Open Text Corporation (OTEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 7, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Steven Enders
analystHi, awesome. Welcome, everybody, to Day 2 of the Citi Global Technology Conference. I'm Steve Enders, part of the software research team here at Citi. With us for this session, we have Mark Barrenechea from OpenText. Mark, thank you so much for being here.
Mark Barrenechea
executivePleasure.
Steven Enders
analystI think you wanted to start it off with some opening comments?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes, it'd be great. Thank you, and great to be in New York City and great to be with the Citi team. I want to start with, we're a growth company and we've purchased Micro Focus to open up new paths for growth for the company. We're investing in our direct sales organization. We'll soon have full coverage of the Global 10,000, which is a very rare and unique franchise of how to sell an enterprise software. We've opened up a new midmarket opportunity with the acquisition of Carbonite and Zix and it's still a very young opportunity for us in the midmarket. And it's not the small businesses that we're necessarily interested in, but the midmarket, which is a big GDP driver here in the U.S. We have a new OpenText partner network. We're very focused on kind of the top of the pyramid with partnerships with Google, AWS, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Accenture and TCS and we've upped our engineering commitment up to 16% of revenue. And we're here to explore new value paths for growth. We're in cybersecurity of scale. We have a new developer platform with our acquisition, in API business, in IoT business. And soon AI -- and I'm sure we will get to AI, which we intend to play our role in it, which is significant. We're also building the world's most important valued information management company. This is a $200 billion TAM with our acquisition of Micro Focus. We're in 6 strategic domains. In our view, it is the highest profits in software in this domain in information management and transformative catalysts, cloud, security, business networks, cybersecurity, information management, which is the basis for AI. And if you just allow me, I just want to quickly touch on our 4 key value drivers: cloud growth, margin expansion, free cash flow expansion and our capital strategy. On our cloud growth, we're a growth company and we've been investing in growth. In fiscal '21, our cloud grew organically 1.8%. In fiscal '22, our cloud organically grew 3.6%. Last year, our cloud organically grew revenue 3.9%. This year, we have projections up to 4% on a much higher base, right? This is on a $1.7 billion base of that growth percent. We don't have any AI revenues yet in the model and we have very low Micro Focus contribution. So there's positive pressure on that. In our F '26 aspirations, our North Star, our North Star for the business is organic cloud growth of 7% to 9%, organic cloud revenue growth of 7% to 9%. And on this map, that is a $2 billion-plus, $2 billion-plus cloud revenue company growing organically up to 9% and a $5 billion ARR business, growing overall up to 4%. We are a growth company. On free cash flow, we've historically operated with a low 20s yield. If you look from the business from fiscal '21 to fiscal '22 over that 10-year period, our free cash flow yield for every dollar revenue, we generated $0.22 of free cash flow. We're going to operate in the mid-to-high teens this year as we work through our acquisition expense, but we expect to return in fiscal '24 to fiscal '26 our North Star back into the low 20s and generate $1.5 billion plus of free cash flow. Margin expansion, I should have done that before free cash flow. Our targets for this year are 36% to 38%. Our North Star for F '26 is 38% to 40% adjusted EBITDA. And those numbers are still without the benefit of us using our own AI. We use our own automation software and gotten great benefit. We will use our own AI software and great benefit. So just in summary for my introductory remarks and see you looking forward to getting to your Q&A. We're a growth company. And we have changed our operating system for growth. We are known of being an M&A consolidator. That is our history and past. Our future is a new operating system for organic growth at OpenText. And I think we're in a very unique position to capture this $200 billion information management market. These are transformative markets. We're going to return Micro Focus to organic growth this year and exceed the $2.3 billion baseline. We expect our cloud growth rate to double, between here and F '26. Again, F '26, our North Star. We expect our free cash flow to double, between here and our North Star in F '26, while expanding margins, while expanding our capital return and having a new AI opportunity for us. So that North Star for us of fiscal '26 is up to $6.4 billion in revenues or 80% ARR, a $5 billion ARR business. 7% to 9% cloud organic growth, 38% to 40% adjusted EBITDA and doubling our cash flow and we remain committed to getting the present value for that North Star. So thanks for giving me a few minutes to provide a bit of an intro.
