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Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Domo First Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.
I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Peter Lowry, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.
Peter Lowry
Good afternoon and welcome. I've enjoyed getting to meet most of you and looking forward to meeting the rest of you. On the call today, we have Josh James, our Founder and CEO; Bruce Felt, our CFO; Julie Kehoe, our Chief Communications Officer. Julie will lead off with our safe harbor statement and then on to the call. Julie?
Julie Kehoe - VP of Communications
Thanks, Pete. Our press release was issued after the market closed and is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website where this call is also being webcast. Statements made on this call may include forward-looking statements related to our business under federal securities laws. These statements are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to documents we filed with the SEC, in particular, today's press release and our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K. These documents contain and identify important risk factors and other information that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking statements.
In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Domo's performance. Other than revenue, unless otherwise stated, we will be discussing our results of operations on a non-GAAP basis. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. Please refer to the tables in our earnings press release for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure.
And with that, let me hand it over to Josh.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Thank you, Julie. Hello, everyone. It's good to be back with you again for our Q1 fiscal year 2020 earnings call. Before I jump in, I first want to congratulate the team over at Looker. Their acquisition underscores the value of helping businesses use their data as well as the challenge and expense that even the world's largest technology vendors face in delivering just a few of the capabilities in our platform.
For today's call, I'll focus on 3 things: first, our strong business execution; second, customers leveraging the power of our platform for our enterprise apps and additional advanced data offerings; and then third, the strength of our ecosystem and the defensible business it creates.
On my first point, our strong execution has helped us sustain growth and achieve operating leverage. In Q1, we saw 28% year-over-year growth in revenue and 22% year-over-year growth in billings. And at the same time, we realized a 19% year-over-year decrease in sales and marketing expense and a 15% decrease in overall operating expenses. We continue to make clear and significant progress towards making our commitment to being cash flow positive without having to raise any additional capital a reality. We focused on the power of the platform when growing and selling into our enterprise base. Our platform message is resonating in the market. We see this in the customer conversations we are having and it is evidenced by a pipeline that is larger than ever with more 7-figure opportunities than we've ever seen.
In the past quarter, we began piloting a new pricing model that focuses on the value of the components of the platform and is designed so that per-seat pricing doesn't hamper our customers' ability to expand Domo across their organization. This allows them to derive more value from increased adoption while paying initially for the platform and incrementally for additional service levels and usage as they realize that value instead of just receipts. To date, this new pricing approach is showing a positive impact on the initial size and scope of deals in the pipeline and on customers' ability to more easily imagine what's possible as their data is easily brought together at scale, securely governed and rapidly leveraged across the business.
Concurrently, we're seeing customers engage in deals that are larger in scope, and we're experiencing rapid expansions and deployments. As an example, a customer we signed in Q4 expanded its rollout from 1,000 people to more than 5,500 in Q1 and is currently on its way to deploying 15,000-plus people.
During the quarter, we added new Lighthouse enterprise customers, including pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline; the global Japanese consumer products manufacturer, Bandai Spirits; and an international oil and gas business. We now have 458 enterprise customers, a year-over-year increase of 19%. Enterprise revenue grew 33% year-over-year, an acceleration from Q4.
Our corporate business also remains a bright spot. We saw strong new logo growth, a modest improvement in sales rep productivity, a 30% year-over-year increase in corporate average new deal size, and as our product becomes more and more automated, the highest mix of recurring revenue in 2 years. Again, on execution, I'm encouraged by the combination of solid results and the robust and growing pipeline of large deals, all while still reducing expenses for which I'm quite impressed with my team.
On my second point, our customers are leveraging the power of the platform for our enterprise apps and additional advanced data offerings. Domo can do things that no other technology company can do today. Domo's enterprise apps include a retail performance suite that helps retailers compete more effectively through better store performance and inventory management. Other enterprise apps also include suites of apps for media companies and for marketers to help drive better marketing and advertising ROI as well as a new suite of IoT apps to help manufacturers create new value from IoT data. It's easy for us to introduce additional apps across the business, all of which are additive to us selling the platform.
