Kaltura Inc (KLTR) 2021 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Kaltura Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call.

All material contained in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of Kaltura with all rights reserved.

For opening remarks and introductions, I will now turn the call over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. With me today from Kaltura are Ron Yekutiel, co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Yaron Garmazi, Chief Financial Officer.

Ron will begin with a summary of the results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2021, and the trends and areas of focus that are expected to impact 2022. Yaron will then review in greater detail the financial results for the fourth quarter and for the full year, followed by the company's outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2022. We will then open the call for questions.

Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Kaltura's expected future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here.

Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Kaltura's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2021, and other periodic SEC filings, including the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, to be filed with the SEC.

Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today and Kaltura assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law.

Please note, we will be discussing a non-GAAP financial measure, adjusted EBITDA, during this call. For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please refer to our earnings release, which is available on our website at www.investors.kaltura.com.

Now I will turn the call over to Ron.

Thank you, Erica, and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. We reported today that our revenue for the fourth quarter was $42.7 million, up 21% year-over-year; and our subscription revenue for the quarter was $38.5 million, up 33% year-over-year and represented approximately 90% of total revenue. Our annualized recurring revenue or ARR for the fourth quarter was $150.8 million, up 29% year-over-year. And our net dollar retention rate for the fourth quarter was 120%, up from 103% in the same quarter in 2020. We also continued improving our gross margins year-over-year, achieving 63% in the fourth quarter versus 60% in the same quarter in 2020. And our adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was negative $7.7 million.

This quarter wraps up a fiscal year where we grew our total revenue by 37% and our subscription revenue by 39%. We also posted 75% year-over-year growth in the number of customers with over $1 million ARR and 25% growth in the number of customers with over $100,000 ARR.

Growth in 2021 was driven by our expansion from a leading position in the video content management market into the virtual event, webinars and virtual classroom market. This expansion was enabled by the recent addition of real-time conferencing and chat capabilities for earlier video-on-demand and live broadcast technology stack. It was also marked by a shift towards powering more external use cases in the enterprise where CMOs are the buyers, as well as an expansion down market that broadens our target customers to include SMEs and departments within large organizations through more low-touch and self-serve products.

We're in the very early days of this strategic expansion to new product markets in the broad enterprise space. This adds to our vertical market activity currently in the education and media and telecom markets. With key differentiators and strong initial demand for all of our new products, we aim to reach a leadership position in these markets. As video-based experiences continue to drive critical interactions, the opportunity ahead of us is bountiful.

But before we discuss further our plans and growth engines for 2022, I want to address our recent growth deceleration and why we expect this trend to reverse this year. In the second half of 2021, we experienced a slowdown in the growth of our subscription revenue and a decrease in our professional services revenue. The headwinds on both revenue sources continued also into Q1 '22.

The following are the 3 driving forces behind this. First, we experienced lower-than-planned EE&T new bookings. We kicked off a very strong 2020 and first half of 2021, which were fueled by higher levels of demand caused both by our newly introduced products and COVID. After a multiyear increase in our EE&T average sales force productivity, we started seeing a decline in productivity mainly due to the lengthening of new business sales cycles. This softness that was felt across the industry is also underscored by organizations shifting from rapidly purchasing a virtual events product along with many professional services to conduct their few flagship events remotely during COVID to more slowly and diligently purchasing a low-touch enterprise-wide platform that would cater to all of their future events, large and small, both virtual and hybrid.

We were expecting this trend and recently launched the second version of our events offering that caters to this broader need, which represents a bigger market opportunity.

And in regard to the number of salespeople, while in Q4 we had over 40% more ramped quota-carrying salespeople compared to the same quarter the year before, we were still below our plan. This is due to the very competitive hiring and retention environment.

We discussed this in our last earning call and have been further accelerating our hiring stint. But we expect that during 2022 we will see average sales force productivity increasing back up, fueled also by the new version of our events offering as well as the continued material growth in the number of salespeople.

Second, the need for less professional services. We've been modifying our offerings for both EE&T and M&T to be more transactional and require fewer professional services in order to appeal to more customers and accelerate our sales and deployment cycle. Part of this trend was already planned and expected with the expansion of our self-service EE&T offering and our shift in M&T from focusing primarily on large telcos to also targeting midsized media companies. This trend was, however, further accelerated with the recent evolution of our events offering that have consumed significant professional services into a low-touch platform that requires far less of them.

While this reduction in professional services slowed down our short-term total revenue growth, we believe it is beneficial in the longer term as it helps boost subscription revenue growth rates and gross margins. It is also not expected to affect our longer-term growth rate as post this transition the proportion of professional services revenue of our total revenue is expected to settle down on the new lower level.

Third, one of our major customers reduced part of their business and revenue with us during the fourth quarter of 2021. They have since renewed various existing projects and have partnered with us on new ones, so our business rhythm is picking up again and they are expected to remain a major customer this year. Outside of this specific customer, our gross retention metric in 2021 was close to our historical average. And as mentioned, our net dollar retention rate remained high in this quarter and in 2021 as compared to 2020.

