Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Verint's Investor Day. My name is Matt Frankel with Investor Relations and Corporate Development. I'll begin this morning by reading a brief disclaimer. We'll then get into the presentation, and we'll finish with Q&A. Throughout the presentation, please feel free to submit questions through the Q&A chat feature on your screen. Okay. Let's get going then. Please note that certain matters discussed in this video presentation contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other provisions of the U.S. federal security laws. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements. Please see Verint's SEC filings for a discussion of risks and uncertainties. The financial measures discussed in the video presentation include non-GAAP measures, which investors may find useful supplemental information. For a description of these non-GAAP financial measures, including the reasons management uses each measure, and a GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation, please see the Investor Relations tab on Verint's website at verint.com.

Good morning, and welcome to Verint's Investor Day. It's an exciting time at Verint. We recently filed a registration statement for Cognyte Software and expect to complete the spin shortly after our fiscal year-end. At that point, Verint will become a pure-play customer engagement company. Today, we will discuss our cloud platform innovation, go-to-market growth strategy and market opportunity. We will conclude with a detailed review of our financial model with a focus on key cloud KPIs as we complete our transition to the cloud. Following that, we will hold a question-and-answer session. Now let me hand it over to Dan to kick things off.

Thank you, Alan. Let me also welcome you to our Investor Day. We believe that Verint becoming a pure-play customer engagement company is happening at the exact right time. A time of digital transformation would drive significant change across the enterprise. Today, customer engagement organizations are increasingly seeking new technology that can increase automation and drive significant differentiation for their brand. Digital transformation is accelerating. Long past are the days that customer journeys are limited to phone calls into the contact center. Today, customer journeys take place across many touch points in the enterprise and across many communications and collaboration platforms with digital technology leading the way. Customer touch points take place in contact centers, back office and branch operations, e-commerce, digital marketing, self-service and customer experience departments. The breadth of customer touch points and the rapid growth in digital interactions disrupt existing workflows and require a new way of organizing work. We are starting to see the emergence of the future of work. I would like to explain the engagement capacity gap and why it's widening. Let's take a closer look at how the acceleration of digital is causing the capacity gap. Today, brands are looking to differentiate based on providing consumers a strong brand experience. But they cannot afford doing so by hiring more people. The workforce expense is already significant, with estimated 50 million knowledge workers around the globe employed in customer engagement roles at an estimated expense of more than $2 trillion annually. With exponential growth in digital journeys and more demanding consumer expectations, organizations need more resources, hiring more knowledge workers and increasing the workforce expense is not a sustainable solution. This creates an engagement capacity gap. And as digital accelerates, the gap is widening. The answer must be new technology. Organizations are increasingly seeking technology to close this gap, solutions that are based on AI and analytics to automate workflows across the enterprise silos to optimize the workforce expense and at the same time to drive an elevated customer experience. Verint is ready and uniquely positioned to help organizations close the capacity gap with our differentiated open cloud platform. Today, we will discuss our cloud platform capabilities in more detail. We will explain the future of work and the applications available in the platform to help our customers connect work, data and experiences across the enterprise. We will also review the platform common services, explain why being truly open is so important to our customers and partners and demonstrate how Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics is embedded in the platform to infuse automation in everything we do. In addition to explaining our cloud platform capabilities, we will discuss our go-to-market strategy, and you will also hear from our customers and partners. Over the 2 decades, we have become a leader in customer engagement, helping some of the world's most iconic brands to evolve their customer engagement operations across the enterprise. Today, we are focused on helping our large customer base to execute their digital transformation strategies in the area of customer engagement. Our cloud platform provides existing customers an easy path to expand in the cloud and close the capacity gap. We are also winning many new logos, and we will review our competitive differentiation. We see a significant opportunity with our large and growing partner network to accelerate our new logo expansion. As you know, Verint adopted an open and agnostic cloud partner strategy. This resonates well with both partners and customers and continues to be a differentiated go-to-market growth strategy. Turning to TAM. We estimate our addressable market at $65 billion, growing around 10% annually. This includes a $30 billion opportunity within the contact center and a $35 billion opportunity in customer touch points with other departments across the enterprise. We believe there is a significant market opportunity for vendors, such as Verint, that focus on delivering comprehensive and open cloud platform designed to help customers close the gap across the enterprise. As a pure customer engagement company, Verint will be laser-focused on growing into this large TAM. As such, we will discuss today our 3-year targets and the financial model behind it. Our transition to the cloud is having a positive impact on our financial model and the benefits include better economics, faster expansion into customers' white space, and improved visibility. For fiscal ending 2024, we're targeting $1 billion of revenue, growing high single digits, with 90% of our software revenue generated from recurring sources. Later, we will explain how we plan to achieve the targets and take you through our 3-year model in detail. Finally, following the separation, Verint will be a category leader well positioned to address a large TAM with a compelling offering that can help customers close the capacity gap. We have a strong balance sheet, a strong management team and a Board of Director that is focused on growth and market leadership. Now let me hand the call over to Celia to discuss our cloud platform in more detail and how it helps our customers to close the gap. Celia joined Verint late last year as our CMO, and she brings significant experience in SaaS and cloud transitions. Celia, please go ahead.