Steven Enders
analystSure. No, that was -- that was great, Mark. Maybe we can just dig into a little bit on those drivers of growth that you're talking about here.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveSure.
Steven Enders
analystI think about the portfolio you have, I mean, pretty wide-ranging, a lot of areas that you have focused on. I guess as you think about that, what will it -- what parts of the portfolio, what will it take to be able to get to those growth targets that you're outlining here?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes, I'll start with our content platform. We've been the market leaders in content management, including Documentum. We have the Global 10,000, thousands of companies who have housed a decade of content in our platform. And certainly, digital was a driver to get to the platform. Cloud was a driver. COVID was a driver to get to the platform. AI is now a driver. Companies have invested in information management for almost 20 years. And we house the automation and some very large datasets. So companies are now when we're working with a variety of them how to -- you'll apply new language models, new algorithms to not just kind of complete their automation, but unlock the value in the datas and some of the use cases or governance, risk management. We have a blueprint customer who has 3 million contracts in one of our platforms and is looking for off-balance sheet liability, looking for the revenue clauses that vendors are not providing with. We have a -- someone in a regulated manufacturing who is looking to speed up the ability to provide information to regulatory authorities. So content management, no doubt. We also see an opportunity in service management and service experience and cybersecurity. I'd put those 3 top of the list.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Right. That's great. I know you're talking about, I think, pretty much doubling the growth rate in…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystCloud to get there.
Mark Barrenechea
executive4% up to 9%.
Steven Enders
analystYes. So as we think about that portfolio and the transition you're going through with Project Titanium and everything going on there, I guess, what gives you the confidence to be able to hit that number and to accelerate both the growth rate in revenue and in cloud bookings?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. So I'll separate revenue and bookings as an early indicator and I started on revenue, because it's the number, right? So we'll start with Titanium delivered SaaS capabilities. So we deliver our platform off-cloud, public cloud, private cloud, API cloud. And with Titanium, Titanium was all about content management, experience management and having our SaaS products at equal functionality. So we've done that. So that's now -- we've been at Titanium for almost 11 quarters. It's now delivered for public SaaS and ECM. And Box is our competitor in that SaaS market very, very squarely. And we're doing very well with that SaaS offering. Second is we're getting traction in our API business as well. And we have all the new Micro Focus products coming on for private cloud. And then after that, the public cloud and in October, our first Aviators for AI. So we have the richest pipeline -- the richest pipeline of product offerings that we've ever had and they're all cloud-based. So that gives us the confidence to speak to doubling, a great acceleration in doubling of our cloud revenue growth rate. In terms of bookings, right, which is an earlier indicator, we think we need to hit 15% plus to make those revenue growth numbers. In Q4, we ended with a cloud growth rate of a bookings rate of 12%. And so coming into the year, we can see the pipeline and the products and the activity that gives us the confidence of the 15% for the year.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Right. That's helpful context there. You mentioned Aviator in there, and so I do want to talk about the AI strategy…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveSure.
