NICE Ltd. (NICE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I hope you enjoyed the general sessions. Let's now move into the investor session where you will hear from Barak, Craig and Beth. Following the presentations, we will open it up for Q&A. Please begin submitting your questions during the presentations. And don't forget to view the customer-led sessions, which opened at 3:45 p.m. and play until 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, just follow the links in the lobby homepage. So without any further delay, I will now turn it over to Barak...

Welcome, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the morning's general session and the keynote from Paul and Barry. Following this investor session and the Q&A, stay tuned for the keynote from former President, George W. Bush. We are glad you can attend today and joined in more than 20,000 attendees at interactions this year, including customers, partners and industry analysts and, of course, all of you are investors and financial analysts. Interaction this year is all about the frictionless revolution and how our CXI framework expands customer service beyond the contact center and enables complete smart customer journeys from any digital doorstep to a prepared agent on a single, fully integrated platform. In today's presentation, I would like to share with you our vision and strategy and how our innovation and tight execution further solidifies our leadership position in our rapidly growing markets. In my opening presentation, I refer to the frictionless evolution, the major impact it already had in our markets and the way in which it is going to continue into the next few decades. While there are multiple industries that are well into the frictionless evolution, we operate in 3 highly specialized markets that are all on the verge of their own frictionless evolution. These markets are now ready to take the first steps and are focusing a lot of their attention and resources in making sure they lead the frictionless evolution in their respective domains. With our unique assets and market leadership, we are in a perfect position to lead those markets to a frictionless future. While this vision is tightly aligned with our long-term strategy that I will present today, we are starting this journey already as we speak in 2022. In customer engagement, we see a rush to digital as consumers from all generations have been embracing digital at an exponential pace, while organizations have been adopting digital at a linear pace. The attempt to have linear growth catch up with exponential adoption is destined for failure and is the major source of friction in the customer service space. Our CX mission is to create frictionless consumer experiences. For financial crime and compliance, bank started their journey towards the frictional by catching up on the front-end services. Already today, you can consume banking in advanced digital way for opening a bank account in a matter of minutes or getting a loan completely online. But the reality is that banks cannot take this vision forward due to the major bottleneck at the back end, predominantly due to outdated compliance processes that are amassed for trust and safety, but an enormous roadblock for speeds. Our mission in the financial crime and compliance world is to remove these roadblocks to create frictionless trusts. Lastly, the criminal justice system can be followed as a functional pipe transporting evidence effectively between policing, prosecution and courts. You will be amazed to know that 90% of evidence today is still managed with boxes, filled with paper and stored in physical archives. The eruption of digital as an essential source of evidence is creating an over load on this delicate system, and it is introducing a high level of friction, threatening its ability to remain effective and unblock the wheel of justice to get to the truth. Our mission in the criminal justice and public safety space is to create frictionless justice. As you can see, there is a common theme on the 3 markets in which we operate where digital is creating a major challenge, but at the same time, an opportunity to revolutionize those markets and allow them to advance into a frictionless reality. While these are 3 specialized markets, they share a similar playbook to navigate through this frictionless transformation and require an almost identical technology stack with separate use cases. The only way to drive a true frictionless evolution is with the power of our unified seamlessly integrated 3 cloud platforms across our markets in which we invested heavily over the last several years. Each of these platforms seeks one for customer engagement, excite for financial crime and compliance and evidence center for public safety have been built with the same ingredients, all encompass a deep, broad portfolio of fully integrated solutions that cover all market segments in all geographies, all are built with next-gen, digital analytics and AI capabilities that are unmatched in their specific markets and all our open platforms, which has enabled us to create a massive ecosystem of technology partners. Our platforms get high regards from the marketplace and our customers, and this is the result of the great success we have achieved in these 3 markets. In Financial crime and compliance, we're experiencing great momentum, thanks to both the expansion of X-Sight to the broader customer risk management market as well as major breakthrough we now have in the mid-market, which was a space that only 2 years ago was not available to us. In customer engagement, just last year, we added hundreds of capabilities and dozens of new native applications on CXone with a major focus on AI and digital. And in public safety, we entered a new market in prosecution and greatly expanded our ecosystem of partners on our Evidence Central platform. In the past 12 months, we landed a record number of DA offices that are now standardizing their digital evidence management using our platform. There is so much to speak about when it comes to our 3 platforms. Therefore, I will focus the rest of my presentation on customer engagement and CXone, while Craig will talk about financial crime compliance and our X-Sight platform. Over many decades, we have established significant domain expertise in customer engagement market, a market that has grown rapidly over the past several years. I am pleased with our strong execution in this market and the growth we have achieved as the clear leader. That said, the market opportunities are still vast with 4 distinct stakeholders, each with their own priorities, creating 4 driving forces that are fueling a significant market expansion for the foreseeable future. The first stakeholder is the CX IT -- if in the past, cloud was one more task on CIO's agenda today, completing the transition to the cloud is the top priority. And now IT organizations are in the midst of Maddash to the cloud. Like most industries, the transition to the cloud and the customer engagement began at the low end of the market, where complexity is minimal. The transition then entered the mid-market and is now moving more rapidly into large enterprises and internationally where need for complexity at scale is greatest. The second stakeholder that is driving the expansion in customer engagement market is the customer service operation. Their biggest priority today is focused on automation and AI in order to mitigate the cost and shortage of labor, but at the same time not to compromise on delivering renew CX as brand loyalty is fleeting employees, a key stakeholder that are revolutionizing the customer engagement market. There is no doubt that the pandemic has created a paradigm shift when it comes to the working place. Work from anywhere is no longer a trend that began and ended as the pandemic wind, but further a secular shift that is driving a complete rethink and a transition to a new complete set of modern tools for the customer service employees and managers with a focus on agility and engagement. The last and fourth stakeholder, transforming the customer engagement market are the consumers, today's consumers regardless of generation are 100% digital. They are developing 0 tolerance to brands that are not catching up to their digital speed. They are the most significant driving force of today's digital agenda for enterprises. These 4 stakeholders' agendas is what's behind the growing momentum in the overall transformation that we see in the CX space today and in the foreseeable future. Let me give you a few examples that will help to quantify the size of the opportunity. Cloud adoption is still in the very early innings in customer engagement with 15% to 20% of the market penetrated and even less at the higher end of the market and internationally. That said, cloud adoption is accelerating. And over the next 5 years, cloud is expected to represent 50% of the market. While AI is accelerating as the foundation for NexGen digital and