I realize that everyone I know and probably everyone you know, knows someone who has an idea for a great app, but no one knows how to get them built. They're time-consuming. They're expensive. The good news here is that for anyone who's a customer of ours who has an idea for an app to improve their business, well, they can easily use one of our enterprise apps and customize it to their needs. One customer, for example, purchased our sales team management app to improve retention and recruiting of its sales team for more than 5,000 people in their organization. This enterprise app provides transparency regarding sales and goal performance and also associated compensation. Other customers use our retail management app to get real-time sales and performance metrics across thousands of floor associates regarding what is happening now, not yesterday, and allows them to also compete with other branches in their organization. Enterprise apps of the future are how our customers will fully realize the value of their data and fully realize the value of a digitally transformed business.
When we talk about enterprise apps, we're talking about fully functioning, feature-rich business apps to help solve some of our customers' most challenging business issues. They aren't just little workflows where someone stitched together 2 data points and called it an app. These apps have robust enterprise-grade security with fine-grained data access controls. They have multiple distribution options, including access with any browser and being natively deployed to iOS, Android and the mobile web. They also have an interactive and responsive UI, taking advantage of Domo's industry-leading end-user experience as well as sophisticated mapping capabilities, integrations with thousands of data sources and importantly, write-back capability to complete the round-trip data exchange.
The excitement around our apps is palpable. At Domopalooza, our annual customer event in March, after a main stage customer session where several customers presented their apps in a session called App Attack, many of our other customers approached us who are upset that they didn't get a chance to show off their enterprise apps that they use to run their businesses. One of those customers was NBC, whom we brought on stage the next morning to demonstrate the programming performance app that 400 to 500 people, everyone from executives, producers to marketers, use on their phones to interact with hundreds of millions of rows of data so they can easily understand how their programming is performing against the competition. Also during the App Attack, UPMC, a 40-hospital health care system, demonstrated how it is using our Digital 360 app, part of the Domo Marketing Suite, to drive better marketing ROI across the entire organization. And TELUS, the Canadian telecom company, shared how they're using a store performance app to get real-time data into the hands of their store managers to drive better store performance across their retail business.
Now to my third point. The strength of our ecosystem is helping us build a defensible business. In combination with the power and scale of the Domo platform, our ecosystem partners allow us to offer new products, features and integrations that serve the unique needs and environments across every area of every business.
In Q1, in conjunction with our growing portfolio of technology partners such as AWS, Google, Azure, LinkedIn, Box, Coupa, Okta and Zendesk, we announced the Domo integration cloud. The Domo integration cloud, our iPaaS solution, includes more than 1,000 prebuilt connectors and federated query capabilities to connect to and leverage data no matter where it lives, on-prem or in the cloud.
To demonstrate how expansive our connector partnerships are, for example, we connect to 17 separate AWS services such as Red Shift, RDS, Aurora, Athena and S3; and 19 Google services such as BigQuery, Google Analytics, AdSense and Google Cloud Storage, many of which include write back and which we believe are industry leading.
Integration cloud is designed for customers who need a solution with more than 1,000 prebuilt connectors to quickly and securely bring together their many disparate data sources to deliver business value. Astellas Pharma US, a $3 billion-plus revenue business, is one example of a new integration cloud customer.
One of the most exciting ecosystem announcements in the last quarter was the Domo business automation engine, part of Mr. Roboto and the first of its kind orchestration layer that works across all of an organization's data systems and people. It leverages machine learning and advanced the learning capabilities to help organizations coordinate intelligent event-based workflows and shorten the time from insights to action. In plain English, this means Domo goes beyond delivering insights to truly becoming an operating system for your company by intelligently automating key actions across multiple systems of record.
Another instance that demonstrates the strength of partnerships in our ecosystem is our new data science and machine learning offerings, which we also announced in Q1 and which have been a big hit with customers as they look to rapidly deliver advanced insights into the business. Through key integrations with Amazon SageMaker as well as Jupyter, we are helping data scientists spend more time doing the work they were trained to do by eliminating much of the time-consuming, repetitive work of data preparation and transfer. A global CPG leader leveraged our data science offering to dramatically improve store forecasting, realizing millions of dollars of value after only 2 weeks of work.
And this also extends beyond the data scientists to help people who aren't technical experts leverage data science to predict outcomes. At Domopalooza, for instance, TripAdvisor's head of people analytics, demonstrated how he's using the programming language R within the Domo platform to better understand and predict employee behavior so they can reduce employee turnover.
