chair, it is my intention to vote all open proxies given to me in favor of Resolution 2. Are there any questions from shareholders in attendance in person on Resolution 2? None?

I'm just wondering if the Board could explain that with an 81% decline in annual profit for 2022 and a decline in all other financial indices, as is Page 23 of the Annual Report, how can the Board justify paying any STIs or LTIs to its executive KMPs in this year? That's particularly when none of the shareholders are getting any of the value for their shareholdings.

Okay. So in reference to this specific motion and the reference to Mr. Ruthven's LTIs, this is a long-term incentive program based on performance of the company. There are a number of hurdles in the LTI, if you've had a look at it. They're quite considerable hurdles. And I believe that if John is successful in meeting those hurdles and earning those LTIs, then the shareholders will be of benefit to that. Just off the top of my head, the hurdles are $0.80 a share, $1.20 a share and $1.60 a share over the next 3 years. So one of the things that we always wrestle with at the Board and one of the things we want to do with the Board is incent our people for performance. And we've spent a lot of time in the last 12 months readjusting everything from the commission plans for salespeople, all the way to senior executive to base them on company performance as based around shareholder value. Our Head of -- Norman [indiscernible] Allan, do you want to add anything to that at all or?

Just to clarify that this allocation of LTI is for future, not for the past. So last year's performance would have been judged for last year's LTI, which was an option scheme with a straight price, I think it's around about $1.92. So that scheme is underwater because the performance was not met. So this new scheme, which is John's LTI going forward for fiscal year '23. John will only get that, as Peter said, if he meets the hurdles, which is a $0.80 share price this time next year, $1.20 the year after and $1.60, which means all shareholders would have gotten rewarded as well as would John when he met those hurdles. Okay. So just to clarify that last year's performance was on a previous LTI. This is for the future.

Okay. Any other questions from the floor? Our phone moderator, are there any audio questions for Resolution 2?

Mr. Chairman, there are no phone questions on this matter.

Moderator, are there any text questions on Resolution 2?

Mr. Chairman, there are no text questions on this resolution.

Okay. Resolution 3, in accordance with the company's constitution, an election of directors must take place each year. Accordingly, 1/3 of Non-Executive Directors must retire every year in rotation and are eligible for reelection. This year, it is only myself who retires and offers himself for reelection. So I will now stand aside and ask Allan Brackin to take over the chair for Resolution 3. Allan?

Thanks, Peter. As Peter said, he's up for reelection. We see how it goes. Okay. And first, before we do any voting or talk about the resolution, well, I'm going to ask Peter to say a few words on his position and where it's going.

So those that have been long-term shareholders of the company probably know me reasonably well because I have been a director with the company for a number of years. I took over from the -- from Paul Brandling as the Chair in March last year. It has been an interesting time as we've discussed already. And I -- one of my character faults is I tend to be stubborn [indiscernible] from time to time. So I am determined to help guide this company back to profitability and back to a reasonable share price. So I offer myself for reelection as a Director of the company. Thank you.

Thanks, Peter. Okay. So the motion to be voted by shareholders proxies present is that Peter Lloyd, a director retiring in accordance with Article 6.1 of the company's constitution and being eligible, offers himself for reelection is reelected as a Director of the company. The Board, with Peter abstaining, considers that Peter's candidacy, in respect of his individual merits, background and experience, plus overall Board composition, and recommends that you vote in favor of this election. The proxies are on the board and looking very strong. As temporary Chair, it is my intention to vote all open proxies given to me in favor of this resolution. Are there any questions from shareholders in attendance in regards to this resolution? Phone moderator, are there any audio questions?

There are no questions on the phone at the moment.

And any text questions, Will?

There are no text questions on this resolution.

Thanks. In that case, I will hand it back to Peter.

Thanks, Allan. Okay. Resolution 4 is for the reelection of a director. So in accordance with the company's constitution, a director appointed during the year to fill a casual vacancy, must resign and stand for reelection at the next AGM. Ms. Cathy Aston was appointed as an Independent Non-Executive Director in April 2022 and offers herself for reelection. As Cathy is a new addition to the Board, I now invite Cathy to address shareholders.

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to be standing for election as a Director on the IR Board today. I joined the Board, as Peter said, in April this year, having been appointed to fill a casual vacancy. And since that time, I've also chaired the Audit and Risk Committee. My executive career was predominantly in the digital telco and technology sector, where I held senior roles in finance, marketing and strategy and digital business. This included CEO and CFO roles on companies throughout Asia. As a Non-Executive Director, I've had over 10 years experience in listed and unlisted boards, both as Chair and Chair of Audit and Risk Committees. I was attracted to IR because of its solid value proposition and providing critical support to business applications and systems. Also, as everyone knows, it has a stellar global customer base, which I believe provides a very solid foundation for future growth. I believe, alongside my fellow directors, which offers a very diverse and experienced Board, that I can make a valuable contribution IR in achieving its growth aspirations. Thank you.

Thank you, Cathy. The motion to be voted on by shareholders and proxies present is that Cathy Aston, our Director retiring in accordance to Article 6.1(e) of the company's constitution and being eligible offers herself for reelection is reelected as a director of the company. The Board, Cathy abstaining, considers that Cathy's candidacy in respect to her individual merits, background and experience, plus overall Board composition, and recommends you a vote in favor of this election. There are a number of proxies cast, which are displayed on the screen for Resolution 4. As Chair, it is my intention to vote all open proxies given to me in favor of Resolution 4. Are there any questions from shareholders in person regarding Resolution 4? Phone moderator, are there any audio questions for Resolution 4?

Mr. Chairman, there are no questions on the phone at the moment.

Moderator, are there any text questions for Resolution 4?

Mr. Chairman, there are no text questions on this resolution.

Thank you. As previously advised, a number of proxy votes have been received prior to the meeting for each of the 4 resolutions. A summary of the proxy votes received for all resolutions is now shown on your screen. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our discussion on the items of business. Shortly, I will close the voting system. Please ensure that you cast your vote on all 4 resolutions. As Chair and as previously advised in the meeting, it is my intention to vote all open proxies given to me in favor of each resolution. I will now pause for about 30 seconds to allow you to complete your voting. [Voting]

Ladies and gentlemen, voting -- are still going? No, no, that's -- I've already voted this proxy. Thanks. Okay. So ladies and gentlemen, voting is now closed. The results of these votes will be released to the ASX later today. There being no other business, I declare that the 2022 Annual General Meeting to be closed. Thank you for your attendance. If you are attending in person, you are welcome to join us for tea and coffee here at the Museum at Sydney. Thank you.