Confluent Inc (CFLT) 2023 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Confluent Q4 and Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Shane Xie from Investor Relations, and I'm joined by Jay Kreps, Co-Founder and CEO; and Rohan Sivaram, CFO.

大家好。歡迎參加 Confluence 第四季和 2023 財年財報電話會議。我是投資者關係部的謝恩·謝（Shane Xie），共同創辦人兼執行長傑伊·克雷普斯（Jay Kreps）也加入其中。和財務長羅漢·西瓦拉姆 (Rohan Sivaram)。

During today's call, management will make forward-looking statements regarding our business, operations, sales strategy, market and product positioning, financial performance and future prospects, including statements regarding our financial guidance for the fiscal first quarter of 2024 and fiscal year 2024. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. Further information on risk factors that could cause actual results to differ is included in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call, except as required by law.

在今天的電話會議中，管理層將就我們的業務、營運、銷售策略、市場和產品定位、財務業績和未來前景做出前瞻性陳述，包括有關我們2024 年第一財季和2024 財年財務指導的陳述。前瞻性陳述存在風險和不確定性，可能導致實際結果與這些陳述的預期有重大差異。有關可能導致實際結果不同的風險因素的更多資​​訊包含在我們最近向 SEC 提交的 10-Q 表格中。除非法律要求，否則我們沒有義務在今天的電話會議後更新這些聲明。

Unless stated otherwise, certain financial measures used on today's call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis, and all comparisons are made on a year-over-year basis. We use these non-GAAP financial measures internally to facilitate analysis of financial and business trends and for internal planning and forecasting purposes. These non-GAAP financial measures have limitations and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release and supplemental financials which can be found on our IR website at investors.confluent.io.

除非另有說明，今天電話會議中使用的某些財務指標是在非公認會計準則基礎上表示的，所有比較都是在同比基礎上進行的。我們在內部使用這些非公認會計準則財務指標來促進財務和業務趨勢分析以及內部規劃和預測目的。這些非公認會計原則財務指標具有局限性，不應孤立地考慮或取代根據公認會計原則準備的財務資訊。這些 GAAP 和非 GAAP 財務指標之間的調整包含在我們的收益新聞稿和補充財務資訊中，您可以在我們的 IR 網站 Investors.confluence.io 上找到這些資訊。

And with that, I'll hand the call over to Jay.

這樣，我就把電話轉給傑伊。

Thanks, Shane. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. We closed fiscal year 2023 with a solid Q4, exceeding the high end of all guided metrics. Total revenue grew 26% to $213 million. Confluent Cloud revenue reached $100 million for the first time, growing 46%, and non-GAAP operating margin came in at 5.3%, our first positive quarter, improving 27 percentage points. Since going public 2.5 years ago, we have more than doubled our total revenue run rate and driven more than 46 percentage points in non-GAAP operating margin improvement. These results are a testament to the power of our platform and the incredible growth of the data streaming category.

謝謝，謝恩。大家下午好，歡迎參加我們的第四季財報電話會議。我們以穩健的第四季度結束了 2023 財年，超過了所有指導指標的高端。總營收成長 26%，達到 2.13 億美元。 Confluence Cloud 營收首次達到 1 億美元，成長 46%，非 GAAP 營業利潤率為 5.3%，這是我們第一個積極的季度，提高了 27 個百分點。自 2.5 年前上市以來，我們的總收入運行率增加了一倍以上，並推動非 GAAP 營運利潤率提高了 46 個百分點以上。這些結果證明了我們平台的強大功能以及資料流類別的令人難以置信的成長。

Last quarter, we discussed our accelerated transition to a fully consumption-oriented go-to-market model for Confluent Cloud, including shifting our sales compensation for Cloud to be based on incremental consumption and new logo acquisition, orienting our field team towards landing new customers and driving new workloads with customers and adapting product and pricing to reduce friction in landing customers and maximize the potential for expansion. As we said before, these changes are internal to our go-to-market teams and don't change our business model or revenue model or any other customer-facing aspect, all of which are already consumption-oriented.

上季度，我們討論了加速過渡到 Confluence Cloud 完全以消費為導向的上市模式，包括將我們的 Cloud 銷售薪酬轉變為基於增量消費和新徽標獲取，引導我們的現場團隊爭取新客戶與客戶一起推動新的工作負載，調整產品和定價，以減少吸引客戶的摩擦並最大限度地發揮擴張潛力。正如我們之前所說，這些變化是我們進入市場團隊的內部變化，不會改變我們的商業模式或收入模式或任何其他面向客戶的方面，所有這些都已經以消費為導向。

We've executed some of the initial changes of our consumption transformation, effective January 1, including a new compensation model and the initial rollout of new systems, metrics and measures. Last week, I spent time with our sales and marketing teams at our sales kickoff. The initial reaction from the team has been very positive. We will be spending the next few quarters, fully adapting and optimizing our business to these changes. We believe our transition to a fully consumption-oriented business, alongside our category leadership, puts us in an excellent position to capture more of the $60 billion data streaming platform opportunity in front of us.

我們已經執行了消費轉型的一些初步變革，這些變革將於 1 月 1 日生效，包括新的薪酬模式以及新系統、指標和措施的初步推出。上週，我在銷售啟動儀式上與我們的銷售和行銷團隊一起度過了時光。團隊的初步反應非常正面。我們將在接下來的幾個季度裡，充分適應和優化我們的業務以適應這些變化。我們相信，我們向完全消費導向業務的轉型以及我們在品類中的領先地位，使我們處於有利地位，能夠抓住擺在我們面前的 600 億美元數據流平台的更多機會。

I'd like to spend a few minutes and reflect on the increasing recognition of data streaming as a category and its potential for growth. One way of thinking about data technologies is to break them into 2 groups, those oriented for handling data at rest, the databases and storage systems, and those oriented at handling data in motion. These 2 areas have very different evolutionary paths. Over the last several decades, data at rest has become highly concentrated around a powerful infrastructure platform, the database, a $90 billion-plus category.

我想花幾分鐘時間思考人們對資料流作為一個類別的日益認可及其成長潛力。思考資料技術的一種方法是將它們分為兩類，一組面向處理靜態資料、資料庫和儲存系統，一組面向處理動態資料。這兩個領域有著截然不同的進化路徑。在過去的幾十年裡，靜態資料已高度集中在強大的基礎設施平台資料庫上，這是一個價值超過 900 億美元的類別。

The landscape of data-in-motion technologies remained highly fragmented with technology analysts recognizing disparate technology categories, including message cues, application integration tools, data integration tools, event brokers, ETL products, iPass and more. The reason for this was largely technological. Each of these product categories was defined by its technological limits, whether latency, scale, complexity of processing or ease of use. The potential for data streaming is to collapse the fragmentation of data-in-motion technologies and create a new data platform that supersedes each of these limited precursors. Since Confluent's creation, that has been our central thesis, that the data streaming platform would be a data platform of similar importance and scale to databases, but acting as the central nervous system, handling all the data in motion.

動態資料技術的格局仍然高度分散，技術分析師認識到不同的技術類別，包括訊息提示、應用程式整合工具、資料整合工具、事件代理、ETL 產品、iPass 等。造成這種情況的原因很大程度是技術性原因。每個產品類別都是由其技術限制來定義的，無論是延遲、規模、處理複雜性或易用性。資料流的潛力在於打破動態資料技術的碎片化，並創建一個新的資料平台來取代這些有限的先驅。自 Confluence 創建以來，這一直是我們的中心論點，即資料流平台將是一個與資料庫具有相似重要性和規模的資料平台，但充當中樞神經系統，處理所有動態資料。

Now that this category has gotten to scale and usage, it's starting to get formal recognition. In December, research published by Forrester validated our thesis that data streaming platforms are a distinct category that has become a mission-critical component of the modern data stack. The Forrester Wave: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2023 recognizes streaming data as the pulse of an enterprise and names Confluent a leader. We were also named a leader in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023 and won InfoWorld's Technology of the Year in the Data Management: Streaming technology category. Taken together, these recognitions show us that the data streaming era is here and Confluent is a clear leader.

現在這個類別已經形成規模和使用，它開始被正式認可。去年 12 月，Forrester 發表的研究驗證了我們的論點，即資料流平台是一個獨特的類別，已成為現代資料堆疊的關鍵任務組件。 Forrester Wave：串流資料平台，2023 年第 4 季將串流資料視為企業的脈搏，並將 Confluence 評為領導者。我們也被評為 2023 年第四季《Forrester Wave：雲端資料管道》的領導者，並榮獲 InfoWorld 資料管理：串流技術類別的年度技術獎。總而言之，這些認識向我們表明，資料流時代已經到來，而 Confluence 是明顯的領導者。

As we've discussed before, this data streaming platform is more than just Kafka. Kafka is the data stream, a foundational layer, but it's just the start to extract the full value of data in motion. Organizations need to connect to the systems they have, process data in real time and govern these flows of data across the enterprise. Each of these capabilities, connectors, stream processing and governance, is on a path to become sizable business on their own. One key aspect of our consumption transformation is that it lets our go-to-market directly drive consumption around these additional products, which can be used under the same consumption contract with no additional purchasing friction.

正如我們之前討論的，這個資料流平台不僅僅是 Kafka。 Kafka 是資料流，是一個基礎層，但它只是提取動態資料的全部價值的開始。組織需要連接到他們擁有的系統，即時處理資料並管理整個企業的這些資料流。這些功能、連接器、流處理和治理中的每一個都正在發展成為規模龐大的業務。我們消費轉型的一個關鍵方面是，它讓我們的上市直接帶動這些附加產品的消費，這些附加產品可以在相同的消費合約下使用，沒有額外的購買摩擦。

Today, I'd like to spend a few minutes covering what's happening in the world of stream processing. Stream processing enables organizations to act on data as it arrives rather than waiting to process it in batch at the end of the day. For an airline, it could be processing data from streams of flight times, weather information and customer information. By itself, these streams are powerful. But with stream processing, these streams can be combined and enriched to drive logistics, pricing, scheduling and cascade that information throughout the system to minimize travel disruptions.

今天，我想花幾分鐘時間介紹一下串流處理領域正在發生的事情。流處理使組織能夠在資料到達時對其採取行動，而不是等到一天結束時才進行批量處理。對於航空公司來說，它可以處理來自飛行時間、天氣資訊和客戶資訊流的數據。這些流本身就很強大。但透過流處理，可以組合和豐富這些流，以推動物流、定價、調度，並在整個系統中級聯這些信息，從而最大限度地減少旅行中斷。

For Confluent, this represents a significant growth opportunity. Today, the spend on applications around the data stream is significantly higher than on the stream itself. By making these applications easier to build and bringing that spend into our platform, we believe both adoption of our platform as well as the growth of our business will be accelerated.

對 Confluence 來說，這代表著一個重大的成長機會。如今，圍繞數據流的應用程式的支出明顯高於流本身。透過讓這些應用程式更容易建構並將這些支出引入我們的平台，我們相信我們平台的採用以及我們業務的成長都會加速。

I'd like to spend the next few minutes addressing the question of why Confluent is uniquely positioned to succeed in stream processing with our Flink offering. There are 3 key reasons I'll address: first, Flink is the emerging de facto standard; second, the company with the stream gets the processing; and third is the rise of data products. Let me address each of these in turn.