Furthering our ecosystem footprint with Domo's IoT cloud, we leverage relationships with AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender, Azure Particle, Raspberry Pi, Kafka and Mondo DB to name a few. Domo IoT cloud features more than 30 unique IoT connectors and several new IoT apps to help customers get more value from machine-generated data. A manufacturer of robotic consumer products, SharkNinja, for example, is using our IoT capability to understand the behavior of their products once they're purchased, which is something they just couldn't do before. And this capability helps them produce better products to improve their customers' experience.
Building on our IoT partnerships, I'm excited to announce today the Zendesk Customer Success IoT app, a new app developed with Zendesk. It takes machine data into our platform and then through Domo's alerting and workflow engines. When certain conditions are met, it automatically initiates a Zendesk support ticket without any human involvement. This is just one of several of new apps you'll see us develop with partners that leverage the power of the Domo platform to create new value for customers. We're in the very early innings of customers adopting the platform for purposes of applying it to very specific high-value use cases, and we believe we'll see significant proliferation of applications on our platform as they become more well-known to the marketplace.
One strength of our ecosystem is our growing body of users and available training. This last quarter, we announced our first official certification program, which includes 5 new product certifications to help people level up their data skills and demonstrate proficiency in Domo. We'll continue to make investments in our vast and growing ecosystem to better support our customers and gain further leverage. You can expect more related announcements in the future.
In closing, I'm proud of our team for the innovation they keep delivering that keeps us ahead of the pack as recognized by our customers and by third parties. In the most recent Dresner Advisory Services report on self-service BI, Domo ranked #1 out of 23 vendors, scoring high points for our collaboration, governance, storytelling and integration features, which continue to grow in importance as organizations realize they need the combination of tools that only Domo provides.
Additionally, in Dresner's separate flagship Wisdom of the Crowds research, Domo received a perfect recommendation score from customers for the third year in a row. In the Gartner report published in May, customers ranked their BI and analytics vendors. Domo received the #1 rating of all vendors for business benefits achieved as well as for ease of migration, which signifies how easy it is to implement the products that we roll out. I'm continually astounded and impressed how the biggest companies in the world are using our platform and our enterprise apps to transform their businesses.
With that, I'll now turn it over to the Bruce. Bruce?
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
Thank you, Josh. I'll begin with our first quarter performance followed by our second quarter and fiscal 2020 full year guidance. We had another solid quarter, and as Josh mentioned, we're executing well against our plan. Billings grew 22% to $41.1 million. Our billings growth was supported by our dollar-based net revenue retention rate that continues to be greater than 100% and was slightly higher than last quarter. We also continue to see more customers entering into multiyear contracts with 45% of our customers now under multiyear contracts at the end of Q1 compared to 35% at the end of Q1 last year. This drove our remaining performance obligations, or RPO, to grow 34% compared to the same quarter last year.
Q1 revenue was $40.8 million, a year-over-year increase of 28%. Subscription revenue grew 29%, represented 84% of total revenue. Year-over-year subscription revenue growth was driven primarily by new customers, and we now have over 1,800 customers. International revenue represented 26% of total revenue, up from 23% in Q4.
Our subscription gross margin was 77%, up 270 basis points from 74.3% in Q4 and up over 7 full percentage points from 69.8% in Q1 of last year. We plan to get additional leverage out of our subscription cost of revenue as we continue to effectively manage our data center operations through finding efficiencies and better-utilizing certain services.
Including our services business, our total gross margin was 69.1%, a 60 basis point improvement compared to 68.5% in the fourth quarter of last year and a 520 basis point improvement compared to 63.9% gross margin in the first quarter of last year.
In addition to our revenue growth and improving gross margin, I was pleased that we were able to deliver these results once again with a further decrease in operating expenses. In Q1, we were able to decrease operating expenses by 15% from last year even though revenue increased by 28% year-over-year. The decreases came from lower marketing and personnel cost. The net effect of increased revenue while effectively managing costs, allowed us to improve our operating margin by 73 full percentage points from the same quarter last year.
Our net loss was $29.2 million and our net loss per share was $1.08. This is based on 27 million weighted average shares outstanding, basic and diluted.
Turning now to our balance sheet. As of April 30, we had cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $154 million, more than adequate amount to get us to cash flow positive. Our adjusted cash used in operations was $22.2 million, an improvement of $5.5 million over the prior quarter and a 40% reduction compared to Q1 of the prior year. Adjusted cash used in operations excludes the effect of $4.5 million of proceeds from shares purchased in Q1 under our employee stock purchase plan, which had no effect on our cash balance, but is presented as a gross-up in 2 different sections of the cash flow statement.