Steven Enders
analystAnd everything that you're doing today. I guess maybe can you, first of all, just touch on where the portfolio sits today? I know you've talked before about Magellan and IDOL and Vertica and all those things…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystCombining to help kind of support it. But where do things stand now with OpenText AI and Aviator and what's new from what you've announced in the past couple of months?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. It's going to be an exciting set of quarters from OpenText. We are -- our automation and I'm going to make a distinction and I know there's lots of ways to describe AI today and I'll give you my version of it, right? You have the world of automation and we've built a near $6 billion company in automation. And we're going to keep automating, right, automate, automate, automate. And our automation captures big datasets. Our content cloud captures big datasets, contracts, employee experience, supply chains, orders, invoices. Our experience platform captures customer interactivity. Our business network captures supply chain transactions and how companies map to each other in very complex worlds. Our developer platform captures testing and coding strategies. Our IT platform captures service management and IT assets. These are very large datasets. So our automation is in a place to capture big datasets, very critical datasets. So we've introduced our Aviator platform, which is Vertica, IDOL and Magellan together. And just like on the automation world, we have metadata engines that take data and turn into metadata and make it useful. On the AI side, we have our own platform that will be readily available, low-cost, lightweight that vectorizes data and makes that -- the operational data immediately available to a language model. We will adopt -- we have a different view of the world where on the automation side, we orchestrated information. We have one document, make it available in Google, Salesforce, SAP, our software. On the AI side, I think there's going to be 1,000 language models and they're going to be highly specialized. There won't be one model from Google and one model from Microsoft as a little self-serving. There will be 1,000 specialized model, one for agriculture, one for ocean climate, one for make it personal, oncology and blood cancers, right? So there's going to be lots -- we're going to provide that orchestration. We're going to have an open platform to help customers bring in the language models. That's sort of the tech stack. On top of that, each of our business clouds will have an Aviator for AI. On content again, we're working right now on a blueprint customer to take 3 million legal contracts and be able to turn that into metadata, vectorize it. We're using actually an open source language model, T5, which is good enough for this exercise to show me -- to produce all the precise contracts of exposure in there. So our business network Aviator will transform the supply chain. We have 0.5 million connections living in our supply chain platform. We've cracked the code of how to use generative AI to allow a supply chain to change a supplier in a day in a complex world. Imagine a world's leading manufacturer connecting to Argentina cocoa. And that -- how do you do banking, regulatory tax filings, electronic invoicing, be able to flow commerce, transportation, bills of ladings, that can take 100 days. We think we can generate that within a day or 2. And once we're able to do that, the world of supply chain flexibility and experimentation at scale. We'll use our developer Aviator to generate testing scripts and to generate a code to accelerate. So the next step up is Aviators for each of our business clouds, content experience, developer and the big one for [ ITOM ] is all Level 1 support. We're going GA next quarter -- excuse me, in October, 23.4, we've our first wave of Aviators. And the other one is Aviator assist. So Level 1 support will be radicalized. Then the next piece on top of that is we see the opportunity to reinvent search. So we have all these graphical user interfaces, so we're going to be introducing Aviator search, which goes across all our applications, all our interfaces to be able to ask questions of the data, right? I -- instead of searching for bicycle red, this is -- I have a 3-mile commute uphill, need bicycle. And then you can go, well, I want -- tell me about electronic versus push. So there's a whole new way to interface with your data. So Aviator stack, business cloud Aviators and in a new way to do search. And we begin shipping in 23.4, which is October.
Steven Enders
analystIt's exciting.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystI'm sure we'll hear a lot more about it at your upcoming conference as well.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveAbsolutely.
Steven Enders
analystSo I do want to talk about customer pilots with AI…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystAnd maybe what are kind of the early -- the early feedback you're getting from clients, because there's a lot of marketing noise out there in AI and right now. So how are customers thinking about it? And how does OpenText really differentiate out there with AI?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveWell, let me just start with it's real, right? And there's no doubt we're in this Gartner early traditional hype cycle, trough of disillusionment, value realization than steady state. So there's no doubt there's -- just a lot of bits on the airways about it. For us, we see very specific use cases. And customers aren't ready yet to kind of jump in and make a big investment. But they see the consumer side, right? Some of the large enterprise players haven't even priced their platform pieces at scale. So what we're hearing from our customers and it's universal, universal across our customers. They all have an interest in starting a journey, starting experimentation. They all know their data. They all know what they want to achieve. They all know their top 3 use cases. And they're very hungry to find skills. They're hungry to find a lightweight, low-cost way to experiment. So I think we're going to get into -- we're beyond this phase of what is it, how can it help? We're sort of in the early adopter, how do I experiment and take my first 1 or 2 use cases, make $0.5 million, $1 million investments before I make that 5-year $20 million investment to really radicalize the process. So we're in this interesting phase where customers are eager to experiment. They know where they want to experiment and they're looking for private, trusted, low-cost ways to kind of prove out a thesis. That's sort of what we're gearing towards. Our Aviators are lightweight, very directed and going to help customers experiment.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. I do want to keep this interactive and engaging. So if there are questions in the room, we want to make sure that we're able to get to those. So yes, raise your hand. We go in the back here.
