Teradata Corporation (TDC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thanks for joining us. The -- let's Claire great to have you hear. I'm looking forward to a very nice calm session.

Absolutely.

Let's start more like bigger picture, like so you have your own [indiscernible]. A lot happened over the last few weeks with election, et cetera. Like how does it play out -- how has it played out for you guys in terms of like, did the election impact anything, and we just started chatting here without the microneedle repeat it. How is the world kind of out there for you?

Yes. I think from an external perspective, we're hearing about a lot of positive sentiment to your point, I think there's an expectation of some tailwinds coming. But from a Teradata specific standpoint, I think we're very deal-driven. We're less focused on consumption. So I wouldn't say that we are seeing any significant changes in customer buying behavior or et cetera. But we're watching it very closely. And I think to your point, though, there's a lot of things happening, which to be excited about. Both from an external standpoint, with that positive sentiment but also internally with Teradata, we've had the second half of this year, a lot of innovation coming out. We had a customer partner event back in September with a lot of innovation announcements. We've announced a new CTO, who has been behind a lot of those innovations, which is really exciting, Louis Landry is stepping up to be our CTO. We've got partnerships with NVIDIA. We just got announced in the leader quadrant, Magic Quadrant by Gartner in terms of emerging GenAI. So there's just -- there's a lot happening that I think both externally and internally. That gives us a good level of confidence that gives us customer sentiment. But in terms of actually seeing a short-term impact, I think it's still a wait and see. How does that impact the pipeline? How does that impact the conversion rates -- so I wouldn't say that we're seeing a budget flush or anything like that.

That was my next question.

So I wouldn't say we're seeing a budget flush. I mean, Q4 for Teradata is a huge quarter every year. I mean our buying patterns with our customers the linearity that we see already means that Q4 is a big quarter. We still expect it to be a big quarter. We have good confidence as we execute the rest of the year. But I think the sentiment that we're seeing and some of the -- both external and internal tailwinds, I think, are going to help us as we look out to 2025.

Is there -- is it a little bit like old time thinking from us as well that we keep asking about budget flush because if you think about like how corporates are buying these days, the subscription, consumption, [ extra stuff ]. It doesn't feel budget flushes kind of that much will think anymore really?

Yes, for Teradata, it certainly, it's not. We are deal driven. We have fairly long deal cycle times. So I think for us -- and we already have a very big Q4. So I feel like it's already -- it's already built into our linearity. It's already built into our expectations in line with historical trends. And I think for us, we're not anticipating a big budget flush. And as I'm sure most CFOs have been telling you today, we want to see it actually in the numbers, in the pipeline, in the closure rates changing before we're going to start making additional commitments externally.

Yes. And it's like maybe kind of slightly broadening it out a little bit from a time horizon. If you think about Teradata, look, are not been covering you guys for like many, many years, I have to see that the last couple of years were a little bit more uneven. Can you maybe -- and some of that is probably the cloud migration, because there's a lot of stuff you kind of guys that is changing, but you have to learn as well. talk a little bit about like how the last couple of years kind of played to come together for you guys?

Yes. And I think specifically, 2024, so this year has been a more volatile year for Teradata. Lots of changes happening from an internal perspective, but also from a buying -- a customer buying patterns. And I think to your point, that is because such a big portion of our business now is cloud ARR, such a big portion of our bills, our migration and expansion deals. So I think it does change the dynamics. And I think what we've seen at Teradata is changing our relationship with our customers for the better, whereby we're really sitting down at the table and having those strategic end-to-end discussions about how are they leveraging their data, how are they using Teradata, and how they could potentially use us in the future. So it has been more volatile in 2024. I think historically before that we've been much more stable. I think with some of the changes that I mentioned at the beginning with regards to some of the internal reorganizations that we're doing, some of the opportunities, announcements that we've been making in the last couple of months sets us up well. as we look forward. And I think those relationships in our -- with our customers and some of the big strategic deals that we're doing with them, we've got much better visibility in the last few months and potentially that we had coming into 2024.

Can you talk -- maybe kind of remind us like if someone goes to the cloud or kind of that -- they're like where did the hiccup start? Or what's different if you do that versus like the old, you just shipped a new box?

