AYX - Alteryx Inc. (AYX) Raymond James TMT & Consumer Conference (Transcript)
2023-12-05 10:55:11 ET
Alteryx, Inc. (AYX)
Raymond James TMT & Consumer Conference
December 05, 2023, 09:10 AM ET
Company Participants
Mark Anderson - CEO
Kevin Rubin - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Alex Sklar - Raymond James
Presentation
Alex Sklar
Good morning, everyone. My name's Alex Sklar. I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very pleased to have Alteryx back with us this year. We have Mark Anderson, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Rubin.
We're going to do a fireside chat. When it gets to about five minutes left, I'll open it up to the audience, see if there's any questions, but Mark and Kevin, thanks for the time today.
So I think a lot of folks here are already familiar with Alteryx, but there's been a lot of innovation over the last few years on the product side. Maybe just talk about kind of where we are today as far as executing against the vision you're hoping to create at Alteryx.
Mark Anderson
You bet, Alex and thanks a lot for having us here. We've built over the last 25 years a piece of software that allows customers typically in the line of business, so people in HR, people in finance and accounting and tax and supply chain, to be able to, without any experience writing Python code or any form of code, to build what we call workflows that allow them to pull data from hundreds of different sources, sources in AWS or sources on big data lakes on their enterprise or in people's laptops and pull that data onto a very familiar looking field canvas called Alteryx Designer and then transform and manipulate that data, so that it can be sent to a place like Databricks or Snowflake.
And then beyond that, allow these same customers, again low code, no code users, to be able to build hundreds of different analytical tools to be able to make better decisions for their business and so, for us, the journey has been a fascinating one. I've been CEO for three and a half years now and we've really been working to make the business outcomes that we deliver, tax transformation or supply chain optimization into consumable use cases or solution blueprints that are easy to deploy, quick to deploy and very quick to value.
And as we do all of this, we're really able to articulate savings to customers by going from manual processes to automated processes that are often expressed in thousands of work hours or millions of dollars of savings.
Alex Sklar
So, I think the market that you all targeted is obviously a massive one. Analytics for all is kind of a vision that you've spoken to. How do you kind of evangelize what your solutions can do for some of those business users who maybe this is going to be the first foray into using a tool outside of maybe just basic spreadsheet type usage?
Mark Anderson
Yeah, so typically we have a large enterprise sales force. We're primarily focused on the largest customers, figure global 2000 in the world, that we're allowed to sell to. And we approach these customers after having done some discovery. Like we're looking at annual reports or we're reading transcripts from earnings calls and we understand that they're looking to say digitize their business and we'll often approach somebody in the line of business with a use case and propose a proof of concept and show them that we can automate manual processes and deliver that business outcome for them.
So I think it's a very prescriptive approach. Often we're doing it with partners, partners that have specialties in certain areas like, for example, Accenture specializes in IT, but KPMG, for example, we have several different tax use cases that will approach customers.
Same thing with PWC, E&Y, and other large partners and so typically it's very much done at the CFO or the controller level and then we typically work our way through the enterprise thereafter. So once we've, let's say, delivered a tax loose with KPMG, we'll ask permission to expand into HR or sales operations or marketing operations. Once we've earned the right to do that.
Alex Sklar
Yeah, the partners, it's amazing to see it kind of go into the user conference, how much buy-in they have internally as well. I think now when folks are joining, they basically put them through training, it seems like, at the likes of PWC and some of these other folks.
Mark Anderson
Yeah, exactly.
Alex Sklar
You definitely hit on that.
Mark Anderson
I've actually participated in training for PWC. They train all their new employees. It's a two-week training process. Two of the days is learning how to use Alteryx Designer. I've taught a class in Dublin and one in Toronto as well.
Alex Sklar
So I want to hit on kind of demands. The enterprise software market right now is facing kind of macro pressures broadly. You've had some changes kind of on the go-to-market side over the past couple of years and I just kind of want to hear about the cross-currents. Like a lot more efficiency, it seems like, on the go-to-market side. You've got this use case selling motion customer success teams that are having a lot of success. How do you see kind of the demand environment playing out?