Unknown Analyst
analystI just wanted to ask about capital allocation, and your deleveraging plans following your Micro Focus acquisition. I think you've guided to is it $800 million to $900 million in free cash flow for the year?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes, that's correct, for this year.
Unknown Analyst
analystAnd I know you increased, you what tripled the dividend, more than tripled the dividend. So I feel like that kind of eats up all of that free cash flow, right? So I just want to kind of understand the deleveraging path going forward? Is it all just driven by EBITDA growth or will there be a component of debt repayment in there? How are you thinking about that?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes, sure, thanks. So we've committed to getting under 3x leverage over 8 quarters. And we set a marker of a minimum payment per quarter of $175 million. So it's a minimum payment. And we've made our kind of first 2 debt paydowns. Our revolver will be clearly fully paid off. This quarter, we'll begin to paydown the TLB. So committed to 8 quarters to get under 3x leverage, minimal $175 million debt repayment per quarter. We have a target of $800 million to $900 million of free cash flow this year. And our capital return strategy has always been taking 20% of our free cash flow -- trailing 12 months free cash flow and return it as a dividend. And so that -- we didn't change our dividend policy through the acquisition. Don't need to change it, given the high profitability of the business. So we continue to return. As you see, we're going to grow from $600-some-odd million to up to $900 million of free cash flow this year. Our EBITDA is going to expand. We're going to work. We're going to kind of complete our acquisition expense and then our North Star goes up significantly with F '26, free cash flow of $1.5 billion. So by the end of F '25, we should be under 3x leverage, minimum payment of $175 million. And then we get into a high flexible capital model with high cash flow of $1.5 billion, which will give us the opportunity to do more significant investments in the business. Give us the opportunity to look at, do we continue with the dividend strategy or get back to our buyback or continue to do M&A that would only add to high growth for us in the cloud, right? We are a growth company in the cloud. If we're going to do M&A, it's got to add to our growth strategy of cloud and ARR. So that's sort of our path over the next 1 to 2 years.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Great. Maybe continuing on -- just go back to the discussion for a second and then we'll move on…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystFrom there. But...
Mark Barrenechea
executiveLet me interrupt you. There was one other question in there that I didn't get to, which is what differentiates us…
Steven Enders
analystYes.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveRight? And I see 4 things, at least. One is we own the automation that creates the important data. And we're not here to just be AI for AI, right? The AI has to lever our automation. We automate a contract process. We store millions of contracts. We learn from the data, we build better automation. So we automate, manage large amounts of data, we better -- the better the data, the better the automation. Now comes along -- and we see that as operational data. And some processes, there's experience like in commerce and customer interactivity. So I call this like operational data and experience data. But the first is we own the automation. But data lives inside of OpenText. So when we integrate to Salesforce, I use Salesforce at OpenText, all my codes, all my contracts, all my invoices live in OpenText Extended ECM. So when we integrate, when customers integrate to Salesforce, Google, SAP, others, the data lives in OpenText. So we own the automation, we own the data. We also have our private cloud, like, customers are adamant that they're not going to donate their data, their secret sauce into some public domain. And they're not going to trust these outside the firewall models for drug therapies, drug therapeutics, their most corporate-sensitive contracts. So I think the third piece is our trusted aspects. Also it's not getting a lot of talk, but a lot of the early work for us is how do you apply security and identity into that data, because not all employees should be able to see all data that lives on the transactional side, on the automation side or the AI side. So I think trust and security is a differentiator. And we're going to own our underlying vectorization technology, which is really important. We own our metadata technology. We're going to own the vectorization technology. So those are some of the things that differentiate us.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Very clear. Yes.