我想用接下來的幾分鐘來解決為什麼 Confluence 具有獨特的優勢，可以透過我們的 Flink 產品在流處理方面取得成功。我將闡述 3 個關鍵原因：首先，Flink 是新興的事實標準；其次，有流的公司得到處理；三是數據產品的興起。讓我依序談談這些問題。

The first reason is perhaps the most obvious. We believe Flink is simply the best technology in the space and has attracted the largest community of developers working with real-time apps. This technological superiority comes with the fact that Flink was designed to have the full processing power of the database but was designed from the ground up for streaming, addressing batch processing needs as a special case of stream processing. This affects every aspect of the design, from how storage is managed, how failover and fault tolerance works, the latency of results and the interfaces presented to users. This is dramatically better than attempts to bolt streaming features into existing databases or batch processing engines.

第一個原因也許是最明顯的。我們相信 Flink 是該領域最好的技術，並且吸引了最大的即時應用程式開發人員社群。這種技術優勢源自於以下事實：Flink 被設計為具有資料庫的完整處理能力，但從一開始就為串流處理而設計，解決了作為流處理的特殊情況的批次需求。這會影響設計的各個方面，從儲存的管理方式、故障轉移和容錯的工作方式、結果的延遲以及向使用者呈現的介面。這比嘗試將串流功能添加到現有資料庫或批次引擎中要好得多。

The result is our ability to offer the most complete platform and ecosystem for stream processing, one that supports SQL as well as native apps in popular programming languages, and it unifies batch and real-time processing. This platform has attracted the most vibrant community doing development in this space. The developers have spoken. And like Kafka, this is the technology that they choose when they need real-time streaming.

結果是我們能夠提供最完整的流處理平台和生態系統，它支援 SQL 以及流行程式語言的本機應用程序，並且統一了批次和即時處理。這個平台吸引了最有活力的社群在這個領域進行開發。開發商已經發話了。和 Kafka 一樣，這是他們在需要即時串流時選擇的技術。

In 2023, there were nearly 1 million unique downloads of Flink and a 43% increase in open job requisitions for Flink developers. Unlike Kafka, it has proven itself with one of the most sophisticated user bases, including companies like Apple, Capital One, Netflix, Stripe and Uber. Perhaps what's most impressive is that Flink has attracted this broad adoption in apex users without having significant commercial backing or go-to-market support. This is truly the best engineers taking the best technology.

2023 年，Flink 的獨立下載量接近 100 萬次，Flink 開發人員的職缺申請增加了 43%。與 Kafka 不同的是，它已經透過最成熟的用戶群之一證明了自己，包括 Apple、Capital One、Netflix、Stripe 和 Uber 等公司。也許最令人印象深刻的是，Flink 在沒有大量商業支援或上市支援的情況下吸引了頂級用戶的廣泛採用。這確實是最好的工程師採用最好的技術。

Our investment in Flink gives us a leadership position and the winning technology in stream processing, but our advantage isn't limited to the technology or developer community. As attractive as stream processing is, it doesn't stand alone. It's always adopted along with a stream of data that needs processing. Everyone agrees that Kafka is the standard for the stream itself. As the leaders in Kafka, we're in a prime position for capturing the emerging stream processing market. Indeed, this pairing is very similar to what made databases themselves successful. Database has brought together data storage with data processing into a unified product, driving a vastly simpler experience. Confluent is working towards the same by unifying data streaming with Kafka with stream processing via Flink. We believe the resulting data streaming platform is exactly the product the customers want.

我們對 Flink 的投資讓我們在串流處理領域處於領先地位和勝利技術，但我們的優勢不僅限於技術或開發者社群。儘管流處理很有吸引力，但它並不是孤立的。它總是與需要處理的資料流一起採用。每個人都同意 Kafka 是流本身的標準。身為 Kafka 的領導者，我們處於佔領新興流處理市場的首要位置。事實上，這種配對與資料庫本身的成功非常相似。資料庫將資料儲存和資料處理整合到一個統一的產品中，帶來了更簡單的體驗。 Confluence 正在努力實現這一目標，將 Kafka 的資料流與 Flink 的流處理統一起來。我們相信最終的資料流平台正是客戶想要的產品。

This pairing is not just skin deep either. Confluent can make the stream and processing layers work together as a coherent product that is optimized as a single system, from performance to security to data discoverability to transactional semantics. And we think the processing layer that is unified with the underlying stream is going to be the easiest, fastest and most obvious choice for any developer. That makes Confluent's Flink offering a kind of default option when it comes to processing data in Kafka.

這種配對也不僅僅是表面的。 Confluence 可以使流層和處理層作為一個連貫的產品一起工作，並作為單一系統進行最佳化，從效能到安全性到資料可發現性再到事務語義。我們認為，對於任何開發人員來說，與底層流統一的處理層將是最簡單、最快和最明顯的選擇。這使得 Confluence 的 Flink 在處理 Kafka 中的資料時提供了一個預設選項。

There's a final trend that supports Confluent's position in stream processing, and that is the increasing role of the reusable data products in modern data architecture. In classical data architecture, data largely lived in a silo and, at most, was extracted to a single destination, the data warehouse, where it was processed to clean it up and make it usable for various reporting and analytics use cases. In modern data architecture, the data warehouse is no longer the single destination for data. Dozens or even hundreds of other systems feed off critical data streams.

最後一個趨勢支持了 Confluence 在串流處理領域的地位，那就是可重複使用資料產品在現代資料架構中的作用日益增強。在經典的資料架構中，資料主要存在於一個孤島中，最多被提取到一個目的地，即資料倉儲，在那裡對資料進行處理以清理資料並使其可用於各種報告和分析用例。在現代資料架構中，資料倉儲不再是資料的單一目的地。數十甚至數百個其他系統提供關鍵資料流。

Repeating the processing that cleans up data for use dozens or hundreds of times is completely infeasible. The result is that the processing is being pulled upstream from the destination to the source to produce high-quality, reusable data products. That is rather than having dozens of destination systems all try to clean up the data, instead, the source is responsible for publishing data in a processed, ready-to-use format to all destinations. This means the processing is happening on the stream as data enters the system rather than in the destination, and this is pulling workloads from batch processing in the destinations into stream processing at the source.

重複數十次或數百次清理資料以供使用的處理是完全不可行的。結果是將處理從目的地向上游拉至來源，以產生高品質、可重複使用的資料產品。也就是說，不是讓數十個目標系統都嘗試清理數據，而是來源負責以經過處理的、隨時可用的格式將數據發佈到所有目標。這意味著當資料進入系統時，處理發生在流上，而不是在目標中，這會將工作負載從目標中的批次拉到來源中的流處理中。

This is why, structurally, we expect the bulk of stream processing won't happen in destination systems like databases, data warehouses or data lakes. We think these 3 reasons are each powerful enough to draw processing workloads into the data streaming platform and, put together, will make the DSP the nexus of next-gen data workloads.

這就是為什麼從結構上來說，我們預計大部分流處理不會發生在資料庫、資料倉儲或資料湖等目標系統中。我們認為這 3 個原因都足以將處理工作負載引入資料流平台，並且綜合起來將使 DSP 成為下一代資料工作負載的紐帶。

We continue to see demand from customers who are building the next wave of generative AI applications, including AI-powered procurement software, chatbots, coding platforms and even unexpected use cases like predicting and detecting cavities. These organizations turn to Confluent to quickly build and scale GenAI applications that connect their proprietary systems to LLMs, so they can deliver trustworthy and contextually rich insights to their customers. We believe this represents a tremendous opportunity for Confluent as customers evolve from experimentation in the short term to production in the medium and long term.

我們不斷看到正在建立下一波生成式人工智慧應用程式的客戶的需求，包括人工智慧驅動的採購軟體、聊天機器人、編碼平台，甚至是預測和檢測蛀牙等意想不到的用例。這些組織求助於 Confluence 來快速建立和擴展 GenAI 應用程序，將其專有系統連接到法學碩士，以便他們可以為客戶提供值得信賴且背景豐富的見解。我們相信，隨著客戶從短期實驗發展到中長期生產，這對 Confluence 來說是一個巨大的機會。

We continue to invest in our product and in our partner ecosystem to address the demands we see across customers. Alongside Anthropic, we recently partnered with a vector database vendor, Pinecone, and their new Pinecone serverless offering. Our integration allows customers to build retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, pipelines that allow customers to bring together the real-time state of their proprietary data sources with general-purpose AI models.

我們繼續投資我們的產品和合作夥伴生態系統，以滿足我們在客戶中看到的需求。除了 Anthropic 之外，我們最近還與向量資料庫供應商 Pinecone 及其新的 Pinecone 無伺服器產品合作。我們的整合允許客戶建立檢索增強生成（RAG）管道，使客戶能夠將其專有資料來源的即時狀態與通用人工智慧模型結合在一起。

OpenAI has become the poster child of GenAI. In Q4, OpenAI signed with us to improve their visibility into customer usage patterns. We're still in early stages with this customer, but we have already identified additional use cases, including ways to help reduce costs across their stack. This customer and others like it continue to validate their strategic role of data streaming in the generative AI landscape.

OpenAI 已成為 GenAI 的典型代表。第四季度，OpenAI 與我們簽約，以提高他們對客戶使用模式的了解。我們與該客戶的合作仍處於早期階段，但我們已經確定了其他用例，包括幫助降低整個堆疊成本的方法。該客戶和其他類似客戶繼續驗證其資料流在產生人工智慧領域的戰略作用。

Finally, I'd like to close with 2 more customer stories that underscore our platform advantage. ACERTUS operates the largest automotive logistics company in the United States. It serves car manufacturers, dealers, rental companies and e-commerce dealers to move, store, recondition, title and register finished and sold vehicles. However, the data systems that supported its business and customers were old and siloed, creating pricing delays, supply chain bottlenecks, duplicate records and customers left waiting. So ACERTUS turned to Confluent Cloud for a data streaming platform to provide real-time access to data across its business.

最後，我想以另外 2 個強調我們平台優勢的客戶案例作為結束語。 ACERTUS 經營著美國最大的汽車物流公司。它為汽車製造商、經銷商、租賃公司和電子商務經銷商提供移動、儲存、翻新、所有權和登記成品和銷售車輛的服務。然而，支援其業務和客戶的數據系統陳舊且孤立，導致定價延遲、供應鏈瓶頸、重複記錄和客戶等待。因此，ACERTUS 轉向 Confluence Cloud 作為資料流平台，以提供對整個業務資料的即時存取。

Connectors allow ACERTUS to instantly connect data to internal systems, including applications in AWS, NetSuite, Salesforce and Snowflake, and external partners. Stream processing enables them to process data in-flight and deliver it to a data warehouse. So data is up to date and accessible by anyone. Stream governance allows the team to search and tag topics so users can find the data they're looking for and know it's trustworthy. With Confluent serving as its data streaming platform, ACERTUS has been able to open new business lines to generate tens of millions of new revenue while delivering internal cost and time savings, savings for the customer, and increased its profit margins.