self service, it is still in its very early days. Over the next several years, AI is expected to become more ubiquitous and power 90% of all customer interactions in some form another. That will drive a dramatic shift of businesses budgets from labor to technology. Over 50% of customer service agents are expected to continue to work from home compared with only 5% 2 years ago. As a result, 75% of service organizations are adopting flexible workplace models, which will require them to go through a full modernization cycle of workforce engagement tools. Lastly, we are entering the phase of a full rep and new place of Gen 1 digital solutions with NextGen digital and smart cell service solutions. Over 80% of customer journeys begin at a digital doorstep and conversational AI and self-service is forecasted to grow 50% to 100% in the coming years. So the need for a fully integrated digital solution that provide smart automation is a necessity. As the markets continue to transform to cloud and digital at an accelerated pace, this is reflected in a very large and fast-growing TAM in customer engagement. In addition, the TAM is not only going but transforming as well. With digital and self-service still at very early stage of adoption, the majority of the $7.3 billion TAM in 2021 was comprised of on-premise solutions, especially around omnichannel routing and workforce optimization. -- as the adoption of digital and self-service accelerates, the TAM is expected to shift over the next several years with the percentage of on-premise declining and the percentage of cloud and digital growing to become the majority of the TAM. Beth is going to demonstrate several examples of the uplift we are already seeing, as you add together the shift to the cloud, WEM modernization and the addition of digital and advanced AI. Our strategy from day 1, including acquisitions, the investments in CXone, analytics, AI and digital is now coming together to capture the growing TAM, Executing on this strategy enabled us to develop multiple industry assets that are selling us apart from other competitors. Let me cover some of those assets. You heard me speak at a general session about CXi in the same way that we have created the market standard several years ago with the expanded definition of CCaaS by converging omnichannel routing, WEM and analytics into a single platform, we are now the market-leading force that is further expanding that definition by adding digital and AI into a new framework called CXI. We have invested thousands of man years in expanding CXone to deliver the full potential of CXI by natively adding digital assets into CXone, infusing the platform with market-leading AI -- we have great innovation, technology and products. And at the same time, we have built a complete and open platform that allows our customers to enjoy an industry-leading marketplace. Our DEVone partner network comprised of independent software vendors, developing solution on an open platform with over 400 APIs that are tightly integrated on CXone. These ISVs, our great asset is the extend the functionality of CXone. This large ecosystem of ISVs and the solutions and the CXexchange marketplace makes CXone even more valuable to our customers as they have a wide choice of solutions to help them build out their customer service operations. We have 194 DEvone partners. And in 2021 alone, we have witnessed a 106% growth in annual contract value from the marketplace. Another great asset is our partner ecosystem. We go to market with a diverse set of partners, including our extensive network of international partners that create a powerful multiplier globally. Additionally, we have a growing list of global partners, CRM vendors, UCAS companies and value-added resellers. This partner ecosystem has been instrumental in the growth of CXone, helping to deliver our platform and solutions to enterprises worldwide. In fact, 70% of our CXone business is delivered through this large partner network. And last year, we grew the number of partners by 67%. Our 27,000 large and diversified customer base is an asset that stands above the rest and helps to fuel our growth. There are several pathways to grow with our customer base. For the ones already on the cloud, we continue to upsell and cross-sell additional solutions and seats. For the ones that are on-premise, we are converting them to the cloud. And for all customers, we're upselling digital self-service and AI. Moreover, we are geographically diverse, delivering our solutions to all corners of the globe. We are also adding many new customers per year, bring them on to CXone as they replace their solutions from legacy vendors. We are signing over 200 new logos per quarter to CXone and signed over 1,000 new logos in 2021. Additionally, there is a clear differentiation between NICE and our competitor in the large enterprise market. This is our domain expertise. It is a market that we have succeeded in for decades and provide tremendous growth opportunity ahead as this market is greatly underpenetrated in cloud and digital. Our market leadership had been validated numerous times by all leading industry analysts. We are the only vendor that is considered to be #1 in all distinct market categories that together define the CXI framework, including CCaaS, analytics and WEM -- those of you who have partnered with us for the past few years know that we always operate with a strategic framework in mind, and we focus our efforts to execute on that framework. As I look back to 2014, we set our sights on long-term strategic plans to transition NICE into an enterprise software company, and we refer to it as our NICE 2020 plan. It marked the beginning of a transformation of our product portfolio, the start of our platform strategy and the overhaul of our financial product portfolio. At the start of 2014, we barely had any cloud revenue. Our operating margin was below 20%, and we were a sub-$1 billion revenue company. It was at this time that we made a strategic move to aggressively enter the cloud with the acquisition of inContact and created the industry's only true cloud platform. In the midst of this portfolio transition, we never lost focus on growth and, at the same time, drove a significant change in our profitability profile, increasing the operating margin by an astounding 600 basis points. After reaching the goals we set in NICE 2020 much earlier than expected, we introduced NICE2B, a strategic plan to turn nico a $2 billion revenue company that is an analytics powerhouse with a leadership position in cloud. CXone was introduced and became the clear go-to platform in all market segments, including large enterprises as well as internationally. We expanded our international partner network. We introduced Enlighten, our Air brand and embedded it across the entire platform. With the $2 billion revenue milestone behind us, it is time to introduce our next strategic plan. We are calling it NICE 3D, which stands for dominate, digital and data. As the clear leader in digital and self service and having the industry's only through complete cloud platform with CXone, we are now in a prime position to expand to CXI, taking the clear lead in this next phase of customer service. At the same time, we expect our financial profile to strengthen even further marked by sustainable double-digit top line growth, cloud revenue, comprising more than 80% of total revenue and increasing our profitability to where operating margin is expected to exceed 30%. The first pillar of NICE 3D is to dominate both markets and products as our enormous TAM and our significant assets provide a huge competitive advantage. We will further expand our capabilities using our native platform and at the same time, keep extending to all market segments, both domestically and internationally. I already spoke a lot today about digital and self-service and our clear leadership with CXI -- this is now a top priority in our strategy with a clear goal to build a strong leadership position, same as we've done with all other dimensions of CXI. Lastly, is the opportunity we have with our unmatched data platform. Data clearly set us apart, and we have decades of it. Our ENLIGHTEN AI, which has experienced strong growth is injecting massive amount of CX specific data, which makes our digital and self-service solutions unique. We'll continue to grow ENLIGHTEN AI and monetize it across our platforms and products. In summary, it all boils down to great execution, and I'm proud of the excellent track record we have established over the past many years, led by our committed and seasoned management team. The great execution has led to excellent results, including our clear market leadership, a top-tier financial profile distinguished by double-digit revenue growth, best-in-class profitability and a rock-solid balance sheet that provide us boundless opportunities to continue to grow the business and out-execute our competitors. Thank you, and I will now turn it over to Craig...