Now to discuss what we expect in Q2. We expect Q2 billings of about $42 million. We expect our Q2 operating expenses to decline as expenses related to new sales hires are more than offset by the Q1 cost of our annual user conference.
For the year, we expect our operating expenses to be down slightly from fiscal '19. We expect to continue to execute on our plan to decrease cash burn sequentially each quarter fiscal year '20 and expect Q2 adjusted cash used in operations of about $20.5 million and $74.5 million for the year.
Now to our formal guidance. For the second quarter of 2020, we expect GAAP revenue to be in the range of $41 million to $42 million. We expect non-GAAP net loss per share, basic and diluted, of $0.98 to $1.02. This assumes 27.5 million weighted average shares outstanding, basic and diluted.
For the full year of fiscal '20, we expect GAAP revenue to be in the range of $173 million to $174 million, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 22%. We expect non-GAAP net loss per share, basic and diluted, of $3.79 to $3.87. This assumes 27.6 million weighted average shares outstanding, basic and diluted.
In closing, I'd like to reiterate, we're pleased with the progress we've made in Q1 and executing against our fiscal year '20 objectives as we balance improvements in our cash profile and our expense profile with investments in growth opportunities.
With that, we'll open up the call for questions. Operator?
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley.
Joshua Phillip Baer - Research Associate
This is Josh Baer for Sanjit. Congrats on 73% op margin improvement year-over-year. Over the last 3 quarters, we've seen a bit more upside, I think, than more in line -- top line this quarter. So I'm just wondering have you seen any changes this quarter in the competitive environment or customer purchasing behavior or demand or anything else?
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
It's Bruce. No, we -- I mean most of the data points that we see with engagement with our customer base further reinforce the fact that this is extremely differentiated product compared to anything out there primarily because it's a complete platform designed for business users to get access to the data they need. And then we're even -- in addition to that, we're finding that the customers are embracing the fact that they can do -- they can build upon the platform and use different components of the platform in ways that really enhance the operations of their business. So I think that we are in an extremely good competitive position. Just to your point on over performance, or just Q1 -- sorry, just tend to be this seasonally low quarter, and we just did not see the outperformance that we've seen in the past. But all the operations, all the metrics still point in the right direction. And again, we're mostly excited about the fact that the customer engagement that we find with our product and platform particularly as evidenced that our large user event -- user conference that we're seeing such positive kind of embracing of it in such robust use cases that we're pretty optimistic about how this is going to play out through the future quarters.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. And the only thing I'd add to that is, if you look at -- it's true Q1 is typically seasonally low. A lot of the big deals that come through are going to come through in Q4. And as we looked at things, we didn't have any of the big deals come through in Q1. But like we mentioned in the script, we have more 7-figure deals in our pipeline than we've ever had. Quite a meaningful amount. And it just feels like there's a lot of really interesting conversations that we're having with brand-new customers, with customers that signed within the last year and then also with customers who have been with us for 3 years. We're having very big strategic conversations with them where they recognize the value of all the things that we're doing, maybe not just some components or just one piece like Looker does, for instance, but really leveraging all of the things that we do and having big strategic conversations with us. So hopefully, we'll see some of that outperformance like we did in previous quarters. But we knew Q1 is always tight just because we have a big cleanout in Q4.
Joshua Phillip Baer - Research Associate
Excellent. Are you still looking to increase sales capacity by 30% this year? Are you seeing the productivity improvements to justify that? And then with that in mind, can you just comment on the potential to accelerate new ACV in FY '20?
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
To answer initially, yes, definitely still pushing forward and on track in terms of hiring the reps and getting the reps in place. Still really encouraged by the underlying metrics like productivity, pipeline coverage. In the different regions, like -- also, like we mentioned, not only in the outer regions, but also just in corporate here, retention rates are starting to look similar to enterprise retention rates. Productivity is looking really positive, which is why about a quarter ago, we said we need to start hiring more reps in all the regions. So we're very encouraged by that, and now it's a matter of getting that capacity in place. And then before I turn it to Bruce to kind of answer this question as well, the other thing that I was really encouraged by in Q1 even though we didn't outperform on some of -- on the billings metrics, we certainly did on the cash flow metric. And that's something that's just important to us right now, is really getting this by some time, I guess, I can't give any kind of time line but sometime in the near future, getting this to where we are close to breakeven and then growing as rapidly as we can from that point forward.