Unknown Analyst
analystOn the Micro Focus acquisition, you said you're going to be returning it back to growth. Can you explain how you did that because I think previously, it was kind of a melting ice cube and you were always rolling up assets and -- they were...
Mark Barrenechea
executiveHad to. Yes. So we're being very clear as we come into fiscal '24 after owning the products for 5 months that will return them to organic growth. So we expect to beat the $2.3 billion baseline for the business, here in F '26, saw a variety of things. The first is the renewals business. The business was operating in the low 80s. We ended fiscal '23 in the mid-80s. We'll end F '24 in the high 80s and getting to F '25, we'd expect to operate in the 90s. We've done a variety of things. The highest correlation to customer staff and renewals is a compelling road map, right? Dear customer, where do you want to -- customer, where you need to go in 2, 3, 4, 5 years, show me the road map to get there. So we published a -- we had a lot of time to work on our road map. And when we closed the acquisition, we published the cloud strategy and cloud deliverables for Micro Focus. Second is their organization design was an account executive, got paid on everything that got sold into an account, whether they delivered it or not. So renewals, PS, cloud, license, whatever got sold into an account that AE got paid on. We don't work that way. So we took the renewals out of the field and put it into a centralized team like we've always done and the account executive only gets paid on what they sell into an account. So we call that unstacking. We sort of unstacked. So now the account executive, they've got to hunt for what value they bring to the account. We applied our renewals processes, which are world-class and upper quartile to the renewals business. And customers are excited. They like when the company land it. They know who OpenText is. They know how we've rolled through many acquisitions. So the engagement is very high. So first on getting Micro Focus back to organic growth was the renewals business. And our work is pretty well done. We're now just going through the renewal cycles on that, we will see the benefit of that this year in the P&L. The second piece is cloudification of the product line. We did this for many companies we acquired of being able to transform them from off-cloud to private cloud. Documentum being one of the largest ones that we've done, we're doing the same thing for Micro Focus products, ITOM, AMC, ADM, cybersecurity. We're private cloud experts. And that's a big deal for these product lines and we've accelerated their SaaS road map. So the combination of those things, pipeline, AE stability, client engagement, pipeline of offerings, show a clear sign to returning them to organic growth in fiscal '24.
Unknown Analyst
analystYou also mentioned that you're shifting your business model from the past, changing it going forward.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. Yes.
Unknown Analyst
analystMaybe you can -- what do you guys look like 3 to 5 years from now?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. Yes. Our operating system for growth in the past has been M&A. That's not our new operating system and that's not our go-forward operating system. We purchased Micro Focus to be new paths for organic growth. And so our previous operating system for growth, which served us well was M&A-driven. Our future operating system for growth is core engineering, product innovation, organic cloud growth. I'd point you to our North Star, which is fiscal '26. That delivers a company of between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion in total revenues. Cloud organic revenue growth, a 7% to 9%, total company organic growth up to 4% (sic) [ 2% to 4%. ] Adjusted EBITDA, 38% to 40% and free cash flow yield in the low 20s as a percent of revenue or $1.5 billion plus. That's our North Star. That's what the company looks like as we get our organic engine going. Yes.
Steven Enders
analystAnd I guess maybe building on the Micro Focus part of it, I guess how is the cross-sell at this point between…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveSure.