Good day. I'm Craig Costigan, the CEO of NICE Actimize. I am excited to share where NICE Actimize has been since we spoke last and where we're headed this year and going forward. NICE Actimize is the market leader in financial crime and compliance. We have more than 800 clients from the largest global financial institutions to the community banks on Main Street. Across these markets, Actimize monitors more than 5 billion transactions per day, and we protect more than $6 trillion daily for our clients and their customers worldwide. Our solutions are mission-critical to financial service providers. Thanks to the benefit of our solutions and that they provide, clients consider Actimize as a strategic business partner and continue to invest in our solutions year after year. Our clients are loyal. In this example, a large multinational bank with over $2 trillion in assets under management, selected NICE Actimize as their partner well over 10 years ago. This relationship started with fraud and AML solutions. The firm realized significant value so we were able to cross-sell trade surveillance solutions. Subsequently, they upgraded, bought additional AML and fraud coverage expanded the number of users that leverage Actimize solutions and began their journey to the cloud. The 10-year value of this loyal customer is quite impressive. Another example is a top 10 U.S. bank years ago, they had a vision to unify all financial crime investigations in one place. And I'm proud to say that our case manager at [indiscernible], is the centerpiece of their financial crime program. Over the years, they licensed more AML and fraud solutions. -- upgraded solutions, began their journey to the cloud and continue to add users. Our client loyalty is unsurpassed. When it comes to expanding our business, there are several major trends continuing to fuel growth in the Americas and international markets, including digital-first and the importance of providing positive customer experience within financial institutions. Second is new regulations and regulatory reform. And third is the increasing sophistication of financial crimes. These all drive the importance and need for comprehensive and resilient financial crime program. Banks and disruptors need to embed strong risk management controls into digital-first strategies. Financial service organizations are continuing to undergo significant digital and analytics transformation for seamless customer access to account all across channels and to enable safe and secure transactions. As a result, financial crime and risk management teams need advanced solutions to prevent crime, adhere to regulatory requirements and to provide a positive customer experience and frictionless trust during the entire customer life cycle. Also ensuring compliance in a highly regulated environment, along with today's geopolitical instability and expansive sanctions means companies must adapt quickly. Today's regulatory scrutiny has created additional pressure on banks to do more as the regulators have expanded their focus across the broader market to include not only large Tier 1 banks but also mid-tier banks and alternative financial service providers, such as investment advisers, asset managers and payment processors. These market drivers create increased demand for risk and compliance solutions across the industry. Criminal sophistication also continues to advance and has become more complex as the growing number of data breaches and cyber security incidents are increasing and threatening PII or personally identifiable information and is putting clients' assets at risk. Criminals are using this information to impersonate others and to open false accounts that can be used to launder money, finance terrorists, manipulate the market, deploy social engineering scams and more. These risks threaten the financial system and put customer assets in jeopardy and can cause major financial and reputational damage. To protect their company and clients' assets, financial providers must leverage sophisticated technologies such as AI, machine learning and advanced analytics to be agile and fast moving. The digital first and customer experience strategies ever-expanding regulatory landscape and sophistication of financial criminals have also created a growing demand and requirements for a single platform to view risk holistically. To meet the market demands, we continue to expand our portfolio of integrated solutions and to provide comprehensive and complete coverage for anti-money laundering, fraud and compliance that help companies identify risk faster and earlier with a single platform. We also have over 300 partners and are continuing to grow our partner ecosystem in new markets with new programs and services that complement our solutions and help us expand our reach. We're also growing the X-SIGHT marketplace partner ecosystem with best-in-class vendors that provide virtual asset intelligence, behavioral biometrics dark web insights and more. Additionally, X-SIGHT Data IQ seamlessly connects with hundreds of data source providers for intelligence on individuals and corporations. These partners provide insights and solutions that complement our portfolio, making it easier for organizations to mitigate risk. Actimize also provides a global certification program to train system integrated partners in the implementation of our solutions. As of today, we have more than 1,100 certified individuals at some of the largest firms in our market, including Mphasis, TCS, IBM, PwC, Cognizant, Deloitte, Unisys and more. We also continue to onboard more strategic go-to-market partners to resell our solutions into new geographies. And -- our current strategic go-to-market partners include NCR, FIS, Fiserv, Finastra and Dow Jones. No other software provider has such an expansive ecosystem as Actimize. Our growth strategy is to expand our leadership position across all segments and increase our addressable market. We'll achieve this by focusing on 3 strategic initiatives. First, by accelerating the move to the cloud; second, by infusing even more AI and analytics within our entire portfolio; and third, by expanding our customer life cycle risk management or CLRM solutions. For the cloud, our 2 platforms provide complete financial crime and compliance coverage for institutions of all sizes. Actimize at the forefront of accelerating the industry's move to the cloud by providing platforms that are secure, scalable and high performing. For the high end of the market, X-SIGHT is an open and flexible AI cloud platform that addresses the complexities of preventing financial crimes while accelerating growth strategies. For the mid-market, Xceed provides comprehensive fraud and AML prevention for midsized companies and fintech disruptors. Xceed is an out-of-the-box solution with direct connectivity to core banking providers for quick deployment. In terms of AI and analytics, we're utilizing innovative technologies and deep domain expertise to detect and prevent financial crimes. In doing so, our strategy is to continue investing in AI, machine learning and natural language processing within our portfolio. Today, we're filing more and more patents, including cluster-based sampling, deep learning and online incremental learning to identify suspicious activity and to stop threats and transactions before they occur. As a result of these investments and our customer footprint, we're uniquely positioned to provide comprehensive and actionable insights to the market. And as the market leader, we recently released a comprehensive fraud insights report that shows trends and provides guidance on how to stop fraud. In one example of those insights, NICE Actimize was able to detect a fraud ring and prevent millions of dollars in crime. One bank had approximately 5,000 customers report card fraud. The reported fraudulent transactions were for goods and services from legitimate e-commerce websites. By analyzing the transactions, Actimize was able to trace back to the point of compromise and determined that fake websites were being used to test stolen cards with small dollar transactions. Detailed analysis further uncovered a fraud ring consisting of more than 2,000 fake websites. And in reality, there are actually 40,000 customer cards that were compromised, although no fraud was reported. We also found that there was more than 270,000 transactions that were linked to the fraud ring. We estimated that there was up to $1.9 million in fraud at this single bank. We immediately advised all of our clients about the fraud ring, provided the fake website details and deployed updated analytics to stop this fraud from spreading. Along with our clients, we've estimated tens of millions of dollars in fraud losses were prevented. The impact of our work is critical to keeping our clients and the markets safe. In terms of customer life cycle risk management or CLRM, digital-first strategies are pushing the industry forward. Financial institutions need to stay at the forefront with solutions to provide a positive customer experience and in parallel, allow firms to access credit scores and to produce risk scores in nanoseconds, Actimize's CLRM solutions, including new account fraud, help validate the good customers from the bad ones and to filter out the bad actors instantaneously during account openings. As part of our strategy, Actimize also launched X-SIGHT entity risk, a powerful solution that provides holistic customer insights and onboarding and across the entire customer life cycle. X-SIGHT entity risk focuses on the bank's customer. whether an individual consumer, private client or a corporate, these entities are customers of the firm and need to be understood through a single lens. X-SIGHT entity risk provides a single entity risk profile and trust score, allowing firms to shift from reactive and solid processes to a proactive real-time customer-centric approach. This drives excellent customer experiences while underpinning risk management and mitigation. Actimize's solutions address growing demands across the globe for all market sizes and needs. Around the world, our solutions are trusted. As I mentioned earlier, our base is more than 800 clients strong from the largest enterprise financial institutions worldwide to the mid-market and community banks. And while a majority of clients are in financial services, we continue to grow our business in adjacent segments such as fintechs, insurance, payment processors and more. While we are proud of our client base, we are also proud to have been recognized by others in the industry. In 2021, we received 25 awards from the analyst community, recognizing Actimize solutions and market leadership. In 2021, we achieved record year-over-year growth. This is a result of our growth strategy, investments in R&D and expansion of direct and indirect sales channels in the International and Americas markets. In 2022, we will continue to capture more market share by innovating and executing on key initiatives, including accelerating the market's cloud adoption, infusing more advanced AI across our portfolio and providing more CLRM solutions to increase our addressable market. Each of these initiatives allows us to continue to grow our wallet share within our existing client base and to win new logos. We look forward to a successful 2022. Thank you...