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
And I'll just add, we did make the comment last quarter that we believe for this fiscal year, we should see new ACV accelerate. And we are on track to kind of deliver on that expectation that we put out there last quarter.
Operator
And our next question comes from Brad Zelnick with Crédit Suisse.
Unidentified Analyst
This is (inaudible) for Brad. Congrats on a strong quarter. I just had a very quick question. I wanted to see what is driving the increases in corporate deal sizes. Is it more driven by bigger initial deployments? Or do you -- or is just a sign of more traction that you're getting upmarket?
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. I think we have very strategic relationships with these customers, so even if it's a $100 million business, $500 million business, $1 billion business in that corporate area, and like I said many times before, to me, half that business feels like enterprise business. And the contracts that we're seeing, the new pricing that we talked about, their ability to go in -- and they've always been a leader at going in, trying to sell the value of the platform. But really, switching hard to that definitely helps. And they're also taking cues from some other successes we've had where they'll go and they'll sell in addition to selling the platform and selling minimums and getting longer contracts, also selling some multiyear services to go along with that to help them get the most out of the product in the platform.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. Also as a follow-up, it seems as if services growth rate is now decelerating. So can you actually give us a little bit of idea if we should expect that to continue? And why that? And why that deceleration is not actually going to be a leading indicator for subscription?
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
Yes. I didn't hear the first part of it. But we put out what we think we will do this year, and underlying it is accelerating ACV. And you don't necessarily see that right away in billings or revenue. So there's no underlying, I guess, factor that would cause us not to be able to kind of deliver again on accelerating ACV.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
And the biggest piece that we indicated to everybody to show that -- or to demonstrate that we believe it's going to accelerate is the commitment to hiring the reps and adding the heads because we're seeing the productivity that we want. But you can't just turn it on overnight. You got to get the reps. You got to get them ramped up, and then they got to close the ACV. And then you have to wait for the ACV to hit your GAAP accounting revenue so -- and billings in some cases, depending if it's annual or not. So yes, we're definitely optimistic about the future.
Operator
And our next question comes from Jennifer Lowe with UBS.
Jennifer Alexandra Swanson Lowe - Analyst
I wanted to just talk about how we should think about the big deals going forward. Can you just give us a little color on how the sales cycles for those types of deals look relative to some of the smaller deals you've done traditionally? And maybe specifically for Bruce, how do you sort of forecast close rates and linearity around those? Because -- is there sort of an extra degree of conservatism there? How do you think about forecasting when some of these big deals can maybe swing things around a bit?
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. So the big deals in most cases are places where we've had a relationship, they had some positive experiences with us and now they want to roll it out across their organization. In addition to buying more capacity whether it's data capacity or seat capacity in the old pricing model or adding additional applications, it's usually a combination of the 2. And it's been really fun to sit down with the CIOs. As we mentioned, we started really going out and talking to more CIOs because the users of Tableau and Qlik and Looker, that's not our target audience in terms of who we sell to -- whom we sell to, but they can be blockers. And so we've tried to make a concerted effort to make sure we get out there and talk to the CIO or the CIO's lieutenants. And as we've had those conversations, it's been really fun because like I mentioned in my comments, you really do -- everybody really does know someone that has a great idea for an app. I probably get -- it seems like I get 2 or 3 text messages a week from somebody that has a great idea for an app. But they're hard to get made, all these things people are having great ideas for apps in their business, but no one has a clue how to do anything with it. And when you get in there and talk to the CIOs, there's been multiple times where you start showing them the power of the platform, the apps that can be built on top of that, configure all these enterprise apps that we have. And they start telling you about 3 projects, 4 projects, 5 projects that they have and they had no idea how to sort through those projects without them being just custom development initiatives. And now they're like, oh, we can do all that with Domo. So it really is a differentiated solution that we have. And these big customers, it's just looking at what we've done smaller and doubling it or 10x-ing it. And as we get bigger and bigger -- into the bigger and bigger enterprise customers, we're seeing people that we're talking to and they're like we're thinking about putting 50,000 employees on this or 75,000 employees on this. And those are the kind of deals that we're looking at in the pipeline.