連接器可讓 ACERTUS 立即將資料連接到內部系統，包括 AWS、NetSuite、Salesforce 和 Snowflake 中的應用程式以及外部合作夥伴。流處理使他們能夠處理動態資料並將其傳送到資料倉儲。因此數據是最新的並且任何人都可以訪問。流治理允許團隊搜尋和標記主題，以便用戶可以找到他們正在尋找的數據並知道它是值得信賴的。透過 Confluence 作為其資料流平台，ACERTUS 得以開闢新的業務線，產生數千萬美元的新收入，同時節省內部成本和時間，為客戶節省成本，並提高利潤率。

We continue to see strong growth in India, particularly in the digital native segment. A fast-growing e-commerce brand is a great example. By matching the world of fashion to the best technology, this company has experienced massive growth. In 2023, it reached tens of millions of new app users while growing its customer base by 100% in the last 18 months. Previously, their data platform relied on open source Kafka to power end-to-end e-commerce workflows: fulfillment, real-time inventories and order management. But with the company's explosive growth came challenges scaling open-source Kafka, resulting in large maintenance overheads and over-provisioning. So in Q4, they turned to Confluent Cloud with a 7-figure deal to power 6 business services that previously used open-source Kafka and plans to leverage our full platform, including streaming governance, connectors and stream processing to support their ambitious growth goals.

我們繼續看到印度的強勁成長，特別是在數位原生領域。快速成長的電子商務品牌就是一個很好的例子。透過將時尚世界與最好的技術相結合，該公司經歷了巨大的成長。 2023 年，它的新應用用戶達到數千萬，同時其客戶群在過去 18 個月內成長了 100%。此前，他們的數據平台依靠開源 Kafka 來支援端到端電子商務工作流程：履行、即時庫存和訂單管理。但隨著公司的爆炸性成長，開源 Kafka 的擴展面臨挑戰，導致大量的維護開銷和過度配置。因此，在第四季度，他們以7 位數的交易轉向Confluence Cloud，為先前使用開源Kafka 的6 項業務服務提供支持，併計劃利用我們的完整平台（包括流治理、連接器和流處理）來支持其雄心勃勃的成長目標。

In closing, we're pleased with our strong finish to fiscal year 2023. We are more confident than ever that our transformation to a fully consumption-oriented business and continued innovation in our category-leading platform will serve as a catalyst for winning the $60 billion market opportunity in front of us.

最後，我們對 2023 財年的強勁表現感到滿意。我們比以往任何時候都更有信心，我們向完全消費導向業務的轉型以及我們類別領先平台的持續創新將成為贏得 60 美元的催化劑億元市場機會擺在我們面前。

With that, I'll turn things over to Rohan.

這樣，我就把事情交給Rohan了。

Thanks, Jay. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll start with a brief recap of our full year results. In fiscal year 2023, total revenue grew 33% to $777 million. Confluent Cloud revenue grew 65% to $348.8 million, and non-GAAP operating margin improved 23 percentage points to end the year at negative 7.4%. This includes the fourth quarter where we achieved our first positive non-GAAP operating margin of 5.3%, far exceeding the breakeven target we set a year ago.

謝謝，傑伊。大家下午好。我將首先簡要回顧我們的全年業績。 2023 財年，總營收成長 33%，達到 7.77 億美元。 Confluence Cloud 營收成長 65%，達到 3.488 億美元，非 GAAP 營運利潤率提高 23 個百分點，年底為負 7.4%。其中包括第四季度，我們首次實現了 5.3% 的非 GAAP 營業利潤率，遠遠超過我們一年前設定的損益兩平目標。

As we look back at fiscal year 2023, we are pleased to have delivered on our commitment of driving higher revenue growth while accelerating our path to positive non-GAAP operating margin by 1 year. Our ability to achieve $750 million-plus revenue and positive non-GAAP operating margin in just 9 years since the company's founding is a major accomplishment. It required substantial effort across every team in the company to achieve this milestone. I'm proud of our incredibly talented teams at Confluent, and I'd like to thank our employees, customers and partners for their important contribution throughout the years.

回顧 2023 財年，我們很高興兌現了推動更高收入成長的承諾，同時將非公認會計準則營業利潤率提前一年實現正值。自公司成立以來的短短 9 年裡，我們能夠實現超過 7.5 億美元的收入和正的非公認會計原則營業利潤率，這是一項重大成就。為了實現這一里程碑，公司每個團隊都需要付出巨大的努力。我為 Confluence 才華橫溢的團隊感到自豪，我要感謝我們的員工、客戶和合作夥伴多年來所做的重要貢獻。

Turning to the Q4 results. Key highlights include: robust subscription revenue growth with our first $100 million quarter for both Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform; record high non-GAAP total gross margin, driven by strong unit economics of our product offerings; and our first positive quarter for both non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow margin, underscoring our commitment to driving efficient growth at scale.

轉向第四季的業績。主要亮點包括：Confluence Cloud 和 Confluence Platform 的第一季營收達到 1 億美元，訂閱收入強勁成長；在我們產品的強勁單位經濟效益的推動下，非公認會計原則總毛利率創歷史新高；我們的非公認會計準則營業利潤率和自由現金流利潤率均實現第一個正成長季度，突顯了我們推動大規模高效成長的承諾。

Total revenue for the quarter grew 26% to $213.2 million. Subscription revenue grew 31% to $202.8 million. Within subscription, Confluent Platform revenue grew 18% to $102.8 million, representing 48% of total revenue. The strength was driven by healthy demand for Confluent Platform in regulated industries. Confluent Cloud revenue grew 46% to $100 million, exceeding our guidance of $97.5 million and ended the quarter at 47% of total revenue compared to 41% of revenue a year ago and 46% last quarter. We're pleased with the healthy consumption we saw in our digital native customers despite a still uncertain macro environment.

該季度總營收成長 26%，達到 2.132 億美元。訂閱收入成長 31%，達到 2.028 億美元。在訂閱業務中，Confluence 平台營收成長了 18%，達到 1.028 億美元，佔總營收的 48%。這項優勢是由受監管產業對 Confluence 平台的健康需求所推動的。 Confluence Cloud 營收成長 46%，達到 1 億美元，超出了我們 9,750 萬美元的指導，本季末佔總營收的 47%，而去年同期為 41%，上季為 46%。儘管宏觀環境仍然不確定，但我們對數位原生客戶的健康消費感到滿意。

Turning to the geographical mix of revenue. Revenue from the U.S. grew 27% to $127.6 million. Revenue from outside the U.S. grew 25% to $85.5 million.

轉向收入的地理組合。來自美國的收入成長了 27%，達到 1.276 億美元。來自美國以外的收入成長了 25%，達到 8,550 萬美元。

Moving on to rest of the income statement. I'll be referring to non-GAAP results, unless stated otherwise. Total gross margin reached another record high of 77.5%, up 450 basis points. Subscription gross margin also reached a record high of 81.1%, up 240 basis points. Gross margin outperformance was driven by strong Confluent Platform margin and the efficiency and optimization we continue to realize in our Cloud offering.

繼續看損益表的其餘部分。除非另有說明，我將指的是非公認會計準則的結果。總毛利率再創歷史新高，達77.5%，上升450個基點。認購毛利率也創歷史新高，達81.1%，上升240個基點。毛利率的優異表現是由強勁的 Confluence 平台利潤率以及我們在雲端產品中不斷實現的效率和優化所推動的。

Turning to profitability and cash flow. We achieved positive operating margin for the first time as a public company, improving 27 percentage points to 5.3%, representing our sixth consecutive quarter of more than 10 points and third consecutive quarter of more than 20 points in margin improvement. Our relentless focus on driving operational efficiency across the company resulted in improvement in every category of our operating expenses, with the largest improvement of 16 percentage points in sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of total revenue.

轉向獲利能力和現金流。作為一家上市公司，我們首次實現了正營業利潤率，提高了27 個百分點，達到5.3%，這意味著我們的利潤率改善連續第六個季度超過10 個百分點，連續第三個季度超過20 個百分點。我們堅持不懈地致力於提高整個公司的營運效率，這使得我們各個類別的營運支出都得到了改善，其中銷售和行銷費用佔總收入的百分比下降幅度最大，達到了 16 個百分點。

Net income per share was $0.09 for Q4, using 342.4 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Fully diluted share count under the treasury stock method was approximately 356.1 million. Free cash flow margin also turned positive in the quarter, improving 21 percentage points to 3.2%. And we ended the fourth quarter with $1.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.

使用 3.424 億股稀釋加權平均流通股計算，第四季每股淨利為 0.09 美元。庫存股法下的完全稀釋股份數量約為3.561億股。本季自由現金流利潤率也轉正，提高 21 個百分點至 3.2%。截至第四季末，我們擁有 19 億美元的現金、現金等價物和有價證券。

Turning now to other business metrics. In Q4, total customer count grew 9% to approximately 4,960. Customers with $100,000 or more in ARR, grew 21% to 1,229 and customers with $1 million or more in ARR grew 24% to 158. We ended fiscal year '23 with 19 customers with $5 million or more in ARR, up from 9 customers a year ago. This reflects our customers' strong confidence in standardizing on our data streaming platform, making Confluent the central nervous system of their technology stack.

現在轉向其他業務指標。第四季度，客戶總數成長 9%，達到約 4,960 名。 ARR 為100,000 美元或以上的客戶增長了21%，達到1,229 家，ARR 為100 萬美元或以上的客戶增長了24%，達到158 家。截至23 財年，ARR 為500 萬美元或以上的客戶有19 家，而去年的客戶數量為9 家。一年前。這反映了我們的客戶對我們的資料流平台標準化的強烈信心，使 Confluence 成為他們技術堆疊的中樞神經系統。

We believe the completion of our consumption transformation in fiscal year '24 will help accelerate the growth of our total customer count. In fact, we saw good traction in total customer count in January. While early, we believe the transformation will make it even easier for our customers and prospects to try, adopt and expand across stream, connect, process and govern in our product portfolio.

我們相信，24 財年消費轉型的完成將有助於加速我們客戶總數的成長。事實上，我們在一月份的客戶總數方面看到了良好的成長勢頭。雖然還處於早期階段，但我們相信這項轉型將使我們的客戶和潛在客戶更容易嘗試、採用和跨流擴展、連接、處理和管理我們的產品組合。

NRR in the quarter was slightly above 125%, exceeding our midterm target threshold of 125%. Gross retention rate remained strong and was above 90%. As discussed last quarter, we expect NRR will be between 120% and 125% as we go through our consumption transformation this year. As we exit the transformation and starting fiscal year '25, we expect NRR to revert to Q4 '23 levels and exceed our midterm target threshold of 125%.

本季的 NRR 略高於 125%，超過了我們 125% 的中期目標門檻。毛保留率依然強勁，達到90%以上。正如上季所討論的，隨著我們今年的消費轉型，我們預計 NRR 將在 120% 至 125% 之間。隨著我們退出轉型並開始 25 財年，我們預計 NRR 將恢復到 23 年第四季的水平，並超過我們 125% 的中期目標門檻。

RPO was $919.9 million, up 24%. Current RPO, estimated to be 64% of RPO, was $591.9 million, up 30%. As called out last quarter, RPO-related metrics are less relevant beginning this year, given our greater focus on driving consumption for our Cloud business.

RPO 為 9.199 億美元，成長 24%。目前的 RPO（預計為 RPO 的 64%）為 5.919 億美元，成長了 30%。正如上個季度所指出的，考慮到我們更加重視推動雲端業務的消費，與 RPO 相關的指標從今年開始就不那麼重要了。

Next, I'm pleased to announce that we recently acquired Notable, which did not have a material impact on our financials. We closed the acqui-hire in Q4 of 2023 and welcomed a small team of highly talented individuals to Confluent. This team focuses on developing a no-code data visualization capability that simplifies navigation and identifies important insights.