Mark Anderson
Yeah, listen. I think since Q3 of last year, we've noted that the demand environment was evolving, right. I think, I would say transparently, all of IT saw a decade of pretty consistent incremental budget increases across the IT stack and low cost of money and a lot of businesses were flourishing.
But at the same time, towards the end of that decade, a lot of companies were recognizing that they had to digitally transform their business. Originally, before the pandemic, it was to avoid being Amazon or Airbnb, but post-pandemic, it's really about, gosh, I could be put out of business by my 100-year-old competitor that's done a better job of digitizing their business.
And so I would say the demand environment just overall for IT has become a lot more picky and it's really just the highest priority things that are getting funded. And so thankfully for us, analytics, digitizing the business has always been number one or number two. Certainly, cybersecurity has had some resiliency as well, but we think with the business case and the solution blueprint approach that we have, we're able to determine very quickly if a potential prospect is prioritizing that kind of spend.
Alex Sklar
And I know we've talked about this in the last quarter about kind of incentivizing more linearity with the sales force. Kevin, one of the things that I'm curious from your side, in terms of visibility, you've got the ELAs, you've got a customer -- most of their growth is coming from expansion with the base. How do you feel about kind of overall visibility into kind of the model broadly?
Kevin Rubin
Yeah, to your point, we're fortunate that we have a large renewal base that does give us a lot of visibility into what that meaningful underlying portion of the AR base may look like and then we have a pretty predictable model relative to expansion of those renewals, which gives us visibility.
You highlighted the ELAs, right? Just by way of example, Q4 of '22, we sold the largest concentration of ELAs that are now coming due. The burst licenses that we've talked about in the past have a one-year expiration, so those come due this quarter, which gives us a lot of insight into usage that we can then translate into expectations around upsell and whatnot.
So the model inherently has some visibility. I think the macro has not helped, to Mark's point, over the last three or four quarters relative to customer behaviour, but I think we do have some reasonable visibility in the business at this point.
Alex Sklar
So I think maybe going back to just go-to-market for a few minutes, Mark, kind of some of those changes you highlighted, you just brought a new head of sales in the Americas region. You have a new head of the partner channel. Can you just talk about big picture, where things stand on some of the changes you were hoping to make for that organization?
Mark Anderson
Yeah, you bet. Listen, I've had the good fortune of being at technology companies over the last 30 years that have been on a long-term assault on a large total addressable market that have grown from a few hundred million to billions of dollars and Alteryx is no exception.
I joined three and a half years ago. We're a little more than half of the current size and I would submit, Alex, that pretty much every year from this year going forward, your needs of the competencies and the experience from your employees, it evolves, right. So we've certainly invested in a, I'd say, very effective enablement and training organizations. So you're always training your people. They always need to be sharpening the saw, but you always have to be on the lookout for people that have the competencies and skills for the next few legs of the journey.
So we replaced our head of partnerships with a guy named Scott Van Valkenburgh, the woman that had done the job before did a great job for us for a couple of years, but she was really over her skis at this close to a billion-dollar stage and Scott has experience at thousands of partners and also much larger -- large domain partners like the big consulting firms, the big accounting firms, the big systems integrators and same thing with Mark Dorsey.
We had a fine gentleman that ran America Sales, did a good job building out the team, but Mark really brings experience managing thousands of people, billions of dollars, and really large domain projects at Oracle and the number of jobs that he had at Oracle.
So we're always on the lookout for the people that are going to help us continue to go up this long-term assault to a very large TAM. We believe we've got a massive, $81 billion total addressable market. We think this is a decade-plus journey to prosecute that total addressable market. We're going to need the best and the brightest to go do that in the most efficient and profitable way and you're always recruiting. You're always developing your people and always looking for better and faster.
Alex Sklar
So fair to say that the bigger changes are maybe past us now. It's kind of at the margin, always looking for new talent.