Yes, absolutely. I think there's two elements there, Raimo. I'll talk about. So first of all, what are the changes that we've seen -- so first of all, I think there's one -- the deal elongation cycle. And I think that's both internal to Teradata, but I think that's an external. A lot of companies have seen that trend. So I don't think we're alone there. And what we've seen more recently is what we've been talking about in terms of stage migrations. So where the total spend commitment from our customers is the same. We've seen a slight difference between how much of that commitment is in cloud versus on-premise. And actually, where historically, some of our biggest customers have been committing to, I would say, big, large 3-year migration plans. Which means they actually commit to expansion at the point of migration as well. They're breaking that down into smaller deals. So they're still committing the same amount and the same total spend with Teradata. So that's some of the things that we've been talking about, which has kind of changed our forecast. But if I answer your kind of first question in the sense of what does it actually mean? What we tend to see is a lot of customers as they migrate to the cloud, they want -- they identify the workloads that they have. And some customers want to, do a big bang and want to migrate all of their workloads. Some want to keep this hybrid. And I think that's an opportunity for Teradata, because we are really the only true hybrid offering out there. There's a lot of cloud native and there's a lot of on-prem, but to have cloud native and on-prem and to be able to really truly provide a hybrid clean hybrid solution, we are the exception there. So I think that is helping us in terms of being at the table with these strategic deals, and it means we can follow the customers desire. So we -- ultimately, we're looking for total ARR growth. Yes, we would like them to migrate to the cloud with us. But if they decide to have a hybrid approach and keep some on-prem and only move some of their workplace, in the short term to the cloud, that works for us, also because total spend stays the same. And as customers migrate and as they stay with us in the cloud, we do see good expansion opportunities. So that is an advantage, normally to us when customers migrate to the cloud. So at the point of migration, we tend to see approximately a 20% uplift at the point of migration. And then once customers have been with us in the cloud, our net expansion rate is also 120%. So it's kind of fairly consistent about how much of the expansion you see at the point of migration versus, okay, once that customer has been on the cloud review for 12 months, we tend to see that continued expansion opportunities. So that's definitely incentives for us to work with our customers to migrate to the cloud. But we know, especially whether it's in financial services or some other industries, we know that they don't want to have everything in the cloud. So we'll work with them on on-premise or hybrid solutions, and we do see expansion there. Lower expansion rates on-premise because it's harder. You need the infrastructure to do that expansion. But still, customers -- our biggest customers are growing with us. Regardless of whether they're in the cloud or on-premise.

And I wanted to go back to -- you said like it's the customer is making -- doing smaller chunks, but the ultimate size is still the same -- is it -- but I'm slightly confused like what's the negative impact and -- like is it the same, but over a longer duration then? And -- or is it more back-end loaded as -- and you only had the starting point, so you see it later? Like how do you have to think about that?

Yes. So when I say the total spend is the same, I'm talking about the total spend across on-premise and the cloud. So the negative impact is -- and as you've seen in our updated outlook for cloud is that we are expecting, in the short term, we're expecting less cloud ARR. The total ARR is staying the same.

Oh, I see what you mean.Yes, yes, yes.

So I mean that's an advantage, the advantage of being hybrid but it does mean that we've had a bit of volatility in our cloud ARR outlook. Which -- but the total ARR -- we didn't have to change the total ARR.

And where is the expansion coming from when the guys are on the cloud? Is that because they realize, oh, I can do -- I could add more data. So the warehouse gets bigger? Or is it because you're running more queries or more users can easily kind of -- kind of access the system and so then it get's bigger there? Like how does that 20% come together?

Yes, see. So actually, all of the above. So you have more users, more data and more queries. I think in terms of those customers that are with us have been with us for multiple years. I think you get -- when you move from on-premise to the cloud, they've been in a constrained environment. So immediately, they want to add more data. They immediately want to add more users. They immediately want to add more workloads. You kind of have across all three as we continue, though, to work with them and they've been with us over 12 months. The expansion then does come from more -- less from the users, but more from the data, more from the queries. And the different workloads that they're running with us on the cloud. But that initial expansion at the point of migration is because they've been in that constrained environment, and it's data queries and users. But after they've been with us for a longer period of time, data is continuing to grow as we see, like, especially with the use of GenAI models and things like that, the amount of data being used. So that definitely is a big driver expansion, but also the computational queries, the number of queries being run is also increasing.

Yes. And then last question on that one. Like if you think back, so now it does sound like the market has shifted for you a little bit because [indiscernible] -- was it a year ago, like earlier this year, it was like, some guys might not renew at the same rate or like there might be some issues. Now it seems more like a timing issue of like people realizing there is a good cloud product, and I just kind of need to slowly start migrating. Is that like an observation that is kind of true like from your perspective?