Thanks, Dan. I'm excited to share Verint's updated messaging and positioning that's reflective of us being a pure-play customer engagement company. More than ever, how a brand engages with its customers will have a direct impact on their success. At Verint, we're helping brands engage with their customers so they can build enduring relationships with them. Before talking about our markets and our messaging, I'd like to share a customer story. [Presentation]

We're extremely appreciative of the partnership we have with Analog Devices. Lisa's comments about the significance of a customer's digital experience is something we've been consistently hearing about from our customers. We saw an acceleration of digital last year. 2020 was a year like no other. We saw significant changes that impacted how business was conducted. Many of the changes that happened during the pandemic were ones that started well before 2020. Businesses we're talking about digital transformation for some time. There were 2 key areas where we saw changes occur with the acceleration of digital: changes that impacted the workforce and consumer behavior. These changes won't go away once the pandemic is behind us, they'll have a deep and lasting impact. From a workforce perspective, we've seen a shift to work from home. We'll have a workforce that can work from anywhere. We're also seeing generational shifts that are changing how people work and what they expect from their employers. We're seeing the human and workforce augmented by AI-driven bots. And increasingly, humans and bots are working together to solve challenges. We're experiencing equally dramatic shifts from a consumer perspective. Consumer expectations are increasing exponentially. And the generational shifts impacting the workforce are also impacting consumers. There is an increased desire to use self-service channels. And as the number of channels that consumers use increases, brands are faced with a complex customer journey. They have to understand how customers want to engage and be able to effectively manage those interactions. At Verint, we understand the significance of these changes. We know that brand success requires answering a new set of questions. A brand has to be able to manage a growing number of interactions. They have to be able to effectively manage a workforce that may work from anywhere. They have to figure out the right balance between automation and human assistance. It isn't enough for a brand to respond to things after the interaction is completed. They need to understand and act on behavior in real time. They need to connect the work silos that exist across the organization so that they can deliver efficiencies and elevate the customer experience. And the demands that brands face today will continue to evolve. The pace of change will continue to accelerate. And as it does, companies will need to have an open technology platform that enables them to keep pace with the speed of innovation. The pressures that brands are under are significant. They are facing a strategic problem. How do they drive enduring customer relationships today when they have the same or fewer resources? How do we do this given the rapidly changing dynamics? Brands are facing a tremendous amount of change today. We talked about a lot of it already. They're seeing the number of interactions and channels increase exponentially. At the same time, customer expectations are growing. And their workforces are undergoing a significant amount of change, too. Many companies have the same or fewer resources available today to manage customer engagement. This has created an engagement capacity gap, and the gap is worsening due to changes we're seeing with consumers and the workforce dynamics. The widening gap has impacts on customer and employee experience. So the imperative facing companies: They must close the engagement capacity gap. And how they close the gap is with an approach we call Boundless Customer Engagement. Brands require a whole new set of capabilities for Boundless Customer Engagement. They have to power today's evolving workforce that is increasingly distributed and augmented by bots. They have to listen to and understand every interaction in the moment, so they can drive real-time assistance. That assistance could be direct help to a customer or coaching to an agent that is engaged with the customer. A brand has to connect the work silos that exists across the enterprise. Customer engagement is happening across the organization and through many channels. Silos have to be connected so that a brand can provide a seamless experience to a customer. A customer must make sure that they're using the right technology that is open and will enable them to rapidly deploy innovation. And of course, they have to drive real business outcomes. As they connect the work silos and deliver a better customer and employee experience, there's an opportunity to drive significant ROI. I want to talk a bit more about our differentiated approach, specifically as it relates to how we help companies close the engagement capacity gap by connecting work, data and experiences across the enterprise. We connect work performed by the new workforce of human and bots. Whether that workforce is in the contact center, the back office, the brands or in the store, we connect the workflows across all of these areas to support customer engagement initiatives. From a data perspective, we enable a company to leverage the interaction and experience data that exists regardless of channel or modality, and we enable a company to enrich that data, to enhance its value. Pulling together that data is only the first step. We also enable companies to freely export that data into their data lakes or analytics applications, so they can drive deeper insights about customer engagement. And from an experience perspective, we're able to fully capture the voice of the customer and derive insights that they experience data can help further improve both the customer and the employee experience. I'd like to invite Jaime Meritt, who is leading Product Strategy in Verint to discuss Verint customer engagement cloud platform.