Thank you, Craig. I'm glad to be here with all of you today. For your reference, all financial results shown in this presentation are non-GAAP and are shown in millions, except EPS. Starting in 2018, all financial results are presented under ASC 606, while results for the prior year are presented under ASC 605. Over the past few years, we have demonstrated accelerated top line growth that is driven by the expansion of our cloud business, which is growing at a rapid pace and surpassed the $1 billion revenue milestone in 2021. We have transformed from a single digit to a consistent double-digit top line grower with accelerating total revenue annual growth as cloud as a percentage of our overall revenue increased to over 50% in 2021 compared to just 27% in 2017. The -- our 29% cloud CAGR is a result of our successful strategy in selling our industry-leading CX platform CXone to all segments of the market with recent growth fueled by the large enterprise and international markets. We are excited about the momentum we have experienced in the cloud to date. And in a few slides, I will share with you some customer examples to convey the tremendous opportunity we see ahead of us. First, I'll provide a brief overview of our financial results. The growth of our cloud revenue has bolstered our recurring revenue model, which today is around 80% compared to just 62% 5 years ago. Our recurring revenue is comprised mainly from cloud revenue and our Workforce Optimization maintenance revenue. As I'll show you shortly, this maintenance revenue when converted to our cloud demonstrates a NICE uplift in annual recurring revenue. One of the key differentiators for NICE is that we have not sacrificed profitability with cloud revenue growth. As cloud grows, we continue to achieve scale in our cloud business, which is demonstrated by our increasing cloud gross profit and cloud gross margin. In the past 5 years alone, the gross margin has increased nearly 800 basis points from 60.9% in 2017 to a record of 68.6% in Q1 2022. -- we expect that our cloud gross margin will continue to increase as we further penetrate the large enterprise, expanding our sales of more software at a higher margin on every cloud deal, including new digital and self-service solutions. In addition, CXone is a complete and seamlessly integrated cloud platform. This compares to our competitors who need to pay many royalty fees to multiple vendors for these vendor products to deliver a siloed and disjointed set of solutions. This competitor business model consequently comes with a much lower gross margin. We expect our cloud gross margin to continue to expand to 70% and beyond in the future. We have an excellent business model compared to many companies in our sector, and this is exemplified by our superior operating leverage, which has increased over 300 basis points to 28.3% in Q1 '22 compared to just 5 years ago. This is a result of both expanding and accelerating our revenue growth as well as our key focus on driving increasing profitability. We have the largest R&D spend in our industry, which drives our clear product leadership. Our decades of experience and our smart investments in sales and marketing has given us the most comprehensive go-to-market assets, including direct and partner sales. Our smart and effective investments in R&D and sales and marketing have enabled us to drive top line growth while expanding our operating margin and growing our operating income by double digits. We continue to see a clear path to an operating margin of 30% or greater in the next few years. Our EBITDA is unparalleled, and our stellar cash conversion rate is a noteworthy asset, especially in markets like we are seeing today. Our strong free cash flow generation and EBITDA growth reflects our growing liquidity and flexibility in investing in the future growth of NICE and are widening competitive differentiation. We have many choices while others don't have that privilege. Our outstanding financial profile is evident, once again, as shown in consistent EPS growth. The bottom line here is that we have double-digit revenue growth, great operating profitability and excellent cash generation, which is unique and highly differentiating in our industry. Our phenomenal cash flow from operations reached nearly $500 million in each of the past 2 years and increased 17% to a quarterly record of $193 million in Q1 2022 alone. Our capital allocation has been utilized primarily for reinvesting into the company through innovation as well as through our share buyback program and debt repayment. Our best-in-class cash position provides nicely unparalleled position to strategically invest in M&A opportunities that are strategic to our CX portfolio. Looking ahead, we are very excited about our positioning to capture the immense growth opportunities and customer engagement, which is an underpenetrated market. We have many opportunities for growth. And in the next few slides, I'll share with you just 3 examples. The first growth opportunity example comes from new CXone logos. Typically, our journey with the news CXOne customer starts with cloud ACD and then expands by upselling WEM and other parts of our portfolio, including digital and self-service. In this first example, the customer started with 3 million ACV in cloud ACD and expanded to a total of 8 million ACV, resulting in a 2.7x multiple uplift. There is still significant additional wallet share potential within this customer, such as expansion of additional seats and in additional regions. A second growth opportunity is our vast existing on-premise customer installed base. Most commonly, we see an initial 2x to 3x uplift on an apples-to-apples solution basis, followed by a more significant uplift when adding cloud ACD and digital and self service, reaching up to a multiple of 16x the annual workforce engagement maintenance. In this example, a maintenance customer with 250,000 ACV converted into a 4 million cloud ACV customer by adding solutions and seats. We have a substantial maintenance space that is expected to migrate to the cloud over time and a significant uplift we see on conversions to the cloud will serve as just one of many growth drivers going forward. Finally, with our expansive CXone portfolio, we are the only vendor that can offer the full CXI framework of omni-channel routing, workforce engagement, analytics and digital and smart self-service solutions. This competitive advantage provides a plethora of opportunities to cross-sell new solutions to existing customers and provides more variety in creating beachheads with new prospects. We've seen a growing trend that digital as a percentage of our total deal opportunities is growing significantly. This final example shows how we use digital and self-service as a beachhead and then cross-sell additional solutions such as cloud ACD and workforce engagement doubling on a large base, where digital is often already a 7-digit ACV CXone's digital and self-service offering that covers dynamic knowledge management, proactive conversational AI and smart web guidance together with our large customer base gives us tangible opportunities to continue to cross-sell moving forward. In summary, while we have demonstrated tremendous growth in the last few years, we are still in the early innings. NICE's financial profile sets us apart from our competitors. Our double-digit top line growth, together with increasing market share, impressive operating leverage and an Iron Cloud balance sheet provides us the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities in the rapidly growing CX market. We have an unmatched ability to upsell and cross-sell and a proven track record of scalability to win in all market segments with growing leadership in large enterprises and global markets where we already have a significant presence today. Thank you, and we will now head to our Q&A session...