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
And then in terms of forecast ability, one element of business that we really like is the fact that the corporate business -- and again, that focuses on company size is less than $1 billion in revenue is doing very well. Productivity remains extremely high on a per rep basis, deal sizes are high and they are growing. And so that's a foundation actually and that has very good visibility from the fact that very fast sales cycles. So we like that as kind of maybe a floor of growth that we have in the business. When it comes to the enterprise business, and again, part of what we see in Q1 and the reason why it's seasonally low is the enterprise business tends to be a back end of the year business generally. And on top of that, that's a big focus of our sales hiring. On top of that, the deal sizes are getting very large or larger than we've seen ever in the history of the company, which adds complexity to it. And on top of that, we're talking significantly to the CIO now compared to before. That adds complexity in general. But we do watch these deals extremely carefully and get updates constantly on the progress, and that does give us the ability to forecast. And we finally have enough volume where you can never predict every single deal how it's going to play out, but you can as a whole get a good feel for where you believe we will land in terms of new business. And so that, the raw volume and the fact that we have the highest pipeline ever in the company is extremely -- is conducive to giving us confidence to forecast what we think will happen in Q2 and optimism for what we think we will see in Q3 and Q4.
Jennifer Alexandra Swanson Lowe - Analyst
Great. And maybe just one more for you, Bruce. I think in your prepared remarks, as you were talking about the growth in subscription revenue, I think you made a comment along the lines of the big lever on growth there was new business. And just -- and you also mentioned over 100% in that retention, so that's -- there's a sort of a gray space in there of -- that's upsell. So I guess the question I had was putting it in context when you talked about new business as being the driver of this subscription revenue growth, what are you seeing on the upsell side? Was it a little bit less? Or are you lumping that into that new business categorization?
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
Well, the new business from new customers was the highest growth component between that and selling into the install base. We just had a lot of that in Q4, and I think that's just -- did have some impact on Q1. But a lot of the larger deals that are in the pipeline are upsell deals because they're much more strategic transactions with very large current customers. So that could easily change and will most likely change toward the back end of the year as those relationships come to closure and we complete the transactions with them.
Operator
And our next question comes from Derrick Wood with Cowen and Company.
James Derrick Wood - MD & Senior Software Analyst
Josh, I wanted to dive into the pricing changes a little bit more, had a couple of questions on that. First, could you give us a sense for how you're rolling it out? Is it with new customers? Is it with renewals? And then, what's the idea in terms of how it helps the cadence of your deal flow? Do you think it will help create less friction at the front end of the funnel? Or you think it helps kind of bigger initial engagements out of the gate? Just curious what you think there.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. So it definitely changes the conversation in a few different ways. I think with renewals, it certainly helps because you don't want to have a customer ask you, do you get the same value if we -- and the same functionality, if we drop our seats in half? That's a bad conversation to have. We don't want to have that conversation with customers, and we had 1 or 2 of them and those conversations freak you out. So we recovered from all those and said we've got to roll out this new pricing approach. And that was a few quarters ago when we got that indicator. And so as we started looking at it, also our sales managers were out there saying, hey, this is an opportunity for us to build more value in that initial contract. And it sets us up to get even more sales. And like I said in my prepared remarks, instead of putting this gating item in for another customer that says, you're not going to really find value until you get more users on here, but we're going to put a big gating item, prevent you from rapidly expanding your users and then another byproduct of the old pricing model was, they would look at what we charged for the first couple hundred users and say we've got 10,000 employees and think to themselves, this is not going to [foot]. And that wasn't a way that we wanted them to think about it as well. So charging them based on the platform, having data charges associated with it, being able to charge for the apps that sit on top of it, being able to charge for data science seems to resonate with them much better. And because IT is generally involved in the -- with this as the contracts increase, they're used to paying for data. They don't have a problem paying for data. But the seat charges is definitely difficult, especially with some of these bigger customers. So that's been helpful and it's also helpful in constructing these new relationships instead of them trying to figure out exactly how many people they're going to have on it to figure out what price they should pay, they want it for a use case and they've already assigned value to that use case. And so introducing seats in many cases was confusing the conversation. So it seems to be better all around. We have our reps out there talking about it, using those pricing models in front of all of our new deals. We've also got a strategy for renewals to bring the renewal into this -- back into this contract by offering them incentives, but setting up the contract in the right way to go forward. And then it also really helps us, in the enterprises, expand to multi-million-dollar deals much earlier than we would have otherwise, instead of hoping and praying that more departments are going to come on. As soon as they're finding that value, they have a lot of ideas for more things that they want to do, but not necessarily going out recruiting all the users. Now all they have to do is see the value initially it, have the ideas for the future and then be willing to pay for that, implement it, knowing the users are going to be able to have access to it.