接下來，我很高興地宣布，我們最近收購了 Notable，這對我們的財務狀況沒有重大影響。我們在 2023 年第四季完成了招聘，並迎來了一支由高素質人才組成的小團隊加入 Confluence。該團隊專注於開發無程式碼資料視覺化功能，以簡化導航並識別重要見解。

Now I would like to discuss Confluent's positioning for 2024 and beyond. Driven by our TAM, technology and team, we have shown in our 2023 results our success in driving efficient growth at scale.

現在我想討論一下 Confluence 對 2024 年及以後的定位。在我們的 TAM、技術和團隊的推動下，我們在 2023 年業績中展現了我們在推動大規模高效成長方面的成功。

In 2024, our TAM, technology and team are only getting stronger. First, our $60 billion-plus TAM is underpinned by the prevalence of data streaming as more than 150,000 organizations have built around streaming, along with long-term secular tailwinds such as cloud migration and GenAI.

2024年，我們的TAM、技術和團隊只會越來越強大。首先，我們超過 600 億美元的 TAM 得到了資料流的盛行的支撐，因為超過 150,000 個組織都圍繞著串流媒體建立，同時還有雲端遷移和 GenAI 等長期長期推動力。

Second, our technology differentiation is expanding rapidly. We have successfully evolved from a single product streaming company to the industry's only data streaming platform company. Our DSP is cloud native, complete with stream connect, process and govern and available everywhere. Our customers are excited about the innovation we plan to bring to the market in 2024 as we have one of the most exciting product release cycles coming up in the history of the company, starting with Flink GA in Q1.

其次，我們的技術差異化正在迅速擴大。我們已成功從單一產品串流媒體公司發展成為業界唯一的數據串流平台公司。我們的 DSP 是雲端原生的，具有串流連接、處理和管理功能，並且隨處可用。我們的客戶對我們計劃在 2024 年向市場推出的創新感到興奮，因為從第一季的 Flink GA 開始，我們將迎來公司歷史上最令人興奮的產品發布週期之一。

Finally, our team has proven ability to execute with the latest accomplishment of delivering higher revenue growth annually while improving non-GAAP operating margin by more than 46 points in just 10 quarters. In 2024, we have strong alignment and commitment across every function of the company to deliver on our consumption transformation. This will put us in a better position, more aligned with our customers to address the $60 billion-plus TAM in front of us.

最後，我們的團隊已經證明有能力執行最新的成就，每年實現更高的收入成長，同時在短短 10 個季度內將非 GAAP 營業利潤率提高超過 46 個百分點。到 2024 年，我們公司的各個職能部門都將堅定不移地協調一致並致力於實現消費轉型。這將使我們處於一個更好的位置，更加與我們的客戶保持一致，以解決我們面前超過 600 億美元的 TAM 問題。

Given this backdrop, we are focused on sustaining efficient growth in 2024 by delivering our first breakeven year for both non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow margin. Given our solid Q4 performance, we feel confident in delivering 22% total revenue growth for 2024 and eventually returning to our midterm target growth of 30%.

在此背景下，我們的重點是在 2024 年實現非 GAAP 營運利潤率和自由現金流利潤率的首個盈虧平衡年，從而維持高效成長。鑑於我們第四季度的穩健表現，我們有信心在 2024 年實現 22% 的總收入成長，並最終恢復 30% 的中期目標成長。

Turning now to our guidance. As announced on our last earnings call, we will be transitioning our revenue guidance metrics to subscription revenue beginning this quarter. To assist the investment community, we're transitioning to our new guidance practice, we will continue to provide total revenue guidance for the first 2 quarters of 2024 and for full year 2024. We will fully transition to providing only subscription revenue guidance beginning with Q3.

現在轉向我們的指導。正如我們在上次財報電話會議上所宣布的那樣，我們將從本季開始將收入指導指標轉變為訂閱收入。為了幫助投資界，我們正在過渡到新的指導實踐，我們將繼續提供 2024 年前 2 季和 2024 年全年的總收入指導。我們將從第三季度開始全面過渡到僅提供訂閱收入指導。

For the first quarter of 2024, we expect: total revenue to be in the range of $211 million to $212 million, representing growth of 21% to 22%; subscription revenue, which is our new guidance metric and consists of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform revenue, will be in the range of $199 million to $200 million, representing growth of 24% to 25%; non-GAAP operating margin at approximately negative 4%, representing improvement of approximately 19 percentage points; and non-GAAP net income per diluted share to be approximately 0 to $0.02. For the full year 2024, we expect: total revenue to be approximately $950 million, representing growth of approximately 22%; non-GAAP operating margin to breakeven, representing improvement of approximately 7 percentage points; and non-GAAP net income per diluted share of approximately $0.17.

對於 2024 年第一季度，我們預期： 總營收將在 2.11 億美元至 2.12 億美元之間，成長 21% 至 22%；訂閱收入是我們的新指導指標，由 Confluence Cloud 和 Confluence Platform 收入組成，將在 1.99 億美元至 2 億美元之間，成長 24% 至 25%；非 GAAP 營運利潤率約為負 4%，提高了約 19 個百分點；非 GAAP 稀釋每股淨利潤約為 0 至 0.02 美元。對於 2024 年全年，我們預期： 總營收約 9.5 億美元，成長約 22%；非 GAAP 營運利潤率達到損益平衡，提高約 7 個百分點；非 GAAP 攤薄後每股淨利約 0.17 美元。

Additionally, I'd like to provide some modeling points. We expect Confluent Cloud revenue in Q1 to be approximately $105 million, representing growth of approximately 43%. We expect free cash flow margin in fiscal year '24 to breakeven, representing improvement of approximately 16 percentage points. Consistent with prior years, Q1 free cash flow margin will continue to show pronounced seasonality, primarily due to our corporate bonus payout, employee stock purchase program and the holdback payment related to our Immerock acquisition. Despite these headwinds, we expect Q1 free cash flow margins to improve approximately 20 percentage points year-over-year.

此外，我想提供一些建模點。我們預計第一季 Confluence Cloud 營收約 1.05 億美元，成長約 43%。我們預計 24 財年的自由現金流利潤率將達到損益兩平，提高約 16 個百分點。與往年一樣，第一季自由現金流利潤率將繼續表現出明顯的季節性，這主要是由於我們的公司獎金支付、員工股票購買計劃以及與我們收購 Immerock 相關的保留付款。儘管存在這些不利因素，我們預計第一季自由現金流利潤率將年增約 20 個百分點。

Finally, we are pleased with decreasing our annualized net dilution from 4.7% in fiscal year '22 to 3.5% in fiscal year '23. We expect net dilution for fiscal year '24 will be approximately 3%, in line with our midterm target. Our goal over the long term is to bring net dilution down to under 2%.

最後，我們很高興將年化淨稀釋率從 22 財年的 4.7% 降至 23 財年的 3.5%。我們預計 24 財年的淨稀釋度約為 3%，符合我們的中期目標。我們的長期目標是將淨稀釋率降至 2% 以下。

In summary, we are pleased with closing out the year with solid fourth quarter results. Our track record of improving non-GAAP operating margin is a testament to the power of our innovation engine and our commitment of driving efficient growth. Looking forward to 2024, we are focused on achieving our first positive non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow margin for the full year while delivering on our top line commitment.

總而言之，我們很高興以穩健的第四季業績結束這一年。我們在提高非公認會計原則營業利潤方面的記錄證明了我們創新引擎的力量以及我們推動高效成長的承諾。展望 2024 年，我們的重點是實現全年首次實現非 GAAP 營業利潤率和自由現金流利潤率正值，同時兌現我們的營收承諾。

Now Jay and I will take your questions.

現在傑伊和我將回答你們的問題。

All right. Thanks, Rohan.(Operator Instructions) And today, our first question will come from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo followed by Morgan Stanley. Michael, go ahead.

好的。謝謝，Rohan。（操作員說明）今天，我們的第一個問題將來自富國銀行的邁克爾·特林（Michael Turrin），其次是摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）。邁克爾，繼續吧。

Nice bounce back here. Jay, I want to go back to some of the partnerships you mentioned. You caught out a few captivating companies with Anthropic, Pinecone and then the OpenAI customer relationships. So I'm just wondering, is there a commonality in terms of their needs for data streaming? Are there reasons they're landing with Confluent versus open-source Kafka? I think this is obviously a new ground for all of us. So just anything else you can provide just to help us understand what drove those is useful.

在這裡反彈得很好。傑伊，我想回顧一下您提到的一些合作關係。您發現了一些具有 Anthropic、Pinecone 以及 OpenAI 客戶關係的迷人公司。所以我只是想知道，他們對資料流的需求是否有共通點？他們選擇 Confluence 而非開源 Kafka 有何原因？我認為這對我們所有人來說顯然是一個新的領域。因此，您可以提供的任何其他資訊來幫助我們了解推動這些變化的因素都是有用的。

Yes. Yes. I think increasingly, streaming is a critical part of the architecture for these generative AI applications. The need is very much to bring together the kind of proprietary enterprise data you would have with one of these more generic language models that kind of knows about the world, but doesn't know the up to the second view of your business and what's happening. And so that's very much the use case where we tend to play in that.

是的。是的。我認為，串流媒體越來越成為這些生成式人工智慧應用程式架構的關鍵部分。非常需要將您擁有的專有企業資料與這些更通用的語言模型之一結合在一起，這些語言模型了解世界，但不知道您的業務的第二個視圖以及正在發生的事情。這就是我們傾向於使用的用例。

So the partnerships with the vector databases like Pinecone, the models, it's very much around supporting that architecture. And our goal was really to support the integration across the best technologies in that space. And I think it was very much embraced on the other side by these companies that are trying to do that.

因此，與 Pinecone、模型等向量資料庫的合作很大程度上是為了支援該架構。我們的目標實際上是支援該領域最佳技術的整合。我認為，另一方面，這些嘗試這樣做的公司也非常歡迎這一點。

And then OpenAI, this is incredible technology company that I think has the potential to be the size of Google over time in terms of the scale of their infrastructure. We're extremely happy to be part of that stack.

然後是 OpenAI，這是一家令人難以置信的科技公司，我認為隨著時間的推移，就基礎設施的規模而言，它有可能達到Google的規模。我們非常高興成為該堆疊的一部分。

That's great. If I can just ask a follow-on for Rohan. It's encouraging to see the 22% guide held on to here. You mentioned a number of impacts for us to consider last quarter. Any commentary you could provide just on how some of those played through in Q4 relative to what you're expecting previously is also useful.

那太棒了。如果我可以問一下羅漢的後續。看到 22% 的指導值保持不變，令人鼓舞。您提到了上季度我們需要考慮的一些影響。您可以提供的任何關於其中一些內容在第四季度的表現與您之前的預期相比的評論也是有用的。

Thanks for the question, Michael. Yes, of course. I mean, it all starts with our Q4 execution. We delivered subscription revenue growth of 31% and total revenue growth of 26% and a couple of milestones, so first quarter of $100 million for both Confluent Platform and Cloud. That, coupled with just the green shoots we started seeing in the digital native segment with respect to the consumption, was, I'd say, one area. In general, Q4 execution was solid.

謝謝你的提問，麥可。是的當然。我的意思是，這一切都始於我們第四季的執行。我們的訂閱收入成長了 31%，總收入成長了 26%，並實現了幾個里程碑，因此第一季 Confluence 平台和雲端的收入都達到了 1 億美元。我想說，這一點，再加上我們在數位原生領域開始看到的消費方面的萌芽，就是一個領域。整體而言，第四季的執行情況穩健。

I think number two, on the consumption transformation side, Michael, we saw good early traction with respect to where exactly where we want to be. As Jay mentioned, we were at sales kickoff last, last week, and the feedback was very, very positive. And generally, like one [mountain], we're getting just positive signals with respect to our transformation. So that's that.