Thanks, Celia. We designed our cloud platform with native cloud architecture to effectively connect work, data and experiences across the enterprise. It's a completely open design and developer-friendly, and the platform provides common services to support an extremely broad set of applications, which we'll explain later. Let's take a closer look. So why does an open cloud platform matter to our customers and partners? And why is the Verint Cloud Platform highly differentiated? In the next few minutes, I'll explain the importance of native cloud architecture, the open imperative, the critical role of unifying customer engagement data, the innovation behind Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics and our cloud services model. With the native cloud architecture, the Verint Cloud Platform was designed to operate in all leading public cloud infrastructures. This is particularly important for partners who prefer to run Verint in their cloud and large global customers who require cloud choices. The native cloud architecture also accelerates innovation by standardizing our approach to microservices, container-based architectures and fully automated DevOps. This dramatically speeds development while improving reliability and security. Finally, the modular design and well-defined APIs between applications allow for extension by our customers and partners to integrate into their IT and cloud vendor ecosystems. We use the same APIs we expose to our customers to connect our own applications, so we know they work. The shift to cloud, the explosion in artificial intelligence and the growth of the API economy have dramatically changed customer and partner expectations regarding what they needed from their core technology vendors. The days of the single-vendor closed ecosystem are long gone. The market demands open technology platforms that enable customers and partners to easily extend and adapt applications to their needs. Partners and integrators need to add their own unique IP and to integrate into their best-of-breed platforms. Customer IT organizations measure openness by the ease with which our data can be integrated with enterprise data lakes or enable their developers to embed Verint capabilities into their business processes. An open platform has to be more than the technology alone, and we've delivered the tools inside the platform required to foster a rich partner and customer ecosystem around our applications. These tools include the Marketplace, where Verint and partner components are made available to accelerate time to value with downloadable assets; the developer portal, where customers can engage directly with the Verint technical community. All of our APIs are available to test with code samples, developer sandboxes, downloadable test clients, education, discussion forums and a rich resource center, which acts as a one-stop shop for all Verint content for self-paced learning or reference. No platform can claim to be open if your data is locked away inside. The Verint Cloud Platform helps organizations to create a unified data hub for interaction and experience data. It provides a holistic view of customer engagement by blending the unstructured data flowing from interactions across all modalities: voice, text, video, survey data, web journey data and much more. This unstructured data is typically locked up in silos across many systems which makes it difficult to access. The Verint Cloud Platform makes it easy. All of this data is normalized in our data hub with an open data model, readily available to customers and partners at no additional charge so they can unlock the value in the data. Most organizations have only their customer profile data in their CRM or CDP system, but this data alone cannot help in closing the engagement capacity gap. The Verint Cloud Platform augments the customer profile data with interaction and experience data, arming organizations with the full data set and making it easy to unlock the value in data and drive strategic outcomes. Verint is well-known for its leading artificial intelligence and analytics capabilities for many years. We package these capabilities into what we call Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics and embedded it natively in the cloud platform. Da Vinci services are delivered through the Verint Cloud platform and used by our applications to infuse AI across the Verint portfolio. These services are state of the art machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning algorithms honed on our unique data set. Da Vinci represents over 2 decades of research into optimizing customer engagements. Our global research team have built our AI using billions of customer interactions across all modalities, generated from real customers. This data set spans all regions, over 70 languages, across all sectors and is unique in the industry. The applications on the Verint platform generate a constant flow of engagement data that's used to further optimize Da Vinci AI services. This cycle continues to accelerate the pace of AI innovation at Verint, allowing us to expand Da Vinci with new AI services and optimize our existing services so we remain on the cutting-edge in the science of customer engagement. How is Da Vinci used in Verint applications? For example, Da Vinci services have been incredibly important in influencing interactions in real time and helping to deliver in-the-moment coaching for agents handling complex calls, or assuring compliance with required disclosures. Another example is identifying interactions that are escalating or agents that aren't engaging appropriately with customers. Da Vinci helps analysts and supervisors focus in on interactions that make a difference to customer satisfaction by scoring customer and agent sentiment as well as classifying all interactions by customer intent. We'll look later at a few demos that illustrate how Da Vinci and Verint applications work together in the cloud platform. Verint Cloud Platform sets the standard for how we deliver all applications as cloud services. First, each Verint application is available as a module with no dependencies. This enables our customers to adopt Verint applications at their own pace and by their business priority. Second, Verint applications all take advantage of the common -- the platform for common business services, and this drives consistency and greatly simplifies the process of using multiple Verint applications in the same organization. Third is our pricing model of pay for usage. Verint cloud products are delivered using a consumption-based pricing model. Customers pay in the same way they measure value for the product. In some cases, consumption is based on the volume of data. In some cases, it's based on the use of bots. And in other cases, based on named employees. Now that we understand how the Verint Cloud Platform works, let's go back to Celia.

Thanks, Jaime. I appreciate you taking us through the platform. Now let's dive a little deeper into the applications that are running in the platform. All cloud platform applications are designed to address key customer engagement processes across future work, data management and experience management. Customer engagement processes across the enterprise are being disrupted by changes in consumer behavior and within the workforce. As disruptions occur, brands are seeing the engagement capacity gap widen. As you can see in the slide, the Verint platform is designed for a wide array of customer engagement processes. Our customers can turn on any number of applications in the platform to manage specific workflows across the enterprise and start closing the engagement capacity gap. The platform is highly modular and customers can choose to turn on any application based on their specific priorities. As customers turn on more and more applications over time, they're able to better connect work, data and experiences to effectively close the capacity gap. Let's bring this to life. During the next few minutes, we'll review 3 examples for applications available in the cloud platform: Verint Quality Management, Verint Real-Time Work and Verint Experience Management. These 3 applications can work together or can be purchased separately. In either case, they all run in the Verint Cloud Platform and leverage Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics. Let me turn it over to Dave Singer, our go-to-market leader for future of work, to take a closer look.

Thanks, Celia. Let's start with quality management and how Verint is changing the game. To level set, let's define what we mean by quality management. We define it as the process of measuring and improving the quality of work done across the enterprise. Traditionally, quality programs were performed by supervisors at the contact center. Many listen to calls and assigning quality scores. This only allowed for less than 1% of interactions to be scored, measured and approved. However, as the number of digital interactions increases and more interactions occur outside traditional contact center channels, a more automated and consistent approach to quality compliance is needed. Verint Quality Management makes it possible to automate measuring the quality compliance for 100% of interactions using Da Vinci AI. But beyond measuring, Verint Quality Management is also focused on driving improvement using the variety of workflows: workflows to coach employees, workflows to drive improvements of virtual assistance, workflows to mitigate compliance breaches and workflows enabled in real-time for in-the-moment guidance. Let's see what that looks like. Starting with the human interactions, Verint Quality Management uses Da Vinci AI to automatically evaluate up to 100% of text and voice interactions. These results are then presented in a simple heat map to make it easy to see where attention is required and [ dealt ] with the appropriate actions. Based on performance workflows, these coaching sessions can be automatically or manually assigned. The outcome of this coaching is also tracked to ensure the coaching is effective. The same AI and workflows can also be used to continuously monitor AI-powered bot interactions to make sure they are held to the same level of performance and compliance. This makes sure that the bots are continuously improved and customers receive a consistent experience. However, quality management is about the quality of work across the enterprise not just the quality of interactions. A single request from customers often turns into multiple activities performed by multiple resources, both employees and bots, across the enterprise. Verint enables the company to manage all the activities resulting from a single customer interaction and provides visibility to all of these activities so that they can effectively manage the quality of the entire engagement. Because we track each activity separately, the appropriate set of criteria can be applied to each one based on type. For example, we could evaluate the call, the underwriting and the issuance of an insurance policy separately according to different criteria. This allows insight into quality from a complete end-to-end perspective as well as at the individual activity level so that it's easy to identify where performance is needed. From here, coaching can be assigned automatically or manually as needed using the same workflow as interactions. And finally, everything rolls up into a single view of work across all resources, both humans and bots, across the entire enterprise, including call center, back office and digital channels. Now let's hear from one of our customers using Verint Quality Management today. Exchange is an $8.6 billion organization providing goods and services to the U.S. military community worldwide. Let's see how it's working for them. [Presentation]