Yes. I think coming into 2024, I think one of the biggest headwinds we had was actually on-premise retention rate. So that was kind of, I would say, the headwind coming into 2025. And that wasn't cloud. Actually, that was on-premise. And we've actually seen in H2 of 2025, we've seen an improvement in our overall retention rate and our on-premise retention when compared to H1, and we're expecting that improvement to continue. I think with regards to our cloud migration plans, our cloud deals to your point, just absorbing that deal on elongation, being able to absorb this year, that less stage migration. That's something that I think we now have a really good alignment with our customers on over time. And I think the reorganization that we've done in the go-to-market, the investments that we've made in customer success and customer health have all been building up to helping us over the last 6 to 12 months.

And then as part of that, like so -- and that's what we see as well when we talk to some of the customers that like they realize there's a good solid solution, and it's much easier to go with you to the cloud and try to redo everything. Like what are you seeing in terms of your relationships with the hyperscalers? Is there a couple of interesting announcements like -- how are they thinking about it?

Yes. I think given the customer loyalty we have here at Teradata, the hyperscalers clearly see the opportunity to partner with us nothing. All of our customers prefer it when we -- we turn up to table together. Sort of thing. Now there is some, I would say, some competition happening especially, for example, with with big queries. You can't avoid that. But I think ultimately, Teradata and the hyperscalers know that if we work together, if we do partner, there's been some great announcements to your point, like AI Unlimited in Microsoft Fabric, for example, being embedded into fabric for all customers. I think that's been an exciting update. And so we are not trying to compete with the cloud service providers when it comes to storage. We don't make any money on that. That's not what we're trying to do. It's much more about compute and queries and workloads. And I think when you are supporting the biggest companies in the world, Teradata's differentiation is that performance at scale. It is that we can easily move people to the cloud, low-risk, low-cost and real fast. And we have multiple customers that have tried to migrate very large workloads with either some of our competitors or even some of the cloud service providers and they've had to back off of that and then and say to Teradata, can you help us do this, and we've been able to do that. So it is our differentiation. I think the partners, the cloud service providers appreciate that, and so therefore, want to partner with us. On where the workloads are huge, where the data is huge because we can provide that performance and we can also provide it at the best cost as well because of the lowest cost of query.

It's funny, yes, because I got to talk with one of your big customers about it, and they were like they did have a look, and it was like it was a 10-year project. And I was like, no, no, I'm going to [indiscernible]. Yes.

We have done it. And we've been doing that for several years and the speed of which we can migrate, our biggest customers for cloud is very impressive. And when they get there, they are surprised with how performance it is. It happens over the course of a weekend, they come back in. We've even had one customer quote saying, did it have -- like is it -- from the users like did it happen? Did it work because there's been no disruption and the performance seems really good. So -- and that comes with the experience that we've got, I think -- so I think we've been known for our reliability of managing migrations what we're starting to, I think, get more known for this year with the innovation side of it is being able to have the kind of analytical capabilities. And so we're trying to share more and more examples, use cases, whether it's GenAI or other use cases, customer to customer, peer to pay references because that's what they want to hear. They want to come with us with a solution that's going to drive my business value show me a customer that's already done this. And I think with this in 2024, we spent a lot of focus and investment in that area, and I think it's starting to pay off. And we had one customer, for example, who's in the financial services industry and our customer electric talking about GenAI work grade, whereby they had a Databricks proof of concept and a Teradata proof of concept, and it was all about credit card applications, for example. And they said we were able to be twice as fast for half the cost. On Teradata to Databricks. And you could tell everyone sits up in the room and go hang on a minute, can tell me more about that, give me more information and we need to do more of that. And we have a great peer-to-peer program at Teradata, and I think it's going from strength to strength. And I think that's something we've just got to continue to put real value, real use cases, peer-to-peer recommendations. And I think that will help us from a reputational standpoint.

Yes. Okay. Makes sense. And then the like now a CFO-type question, like if you think about that, how does that kind of translate into growth for you? Because like at the end of the day, you were the poor person that has to deliver the growth rent -- like how do you do that? And then like how do you think about that?

Yes. I mean what we're focused on at Teradata is getting back to total ARR growth in 2025. And that's what we're committed to, that's what we're on the path to -- and that's what's really important. And I think there's multiple ways that we can do that, improve retention rates as we talked about continue to have strong expansion rates, especially in the cloud and to continue the strong successful migrations that we've seen. The other area, probably not a huge contributor in '25, but an opportunity for us at Teradata is that net new customers. Really, how do we get net new logos in at Teradata. And part of our go-to-market reorganization is addressing that, new leadership, new team, new approach. And -- I mean we've seen net new logos every quarter. I would just like to see more of that. And I think that's what we're expecting to see as we move forward.