Mark Anderson
Yeah, correct.
Alex Sklar
So I want to switch gears. Something that came up, obviously, has been topical for everyone this year, is generative AI. At your user conference, you announced your AiDIN product. I think you've talked about being able to leverage generative AI internally. For efficiency side, you're obviously looking to create solutions using it. Maybe just talk about your kind of AI strategy broadly.
Mark Anderson
Yeah, you bet. First of all, let's take a half step back and remember what Alteryx does. What we do for our customers, and especially our users, the people that are in the line of business like HR analysts or tax analysts or FP&A analysts, people in accounting, is we allow them, without any experience coding, by the way, we allow them to use our very powerful software engine to be able to automate manual processes and then publish these automations that we call workflows throughout the organization to really allow companies to go faster and do more.
And so for us, generative AI is a dream come true, right? It allows us to be able to accomplish that mission even better and I would submit to you that I've talked to CEOs and CFOs, as has Kevin, almost every day in the last six months, and everyone's excited about generative AI, but no one's saying, hey, we're going to launch Copilot to every employee worldwide starting tomorrow.
We're sorry, not Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT and even projects like Microsoft's Copilot, these are expensive add-on capabilities. I would submit that the enterprises that we're talking to, they want to dip their toes in the water with bite-sized chunks of generative AI capabilities that are already built in to their trusted enterprise stack partners, partners like Alteryx.
And so we've infused generative AI into all of our products under the brand name of AiDIN, but for example, one of our products is called Alteryx Auto Insights. We built a Magic Documents capability that takes the insights that the product generates and actually puts it into a presentation or builds an email for you, again, with just human interaction on asking the question.
Same thing with our designer flagship product. We're building an assistant-like capability that will allow customers to build better workflows more efficiently and build them faster and when you're digitizing your business, when you're trying to automate your business, speed matters and so we really think this is going to be a mid and a long-term tailwind for us.
It just helps us accomplish our mission for customers faster and so far, the response has been great. Auto Insights, Magic Documents is in the general population of customers. More than half of our customers have already started to use Magic Documents, so people are already experimenting with this. And as we introduce newer products, you're going to see very quick proof of concepts with customers and then ultimately implementations, but I would submit to you, Alex, that all of our products going forward will have some form of generative AI already built into them.
Alex Sklar
Got it. And maybe you just kind of hit on Auto Insights as one example, but the product velocity has certainly picked up over the last few years at the company. I'm curious kind of what you're seeing in terms of adoption of some of these other solutions like ML and Auto Insights. You got a few others around the geospatial location intelligence, but how are you seeing multi-product kind of adoption, or is most of the growth still coming from just more use cases to the kind of customer base?
Kevin Rubin
It's a little bit of both, right? As we think about the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform, there's an opportunity to, in essence, imagine what that platform could look like today as opposed to just simply replicating an activity that we did on premise. And so some of the things you're seeing, you mentioned location intelligence, which is our geospatial capability, that's a core heritage of Alteryx going back 15 years. And so those capabilities are embedded in the designer desktop product, and now there's a completely new reimagined experience in the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform.
To your point, the designer and server products continue to be the lion's share of the business, but we now have a complete suite of products that we can offer customers, and we are seeing, and Mark alluded to Auto Insights, we're seeing Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform traction and so it's nice to be able to go have a conversation with a customer and be able to talk about how do you want to deploy the technology, what are the use cases, and then having a suite of products that are purpose-built for how the customer wants to be able to actually leverage our technology.
Alex Sklar
I think you have a lot of customers that leverage, that are kind of dipping their toe into the cloud, but any early findings in terms of cloud customers, in terms of more multi-product adoption versus kind of the ones that are still on-premise only?
Mark Anderson
Yeah, listen, I think our very loyal base of power users, and if you've ever been to one of our conferences, I know you were at Inspire earlier this year, Alex, but you'll see thousands of very, very loyal Alteryx customers. They talk about putting Alteryx tattoos on their biceps or naming their kids' middle names Alteryx, because we've actually transformed their roles in organizations. We've turned them from being an analyst to being more like a data ninja and so I think we're early in this journey of transitioning to the cloud.