Now that many interactions are taking place over digital channels like chat or from agents working from home, real-time guidance has become critically important. For example, when a customer interaction involves a complaint or escalation, real-time assistance can be the difference between a satisfied customer or one who was lost to the competition. Let's see what that looks like. [Presentation]

With Verint Real-Time Work, brands can drive automation and workflows to address customer issues proactively during the interactions, so they're resolved in real time. This can directly reduce the cost of interactions and increase customer satisfaction. Let's look at one example of a customer. Florius is a mortgage lender who uses Verint's Real-Time Work to provide the information they need as the interaction is happening. Within just 4 months of implementing it, they had reduced their hold times by more than 4% and had first call resolution by nearly 10%. These numbers may not seem large, but for example, for a 1,000-person contact center, a 10% reduction in calls, a combination of increased first time resolution and hold time reduction, results in more than a $5 million annual savings. Let's turn our discussion to experience. With Verint Experience Management, organizations can capture all the experience data across the customer journeys and drive the needed improvement of work across the enterprise. This is connecting work, data and experiences. Because we connect the experience to work, we're able to drive action, both strategic and operational. Let's take a look at a customer example. The U.S. Department of Justice is using Verint to improve the digital experience they provide across 40 different web domains and digital assets. With Verint, they've been able to reduce response time for customer experience improvements from 30 days to 3 minutes. In summary, the Verint Cloud Platform provides our customers and partners with automation workflows they can leverage to modernize their processes and create boundless customer engagement. With the explosion of channels and modalities, it is no longer enough to just measure the experiences resulting surveys in the contact center back office or branch. You need to be able to capture those experiences across the complete customer journey and using it to drive action across the enterprise. Let's see what this looks like. Imagine a customer who engages in a chat session with either a bot or a human agent. But they're dissatisfied with the outcome, so they respond to a post chat survey. Now in a traditional survey solution, this response will be captured, aggregated with other responses over days, weeks or months and analyzed by marketing, then summarized and sent to business leaders to suggest changes. Verint takes this to the next level. The feedback is routed in real-time through automatic workflow to the appropriate customer service group so they can resolve the issue. At the same time, Verint's AI robotics is monitoring all the responses coming in to see if this is a systemic issue or if it's isolated to that one interaction. Since, in this case, it was identified to be a systemic issue, workflows are triggered to prioritize coaching for the chat agents. Verint's approach of connecting work, data and experience allows the inside drive from listening to experiences across the entire customer journey to drive both tactful action to resolve the issue in the moment, as well as strategic action to help building during customer relationships.

Thanks, Dave. Verint solutions are leading the way to help brands close the engagement capacity gap. We saw how Verint solutions such as Quality Management, Real-Time Work and Experience Management, are delivering real business outcomes for many of the leading companies in the world. At Verint, we're enabling companies to build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data and experiences with our cloud platform. At this time, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Elan to discuss our go-to-market growth strategy.

Thanks, Celia. As you've heard, we have an open cloud platform with a broad set of business applications that connect work, data and experiences across the enterprise. In 2020, we saw business change at a pace many thought wasn't possible. Companies accelerated their digital transformation, and they quickly changed how and where people work. During this period, many companies experienced a widening of the engagement capacity gap. Verint is uniquely positioned to help companies close the gap and achieve brand differentiation. Now is the perfect time for Verint to be laser-focused on this strategic opportunity as a pure-play customer engagement company. I'm going to spend the next few minutes to explain our go-to-market growth strategy. We have 3 pillars of growth: our large customer base of nearly 10,000 brands around the globe with significant expansion opportunity, new accounts across all key verticals that we are winning and our growing partner ecosystem that is providing additional expansion opportunities. Let's start by talking about our customer base. We have an amazing set of customers. Some of the best brand in the world trust Verint to help them evolve their customer engagement programs and build enduring relationships with their customers. Our customers come from many industries, including financial services, health care, utilities, public sector and more. Because our solutions are mission-critical and Verint has been a trusted partner to our customers, our renewal rates have been very strong over the years. And we see many expansion opportunities within our customer base. As we are helping our customers transition to the cloud, we see expansions very often occur at the time of cloud conversion. I'd like to share a customer story with you. [Presentation]

Mastercard has worked with us for the last several years. We appreciate the partnership we have with Mastercard. The changing workforce dynamics is one of the reasons that the capacity gap is worsening for many brands. At Mastercard, we've been able to help them address the changes so that they can close the gap. We've enabled them to deliver to workers the knowledge and the tools at just the right time so that they are able to effectively meet rising customer expectations. Another point I would like to highlight is the work that we did with Mastercard during COVID. Like many of our customers who saw an acceleration of digital and quickly transitioned to working from home, we worked together to ensure they could take care of their employees and customers remotely. We have significant opportunity to expand within our current customers. We did an analysis of our top 1,000 accounts in the Americas and identified about $5 billion of white space opportunity. White space doors are determined by looking at applications that Verint currently offers and are not yet deployed into our customer base. Our goal regarding this large white space is to help our customers easily expand with Verint as the customer engagement needs evolve. Today, our cloud platform makes it easier for customers to expand compared to efforts needed for deploying on-premises. With our cloud platform, customers can consume additional applications from the platform by simply turning on SaaS license in the cloud. I'd like to share a customer story about cloud conversion. Patterson Dental is a multibillion-dollar company that has been a customer of ours for nearly a decade, and recently converted to the cloud. [Presentation]