Sorry, it's a technical question. But like if you think about like like, in theory, the cloud enables you to get customers at a lower kind of size point, and then they can expand from there. And historically, there wasn't like because you were the big guys with the big kind of appliances. Is that kind of a way that we need to think about you? And are you working towards that?

Absolutely. Yes. So to your point, net new logos, they tend to start small and then expand over time. It is much easier with a cloud-native product with AI Unlimited with all of these interventions that were coming out, it is much easier to be able to do a proof of concept to do exploratory work close with Teradata. Historically, that has not been easy, especially 3, 4 years ago when on-premise standpoint. So we're very much focused on how do we do those exploratory workloads. And as I was mentioning, what are those AI use cases? What are the things that we can take to customers and say, this is ease quick, easy to set up get going and you get business value very quickly. And the more we can do that, the better. And that is not, I would say, the Teradata of [ old ]. So that is an opportunity for us to continue to leverage.

And I'm trying to avoid you mentioning AI, but I don't think I can anymore. So if you think about like I mean you kind of think new fancy names that in public. How do you think you fit in there in the long run? Like you do have a big data estate, that's point one. But like talk about your kind of strategy there?

Well, first of all, I would say, I mean, we tend to use AI and GenAI interchangeably and what we probably shouldn't. I mean, AI ML has been around for many, many years. We have a very large analytical capabilities, leveraging AI and ML and we always have done built into our software. I think specifically from GenAI, the biggest opportunity for Teradata and you can see it potentially as a TAM expander is the fact that the amount of data being used to support GenAI, it's huge and it's growing. And I think, again, coming back to where Teradata differentiates itself where is the opportunity? It is about performance at scale, being able to organize, use compute large workload at low cost. That's where we differentiate us from a GenAI standpoint, our opportunity to support our customers in the GenAI journey to be able to show them how we can support and help them from that standpoint to show them that we've got examples, for example, in terms of analytical capabilities using CPU being shown to be the same performance as GPUs. So that -- all of that is something where we can work with our customers to help them on their journeys. And naturally, we're building AI capabilities, continue to build [ AI ] capabilities into our product offerings.

And then how -- like the CFO question now is like how do you monetize that then? Is it basically it requires more compute. And so you get more -- there's more data coming in, there's more storage or like if there's AI SKU idea? Like how do you think -- how do we think about that?

Yes. I think first of all, it's about retention rates. So first of all, it's about how do we show our customers. We are relevant, we're innovative and that they should be on this journey with Teradata. That's the first thing. And that helps you on retention rate. It helps you with migration. But to your point, once you're working with a customer and it ultimately, it helps your expansion. More data, more users, more workplace, more queries, all of that drives expansion. And we can see -- we can do on-premise. I mean the other thing we got to remember is AI is not -- can't just be done on the cloud. You also have AI on-premise sort of thing. So ultimately, we're looking for that commitment to stay with Teradata commitment to migrate with Teradata and ultimately, commitment to expand with Teradata.

Yes, yes. I mean, the -- that commitment to stay with you guys, like -- do you see that in your CFO metrics that had changed from like beginning of the year or 2 now and propensity to renew a net of stuff or...

Great question, Raimo. Thank you for asking it. Absolutely. So one of the things that we've seen is in H2 of '24. Our overall retention rate from a company standpoint that on-prem and the cloud has improved compared to H1. And we're seeing -- and as we look out to 2025, expecting that improvement to be -- to continue to maintain. But absolutely, you can see it in the numbers in terms of net retention rate in H2 being better than it was in H1.

And if there -- is there anything you did -- I mean, like there's one of the oppertunity is obviously like giving the customer more vision, like having a cloud product and doing those kinds of agreements? Is there also something you did from an operational perspective to more handholding, et cetera, like kind of following the renewal path from your clients more? Like is there anything you did as well here?