So we've articulated our cloud products really as an incremental offering and so typically, we're identifying different types of users than our typical power user that would be able to maybe begin using Alteryx with Alteryx Designer Cloud and perhaps become an incremental user that we may not have attracted with a premise-based license.
Alex Sklar
So I think I want to switch back to kind of the expansion opportunity. That's been, with the G2K, I think 130%, 131% and are 121% maybe in the last quarter on the total base. When you look at kind of ELAs as a driver of kind of that expansion, how early are we in terms of how you see that, how addressable your population could be towards ELAs? So is it possible we can get kind of a quarter or third of your customers, the G2K folks on that kind of contract where you're driving more regular expansion cadence? Curious your usage of that.
Kevin Rubin
I think over time, you're going to continue to see more and more customers elect the ELA. It's an incredibly elegant way to get access to a lot of our technology. It's attractively priced and then as I alluded to earlier in the discussion, it's got this concept of Burst License, right?
So the ELAs are constructed around a number of designers. The cloud ELAs are a little bit different from the on-premise and then we allow customers to trial in effect up to 50% more designer seats, but it includes servers, it includes intelligence suite, it includes customer success and so they're really packaged to provide the customer an opportunity to easily consume our technology and to do so with the ability to prove out other use cases as well as have resources around them to be successful.
We've been two and a half years-ish or maybe one and a half years. We started in Q3 of '21. So yes, so we just crossed over the second year of selling these and we continue to see traction. Q3 was the second largest quarter for ELAs just behind Q4 of last year. So I think as we go forward, we're going to continue to see more and more customers elect it. Our sellers are becoming more comfortable positioning an ELA and then to the point, it gives us more visibility into how they're using Burst and what that expansion looks like over time.
It's not the primary vehicle. There are many reasons where customers will elect a la carte quantities, but more and more we are seeing it as an attractive solution.
Alex Sklar
And to date, are you seeing similar usage trends with the Burst that I know you don't call it out every single quarter, but similar usage trends I think that you've called out in past quarters?
Kevin Rubin
Directionally, the behaviour has been very consistent and encouraging, right? To give customers an opportunity to go into areas of the business that they didn't purchase licenses for and previously they'd have to go get a purchase rec and get their manager to approve, hey, I want to try Alteryx in this area of my business. There's friction there and so the ability to be able to take those licenses into a new area of the business, prove out a use case.
We're fortunate that when we do tend to prove out use cases, it's hard to then take that back from somebody and say, you just saved yourself a bunch of time, money, made a better business decision. I need to now take that back from you. That doesn't happen very often.
Mark Anderson
But I would say overall, the reception from customers has been very positive. I think many customers are used to some of their legacy software vendors wrapping their knuckles when they go over the license count threshold and our philosophy is, well, when you're digitizing and automating your business, you want to go fast, right? And you don't want things that are going to inhibit your ability to go fast, especially if it's existential or competitive, those competitive dynamics in our customers' businesses. And so I think the response has been fantastic.
Alex Sklar
Great. Switching gears, profitability, we've seen a notable step up as the year's kind of progressed. You've already kind of given some early thoughts next year kind of in terms of expansion, but how should we think about kind of sources of leverage with profitability under the framework of your longer term guide and if there were any outperformance on the top line, like are there any specific areas you'd be looking to reinvest that back in?
Mark Anderson
Yes. So as I think about the path from kind of where we sit today to the long term model that we talked to in May of this year, the largest area of leverage in this business is going to be in the go to market overall. We've talked about, we hired an organization and created an organization that's designed to serve the largest customers in the world. We think there's leverage and scale opportunities there. We talked about partners and how partners can help drive leverage at a lower cost of doing business and so as we think about the point from here to the long term model, it's really going to be, continuing to get leverage out of the business.