So hello, everybody, and welcome to our Q&A session today. Barak and I are here in our office in Hoboken, New Jersey, while Beth is joining us at our office in Salt Lake. So why don't we jump right into our first question. And the first question actually goes to you, Barak. What's driving your impressive growth despite the macro pressures we see?

Thanks for the question, Marty. And again, welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed the morning keynote and also the follow-on session. I welcome you to stay with us for the rest of the day with demonstration and numerous of other content that we have. So as you probably know, we reported last quarter, following Q1, a very strong quarter that continues the momentum that we saw throughout 2021. And it is the same growth drivers that we've seen throughout 2021 continues this year. I think we have to remember both historically but also where we stand today, that in all the markets we operate, whether it's in our prime market, the CX market, in our financial crime and compliance market and even in the public safety market, the solutions that we offer are mission-critical. And I remember myself through my years at NICE, I was -- back in 2008 and also in 2000, those solutions are mission-critical. And even at a time, potentially of a certain stress on the macro situation, even in a recession time, these are the things that enterprises do invest in order to keep the lights on almost, whether in order to serve their customers and keep the loyalty or it is in order to make sure that they are compliant with our financial crime and compliance solution, and of course, on the public safety side, it goes without saying. So with any of that impacting our business at the moment,and same trends we saw in 2021 continues well into Q1, and we believe also for the rest of the year.