Steven Enders
analystCore OpenText and what's coming in with Micro Focus? And how does that kind of build upon the improvement of renewals at this point?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. So we -- we're taking a very select -- very strategic and select strategy to cross-selling. So it's not 100 products times 6 domains. The first area of taking some Micro Focus product and going across our installed base. The first is enterprise security. So NetIQ and Voltage are now integrated into the content suite, content cloud and the business network cloud. So we finished that integration with 23.3. Our sales force is trained up and we're bringing basically identity security and encryption and tokenization security across the business network and the content world. We think there's a lot of value in being the most secure content provider in the market and the most secure business network with the combo of Voltage and NetIQ, identity security as well as tokenization. The second piece of key integration, which means cross-selling, is taking our AI Aviator platform and having it integrated into each of our market domains. So the Aviator stack of IDOL, Vertica and Magellan working with content, working with experience, working with the business network. And that work will be available in 23.4 in October. So first we'll just get our strategy, get our products integrated, get the release in the market, get our sales force trained up. And we're basically 30 days from all of that, and then we'll start selling and winning.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Maybe going back to earlier comments you had on the growth algorithm. You did talk about security business. You did talk about the MSP business and both of those from, I think, largely from acquisitions you've made. How are you thinking about, I guess, first of all, how those investments have been post-acquisition? And secondarily, how are you viewing them as part of the growth math going forward?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveSure. I think maybe one piece I would like to touch a little more based on, which I think is in the heart of the question is our SMB business. And so we acquired Carbonite, which is really 2 companies, Carbonite and Webroot. We acquired Zix, which was really like 3 companies, CloudAlly being one of the larger pieces inside of Zix. So that's given us a really nice base to go after the midmarket. And I don't think we can reach our full potential at OpenText and pursuing the $200 billion TAM, if we don't have a midmarket offering. And going into the midmarket, it's not just about your product, but how you get there, right? And part of the acquisition was we also acquired a platform, sort of the best way to describe it is like a Salesforce.com for midmarket, right? We've built -- these companies had built, and we've now modernized it, a selling platform for partners, a partner comes to register. They're able to transact. We're able to see that partner's customers' usage. And that's how the MSP model sort of works. We call the platform internally our El Dorado platform, right? So it has a name, it's called the El Dorado platform, a City of Gold. So we've taken those platforms. We've modernized it into El Dorado and we're very excited. We're excited to bring -- so we've modernized the platform, El Dorado. We're excited to bring more product into it now. We think Voltage has an opportunity there. Debricked a piece of technology from Micro Focus. Our SaaS core platform for content management kind of box in the midmarket will go through El Dorado as well. So we've been at this for 2 years. We've been at the enterprise for 32 years. We've been in the midmarket for roughly 2 to 3 years. And I remain just as optimistic here. We've got a great team. We've got great building blocks. We have a great new platform. It's going to contribute to our growth and we're still learning as we go.
Steven Enders
analystYes. So we only have about 5 minutes left here. And I guess it wouldn't be a tech conference if we didn't ask about what's going on in the macro today and what's going on in the deal environment. So I'll just I just leave it there. Like what's going on out there? How is the macro deal cycles? Just how are you kind of viewing where customer budgets are today?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveWe've been an outlier in how we answer this.