At a 20% growth rate calibration, we talked about three to four points of leverage in each of the subsequent years to achieving that model. I did mention last quarter that we would expect in 2024 to give five points of leverage relative to that guide, which was an 8% margin. So that, kind of gives you a sense of how we think about the balance between growth and profitability in a lower growth environment, more challenging environment we have today.
We have seen leverage in G&A. To your point about outperformance, I think there's always opportunity to continue to lean into innovation, specifically with some of the Gen AI stuff that we've talked about. So that's just the general framework that we think about as we're going forward.
Alex Sklar
And just in terms of kind of, I know the longer term framework for 20% growth was, is you're not walking away from that. Do you have the headcount, the sales market -- the go-to-market kind of investments in place today where kind of if in a better macro, you can still hit those targets? Or should we think of the need to potentially invest more in the go to market side as part of that longer term framework?
Mark Anderson
I think one of the advantages of being a software company is our expense structure is highly variable with people and so I think we've demonstrated years past an ability to ramp to be able to continue to serve at a high growth rate and I think we've shown this year that we have an ability to calibrate in more challenging environments. So certainly believe that we can continue to calibrate both for upside as well as cost control as we go forward.
Alex Sklar
I'll open it up to the audience if there's any questions.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q -Unidentified Analyst
[indiscernible]
Mark Anderson
Yeah, great question. I'll take that Kevin, welcome your comments as well. So I think we've said publicly before that, we've got close to half of the G2K and in more than half of that population, our penetration size is well below $100,000 of ACV. So I think just generally, even in our existing customers in the G2K, we've got the ability to expand pretty profoundly.
And then listen, I think every enterprising sales team that lands a use case, as soon as we stand up that use case and validate that we've delivered the business value that we committed to; we're in there asking for permission to go to adjacent organizations and so I can give you an example of a large, big eight bank that has gone from a few hundred licenses to over 30,000 licenses in the last three and a half years.
That's come with comprehensive support from IT around the governance within which we deploy now tens of thousands of licenses, but also going across the business and selling to the analysts in different functional areas of the business to deliver the same kind of results in much higher productivity.
So it's clearly a motion. We've never really quantified that, but if I think of our largest, say, 20 customers, in every one of those large 20 customers, we've traversed into the functional areas of the business. That's a natural kind of phenomena of a coin-operated sales team.
Alex Sklar
So definitely, it's a great part of the model that you can sell across the entire enterprise. So just maybe sticking with the kind of profitability improvements, two last questions here, but uses of cash. You're going to be putting off a lot more cash in the coming year under the framework you've kind of laid out. How should we think, and you raised some debt earlier this year, but you've got good liquidity to convert maturities. How should we think about uses of cash for the next couple of years?
Kevin Rubin
Yeah, the near-term focus is the 2024 converts and to your point, we issued bonds earlier this year as a effective refinancing of those converts. So, and then we have a tranche of 2026s that we're focused on. We are obviously driving increased levels of profitability, which will also convert to free cash flow, which will give us a lot more flexibility over time. So the intent is to really, to start seeing meaningful leverage in the business and giving us flexibility from a capital allocation perspective.
Alex Sklar
Got it. And maybe just to wrap up, so you've got the long-term model framework out there. What are kind of maybe the biggest priorities you're each focused on the next year as you think about kind of executing against that longer-term framework?
Kevin Rubin
I think from my perspective is really just making sure that we are appropriately balancing growth and profitability, that we're investing in the areas of the business that we'll get the right returns for, but also balancing that with showing increased levers of profitability in the business going forward.
Mark Anderson
Yeah, and for me, just, I'd say world-class leadership teams that I've been around or been associated with, they become world-class by adapting and iterating to the phenomena that happens around them with their customers and in the market, in the macroeconomic environment. And I think our team is very much focused on kind of reading the tea leaves and executing as well as we can.
Alex Sklar
Great. Mark and Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, everyone.
Mark Anderson
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Alex.
For further details see:
Alteryx, Inc. (AYX) Raymond James TMT & Consumer Conference (Transcript)