Thanks, Barak. So the next question goes to you, Beth, in Salt Lake. To what do you attribute your unique standing in your industry to report impressive top line growth combined with operating leverage and strong free cash flow?

Marty and Barak, and thanks for the question. At NICE, we have always had a balanced approach to both our top line growth as well as really keeping a keen eye on our profitability as well. That has continued as we've become a more cloud-centric company. And if you look at 2021 as an example, you would see that for the full year last year, we grew our revenue at an accelerated 16% total revenue growth. And at the same time, we also grew our operating income by 16%. So we're always looking to have that balance in our business, continuing to keep an eye on profitability, and that's flowing all the way down into our free cash flow. We have generated a $500 million in the last couple of years as cash from our operations. And so that's going straight to the bank and is really reflective of that overall balance approach I talked about. The top line growth, combined with the focus around profitability and all the way in terms of free cash flow generation gives us a lot of opportunities and flexibilities that a lot of our competitors in the market don't have.

Thank you, Beth. I have another one here for you, Barak. So what are you doing to help incentivize customers to migrate existing business to the cloud? And what incentives are you going -- what incentives are you providing to salespeople to nudge customers in that direction?

Sure. So throughout our industries, we see the increase -- the ongoing increase in the adoption of cloud. As you're tracking our cloud evolution and as I've highlighted in my earlier presentation, our cloud migration, transformation of the company is a bit different in a positive way in the sense that actually our cloud migration started by stepping into an adjacent market even before we started to convert our existing very large, on-prem customers to the cloud. We're starting to see the shift happening right now and we are allowing our customers numerous or multiple ways to migrate into the cloud in a way that provide them both the commercial incentive, but also the way to migrate our solution and benefit from that. So on incentive to the customers, I think the biggest incentive of cloud and our customers understand that it's the pace of innovation. That's one of the kind of the great vias of cloud in general, it's the pace of innovation, the ability to be on the latest and greatest. Obviously, there are many other reasons why to move to the cloud, specifically in the CX business, which is quite unique in that regards. Cloud allows you to pay as you go. Instead of a very significant investment to the maximum capacity, you can actually pay as you go because it is a market where there is seasonality for a variety of verticals. And the last one, of course, is a commercial term that allows them to migrate as they finish their depreciation on the perpetual to the cloud. However, by the way, we still see customers that decide to stay on on-prem for reality of reason for a certain period of time. And I think you saw it in our Q1 earnings. And from time to time, we'll have a certain positive fluctuation in the product. But in the long run, we definitely see that cloud transition continues at full force. On the sales side, needless to say for our sellers, there is full incentive to move to the cloud. It's not new. We've been operating this way for many years. And if the customer is the one that would like to move to the cloud, we're not forcing them, of course, it is -- there is a higher earning opportunity for the sales team.

Thank you, Barak. Beth, I have one here for you. Given your recent more aggressive buybacks and the recent share price decline, would you consider announcing another share repurchase plan?

Thanks for the question, Marty, and great question. In Q1, as you highlighted, we actually repurchased $64 million of stock back to the company, and that compares to $73 million for all of 2021. So you can see that we really took an opportunity as we've seen the change in the market and the share price to demonstrate that commitment. We continue to be really excited and confident about our future growth and our overall strategy. And so that means that it is likely that you'll see us announce another buyback, even likely that you may see that sometime this year.

Thank you, Beth. I think next question actually goes back to a Beth's presentation. And Barak, this is for you. What is the traditional timing of expansion of customers from ACD adoption to WEM to digital and so forth?

Sure. So actually, we see a variety of scenarios. We do see customers, as you noticed in Beth's presentation, she discussed several scenarios of a few customers and different timing of adoption of the variety of solutions. We do see a lot of customers that decide to adopt in day 1 everything, meaning both ACD, the full portfolio of our applications, as well, of course, as the digital and self-service. These are one type of customers predominantly, by the way, the more midsized customers, were one decision-maker can orchestrate the entire thing and have one shot at transformation. In other cases, we do see a case where there is the ACD. They usually come with some basic WEM. But about 6 months to a year later after they've experienced already the power of CXone, this is the point where they decide now to advance further and move into additional solutions, either because they experience the platform and they see those capabilities that are grayed out and they want to try them out, or they attended one of our conferences, like the one that we have today, or met another customer or have an initiative internally. So I would say between 6 months or a year after of the initial deployment, there is a vast interest about expanding.

Thanks, Barak. Beth, I have one here for you. When you speak about the 30% plus operating margin, where does the additional leverage come from? Is it the changes you're making? Just faster adoption of more profitable products? Where are we going to get that leverage from?

Yes. Thanks, Marty. I would say that one of the greatest muscles that we have at NICE is really evidencing and showing the leverage we have in our operating model. One of the clear places we're seeing that leverage come from is our cloud business. So our cloud has transformed significantly over the last several years. It was 56% of our total revenue just last quarter. And our cloud gross margin has increased 600 basis points since the first quarter of 2020. And that's due to the fact that, first of all, our cloud platforms and CXone, in particular, was built native to the cloud. So as that continues to be one of the key drivers of our overall business, we're seeing that the margin continues to expand in that business. And of course, recently, we've talked a lot about the number and acceleration we're seeing of enterprises, large enterprises adopting. And when we see these large enterprises adopting our platforms, they are often buying multiple solutions that are all seamlessly and natively integrated into the cloud. So when they're buying these additional solutions, it's driving additional profitability and that's further expanding our cloud margin. So the expansion in our cloud margin will continue to be one of the key drivers that will add to the overall profitability looking forward in that operating margin expansion. And then as it pertains to our operating expenses, we're also always looking how to further synergize our G&A expenses as well. So a combination of those 2 are really some of the key levers that will continue to help us on that path to the 30%-plus margin. We just recorded a 28.3% operating margin just last quarter, so we're well on our way and very confident about our ability to see 30% plus in the future.