James Derrick Wood - MD & Senior Software Analyst
Makes sense. That's great. And my second question is just around the Google Looker acquisition. It'll be nice to get your thoughts on how you guys fit in the market with Looker and what you think this means for the space. And maybe kind of remind us on your AWS partnership and what you've been doing to strengthen that.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. So I think this is a case where one of the things that's challenging is getting data into places like BigQuery or AWS or Microsoft's Azure cloud, and Looker provides one of those functions. We actually don't see them a ton. They're down the list on competitors that we see frequently and they provide -- of the competitors that we normally talk about, they provide the smallest amount of the stack. But it's a good technology, and IT people really like it, and it's an admirable technology. Some of the things that they did and put together are things that we've talked about doing as well. It is further down that stack in terms of just connecting data, being able to visualize that data. And I'm sure for Google, it's going to be a great thing for them. But they've already said in their acquisition notes, the CEO of Looker came out and said, hey, this is -- we're still going to be partnered with all the other vendors out there and Google is still going to be open to every other vendor despite -- in no way changes any of the dynamics or approaches that we've taken there, which I think is important to make that statement from them. But it also is indicative of the fact that no vendor controls data anymore. The data is owned by the customer. Customers figured that out about 10 years ago. And any vendor that says anything otherwise, you really raise the ire of your customers. So from that perspective, Google is a great partner of ours. We do connect over 1,000 different enterprise applications and databases with prebuilt connectors, thousands upon thousands with some of the generic connectors that we have. And Google, I think, we have over 19 prebuilt connectors that we use. We have -- we integrate with Snowflake. We integrate with AWS in a lot of different ways. And it's been fun working with AWS because they bring us deals and they say, hey, here's something. We provide this. We need some people to help us create this solution like we described with the IoT solution. So these solutions that we're creating are exciting to us because we're not out there looking for something to do. Our customers are coming to us. Our partners are coming to us and saying, can you help us with the final mile here in the last leg? And it's been fun to deliver those to the market and see the value that then goes straight to the customer. So I think all in all, it's a good thing. It certainly raises more awareness in the market. We've had a lot of customers ask us to -- they've got -- there's very few companies that only pick one cloud. Most of them pick multiple clouds. We happen to really be the only agnostic cloud data provider that's out there with any of the kind of functionality that we have. And so I think that's going to bode well for us as well as you look at all the other major technology companies that aren't aligned with one of the big 3 cloud providers. And then when you look at most companies, they use multiple cloud providers. So I think from that sense, it's taking a competitor in a way, it's certainly from one perspective.
Operator
And our next question comes from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities.
Patrick D. Walravens - MD, Director of Technology Research and Senior Research Analyst
So my question would be getting all the moving parts here and how dynamic this space is for each of you. Josh, what's -- I mean what's the #1 thing you're focused on right now in terms of what you're personally trying to accomplish? And Bruce, for you, what's your #1 focus?