我認為第二，在消費轉型方面，邁克爾，我們在我們想要達到的目標方面看到了良好的早期牽引力。正如傑伊所提到的，我們上週參加了銷售啟動會，反饋非常非常積極。一般來說，就像一座[山]一樣，我們只收到關於我們轉型的正面訊號。就是這樣。

And in general, when you think about our guidance philosophy, if you look at our Q1 and full year guidance, we're not assuming a huge amount of acceleration in the second half of the year. So that -- I mean when you combine all of these, it just gives us, I'd say, more confidence around our 2024 guidance.

總的來說，當你考慮我們的指導理念時，如果你看看我們的第一季和全年指導，我們不會假設下半年會有巨大的加速。所以，我的意思是，當你將所有這些結合起來時，我想說，它只會讓我們對 2024 年的指導更有信心。

All right. Thanks, Michael. We'll go to Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley, and then followed by Deutsche. Sanjit?

好的。謝謝，麥可。我們將與摩根士丹利一起拜訪桑吉特辛格，然後是德意志銀行。桑吉特？

Yes. Just to pick up on the previous question and some of the themes last quarter. Jay, I think one of the themes that you called out last quarter was just that software development projects had slowed down throughout the course of calendar 2023. It doesn't sound like you're giving the all clear signs just yet, but there are -- seem to be some encouraging signs with like new logo acquisition in January. In terms of what you're seeing from the customer base and sort of them sort of restarting some innovation initiatives, any update there that you can tell us as it relates to potentially driving pipeline for Confluent?

是的。只是為了回答上一個問題和上個季度的一些主題。 Jay，我認為您上季度提出的主題之一就是軟體開發專案在 2023 年整個過程中都放緩了。聽起來您尚未給出所有明確的跡象，但有——似乎是一些令人鼓舞的跡象，例如一月份收購新標誌。就您從客戶群中看到的情況以及他們重新啟動一些創新計劃而言，您可以告訴我們任何與潛在推動 Confluence 管道相關的更新嗎？

Yes. I would characterize it this way, like -- I think '23 was just a tight year for IT budgets kind of everywhere. And then in the digital native space, it was extra, extra tight where there was very significant push on optimization. So where are we now? Yes, I wouldn't say it's all back to where 2021 was, but there are some green shoots, right? There's -- we've definitely seen more activity in the digital native space, right? I think some of the optimization has been accomplished. So there's projects happening there. I think maybe there's kind of a normalization across both large enterprise and digital native where people are getting a little bit back to normal. It's early in calling that, but that's -- I would say that's the early part of what we've seen.

是的。我會這樣描述它，就像——我認為 23 年對各地的 IT 預算來說都是緊張的一年。然後在數位原生領域，它非常非常嚴格，需要非常大力地推動優化。那我們現在在哪裡？是的，我不會說一切都回到了 2021 年的水平，但也有一些萌芽，對吧？我們肯定在數位原生領域看到了更多的活動，對吧？我認為一些優化已經完成。所以那裡正在進行一些項目。我認為大型企業和數位原生世代可能都存在某種常態化，人們正在稍微恢復正常。現在這麼說還為時過早，但我想說這是我們所看到的早期部分。

Great. So a little bit of incremental progress. And maybe just one quick follow-up. I mean from -- Q4 is typically a big renewal quarter for most software companies. As you saw the renewals come up, did you pick up any sort of increased motivation by a cohort of customers to move or downgrade from paid Confluent to open-source Kafka and sort of update them?

偉大的。所以一點點漸進的進步。也許只是一個快速的後續行動。我的意思是，對於大多數軟體公司來說，第四季通常是一個重要的更新季度。當您看到續約出現時，您是否發現一群客戶有任何增加的動機從付費 Confluence 遷移或降級到開源 Kafka 並進行更新？

No. That's -- like overall, the kind of gross retention rate has remained very strong. As I think we called out, that we track exactly whenever we compete versus open source, whether renewal or kind of new win. And those win rates have remained very strong. In fact, it actually improved in Q4 over past quarters.

不。總體而言，這種毛保留率仍然非常高。正如我認為我們所呼籲的那樣，每當我們與開源競爭時，無論是更新還是新的勝利，我們都會進行精確追蹤。這些勝率仍然非常高。事實上，第四季度的情況實際上比過去幾個季度有所改善。

Great. Thanks, Sanjit. We'll go to Brad Zelnick with Deutsche next, followed by RBC.

偉大的。謝謝，桑吉特。接下來我們將邀請德意志銀行的布拉德·澤爾尼克 (Brad Zelnick)，然後是加拿大皇家銀行 (RBC)。

And great to see the strong finish to the year. I want to follow up on Michael Turrin's question around these partnerships, Jay, and AI use cases, which you called out in your press release, I think, where you referenced real-time generative AI use cases as really being at the forefront right now. If we kind of go back to where we were at your analyst event in New York, I don't know if that was 6 or 8 months ago, it feels like with these partnerships, this is really more coming into focus and into fruition. Can you give us any prospective view in terms of like the types of use cases and the extent to which this is really going to materialize into demand, which I think, again, reflecting back 6, 8 months ago, was a little bit unclear as things were shifting in the world exactly. You kind of knew Confluent was participating, but I think you left the door open to exactly how -- if you could articulate that, that would be great.

很高興看到今年的強勁收官。我想跟進 Michael Turrin 關於這些合作夥伴關係、Jay 和人工智慧用例的問題，我認為您在新聞稿中提到了這些問題，您在其中提到實時生成人工智慧用例目前確實處於最前沿。如果我們回到紐約的分析師活動上，我不知道那是 6 個月還是 8 個月前，感覺有了這些合作關係，這確實更加成為焦點並取得成果。您能否就用例類型以及需求真正實現的程度等方面給我們一些前瞻性的看法，我認為，再一次回顧 6、8 個月前，這有點不清楚，因為世界上的一切正在改變。你有點知道 Confluence 正在參與，但我認為你沒有明確如何參與——如果你能清楚地表達出來，那就太好了。

Yes. Yes. So I would say the kind of our place in that stack has played out exactly as we called, right? We're in that kind of data supply chain for use cases around large language models. I would say the predominant use case, it's a lot of language and chat stuff, as you would see, very much that kind of applied -- apply this language model using the data about my business. That's the broad version of it. That could be around augmenting internal employees and making them effective, that could be something customer-facing, that could be kind of a back-end data processing task. We've seen that across a variety of disciplines, whether it's -- I can't call out some of them, but everything from kind of retail to tech companies to financial services. So I think that's happening.

是的。是的。所以我想說，我們在堆疊中的位置已經完全按照我們的要求發揮了作用，對嗎？我們處於圍繞大型語言模型的用例的資料供應鏈中。我想說的是，主要的用例是大量的語言和聊天內容，正如您所看到的，非常多的應用程式——使用有關我的業務的資料來應用這種語言模型。這是它的廣義版本。這可能是圍繞增強內部員工並提高他們的效率，這可能是面向客戶的，也可能是後端資料處理任務。我們已經在各個領域看到了這一點，無論是——我不能說出其中的一些，但從零售到科技公司再到金融服務的所有領域。所以我認為這種情況正在發生。

Where are we at in that cycle? Yes, I would say it's still early. There's more experiments in production applications, and obviously, we're kind of a production data layer. So that's where we come into play. But I think it's definitely promising. It kind of adds to the set of use cases that we have that drive adoption of this new architecture around data streaming.

我們在這個週期中處於什麼位置？是的，我想說現在還早。在生產應用程式中有更多的實驗，顯然，我們是生產資料層。這就是我們發揮作用的地方。但我認為這絕對是有希望的。它在某種程度上增加了我們擁有的用例集，推動了圍繞資料流的這種新架構的採用。

Great. And maybe just a quick follow-up for Rohan. As -- great job on the quarter. Better Q1 guide than we were modeling. But would I be wrong to assume -- and just what I think I'm hearing from you is that you're feeling better about the environment and growth opportunity versus a quarter ago, given you've nudged up your 2024 guidance, but you're still keeping the margin guide for flat. Making me wonder, are you hiring more into the opportunity you see ahead? Or is there maybe dilution from Notable? What should we -- not to nitpick, but what should we be thinking about here?

偉大的。也許只是羅漢的快速跟進。本季的工作非常出色。第一季指南比我們建模的更好。但我的假設是否錯誤——我認為我從你那裡聽到的是，考慮到你已經上調了 2024 年的指導，你對環境和成長機會的感覺比一個季度前更好了，但你仍保持保證金指導不變。讓我想知道，您是否會在未來的機會中招募更多人員？或者可能有 Notable 的稀釋？我們該做什麼——不是吹毛求疵，而是我們在這裡應該考慮什麼？

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for the question. When you -- on the top line side, like I mentioned, 3 things: strong Q4 performance, our consumption transformation after the start, exactly how we expected it to be, and just some green shoots on digital native that's driving our slight increase in dollar terms and increased confidence in our '24 guide.

謝謝，布拉德。謝謝你的提問。當你——就像我提到的那樣，在營收方面，有三件事：第四季的強勁表現、我們開始後的消費轉型、我們的預期完全符合我們的預期，以及數位原生的一些萌芽推動了我們的小幅成長美元計算以及對我們 '24 指南的信心增強。

On the margin side, we have a guide of 7 percentage points improvement year-over-year. That's holding to what we said a year back. So I wouldn't call out anything specific. I told -- called out that Notable does not have any material impact on our financials, and it's included in the guidance. But in general, as we head into 2024, we will hire in critical areas of the business and -- to overall make sure that we are driving durable growth and doing that efficiently in a thoughtful manner.

在利潤率方面，我們的指導方針是年增 7 個百分點。這與我們一年前所說的話是一致的。所以我不會提出任何具體的內容。我告訴 - 指出值得注意的是，Notable 對我們的財務沒有任何重大影響，並且它包含在指導中。但總的來說，當我們進入 2024 年時，我們將在業務的關鍵領域進行招聘，並從總體上確保我們正在推動持久增長，並以深思熟慮的方式高效地實現這一目標。

All right. Thanks, Brad. We'll take a question from Matt Hedberg with RBC, followed by Needham. Matt?

好的。謝謝，布拉德。我們將接受 RBC 的 Matt Hedberg 的提問，然後是 Needham 的提問。馬特？

Great. I'll offer my congrats as well. Following up on Brad's question a bit and focusing on the TAM for data streaming. Do you have a sense for the percentage of workload, Jay, that -- or workload or apps that customers typically see as needing real-time data versus where maybe batch is fine?

偉大的。我也將表示祝賀。稍微跟進 Brad 的問題，重點放在用於資料流的 TAM。 Jay，您是否了解工作負載的百分比，或者客戶通常認為需要即時數據的工作負載或應用程序，而批次可能沒問題？

Yes. Yes, it's a great question. I mean the key observation is I think that everybody wants data to be up to date and they want things in sync with the business. The question is how critical is that, right? Is that something that you must have at all costs? Is that something you would like to have?