As Kevin mentioned, they recently converted to SaaS, and I'm particularly proud of what he said about our support of customers. We're there to support the customers not just with technology, but also with best-in-class experiences. In addition to the significant opportunity that we have from our customer base, we also have a significant opportunity from winning new logos. We are continuing to add new logos across industries and regions. We're increasingly seeing new economy leaders choosing Verint such as Google, Lyft and DoorDash. Our new logo wins include both competitive displacements and competitive wins of greenfield opportunities. Behind these wins is our differentiated open cloud platform, and our partner-agnostic strategy. The openness of our cloud platform and the breadth of our applications it supports are key reasons for our solutions being selected. Openness and flexibility are critical for customers, and our platform provides them free access to data, ease of integration and ability to quickly innovate with new functionality. I'd like to share a customer story that highlights one of our recent wins, Google. [Presentation]

We are pleased to have Google as a Verint customer and that they selected Verint as their partner for customer engagement. Another competitive differentiator is our extensive partner ecosystem. Our open cloud platform makes us an ideal product choice for partners. And our partner-friendly strategy ensures we have strong and lasting relationships. We have partners that we've worked with for many years, and we're also adding new partners. You can see some of our partners' names on the slide across several partner types. We partner with technology vendors that augment our platform in complementary areas, such as CCaaS, collaboration and CRM. We partner with cloud service providers to give our customers cloud choices. And increasingly, we are working with system integrators engaged in digital transformation and customer experience projects where our solutions play a key role. We expect partners to be a key growth driver for Verint in the future, especially with winning new accounts. For example, in a competitive bid that we won earlier this year, there were 5 bidders, and we participated together with partners in 4 out of the 5 bids. I believe this speaks to the openness of our solution and how we have become the partner of choice in our industry. I'd like to share a few comments from our partners about why they prefer to work with Verint. [Presentation]

I'm excited about the work we are doing with partners and the reputation we have built as a partner-friendly company. Today, I've discussed our go-to-market strategy as it relates to our customer base, winning new logos, and our partner ecosystem. We have a strong growth opportunity with the white space in our base, especially as it relates to cloud conversion, and are also winning new logos especially with the growing partner ecosystem. I've introduced some of our customers and partners, and I'm very proud of the lasting relationships we built with our customer and partner base over many years. I'm more excited than ever about the growth prospects for Verint. As we enter a new chapter as a pure-play customer engagement company, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. I'd like to turn the presentation back to Alan to talk about the customer engagement market opportunity.

Thanks, Elan. Today, we spend time discussing the significant impact digital is having on customer engagement. According to a report by Deloitte, digital is changing the rules of customer engagement. They say to continue acquiring and retaining customers, organizations need to recognize this and adapt to these new dynamics. And digital is accelerating. According to IDC's Worldwide Digital Transformation Report, by 2022, 70% of our organizations will accelerate their digital initiatives to drive customer service and employee productivity. Given these challenges, it's very clear that a brand do not make adjustments to their customer engagement strategies, they will become less competitive in an increasingly competitive world. This creates a significant market opportunity for the new Verint. Let's take a closer look at the market opportunity for Verint by the numbers. According to IDC, more than $1.5 trillion is expected to be spent on digital transformation initiatives this year. Digital is an enterprise initiative and the $1.5 trillion will be spent across all functions, including those that touch customers. As discussed earlier, the customer touch points are no longer limited to phone calls in the contact center as digital made it possible for brands to engage with their customers in many different ways. So what's our opportunity? We estimate our TAM at $65 billion, growing around 10% per year. About $30 billion of TAM comes from traditional contact center market, and around $35 billion comes from customer engagement through touch points across the enterprise. Our estimates are based on a number of knowledge workers and customer engagement roles and the average spending technology per knowledge worker. We estimate a total of 50 million knowledge workers, with around 50 million workers in contact center roles and 35 million workers in back office, branch and other customer touch points. We believe that technology spend in contact centers and knowledge workers is around $150 to $200 a month, and the spend on noncontact center knowledge workers is about half that. Vendors such as Verint that focus on delivering an open cloud platform designed specifically to close the capacity gap across the enterprise, are well positioned to address this TAM. Verint's strategy is to enable brands to close the capacity gap without increasing the largest expense, labor. Brands spend around $2 trillion per year in customer engagement knowledge workers. Hiring more workers is just not a sustainable solution. They need software that introduces more automation to customer engagement workflows, connects the silos across the enterprise and ensures brands build enduring customer relationships. Today, vendors are approaching the capacity gap problem from many different angles. Some vendors focus on enterprise offer consolidation, others offer data analytics tools or modernize infrastructure software. There are vendors that specialize in robotics and AI solutions horizontally who had no customer engagement experience, and there are vendors of point solutions that can address only a very narrow aspect of the capacity gap. We are uniquely positioned to address it with our open cloud platform across the enterprise and our pure-play customer engagement focus. Now let me hand it off to Doug to discuss our 3-year targets, financial model and the Cognyte separation.

Thanks, Alan. Today, Grant will review our 3-year plan, and I'll follow with some additional details. Grant joined us 5 years ago to run the finance organization of our customer engagement business and is one of the architects of our cloud strategy. Grant?