Yes, absolutely. I mean we have been investing in our customer success, customer health making sure that we've got good visibility using early warning signals, working on those relationships. To make sure that we have good visibility of -- I mean, ultimately, the happiness of a customer can be measured by in how they're using you? And what their consumption looks like, even though we're not consumption, we don't have a lot of consumption deals, we can see the consumption within the software. So I think all of that information to help drive to make sure we're staying close. The other thing we did, I mentioned the go-to-market reorganization. But just to be clear, what we did there is we actually -- we effectively took out a management layer. So we want some kind of a regional approach to actually more geo and industry verticals. And took out on management layer, which means we're closer to the customer. So we mean that -- which I think all of that helps in terms of customer relationships, in terms of being agile. And so all of those are kind of operational changes that we're making. We believe -- there's not one thing that as a big difference, but all of these add up to help us with that relationship with the customers and help to -- just taking business use cases that add value from one customer quicker. To other customers in that industry verticals, all of that is an opportunity.

And the last few minutes, I wanted to talk a little bit more on the operational side. If you think about it, you kind of did -- as you mentioned, you did take out some layers, et cetera. Like going from cloud to -- from on-premise to cloud, sorry, is obviously something that is a challenge for every vendor. Like we've seen it again and again, like where are you on that operational journey of realizing, okay, this is different. I need to kind of change my organization, et cetera?

Yes, we've done a lot of changes over the last few years that we've gone along this journey. And to point -- it doesn't all happen overnight, and we still have to support a very large on-prem business. So what we've done is we've been looking at how we -- how our processes work, how we execute operationally, and it has to be end-to-end. It has to be not just the customer-facing organizations. It needs to be all the back-end support organizations as well. So we've been doing a lot of work from a functional standpoint as well as how do we change what we do and how we do it to be able to really support to SaaS as well as on-premise and customers at a hybrid. So yes, we've been making a lot of changes in terms of how we operate, how our processes run. And it's always an ongoing journey. I'm always talking about continuous improvement, how do we get better, how do we move forward? But yes, we've had to make a lot of changes as a company. And I think we've done a good job. Yes, '24 has been a volatile year, but I think we've done a really good job. We've got over $0.5 billion in cloud ARR. We've got our feedback from our customers is in terms of the Net Promoter Score is really high. So I think that's really good. And so transformation is never linear, as we all know. And I think -- I think we're moving forward...

And like the if you think about your cost base, like if you think -- as a CFO, when you think about it, like you have to deliver like cash and profitability to us, like if you think about a decision there, like how does it feel in terms of like, okay, well, we're just a different organization. So we just need to be differently organized versus like, okay, I need to deliver profits?

Both -- so I think whenever we're looking at our processes, looking at how we do things always looking at how can we be more efficient, how can we be more effective? And I think one thing that Teradata has always said is that we will be focused on profitable growth. So profitability has been at the forefront. And I think we've done a very good job of that. We've got strong operating margins in the low 20% range. We're committing to -- we have strong free cash flow generation, so -- but it has to be a balance. So yes, we've made some restructuring. We've taken out costs, but some of that will be reinvested. We invested in sales and marketing, we invested into product innovation. So -- how can we be more efficient? How can we take cost out, how can we take out layers of management, how can we take out things that are not customer-facing. All of that is something that we continuously look to improve and drive to drive the operating margin improvement that we've seen. But at the same time, it's really important that we do reinvest some of those savings back in. And as you see, we are making some -- we have done some restructuring in the second half of 2024. Some of that will help us from an operating margin standpoint, but some of that will be reinvested to ensure -- help us from innovation, help us from customer relationships, help marketing, rebranding [indiscernible] .

Yes. Okay. And then last question for me is like cash, like you've been very focused on delivering on the cash -- operating cash flow side. Like -- can you speak to that, like in terms of like you've been able to kind of actually do really well there and very shown us kind of very good performance there. How do I -- is there -- is that just the operations side? Or like do you have other like CFO levers to kind of you can pull there?

No, it's purely the operational side. I mean, focus on obviously cash coming from -- in terms of cash conversion cycle, we have improved the efficiency on the cash conversion cycle over the last couple of years. That's been a big focus for us, but it's kind of -- it's our internal operational effectiveness. Obviously, focusing on operating margins has helped us from that standpoint. But yes, we're very committed to that free cash flow generation growth as we look out from '24 to '25. When we're committed to approximately a midpoint of about $280 million free cash flow generation '24 and growth in 2025. So to your point, if you look at the amount of free cash flow that we are committed to generating and the value compared to -- if you look at our price and valuation, there's a big opportunity there. And yes, that's something -- and we also returned 75% of that free cash flow back to shareholders in the form of share repurchases. So I mean that is something we've committed to, we're focused on. It's very much an operational deliverable, for us. And I think we've done well historically and continue to expect that to grow as we look out to 2025 and beyond.

Perfect. That's a great closing statement as well. Thank you I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.

Thank you very much.