是的。是的，這是一個很好的問題。我的意思是，關鍵的觀察是我認為每個人都希望數據是最新的，並且他們希望事情與業務同步。問題是這有多重要，對吧？這是你不惜一切代價必須擁有的東西嗎？這是你想要的嗎？

And I would say there's 2 changes there. First, increasingly, use cases do need that. As systems become more part of the operational stack of companies, as more of the use of data is driving action, not just reporting, I think that does require things to be much more in sync with the current state of the world. And so I think there's a trend, overall, in that direction. And then secondly, the cost of real-time, the cost of streaming and the difficulty of it is very much coming in line with batch computing. There's no reason this should be harder. It's just newer, right? And that takes time to mature.

我想說有兩個變化。首先，用例確實越來越需要這一點。隨著系統越來越成為公司營運堆疊的一部分，越來越多的數據使用正在推動行動，而不僅僅是報告，我認為這確實需要與世界當前的狀況更加同步。所以我認為總體而言，有一個朝這個方向發展的趨勢。其次，即時成本、串流媒體成本及其難度與批次計算非常一致。沒有理由這應該更難。只是比較新而已，對吧？這需要時間才能成熟。

So yes, we felt like a -- without making a lot of really big assumptions, if you look at kind of what's the portion of workloads that the average enterprise would have on the streaming platform, I would say about 1/3, maybe 1/3 live in this kind of operational database world where you're doing the quick lookups and serving the interactive web apps, maybe 1/3 are in the kind of analytics world kind of back-end dash [salvage], really doesn't need to move out of that, kind of off-line processing, and maybe 1/3 are in that stream processing space. I think that's the end state that we're aiming for.

所以，是的，我們感覺 - 沒有做出很多非常大的假設，如果你看看普通企業在串流媒體平台上的工作負載比例是多少，我會說大約 1/3，也許 1 /3 生活在這種操作資料庫世界中，您可以在其中進行快速查找並為互動式Web 應用程式提供服務，也許1/3 處於分析世界中的後端破折號[搶救]，實際上不是需要擺脫這種脫機處理，也許1/3 位於流處理空間。我認為這就是我們的目標最終狀態。

If you look at companies that are a little more technologically advanced and have been at this for a while, that's where they are. If you look at companies who are just starting in this space, they just have a few things, right, that they've done. So the assumption is that those newcomers will be able to progress. What enables that is making this technology easy and approachable, which is, of course, the direction of all our investments.

如果你看看那些技術稍微先進一點並且已經從事這一領域一段時間的公司，那就是他們的處境。如果你看看剛在這個領域起步的公司，他們只是做了一些事情，對吧，他們已經做了一些事情。因此，我們假設這些新人能夠取得進步。實現這一目標的原因是使這項技術變得簡單易用，這當然是我們所有投資的方向。

Great. And then maybe just a quick follow-up. Obviously, good execution here in Q4, and Rohan noted that new customer adds have increased in January, which is good to hear. Have you just heard any more just general feedback from the sales force on these changes? And did you notice any abnormal sales rep attrition?

偉大的。然後也許只是快速跟進。顯然，第四季的執行情況良好，Rohan 指出，一月新客戶的增加有所增加，這是令人高興的消息。您剛剛聽到銷售人員對這些變化的更多一般性回饋嗎？您是否注意到任何銷售代表的異常流失？

Yes. Yes, it's a great question. So like when we were thinking about the risks involved in this consumption transformation, that was definitely one of our potential risks, was like, hey, this is a big change for the sales team. What we've seen so far, I think, has been very promising.

是的。是的，這是一個很好的問題。因此，就像當我們考慮這種消費轉型所涉及的風險時，這絕對是我們的潛在風險之一，就像，嘿，這對銷售團隊來說是一個很大的變化。我認為，到目前為止我們所看到的情況非常有希望。

So first of all, people understood why we were doing it. They felt like it was coming more in line with some of the peer companies. Those companies have done it successfully. So I think there's enough kind of in water that you know this makes sense. I think it's in line with what we see from customers, like what customer want to do. So I think it made sense to people. You have a lot of conversations with bag-carrying sales reps, sales leaders at our sales kickoff last week. And I was expecting a more mixed set of feedback. Usually, if you make big changes, you get a little bit of everything. On the whole, I thought it was extremely positive. So that's been good.

首先，人們理解我們為什麼要這樣做。他們覺得它與一些同業公司更加一致。這些公司已經成功地做到了這一點。所以我認為水中有足夠的物質，你知道這是有道理的。我認為這符合我們從客戶那裡看到的，就像客戶想要做的那樣。所以我認為這對人們來說是有道理的。在上週的銷售啟動儀式上，您與背著袋子的銷售代表、銷售領導進行了許多對話。我期待著更加複雜的回饋。通常，如果你做出重大改變，你就會得到一切的一點點。總的來說，我認為這是非常積極的。所以這很好。

And then yes, attrition, we -- that was one of our concerns. Overall, that's not been an issue. Attrition is under what we modeled for the year and in line with historical norms for years when we haven't had this change. So that's very positive.

然後，是的，人員流失，我們——這是我們關心的問題之一。總的來說，這不是問題。人員流失率是根據我們當年的模型得出的，並且符合我們沒有發生這種變化的多年來的歷史標準。所以這是非常積極的。

All right. Thanks, Matt. We'll go to Mike Cikos with Needham next, followed by William Blair.

好的。謝謝，馬特。接下來我們將與尼達姆一起邀請麥克·西科斯，然後是威廉·布萊爾。

And I just wanted to pick up where Matt left off, just because I know that there's so much focus on this go-to-market transformation that you guys have been talking about. We're probably going to get this question. I just want to get it in a public forum here. But the concern, if we wanted to play devil's advocate, is that part of the Q4 strength was driven by, let's say, sales reps really trying to jam some of these contracts in under the old incentive structure. Can you just parse that out, while we have everyone here to hear, I guess, what you saw on that front?

我只是想繼續馬特停下來的地方，只是因為我知道你們一直在談論的進入市場轉型受到瞭如此多的關注。我們可能會被問到這個問題。我只是想在這裡的公共論壇上獲得它。但如果我們想唱反調的話，我們擔心的是，第四季度的強勁表現的一部分是由銷售代表真正試圖在舊的激勵結構下塞入其中一些合約所推動的。我想，當我們每個人都在聽你在這方面看到了什麼時，你能解析一下嗎？

Yes, I'm happy to do that. I mean first, it's important to understand that there's no change for Confluent Platform, the licensed software offering. So there's no -- I mean, sales reps always want to get something done in the current year, if they can. But there's no particular need to jam it through in '23 versus '24 on the Confluent Platform side.

是的，我很高興這樣做。我的意思是，首先，重要的是要了解 Confluence Platform（授權軟體產品）沒有任何變化。所以，我的意思是，如果可以的話，銷售代表總是希望在今年完成一些事情。但在 Confluence 平台方面，沒有特別需要在 '23 與 '24 中將其堵塞。

On the Confluent Cloud side, it's very important to understand that the revenue actually comes with the consumption. And so what you're seeing has nothing to do with the kind of deals closing that would show up in RPO, but the revenue represents just the increasing consumption, as you would expect.

在 Confluence Cloud 方面，了解收入其實是隨著消費而來的，這一點非常重要。因此，您所看到的與 RPO 中顯示的交易結束類型無關，但正如您所期望的那樣，收入僅代表消耗的增加。

So yes, I don't think there was a -- always people want to close deals in the -- as soon as they can, but I don't think there was a huge transition or kind of pull forward.

所以，是的，我不認為人們總是希望盡快完成交易，但我不認為有巨大的轉變或某種推動。

Great. And then a bit of a 2-parter here, one to close out the sales and another just to the broader platform. The first more just a financial checking here. But for Rohan, maybe you could give us a comment. But I think last quarter, the company had alluded to maybe 200 to 300 bps of an operating margin headwind based on the upfront expense recognition for Confluent Cloud with this incentive structure. Can you confirm that that's still the case when we think about this guidance here for the year?

偉大的。然後這裡有兩個部分，一個負責完成銷售，另一個負責更廣泛的平台。第一個只是財務檢查。但對於 Rohan，也許你可以給我們一個評論。但我認為，上個季度，該公司曾暗示，基於採用這種激勵結構的 Confluence Cloud 的前期費用確認，營運利潤率可能會出現 200 至 300 個基點的逆風。您能否確認，當我們考慮今年的指導意見時，情況仍然如此？

And then the second part, again, this is coming back to you, Jay. But can you talk about the importance of Flink? And where I'm going with this is, I believe Flink actually generalizes the processing, right? It can handle both streaming and batch processing. And again, for those folks who don't have the technical [chaps], myself included, but what is the importance of that generalization when we think about the potential that Flink has for your platform?

然後是第二部分，傑伊，這又回到你身邊了。但您能談談 Flink 的重要性嗎？我想說的是，我相信 Flink 實際上概括了處理，對吧？它可以處理串流處理和批次處理。再說一遍，對於那些不具備技術知識的人（包括我自己），當我們考慮 Flink 對您的平台的潛力時，這種概括的重要性是什麼？

Yes. Great. Do you want to go first, Rohan?

是的。偉大的。羅漢，你想先走嗎？

Yes, I'll go first. Mike, you're right. What we said last quarter was around just how commission is recognized, and that had a 200 to 300 basis point headwind to our operating margins. That still holds good. And that impact has actually been incorporated into our guide that we shared. So the 7 percentage points improvement that we're talking about year-over-year takes into account that dynamic that's happening. So to just confirm what you said, it's true.

是的，我先走了。麥克，你說得對。我們上個季度所說的是如何確認佣金，這對我們的營業利潤率造成了 200 到 300 個基點的阻力。這仍然有效。這種影響實際上已納入我們分享的指南中。因此，我們所說的同比增長 7 個百分點考慮到了正在發生的動態。所以為了證實你所說的是真的。

Yes. And then on the Flink side, that's exactly right. When people think about streaming, one of the mistakes I think they often make is to think of it as kind of a niche, right? What's actually happened in the world to make this area successful is it's really kind of a generalization of the batch systems. And that's actually true in the Kafka layer, where data is streamed but it's actually stored permanently, if you like, as well, and it's true in the Flink layer, where data is processed in real-time but can also be reprocessed in batch. So it has actually a very sophisticated batch processing engine as well.

是的。然後在 Flink 方面，這是完全正確的。當人們考慮串流媒體時，我認為他們經常犯的錯誤之一就是將其視為一種利基市場，對嗎？世界上實際發生的事情使這個領域取得了成功，這實際上是批次系統的推廣。在 Kafka 層中實際上是這樣，資料是串流的，但實際上是永久儲存的（如果您願意），在 Flink 層中也是如此，資料是即時處理的，但也可以批次重新處理。所以它實際上也有一個非常複雜的批次引擎。

And it's a bit into the tech weeds. But like that ability to provide something that's a generalization, that's actually key to the earlier point of what workloads would move, why would they move. You want something that is as capable as fully featured can handle the full set of workloads, but now does them continuously in sync with the business.

而且它有點像科技雜草。但是，就像提供概括性內容的能力一樣，這實際上是前面提到的哪些工作負載會移動、為什麼會移動的關鍵。您想要功能齊全的東西可以處理全套工作負載，但現在它們可以與業務持續同步。

All right. Thanks, Mike. We'll go to Jason Ader with William Blair next, followed by Goldman Sachs. Jason?

好的。謝謝，麥克。接下來我們將邀請傑森·阿德和威廉·布萊爾，然後是高盛。傑森？

Yes. First question for you. Just beyond the comp model shift that you guys have undertaken here, just wanted to get some more detail on some of the organizational changes. I know you have a new CRO. Can you just talk about how sales ops is changing, account coverage, sales engineering, customer success, partner engagement? Just sort of a little bit of a lay of the land in terms of how the sales organization looks today versus what it looked like a year or 2 ago.