Thanks, Doug. Today, I will focus on key KPIs starting with our current year, fiscal '21, and reviewing our 3-year targets. Our shift to the cloud is creating a very attractive financial model. For fiscal '24, we are targeting $1 billion of revenue, growing in the high single digits with 90% of our software revenue coming from recurring sources. Throughout the next 3 years, we expect accelerating revenue growth and to maintain strong EBITDA margins and strong free cash flow. To put our 3-year targets in context, let's start with a review of our outlook for the current fiscal year '21, which ends next week. At the midpoint of our guidance, we expect $835 million of revenue, with 80% of our software revenue coming from recurring sources and $240 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our guidance reflects a significant shift from perpetual license to SaaS. As we progress with our cloud transition, the percentage of our new bookings coming from SaaS has been steadily increasing consistent with our Cloud First strategy. This year, we are pleased to be achieving an important milestone. With around 50% of our new software bookings coming from SaaS compared to only 24% 2 years ago. We believe that COVID is accelerating the shift and expect this mix to increase to nearly 2/3 next year. Looking beyond next year, we expect the shift to continue, though some customers are likely to remain with perpetual licenses. We will discuss our model for perpetual revenue in a minute. The percentage of our software revenue that is recurring has also been steadily increasing. This year, we expect approximately 80% of our software revenue to be generated from recurring sources, up 400 basis points from the prior year and up 900 basis points from just 2 years ago. Next year, in fiscal '22, we expect approximately 85% of our software revenue to be recurring as we continue to make very good progress towards our fiscal '24 target of 90%. Achieving the 85% level marks the substantial completion of our cloud transition, which provides us with many benefits, including improved visibility and better economics over the lifetime of the customer. Within recurring revenue, there are 2 components: cloud and support. We expect strong cloud growth over the next 3 years with support revenue coming down as our customer base converts to the cloud. We expect approximately $300 million of support revenue during the current year and expect to be able to convert those customers to cloud over time. With respect to renewal rates, we have maintained a strong renewal rate on support in the low 90s and expect our renewal rate for enterprise SaaS deals to grow even higher. Our fastest-growing revenue stream is cloud. This year, we expect approximately 20% cloud revenue growth, excluding 4C. About 15 points of the growth will come from new deployments and 5 points from support conversions. Next year, we expect our cloud revenue growth to accelerate to 30%, driven equally from new deployments and conversions. Looking beyond next year, we expect to sustain strong cloud revenue growth and are targeting a CAGR of 30% over the next 3 years. As we go through the cloud transition, we think it's helpful to analyze our perpetual revenue stream separately. Due to our Cloud First strategy as well as the impact of COVID, we expect perpetual revenue to decline this year to around $140 million. Next year, we expect a further decline to around $120 million as we approach the completion of our cloud transition. Looking beyond next year, we expect our perpetual revenue to trough in FY '23 above $100 million and to grow modestly after that as certain customers remain on a perpetual license model. In fiscal '24, we expect approximately 10% of our $1 billion of revenue to come from perpetual. Now let's put all the revenue streams together. For next year, we expect $860 million of revenue, reflecting low single-digit growth year-over-year. Clearly, our total revenue growth is not the most meaningful growth metric as our bookings mix shifts to SaaS. To help investors understand our growth during the transition, we are also providing guidance for new perpetual license booking equivalents, which normalizes our bookings for the mix change. Next year, we expect this KPI to grow 10%. Looking beyond next year, as with most cloud transitions, we expect our revenue growth to accelerate due to strong cloud growth, combined with reduced headwind from nonrecurring revenue. Over the next 3 years, we expect revenue growth to accelerate from low single digits to high single digits, driving $1 billion of revenue in fiscal '24. During our cloud transition, we expect to maintain strong margins and strong free cash flow. Next year, we expect a onetime step down in adjusted EBITDA margins to around 27% due to $15 million of separation dissynergies. Beyond next year, we expect our margins to gradually expand and to deliver strong growth for both adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. The bridge from adjusted EBITDA to cash from operations includes: tax payments, interest expense, CapEx and change in working capital. We model CapEx at around 3% of revenue for the next 3 years. Because our collections and revenue recognition are generally aligned, we do not expect significant working capital consumption as we complete our cloud transition. In summary, we believe we are executing well on our Cloud First strategy, and that the cloud transition is creating a very attractive financial model. We covered a lot of information today, and we'll be happy to take questions during the Q&A session. Now let me turn it over to Doug.

Thanks, Grant. As Dan noted earlier, we expect to consummate the separation shortly after year-end. Today, I'll review our post-separation capital structure and provide some additional details for your modeling. As part of the separation, Verint will retain existing debt and Cognyte will be spun with working capital and a new revolver. Following the separation, Verint will have a strong balance sheet with modest net leverage less than 1x adjusted EBITDA. This is based on an expected cash position of nearly $600 million, excluding the second tranche of Apax investment, and debt of approximately $795 million, excluding the preferred stock. Our diluted EPS guidance for fiscal '21 is $3.40. For next year, we have provided diluted EPS guidance on an as-is basis of around $3.45. Today, we're providing EPS guidance, assuming the separation is completed on February 1. To arrive at this guidance, we first adjusted our EPS for the spin of our security business. This takes our as-is diluted EPS that we discussed during our third quarter conference call from around $3.45 to $2.45. We then adjusted our EPS for the dissynergies and other inefficiencies, which takes our diluted EPS to around $2.20, at the midpoint of our revenue guidance of $860 million. Our EPS guidance reflects approximately $19 million of interest expense, around 73 million shares and an approximate 10% tax rate, and does not reflect the second tranche of the Apax investment, which we expect to close sometime in Q1. Before taking Q&A, let me briefly summarize. We are excited to become a pure-play customer engagement company. We have a large opportunity in customer engagement and a clear growth strategy. Following the separation, we will have a strong balance sheet with solid cash generation and are entering next year with strong cloud momentum. With that, let's take questions.