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. So my #1 focus right now is the one that we stated at the time of IPO, and that's going to continue to be our #1 focus, probably another 12 months, which is just trying to find the most efficient way possible to identify new customers and close those new customers, acquiring new customers. Once we get the customer -- our nose in the tent, we do a heck of a job retaining that customer, selling them additional products and services. Actually, once we even get in where we have a real opportunity on the line, we have a great close rates. We just need to continue to find customers more efficiently, which is why things like the Looker acquisition just continue to help us because it raises more eyes that are saying, "Hey, what am I supposed to do in this space? What's my strategic move here?" And you're seeing companies like Google start to put together more of the stack that we built. And we'll find at the end of all this whether or not we should have built the whole thing or not. But we did, and it really resonates with the forward-thinking customers that we have. And that gives us a lot of confidence that over time, that will end up being the right thing because these are the forward-thinking customers that are looking at our whole stack and realizing how they can change the way they run their business. I'd say secondarily, the other thing that we have a lot of effort that we're focusing in right now is our ecosystem and our partners. We've got a lot of technology partners. We don't have as many go-to-market partners. And we just hired a new VP, Rob Davy, who's going to help us out. He was at Microsoft for 12 years and was in their enterprise space and partner businesses. And he's going to come and run partners for us working for Jay Heglar. And we also actually just got John Miller, who was over Adobe, and he's going to be our VP of Strategy and Jay is going to move to -- or Chief Strategy Officer, I should say, and Jay is going to move to Chief Business Officer, which is where he was spending all of his time anyway. And that's going to help us a lot with that go to market, with the CAC, with efficiently finding customers, messaging to those customers. So we feel like we made 2 really good hires on those fronts. And then the last piece is retention. The numbers start getting bigger in terms of the recurring revenue, and as efficient as you can get there, that's a positive thing and we're kind of getting to the time in our life cycle where -- our company's life cycle where we can be focus in on that. So we just hired a lady named Pam Marion, who's had a lot of experience at SAP and other companies managing renewal streams. And so we're excited for that as well. So we've got 3 new people helping us in the 3 areas that we think are the most important right now.
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
Yes. For me, it's support, support all the growth initiatives, including hiring new reps, building new apps, supporting new customers.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
And closing deals. Bruce closes a lot of deals.
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
Thank you.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
He visits a lot of CFOs and it's a pretty interesting demo. He says, here's how I run my public company. And the CFO's mouth usually drops. So that's been probably (inaudible) big focus.
Bruce C. Felt - CFO
And on that point, I guess I will say, I need it. They've always said, I need it.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
But if -- to support all that within the same cost envelope. Like we want to do all these things, but we can't spend any more money. So me and my team, we spend a lot of time working on, well, how do you fund it because the total cannot go up. And this automatically drives down CAC. This automatically -- in a recurring revenue model where you're just building layers and layers of new business that's highly profitable, it just drives you to be cash flow positive naturally. We don't do anything unnatural. So that's just a lot of my effort. And I have the whole company kind of working with me so it's not impossible task by any means. In fact, we've shown these numbers, we are able to keep growing the business and we're able to do it with even fewer costs than what we have done in the past.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Jack Andrews of Needham & Company.
Jon Philip Andrews - Senior Analyst
I was wondering if you could shed some light on the pricing scheme of your verticalized applications like Marketing Suite and IoT cloud and maybe how these compare to your core platform.
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. So there's an incremental fee associated with configuring those enterprise apps. We've built hundreds and hundreds of apps for our customers. We have thousands of apps being used by our customers, some of which they've built themselves. And so we're able to go off the shelf and pull these different building blocks and put them together for our customers. So there's a fee associated with that, and then there's an ongoing ACV component. So you might have an app like Digital 360. It might be $200,000 to set it up and $200,000 a year depending on how many users they have. By the time we've gotten to that point, they've identified which users they want and so that's one way that we can charge. But generally, whatever it is that we're selling, there is an annual fee associated with that app. And there's some apps that are small that don't have tons of technology behind them that we might only charge $25,000 to $50,000 a year for and then there's others that we'll charge $250,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year for.
Jon Philip Andrews - Senior Analyst
Great. And then just sort of moving forward, thinking about the apps you've introduced so far, I mean is it fair to think that you may become perhaps more verticalized over time around this initiative?
Joshua G. James - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Yes. I think specialized, whether it's verticalized or for a particular function in your organization, we have a very -- certainly a very well-known brand that's in the news all the time and they're a customer of ours and they -- in the pipeline right now -- have a travel and expense application that they're looking to meet. And it's a good size contract. So sometimes, it's verticalized. Sometimes, it's a function, like I mentioned, there is that app that was shown at Domopalooza around HR and retaining your employees. So I think really over any function in your company, and that's why I say your customers look at us and say, hey, we've got these -- all these employees and we're trying to figure out how to give them real-time commissions on what they're selling because they sell so many things and we're losing employees because our reps can't actually make sense of the commission spreadsheets that we send to them. Can we give them an app that helps them see it in real time? And it feels kind of next-generation. It feels like we're being transparent and open with them because they get it in real time. And we're able to, again, pull those building blocks off the shelf, put a skin on it that looks like their brand and they get a really cool custom software application that we just pulled off the shelf that looks custom to all their employees. So yes, I think we'll see more verticalization and more specialization for sure.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude today's program, and you may all disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.