Thank you, Beth. Next question is the advantages of cloud versus the legacy on-premise are clear, how does CXone compared to other competitors that have a cloud offering, whether it's hosted or not? I think, Barak, want to take that one?

Sure. And actually, I'm going to connect it directly to what Beth said, and you can see it in the gross margin of our cloud solution compared to other competitors in the CX industry. We spent the last 6 years significantly in R&D in order to make sure that we build CXone natively, but not just natively but also with the complete set of solutions. We don't have a need to go and resell or integrate and pay significant royalties to others in order to offer some basic capabilities in our offering like WEM, like digital, like self-service and other. We have a vast marketplace, but the things that are more common or kind of very common in every deal, those are completely natively built in our platform. That's one big difference, not just from the margin perspective, also from the ability to provide to the customer in a complete way and in a native way. The second thing is about our ability to manage complexity at scale. While building those solutions in the way that I described in a very native and a complete way, the other thing that we have done, and this is kind of in our roots, we understand enterprises. We -- NICE started at a very large enterprise market, so the whole notion about managing complexity at scale, not just scale, not just complexity, but the combination of the 2, is a very significant advantage of our solution versus others. And the third one that I would like to mention is our infusion in the last year of AI into the platform. We have a massive amount of data that is on our platform for the past many, many years, which allowed us to build ENLIGHTEN, which is the thing that is powering today our entire digital and self-service strategy. When you add all of that together, head-to-head when we are in an opportunity and the customer look at them to a platform or actually try it, we believe we have the upper hand by far. And also the many analysts who are covering our market numerous times highlighted our differentiation, both on our vision and as well as, of course, on the execution side.

Thanks, Barak. And so on the next question, so software valuations have re-rated lower, we all know that. Are you seeing this flow through to the private markets? Is your appetite greater now for M&A as a result? And to add on to that, given your strong balance sheet, great cash balance, can we expect any larger acquisitions in the future? Or are we going to continue to see just maybe smaller tuck-ins?

Well, first of all, none of us like the fact that valuations went down, generally speaking. But in our markets, we feel that we are in a perfect position. If you look on the different competitor in our markets, we are, I think, the only one that has such a strong balance sheet with virtually very small or no debt and so much cash, but also generating about, as Beth mentioned, more than $0.5 billion of cash every year. And that's a perfect vehicle that we have to use in such an environment. On one hand, we have see expectations of valuations, if you would like, in the private market going down. I think it is about to happen. We do see, by the way, a lot of incoming requests from a lot of small companies that ran out of their cash. These are probably not the most desirable assets that we are planning to go after. But I definitely believe that this upcoming market will give us a lot of opportunities. We have the muscle. I think we know from the past on how to do acquisitions, but more importantly, how to integrate them. And I think it will serve us well in our strategy moving forward also as a competitive advantage, because as we do those moves, there are certain moves that potentially we can do and our competitors cannot because many of them sit on a very significant convertible debt or other type of debt that doesn't allow them the same agility. So we'll see how it's evolving, but we have the know-how of the M&A., we have the capital to go after it, and we'll see how the market evolves. But that's -- it only accelerates our strategy from the past.

I have one more here for you, Barak. So we know that NICE held up well during 2008 and 2009, the last recession. How should we think about the sensitivity of CX1 to -- if we did go into another recession?

As a graduate like many -- probably a few of numerous recessions or turmoil in the market, whether it's 2000 or 2008, you can definitely say that each and every one of them has different characteristics. So yes, we can probably do some lesson learning and try to deduct some those. But at the same time, I understand that this one might be different. But to judge from those 2 turmoil we saw in the market, specifically 2008, as I mentioned before, in all the markets where we operate, from my experience, we are mission-critical. We provide mission-critical solutions. And I mentioned the 3 markets where we operate in. And specifically on CXone, I think we can learn also from what we saw in 2020 just as a pandemic hit, is that even the industries that were kind of completely down, whether it's travel and tourism and other, we -- when it comes to how to use our solution, we saw actually a significant uptick. Because your customers, their customers, their consumers at such a time are still the most important asset that they have. And the need to adhere to those customers, whether it's a financial stress or that from the situation of unemployment, people need to roll over their 401(k) or have other questions or people try to save money and cancel a certain trip and a variety of other scenarios, in many of those cases, they use any type of channel to pick up the phone or pick up the chat and contact their provider and the provider needs to be available to them on the other end, and that's, of course, the driver to our business, it can be a very significant force. So time will tell, but as I said, he's someone that have seen it in the past and the type of solution that we provide, we believe that it's a great business to be in any economy.

Thank you, Barak. So Beth, you did speak already about the operating margin. What's the ceiling -- I mean what do you believe is the ceiling for cloud gross margins going forward or in the near future?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Marty. As I talked about earlier, we've really seen an incredible expansion on our cloud business already, and that's showing in the cloud gross margin. We had a record 68.6% cloud gross margin just last quarter. And I talked earlier about how we'll see the expansion in the overall operating margin and that one of the key factors of that is coming from the expansion in the cloud gross margin. So it's really a combination of the factors that I was talking about previously, selling additional solutions that are really natively integrated into our platform, add that scale in our business. And of course, we're always having a very focused attention to how we manage our expenses broadly. So there are many areas where we're continuing to expand. Today, Barak talked earlier about international expansion. And of course, as we continue to get more and more momentum, we've seen great momentum already, we'll see expansion in the cloud margin coming from those regions as well as they start to become more material in the future. So all of those factors combined will continue to allow us to see some additional gradual expansion in the cloud gross margin. We're definitely confident we can see 70% cloud gross margin and even greater looking ahead in the future.