Okay. This is Matt Frankel again, and that concludes our presentation. I hope you found it informative. We'll now take your questions. And with me are those members of the leadership team, which you saw in today's presentation; Dan Bodner, Doug Robinson, Elan Moriah, Celia Fleischaker, Alan Roden and Grant Highlander. If you have any questions -- if you have questions, you can submit them through the chat function on your screen. But we've already received a few, so we'll just get started here. So the first question is about cloud. And it says, "What is behind your cloud acceleration to 30% next year and your 3-year target for a 30% cloud CAGR? Dan, can you address that, please?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. This year, we've seen a strong shift to cloud in the enterprise market and believe this market trend will continue. Based on our Cloud First strategy and our differentiated cloud platform, we see an opportunity for strong cloud growth. Let me elaborate. There are actually 2 different sources of cloud growth: growth that's generated from winning new deals, and growth that is generated from existing customers converting to cloud. We expect 30% growth next year, fiscal ending '22, which includes 15% growth on new deals, which is similar growth rates to the current year. And also another 15% growth from cloud conversions, which is our base converting to the cloud and recently accelerating. Looking beyond next year, we believe these dynamics will sustain and we're targeting a 30% CAGR over the next 3 years.

Okay. Thanks, Dan. Next question is about competition. It says you are targeting a large TAM of $65 billion. So has your competitive landscape changed? Dan, would you mind taking that, too?

Sure. The competitive landscape is evolving. Today, the customer engagement market includes many vendors trying to help brands close the capacity gap with different approaches. Each vendor's approach is based on their historical strengths. So we see some vendors focused on enterprise software consolidation. Others offer data analytics tools or modernized infrastructure software. There are vendors that specialize in robotics and AI solutions horizontally, but with no customer engagement experience. And there are also vendors with point solutions that can address only a very narrow aspect of the capacity gap. We believe we are uniquely positioned based on the following pillars: Our open cloud platform is differentiated. Our ability to connect work, data and experiences across the enterprise is unique. We're a partner-friendly company. And we are a pure-play customer engagement company.

Okay. Thanks, Dan. Next question. It says, "You are a contact center leader for many years, but do you need to change your sales force to win deals outside of the contact center?" Dan, I should go back to you on this one as well, I think.

Not really. Not really. Our leadership in the contact center prepares us well to address enterprise-wide challenges driven by digital transformation. As a leader in workforce engagement for many years, we've developed applications that connect work, data and experiences in the contact center. Our customers are aware of the expertise we have, and as they get ready to deploy outside the contact center, they know we can be a trusted vendor. So we don't need to change the sales force to address new buyers as the opportunity is really to help brands connect their contact center with other organizational silos. And also, many of our partners see an opportunity to expand with the Verint Cloud platform outside the contact center.

Thanks, Dan. We have a follow-up to that. So it says, "Can you give an example where you won a deal because of your ability to deliver solutions in the contact center and also across the enterprise?" Elan, would you mind taking that -- mind taking that one, please?

Sure, Matt. Let's look at an example of a consistency across customer touch points. Earlier today, you heard from Mastercard that Verint enables them to ensure that the interactions are handled exactly the same way every time regardless of channel, whether it's e-mail, chat or voice. We're also winning deals related to expansion from assisted service to self-service. An example of this is a large financial services organization that is using our applications across the enterprise for more than 5,000 agents. And more recently, they implemented our self-service automated chat solution. And we're also winning deals due to our ability to drive consistency of work across contact center and branches. A large credit union with 10,000 Verint licenses across their business comes in mind. They started deploying Verint in their contact center and added branches all the time. We're winning deals due to our ability to connect data silos as well. One of the largest global banks has been using Verint to manage contact center interaction data across many centers around the world and recently added our data management for their back-office operations. There are a lot of examples where we see customers start with 1 area of the platform and expand to other areas over time. Our strategy is to offer an open and modular platform that makes expansion easy.

Okay. Thanks, Elan. We have -- our next question here is about our revenue outlook. It says, you mentioned that you expect your total revenue growth rate to improve every year. Can you elaborate on the assumptions you made? Dan, can you take it?

Yes, that is correct. We expect revenue growth to accelerate from the low single digits in fiscal '22 to mid-single digits the following year and high single digits in year 3. Revenue acceleration is typical in cloud transitions. The headwinds that we face from declining perpetual licenses will be winding down as we complete the transition. So the assumption we made is based on the combination of 30% cloud revenue growth over the next 3 years with less headwind from perpetual licenses every year. This will result in overall revenue growth accelerating.

Okay. Thank you, Dan. Next question, it says, what will happen to your revenue if the transition to the cloud happens faster or slower than you expect? Grant, can you take this one?

Yes. Sure, Matt. So as with most cloud transitions, the SaaS mix and the exact pace of the transition can be a bit slower or faster. Our outlook today is based on what we currently hear from customers and our sales force. If the cloud transition happens faster than expected, revenue near term will be a bit lower, but SaaS bookings growth will be higher. And if the cloud transition happens slower than expected, then revenue near term would be higher. But to help our investors understand our true new bookings growth regardless of the pace of transition, we already provide a perpetual license equivalent metric so investors will be able to measure our progress and not just based on revenue growth. In addition to help investors understand the pace of the transition, going forward, we'll also share and discuss our SaaS mix.

Thanks, Grant. So our next question is about our conversion program. It says, you mentioned approximately $200 million of support revenue this year. What will it be in 3 years? Grant, can you take that one as well?

Yes. Sure. Thanks, Matt. So as we did discuss, we're seeing customer-based conversions accelerate, and there's many benefits to Verint from a customer converting from support to SaaS, including faster adoption of our portfolio. So when a customer converts to SaaS, it's a natural time to discuss expansions and new applications. Looking out, we expect our support revenue to decline from the $300 million today to between $150 million to $200 million in 3 years as that cloud conversion accelerates in our base.

Thanks, Grant. Actually, a follow-up here on conversion. It says, you mentioned earlier that conversions are expected to accelerate next year and generate 15% cloud growth compared to only 5% this year. What is your confidence level that conversions will accelerate? Grant, it's perhaps for you, please.