Steven Enders
analystYes.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveAnd we answer it the following way that the market and the responses are uneven. It's uneven, right? We're going from cloud growth of like 1.5% to 9%. So we're kind of going from like little local growth to planetary growth in our cloud. While other companies going from galactic growth down to -- into planetary growth. So it's uneven. And for us, the demand for our product, of information consolidation, information security is our improved execution, our new growth operating system, our very rich product pipeline, we're growing. And we see our growth expanding. So we're in highly regulated markets, which have dollars to spend. We're in infrastructure places that have dollars to spend. We have a rich installed base looking to consolidate and modernize. We have new value streams to unlock their data platforms that they've invested in. So for OpenText, we factor this into our North Star of F '26 and into our F '24 plan that's producing the growth numbers that you see. So we're a bit of an outlier on how we talk about -- and we're monitoring, of course, the macro, but it's uneven. And for us, it continues to be a bit of a growth driver.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. I do want to ask about the -- again, like Micro Focus financial integration, you do have the North Star out there for fiscal '26. I guess how much -- how should we think about how much is being put to work to help modernize the portfolio, help cloudify it, help SaaSify it? And what should kind of the glide path look like to kind of reach those EBITDA and free cash flow targets that you've talked about?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes, fiscal '24 is a big year for us, right, as you can see. It's -- we're done on the people side, benefits, compensation. All that was integrated very early on. We started fiscal '24 united as one company. Our year started July 1. It's been a very high-energy, high-engagement, very low turnover, very rich engagement environment for July 1. We still have our systems to integrate. And for us, it's easy, the destination is our mother ship systems, right? We thank Micro Focus for the $1.5 billion investment in their systems and we're going to throw them away. And they're just going to integrate into the OpenText platforms. That's how we integrate and have scaled. So this year is a little higher cash outlay as we do our legal entity rationalization, complete our systems work. And we've reprioritized our R&D budget. We're between 14% to 16% this year. That's rough math depending where your estimate is. In your bull case, it might be -- a little higher, but call it roughly $1 billion investment, $1 billion investment in R&D this year. So they didn't have a spending problem, they didn't have a spending challenge. They had a prioritization challenge. So our plan is based on a very significant reprioritization that we've done of that 14% to 16% R&D investment. So we can deliver all our objectives, wave 1 of Aviators with the 14% to 16% R&D spend.
Steven Enders
analystOkay. Only have a couple of minutes left. So I want to see if there's any questions in the room here and make sure we can get to them before -- and make sure we're getting to them. Yes. I do want to ask on -- I think you made an acquisition a couple of weeks ago…
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes.
Steven Enders
analystWith KineMatik. I guess what does that bring to the portfolio? And I guess how does this kind of change your appetite with M&A? I know you're digesting Micro Focus, so that's probably still very top of mind. But like any kind of view on how you're viewing M&A today?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. I mean KineMatik is a company that -- we call them the SolEx partner. They built their solution on top of our APIs. And what they do is content and collaboration management for regulated manufacturing. That's what they do, whether it's biotech, whether it's a chip and micro-technologies, nuclear energy, they do collaboration management, content management for that regulated manufacturing. How do you interface to a government and provide all the necessary regs and processes? How do you have certain manufacturing techniques in QMS? So they've built a wonderful solution. We had won a couple of customers together. They were a small sales organization ready to go in the private cloud. And so we were able to purchase them and we're going to put them on a global stage. We're going to put them on a global stage for biotech micro-processing and in the energy industry. And we'll drive out organic growth from that. And so yes, we are open to those very kind of focused strategic acquisitions that will be accretive to revenue and particularly ARR.
Steven Enders
analystOkay.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveRight.
Steven Enders
analystYes. Final question here. Your conference coming up next month. Any -- how should we be thinking about that expectations going into it? And yes, what's the early preview look like there?
Mark Barrenechea
executiveYes. I think we have a press release out this morning, if it's not, it will be out soon, just outlining the conference and our speakers. Look, we have a very applied AI conference and there's going to be 2 days to talk about applied AI techniques and technologies into the enterprise. We think biotech is one of the big areas where we all should be living longer; education, we all should be getting smarter; climate, top of the list. So we're going to have the UN leader for our sustainability goals in AI. We have David Wallace-Wells speak about climate and AI. We're going to have a couple of AI experts of how to get started. So we're in full preparing mode. We'll be announcing our first Aviators, 23.4. We'll be providing demonstrations of customers, industry luminaries. We'll introduce our pricing in the conference as well. And it's going to be exciting a few days.
Steven Enders
analystGreat. Well, we're looking forward to it. Mark, I want to thank you so much for being here today.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveThank you.
Steven Enders
analystAnd I want to thank everybody in the room for attending as well.
Mark Barrenechea
executiveThank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.
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