Thank you, Beth. So Barak, so we've seen a nice boost in our product revenue recently, so how can these customers are opting for your on-premise solutions instead of cloud?

So we have a very large installed base or customer base, 25,000 customers of all different sizes and each and every one of them has a different cycle of investment. Specifically, on the product side, I'll refer to where it's coming from. So one hand, and I think you heard from Craig in the financial crime and compliance business, we still have a lot of customers that elect to go with on-prem solution or with term solution. And I think this is an important comment to make. When we sell term, we recognize it as part of our product sales and not as part of our cloud sales like some companies do in a certain way. So a lot of those customers do buy it as a term, but deploy it on-prem. And this is predominantly in the financial crime and compliance. And the other reason is that on the CX business, we have customers that have well-established inventory, if you would like, or deployment. They do have plans to go to the cloud. I'm talking about very large customers. There is a plan to go there. It takes them time to go through this journey. And in the meanwhile, they'll continue to buy those products on the on-prem, but there is a clear path together. As Beth presented as we held those customers in their transition to the cloud and as they transition from on-prem product to cloud, we obviously monitor very carefully and we see a great uplift of at least 2x just from like-for-like as they do a transition to the cloud. They want to transition to the cloud, but we want to make sure that at the end of it, it's not just a reclass of existing revenue, but really going through this major uplift that we'll see in the cloud. So yes, we want to grow the cloud, but at the same time, doing it in a way that the outcome, as we've seen so far, is really significantly increased the wallet share per customer.

So Beth, it seems like getting a lot of questions on profitability, not surprising in this market. So how are you thinking about the annual pace of operating margins each year?

Yes. So as we talked about, our operating margin has been in a really healthy place at a 28.3% margin last quarter. And as we think about looking forward, I think you'll still continue to see some gradual expansion in our operating margin coming from those key drivers that I talked about, the continuation of expansion in our cloud gross margin, continued focus around some of our G&A costs. So as we think about looking forward in the next few years, you should expect that you'll see come some gradual continued expansion in the operating margin overall. That will track us over in the next few years to really achieving that 30% operating margin that we talked about. And of course, you can see that, that always is flowing directly from our profitability all the way into our balance sheet and really continuing to drive that healthy cash and balance sheet that Barak talked about earlier as well.

Thank you, Beth. I think we have one more question here and, Barak, I'll turn it to you for it. We haven't spoken about the competitors really so far. So this becomes a competitive question. So how is the competitive landscape changing? Do you see more competition with new entrants such as Zoom, Amazon Connect or Twilio Flex?

Yes. I -- first of all, we -- when we see a big techs trying to get into our space, first of all, it's a good sign. It's a good sign because it means that what we said all along that this is a very sizable market and it's a fast-growing market. This is not just a thesis, but it's a reality. That's an indication, because those players are not interested in small markets. And you can decide to operate in a market that is large and not expect certain big techs to have at least the desire to get in. But at the same time, I must say, and at least from my experience, but also what we see in reality, while it is a large market, it is a highly specialized market. It's not just a cookie-cutter market. It requires a lot of deep domain expertise that we have. Myself and the management team, and of course 8,500 employees for the past 20-some years, that's what we do for a living. We understand CX. We understand that business. Our customers are confident and counting on our expertise. It's not a generic technology. So as some of those big techs would like to get into this market, I think they are starting to realize that, on one hand, it is too late to develop into this market at this stage. Because in order to have a viable product into this market, you need to spend roughly $200 million to $250 million in R&D before you have an MVP, a minimal viable product, and this is before you started to spend a go-to-market, it's not really an option from a time to market. And at the same time, there aren't too many assets to go and acquire into this market. And even if you do, it doesn't mean that you don't lose the focus on this market. So we like the attention, if you'd like. It helped us in the market education. It help us to explain to customers the whole notion of CX. And last but not least, I think those big -- many of those big techs end up partnering. Some of the names that you -- that were mentioned are actually our partners, some already partners, some we are not announcing big time router partnership, but we partner and we work together and we close reference to each other. A classic competition type of dynamic. But we believe that our investment in the past 6, 7 years with thousands of man years in R&D, create a very significant barrier of entry for such players into the market.

Actually, we get some questions in on the international front. So why don't we just end it on this one last question, Barak. You did talk about international in your presentation, but you want to just maybe reiterate how we plan to expand the cloud internationally.

Yes. Well, it's not a secret and we state in our financials, which we are happy about, that about 80% of our business comes from the U.S. And there are a variety of reasons for that. The way we grow the cloud adoption, that started in the U.S. And generally, the fact that 50% of the CX business, the customer service business, is in the U.S. from a market perspective. At the same time, international is another 50% of that market. So it's a very sizable opportunity. And it's still in the very early beginning of the transition to the cloud. It's a market that was somewhat slow to adopt. It is now happening. And the way we go for it, and if you look on our variety of press releases and the updates we gave on the earnings call, you noticed that in the last 24 months, we entered into a variety or expanded into a variety of international markets. We signed some very significant partnerships. Our go-to-market strategy in the international market is predominantly through partners. And we did already the majority of the investment from actual infrastructure in order to go to those territories. We don't need too much of that because the way we have built our platform, which is natively built on a public cloud, the investment we need to do from a physical infrastructure in each territory are very, very minimal. So we believe that we are starting to see what we talked about in the booking, translating itself into the revenue. And there is a lot of runway for all of our solutions and for the CX in the international markets in the years to come.

Thank you, Barak. So I think we'll end it there. Everybody, please stay tuned. At 3:00, we have an interview with former President George W. Bush. I think you'll find that very interesting. You can just get to that from the lobby homepage. And then at 3:30, we have our customer-led sessions. These are on demand and they'll play from 3:30 to 8:00 tonight Eastern time. So I want to thank everybody for joining us, and we do look forward to seeing you next year. And thank you, Beth, from Salt Lake.

Thank you.