Yes, sure. We've seen very good traction in our customer conversion this year. Actually, the vast majority of the customer conversions revenue that we need to drive that 15% cloud revenue growth in fiscal '22, it's already been booked here in fiscal '21. And I can give you some numbers around that. So 12.5% of growth has been booked relative to the 15% growth guidance and we expect specifically from those conversions. These were primarily deals that we booked in Q3 and Q4 this year that will contribute to cloud revenue throughout next year. And we think the momentum that we've experienced in our conversion program will continue contributing to cloud revenue growth for many years.

Thanks, Grant. So next question. It says, can you explain the capabilities of the cloud platform and how Da Vinci works with your solutions. Dan, back to you on this one.

Sure. Verint has been a leader in AI, automation and analytics for many years. We've developed advanced AI algorithms based on working with customers across many industries and for over 2 decades, and based on research that we've done in our labs studying real customer data. When we created the cloud platform, we decided to package all these AI models and analytics engines into a common platform service that we call Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics. Because it's a common platform service, it's available to all Verint applications running in the platform, and it accelerates our ability to innovate across the platform. In terms of capabilities, what we have today in Verint Da Vinci is state-of-the art in our industry; includes capabilities such as intent engines, biometrics engines, transcription services, sentiment services, behavior analytics, real-time bots and many, many more.

Thanks, Dan. Next question. Celia, I think this is a good one for you. It says, can you explain Verint's vision for the future of work?

Sure. Thanks, Matt. As we talked about earlier today, the acceleration of digital is disrupting work and new tools and workflows are required for balanced customer engagement across the enterprise. It might be helpful for me to summarize what customers are telling us about the disruption of work. We're hearing that work silos need to be connected, and that remote work is the new norm. And we're also hearing about a new workforce of humans and bots that is emerging. Work is clearly evolving and solutions, they have to evolve with it. And our open cloud platform offers brands many applications to start preparing now for the future of work. Our vision is focused across 3 main themes: connecting work across the silos enabling real-time work and empowering the workforce of humans and bots. There is a tremendous opportunity for companies like Verint who can help brands address the future work.

Thanks, Celia. The next question is, what is your appetite for M&A? Alan, can you please take it?

Sure, Matt. The customer engagement market is very fragmented today, and we'll continue to evaluate tuck-in acquisition opportunities as we believe there's a really good ROI buying small companies with innovative solutions that we can sell through our sales force into our large base of customers. The 3-year targets we discussed today are based on our organic model. We're able to drive organic innovation through our domain expertise and the insights we get from our customers and partners. And we believe that our current portfolio is sufficient to drive strong cloud growth and our 3-year targets.

Thanks, Alan. Our next question is about COVID. It says, are you assuming any COVID impact in fiscal '22? Dan, can you take it, please?

Yes. Let's start with the impact COVID is having on our current year results. COVID had 2 impacts this year: First, it delayed certain perpetual deals, which are gradually coming back in the second half. And second, it accelerated the market shift to SaaS. Looking ahead to next year, we backed into our guidance and assumption that perpetual deals will continue to come back gradually.

Okay. Next question here. Can you take us through guidance again? Doug, would you mind taking it?

Yes, sure, Matt. For fiscal '22, we're targeting $860 million of revenue plus or minus 2%, and a $2.20 EPS at the midpoint. Our EPS reflects the separation of Cognyte and around $15 million of dissynergies and inefficiencies associated with the separation, and it doesn't reflect the Apax second tranche investment, which we expect to close sometime in Q1. To help you build your models, we also provided some below-the-line assumptions, including net interest and other expense of $19 million, depreciation and amortization of around $25 million, a cash tax rate of approximately 10% and a share count of approximately 73 million fully diluted shares. For fiscal '24, we're targeting $1 billion of revenue with a high single-digit growth rate and 90% of our revenue coming from recurring sources.

Thanks, Doug. Next question is about free cash flow, so I think we'll come back to you on this one. It says, can you take us again through the bridge from EBITDA to free cash flow over the next 3 years? And what type of free cash flow growth can we expect?

Yes, sure. We've historically generated strong cash flow and expect that to continue post separation. The bridge from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow primarily includes CapEx, change in working capital, tax payments and interest expense. We're not a very capital-intensive business, and we're modeling CapEx around 3% of revenue for the next 3 years. Our cloud transition shouldn't have a material impact on the working capital component. Because our collections and revenue recognition are generally aligned we don't expect significant working capital consummation. So we expect free cash flow to grow at a similar rate to EBIT growth.

Thanks, Doug. Next question is, what will your cap structure be post spin? And what's the status of the second Apax tranche? Alan, can you please take this one?

Sure, Matt. Following the separation, we'll have a strong capital structure and expect our cash position to be nearly $600 million with around $795 million of debt. The $600 million of cash is before the second tranche of the Apax investment. Apax has been a really great partner. And as Doug mentioned a minute ago, we expect the second tranche of $200 million to close in our first quarter.

Okay. And we've got time for a final question here. So it says, I believe your convertible matures in June. How do you plan to pay it down? Doug, would you mind taking that?

Yes, sure. As Alan just highlighted, at the time of the separation, we'll have a strong cash position of nearly $600 million. The conversion price of the convertible, including the hedge is $75. And we expect to settle the principal with our existing cash in June when it matures.

Okay. Thanks, Doug. So that concludes our Investor Day. A replay of the presentation will be available shortly on our website, verint.com. We will be conducting an investor roadshow next week, and it's going to be managed by Goldman Sachs. So if you'd like to participate or have any questions regarding today's presentation, please contact us at [email protected]. And thank you very much for attending today's Investor Day. Have a good day, everybody.