是的。第一個問題給你。除了你們在這裡進行的薪酬模式轉變之外，我只是想了解一些組織變革的更多細節。我知道你有一個新的 CRO。您能否談談銷售營運、客戶覆蓋、銷售工程、客戶成功、合作夥伴參與度等方面的變化？就銷售組織今天的情況與一兩年前的情況相比，這只是一點點了解。

Yes. So the field operations, overall, remains under Erica Schultz. There are some changes within that, that kind of line up to this consumption change, right? It changes a little bit and how the sales engineers operate since the distinction between kind of land and expand is now a little bit different in a consumption world, changes in some of the organizations in the Americas and elsewhere as well.

是的。因此，總體而言，現場運營仍由埃里卡·舒爾茨負責。其中有一些變化，與這種消費變化一致，對嗎？它以及銷售工程師的運作方式都發生了一些變化，因為在消費世界中，土地種類和擴張之間的區別現在有點不同，美洲和其他地方的一些組織也發生了變化。

Okay. And so it's more of a tweak, is that fair, versus overhaul.

好的。所以這更多的是一種調整，公平嗎，而不是徹底改革。

Yes. Yes. I mean, I don't know where the line between one and the other is. But on the whole, I feel like we've had a lot of continuity in that team. The people kind of driving this are the same people who kind of set up the set of changes that we executed in '23. So I think there's been a lot of continuity in how we've thought about the kind of set of adjustments we would need to make.

是的。是的。我的意思是，我不知道兩者之間的界線在哪裡。但總的來說，我覺得我們團隊有很多連續性。推動這一切的人與我們在 23 年執行的一系列變更的人是同一個人。因此，我認為我們對於需要進行的一系列調整的思考方式具有很大的連續性。

Okay. And one quick one for Rohan. Can you talk about just the shape of the quarterly revenues in 2024? And any rough cut on impact of Flink and timing of impact from Flink?

好的。給羅漢一個快速的。能簡單談談 2024 年季度營收的情況嗎？ Flink 的影響以及 Flink 影響的時間有什麼粗略的劃分嗎？

Yes. I'll start with the second part, Jason. With respect to Flink, as we mentioned earlier, we expect the GA Flink in Q1. And with any kind of infrastructure product, it takes a couple of quarters for customers to start -- build applications and use it. So as we've said before, very consistent with what we've said before, we expect revenue -- material revenue contributions from Flink to happen in fiscal year '25. So that's on the Flink part.

是的。我將從第二部分開始，傑森。至於Flink，正如我們之前提到的，我們預計Flink GA將在第一季發布。對於任何類型的基礎設施產品，客戶都需要幾個季度的時間才能開始建立應用程式並使用它。正如我們之前所說，與我們之前所說的非常一致，我們預計 Flink 的收入貢獻將在 25 財年實現。這就是 Flink 部分。

On the shape, I'll just call out a couple of things. I'm not going to guide or provide color commentary on every quarter. But in general, I think one thing I can give you some additional color is around the shape of the Cloud business for 2024. In general, Cloud as a percentage of total revenue for 2024, we expect to be in the range of 50% to 51%, which is kind of in line with where the estimates are. And of course, from a first half versus second half, what I've shared earlier is, as a result of the consumption transformation, we're expecting second half growth rates to be slightly more elevated than first half. But as you can see from the guide, it's not a huge acceleration in that number. I hope that helps, yes.

關於形狀，我只想指出一些事情。我不會對每個季度進行指導或提供色彩評論。但總的來說，我認為我可以為您提供一些額外資訊的一件事是2024 年雲端業務的形狀。一般來說，雲端佔2024 年總收入的百分比，我們預計將在50% 到50%之間。51%，這與估計相符。當然，從上半年和下半年來看，我之前分享的是，由於消費轉型，我們預計下半年成長會比上半年略高一些。但正如您從指南中看到的那樣，這個數字並沒有大幅增加。我希望這會有所幫助，是的。

Thanks, Jason. I will go to Kash Rangan with Goldman, followed by JPMorgan. Kash?

謝謝，傑森。我將和高盛一起去卡什蘭根，然後是摩根大通。卡什？

Yes. So as you [fought] the new consumption model and how salespeople are going to get compensated, what has been the customer feedback? Does it change anything about the way the customer is going to be dealing with Confluent regardless of the way you compensate your salespeople?

是的。那麼，當您[對抗]新的消費模式以及銷售人員如何獲得報酬時，客戶的回饋是什麼？無論您以何種方式補償銷售人員，這是否會改變客戶與 Confluence 打交道的方式？

And secondly, Jay, as you go into 2024, we're hearing a lot more Flink. The message, Confluent is an elegant technology platform. This is pretty complicated, but it gets even more complicated as we get into discussion of where Flink fits in versus Kafka. Are we -- how are we to navigate this complexity in the technology portfolio versus the complexity in the way we're going to be compensating salespeople? One of the tools and techniques you're giving your core market organization to navigate and get through this complication.

其次，Jay，隨著 2024 年的到來，我們會聽到更多 Flink。消息稱，Confluence 是一個優雅的技術平台。這非常複雜，但當我們討論 Flink 與 Kafka 的定位時，情況會變得更加複雜。我們如何因應技術組合的複雜性與銷售人員薪酬方式的複雜性？您為核心市場組織提供的工具和技術之一，用於導航和解決此複雜問題。

Yes. Yes. On the first question, there's nothing immediate that changes in the interaction with customers or at least not in the way that you would immediately notice, right? So the payment model, the kind of business model, that has all been consumption-oriented since prior to the IPO. And so you might not notice anything if you're a customer. Hopefully, you noticed that our field team is more helpful in finding the applications that are critical to your success, making sure that those get to production as quickly as possible. Hopefully, they were doing that already. But the consumption incentive kind of directly drives that behavior, but it wouldn't be something where we have to send you some notice of something changing. Really, it's internal to our operations that the change is most apparent.

是的。是的。關於第一個問題，與客戶的互動沒有立即發生任何變化，或者至少不會以您立即註意到的方式發生變化，對吧？所以支付模式、商業模式，從IPO之前開始都是以消費為導向的。因此，如果您是客戶，您可能不會注意到任何事情。希望您注意到我們的現場團隊在尋找對您的成功至關重要的應用程式方面更有幫助，並確保這些應用程式盡快投入生產。希望他們已經這樣做了。但消費激勵直接驅動了這種行為，但我們不必向您發送一些變化的通知。事實上，這種變化在我們的營運內部最為明顯。

On your second point, I think you will hear about complexity around Kafka or around Flink. I think it's actually very important to separate out the operational complexity of trying to build a big in-house data system that you self-manage from actually using one of these cloud services. The interface to Kafka is a very simple kind of read and write data streams. The interface for Flink is just SQL, as people are used to this kind of the common language of databases or in other common programming languages, very similar constructs. So that developer interface is not complicated. If you want to stand up and build an in-house data platform and run it yourself off the open source, yes, there's a lot of rocket science involved in that.

關於你的第二點，我想你會聽到有關 Kafka 或 Flink 的複雜性。我認為，將嘗試建立一個由您自行管理的大型內部資料系統的操作複雜性與實際使用這些雲端服務之一分開實際上非常重要。 Kafka 的介面是一種非常簡單的讀寫資料流。 Flink 的介面就是 SQL，因為人們已經習慣了這種資料庫通用語言或其他通用程式語言，結構非常相似。所以開發者介面並不複雜。如果您想站起來建立一個內部數據平台並自己透過開源運行它，是的，這涉及到很多火箭科學。

And so when we think about how does that affect our sales model, well, that's part of what we're bringing, right, the value of these cloud platforms, in particular, is taking all that way. You can just depend on this as a service. And I do think that that's where, call it, 90% of the complexity in this new stuff lies. And that's always been true. Like running databases is hard, running data systems of all kinds is hard, and this stuff is no different from that.

因此，當我們考慮這如何影響我們的銷售模式時，嗯，這是我們帶來的一部分，對吧，這些雲端平台的價值，特別是，正在採取所有這些方式。您可以將其視為一項服務。我確實認為這就是這個新東西 90% 的複雜性所在。這一直都是事實。就像運行資料庫很困難一樣，運行各種資料系統也很困難，而這個東西與此沒有什麼不同。

All right. Thanks, Kash. We'll take our next question from Pinjalim Bora with JPMorgan, followed by Mizuho.

好的。謝謝，卡什。我們將接受摩根大通的 Pinjalim Bora 和瑞穗的下一個提問。

I want to ask you on the go-to-market changes. I think I heard you have already put kind of the initial changes in place. Maybe go a little bit deeper. What has been rolled out? What is remaining? Because what about the sales enablement side? Because it seems like the conversations for the sales reps also changes a bit, looking at more use case-driven versus committed contracts. So maybe talk about what is rolled out and what is remaining.

我想詢問您有關上市變化的問題。我想我聽說你已經做出了一些初步的改變。也許再深入一點。推出了什麼？還剩下什麼？因為銷售支援方面呢？因為銷售代表的對話似乎也發生了一些變化，更專注於用例驅動與承諾合約。所以也許可以談談已經推出的內容和剩餘的內容。

Yes. Yes. The kind of set of things that need to change at a high level, the compensation structure changes, what we track in sales force changes. We're now tracking the individual application workloads, not just the kind of high-level contracts progressing. That's intentional. That lets us really explicitly drive back. And then yes, there is a bit of a different motion and enablement around that.

是的。是的。一系列需要在高層進行改變的事情，薪酬結構的變化，我們在銷售隊伍中追蹤的內容的變化。我們現在正在追蹤單一應用程式工作負載，而不僅僅是正在進行的高級合約類型。這是故意的。這讓我們可以真正明確地返回。是的，圍繞這一點有一些不同的動議和支持。

And so what have we done? We've rolled out these new systems. We've changed the compensation. We're kind of managing and driving this. We've run through the enablement. That was obviously a big focus in our sales kickoff. So does that mean everything is done, mission accomplished? Well, no. Now we have to go drive it successfully. Like any new thing, you got to put all the parts together and turn it into a car and drive the car. So that last bit is kind of the key focus this quarter and next quarter is really making sure we nail that, that all of this works well in every territory for every rep everywhere in the world. That's obviously our focus.

那我們做了什麼？我們已經推出了這些新系統。我們改變了補償。我們正在管理和推動這一點。我們已經完成了啟用。這顯然是我們銷售啟動中的一個重點。那麼這是否意味著一切都完成了，任務完成了？嗯，不。現在我們必須成功駕駛它。就像任何新事物一樣，你必須將所有部件組裝在一起，將其變成一輛汽車並駕駛汽車。因此，最後一點是本季和下季的關鍵焦點，真正確保我們能夠解決這個問題，確保所有這一切在每個領域都能很好地為世界各地的每個代表服務。這顯然是我們的重點。

But in terms of like, well, what -- how do we feel relative to last quarter as we talked about this? Well, obviously, a number of things have derisked, right, like we rolled out this compensation program. I think it was successful. People understood. They felt they could make money on this plan. We got the systems and tools built to run the business. So a lot of progress has been made, but there's obviously still a lot of work to do.

但就比如，嗯，當我們談論這個問題時，我們對上個季度的感受如何？嗯，顯然，很多事情已經消除了風險，對吧，就像我們推出了這個補償計劃一樣。我認為這是成功的。人們明白了。他們覺得他們可以透過這個計劃賺錢。我們建構了用於經營業務的系統和工具。已經取得了很多進展，但顯然還有很多工作要做。

Yes, understood. That's helpful. And want -- Jay, I want to ask you about Flink. Is it possible to understand what portion of your customers -- customer base today already uses kind of an open-source version of Flink or maybe using Kafka streams on AWS to query...

是的，明白了。這很有幫助。我想——Jay，我想問你有關 Flink 的問題。是否有可能了解您的客戶的哪一部分——當今的客戶群已經使用某種開源版本的 Flink 或可能使用 AWS 上的 Kafka 流來查詢...

Yes. Yes. So it's a pretty high overlap. Like any open-source stat, it's a little -- there's -- it's an inexact science, tracking the usage of open source things. But yes, we had given some adoption stats for Flink. It's smaller than Kafka is but on very similar growth trajectory. I think it was a few earnings calls ago when you kind of plotted out the relative adoption of those 2 projects. So yes, it's certainly double-digit percentages of the customer base already uses open source play.

是的。是的。所以這是一個相當高的重疊。就像任何開源統計數據一樣，它是一門不精確的科學，追蹤開源事物的使用。但是，是的，我們已經給出了 Flink 的一些採用統計數據。它比 Kafka 小，但成長軌跡非常相似。我認為是在幾次財報電話會議之前，您策劃了這兩個項目的相對採用情況。所以，是的，兩位數比例的客戶群已經在使用開源遊戲。

Thanks, Pinjal. We'll take our next question from Gregg Moskowitz with Mizuho, followed by TD Cowen. Gregg?

謝謝，平賈爾。我們將接受 Mizuho 的 Gregg Moskowitz 的下一個問題，隨後是 TD Cowen。格雷格？

Your net new logos were lighter than the typical Q4. Did the self-service activity really slow down? And did the upcoming go-to-market transition to consumption factor into that? Also, it sounded like you had a nice bounce back in net new logos in January, and so any additional color there would be helpful as well.

你們的淨新標誌比典型的第四季更輕。自助服務活動真的放緩了嗎？即將到來的市場轉型是否會影響消費因素？另外，聽起來你在一月份的淨新標誌中得到了很好的反彈，所以任何額外的顏色也會有幫助。

Yes. I would say this one is -- that's an accurate observation. I would say this one is mostly mechanical, and this is one where the consumption changes did have an impact in Q4.

是的。我想說這是──這是一個準確的觀察。我想說這主要是機械性的，這是消費變化確實對第四季產生影響的一個。

So one of the changes we made, in Q4, we incented just kind of the bookings for Cloud or Platform. Starting in Q1, starting in January, we're directly incenting both land, new logos and expand the kind of consumption off of it. So yes, if you were going to close a very small new customer in late December, you might want to do it January because you get paid on it. And so yes, we did see a bit of a shift there.

因此，我們在第四季度做出的改變之一是，我們只刺激了雲端或平台的預訂。從第一季開始，從一月開始，我們直接激勵土地、新標識，並擴大由此產生的消費。所以，是的，如果您打算在 12 月下旬關閉一個非常小的新客戶，您可能需要在 1 月這樣做，因為您可以從中獲得報酬。是的，我們確實看到了一些轉變。

We're off to a good start, as we noted in the script, in January. And then if we think about the trajectory over the rest of the year, we do think there's an opportunity to really drive higher velocity land of customers, and that's part of our goal with this consumption transformation. So that's one of the areas we're going to be watching, to try and see some like significant growth there over the course of the year.

正如我們在劇本中指出的，一月份我們有了一個好的開始。然後，如果我們考慮今年剩餘時間的發展軌跡，我們確實認為有機會真正推動更高的客戶成長速度，這是我們消費轉型目標的一部分。因此，這是我們要關注的領域之一，試圖在這一年中看到一些類似的顯著成長。

Very helpful. And Rohan, so your subscription gross margins continue to impress. And in fact, your total gross margins are now well above your prior or current, I should say, long-term guidance. Is there anything sort of onetime in nature that's contained within gross margins today? Or are you unlocking more efficiencies than you maybe had expected previously?

很有幫助。還有 Rohan，因此您的訂閱毛利率繼續令人印象深刻。事實上，你的總毛利率現在遠遠高於你之前或當前的，我應該說，長期指導。今天的毛利率是否包含某種一次性的東西？或者您的效率是否比您之前預期的要高？

No, Gregg, that's the right observation. When you look at our gross margins, we had record gross margins for total gross margins as well as subscription gross margins. And when you just kind of double-click into it, the dynamics are as Cloud mix over time increases, that's a headwind to gross margins. And generally the same time, our engineering and product teams have done an incredible job in making sure they're improving the efficiency with which we done delivering our products to the customers. And that's one driver. As we look ahead, I think there's an opportunity for us to drive a higher multi-tenant mix in our product, which is obviously going to be a tailwind to gross margins.

不，格雷格，這是正確的觀察。當你看看我們的毛利率時，我們的總毛利率和訂閱毛利率都創下了紀錄。當你雙擊它時，隨著時間的推移，雲端混合的動態就會增加，這對毛利率來說是一個阻力。一般來說，我們的工程和產品團隊在確保提高我們向客戶交付產品的效率方面做了令人難以置信的工作。那是一名司機。展望未來，我認為我們有機會在我們的產品中推動更高的多租戶組合，這顯然將成為毛利率的推動力。

So looking forward, we expect to be in the, I would say, zip code of 75-plus percent, which is our long-term target gross margins. With some puts and takes, the tailwind is going to be more efficiencies coming through multi-tenant, and the headwind is going to be as Cloud becomes a bigger piece of the mix. So we expect them to offset and be in this range that you see right now.

因此，展望未來，我們預計郵遞區號的毛利率將達到 75% 以上，這是我們的長期目標毛利率。透過一些投入和採取，順風將是透過多租戶提高效率，而逆風將是雲端成為混合中更大的一部分。因此，我們預計它們會抵消並處於您現在看到的範圍內。

Thanks, Gregg. Our final question today will come from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. Derrick?

謝謝，格雷格。我們今天的最後一個問題將由 Derrick Wood 和 TD Cowen 提出。德里克？

Great. First, for you, Jay. The -- I think you guys, in the past, have talked about Confluent Cloud 60% cheaper than self-managed open source, and we know there's over 100,000 companies using open-source Kafka. You've taken this environment where there's more focus on spend efficiency. Maybe you could see some kind of rising interest on the Cloud side. So I guess as you move into 2024, are there any things you'd flag that you're doing to help drive more open-source conversion?

偉大的。首先，為了你，傑伊。我想你們過去曾談論過 Confluence Cloud 比自我管理的開源便宜 60%，而且我們知道有超過 100,000 家公司使用開源 Kafka。您所處的環境更加重視支出效率。也許您會看到人們對雲端方面的興趣日益濃厚。因此，我想當您進入 2024 年時，您是否會標記自己正在做哪些事情來幫助推動更多開源轉換？

Yes. Yes. It's a good observation. Yes, there's 2 key things. So I think the observation is right. There's like excellent TCO. The 2 things that we think are critical to get right to raise the volume of conversions, one is this consumption transformation. One of the things that happened in '23 was I do think a lot of organizations tamped down on kind of bottom-up purchasing. So the interplay between product-led growth and the sales team suddenly becomes very, very important. And that's a key aspect of how we've kind of designed our plan for this year and how we've designed the consumption model for Confluent, is to make sure that we have the right setup to land customers in our product, convert them over and kind of take them all the way with a little bit of help from the field team. And I think that's actually incredibly important in the infrastructure space, if you want to be able to land volumes of customers. So that's the first change.

是的。是的。這是一個很好的觀察。是的，有兩件關鍵的事情。所以我認為這個觀察是正確的。整體擁有成本非常出色。我們認為，有兩件事對於提高轉換量至關重要，一是消費轉型。 23 年發生的事情之一是，我確實認為許多組織都抑制了自下而上的採購。因此，產品主導的成長和銷售團隊之間的互動突然變得非常非常重要。這是我們如何設計今年計劃以及如何設計 Confluence 消費模型的關鍵方面，就是確保我們有正確的設置來吸引客戶使用我們的產品，並將他們轉化為在現場團隊的一點幫助下，他們一路走來。我認為，如果您希望能夠吸引大量客戶，那麼這在基礎設施領域實際上非常重要。這是第一個改變。

The second change on our side is reducing the kind of friction of adoption. So that's technological. Just how easy is it to get from here to there? Like there may be some savings. But if I'm also reducing my team, do I have -- do people actually make the change or make the switch? Part of that is just doing everything we can to make our product to drop in replacement, making it as easy to switch, making that kind of starting cost as appealing as possible. All of that matters a lot to make the -- not just the payoff, but the payoff time really appealing.

我們這邊的第二個變化是減少採用方面的摩擦。所以這就是技術。從這裡到那裡有多容易？好像可以省一些。但如果我也減少了我的團隊，人們是否真的做出了改變或做出了轉變？其中一部分就是盡一切努力使我們的產品能夠更換，使其變得更容易轉換，使這種起始成本盡可能有吸引力。所有這些都非常重要，不僅是回報，而且回報時間真的很有吸引力。

Great. And Rohan, the -- this was the biggest Cloud revenue upside quarter you've delivered in nearly 2 years. Can you just parse out the puts and takes? Did you see notable improvements in consumption in the quarter? Or were you overly conservative in your guide perhaps with respect to the 2 large customers you flagged last quarter in terms of headwinds? Can you just double-click on the outperformance in the quarter and what that's telling you around consumption trends heading into '24?

偉大的。 Rohan，這是近兩年來雲端營收成長最大的一個季度。你能解析出puts和takes嗎？您是否看到本季消費有顯著改善？或者，對於上季度您在不利因素方面標記的兩個大客戶，您的指南是否過於保守？您能否雙擊本季的優異表現以及這對您進入 24 世紀的消費趨勢有何啟示？

Yes. I mean, of course, we were pleased with the results from Confluent Cloud. We grew 46% and the momentum with which we are exiting Q4 is also showing up in our Q1 guide, which is north of 40% as well, Derrick, right?

是的。我的意思是，當然，我們對 Confluence Cloud 的結果感到滿意。我們成長了 46%，我們退出第四季的勢頭也體現在我們的第一季指南中，該成長也超過了 40%，Derrick，對吧？

So when you look at puts and takes, the first piece I spoke about during -- in the prepared remarks was just the green shoots around digital native segment. That's positive as we head into next year. And outside of that, when you look at our broader customer base, in general, we felt the consumption came in line with our expectations and nothing unusual. And obviously, that's probably the drivers of consumption. And as we enter next year, we were optimistic with respect to -- as you can see in our Q1 guide.

因此，當你看到看跌期權時，我在準備好的發言中談到的第一件事就是圍繞數位原生市場的萌芽。當我們進入明年時，這是積極的。除此之外，當你看看我們更廣泛的客戶群時，總的來說，我們覺得消費符合我們的預期，沒有什麼異常。顯然，這可能是消費的驅動力。當我們進入明年時，我們對此感到樂觀——正如您在我們的第一季指南中看到的那樣。

Thanks, Derrick. That concludes today's earnings call. Thanks again for joining us, everyone. We appreciate it. Take care.

謝謝，德里克。今天的財報電話會議到此結束。再次感謝大家加入我們。我們很感激。小心。