As we look into 2022, we expect the 3 factors that I noted to affect primarily the beginning of the year. We expect our growth to be fueled throughout the year and beyond by the following 3 main engines. The first is our continued sales force ramp. Our plan this year is to continue ramping our enterprise sales force by more than 40% year-over-year. After many years of not growing our sales force, we'll be able to enjoy the contribution of both the new recruits of 2021 and of 2022.

The second is the expansion of our event platform capabilities. As mentioned, during 2020 and 2021, we primarily focused on high-profile flagship events. We were ideally suited for this use case as we power all types of video experiences, on-demand, live and real-time, at great scale with tight integrations into other enterprise systems and workflows, great flexibility for customization and branding, unique engagement features and advanced analytics and tracking.

Towards the end of last year, we expanded our event platform capabilities to address not just large flagship events, but all events of all sizes, allowing organizations to easily and rapidly create, manage, analyze and duplicate virtual and hybrid events by using automated event templates and not by consuming Kaltura's professional services. This easy-to-use platform still offers our unparalleled breadth of video experiences, engagement features, insightful analytics and a high degree of flexibility in branding.

We've deployed Kaltura meetings and events solutions for many exciting customers in Q4, including Check Point and Lowe's. Lowe's is now providing a Kaltura-powered live virtual do-it-yourself workshop experience for customers called Lowe's DIYU, where Lowe's experts provide live video instructions and engage an interactive Q&A in support of Lowe's customers engaged in various DIY projects.

Check Point, a leading software security company, conducted its recent Check Point Experience event series on Kaltura.

The third driver is our low-touch and self-serve products and go-to-market vehicle. Towards the end of last year, we finished developing our new experience for the self-serve purchase of our webinar, virtual classroom and media services offerings through our website. We're now optimizing and scaling our digital operations to support efficient online sales and are continuing to improve these products and to add to the mix more self-serve products.

We also recently started building an inside sales team for EE&T low-touch commercial sales to augment our main sales team by also focusing on transactional sales for small organizations.

In M&T, we're continuing to expand our market from large telcos towards lower-touch midsized media companies with an easier to deploy end-to-end cloud TV platform that includes a front-end user experience and content syndication and monetization tools.

In Q4, 2 such new media customers went live, Canal Panda, an AMC Network channel, and CH Media, a Swiss broadcaster. Both of these customers launched in only a few months, far faster and with far fewer professional services than our typical large telco deployment.

In addition to these 3 main growth engines, we're also growing our investment in our channel partners. We announced in 2021 our expanded relationship with partners like AWS and Oracle. We plan to continue to invest in these partnerships and others in 2022 and further grow our revenues from co-sell, resell and OEM partnerships.

We're also launching this year our new M&T deals from 2021, which was a record new booking year for M&T. Due to their lengthy deployment time, many of these deals will contribute revenue only starting from the second half of 2022. Several other M&T customers from prior years have also planned expansion projects in 2022.

Lastly, we're continuing to grow our strong presence in the education market and to expand to cater also to smaller institutions.

So in summary, all of our offerings, including our newer ones, events, webinars and virtual classroom, are growing and important. Top brands are relying on Kaltura across each of our markets to engage our customers and users. Retention rates remain strong, and we believe we are well positioned to increase our market penetration in all of our markets in the coming year and beyond.

We were expecting a certain slowdown as we shift from growing sales force productivity to scaling the sales force. We did, however, encounter greater headwinds in the last few months by way of industry-wide sales cycle slowness, delayed hiring and a partial loss of business from one customer that's already going back. We also temporarily delayed our revenue growth by reducing our professional services and their associated revenue in order to increase our target market, shorten sales and deployment cycles and increase our gross margins.

While we're disappointed with our slower short-term growth, we are confident that the headwinds we encountered are short-lived and that they will soon be offset by our strong growth engines, including the new products that we have brought to market and their modification to cater to lower-touch and self-serve use cases, the ramp-up of our sales force, the strengthening of our go-to-market partnerships, and of course, the continued growth and success of our customers. With these engines, we expect to reaccelerate our revenue growth in the second half of 2022.

With that, I'll turn it over to Yaron, our CFO, to discuss our financial results in more detail. Yaron?

Thank you, Ron, and good morning, everyone. As I review the fourth quarter and our fiscal year results today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric, adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial is included in today's earnings release, which is available on our website at www.investor.kaltura.com.

Total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2021, was $42.7 million, up 21% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $38.5 million, up 33% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $4.2 million, down 31% year-over-year. The remaining performance obligation were $185.5 million, up 32% year-over-year, of which we expect to recognize 57% as revenue over the next 12 months.

Annualized recurring revenue was $150.8 million, up 29% year-over-year. Revenue benefited from our continued year-over-year growth in net dollar retention rate, which was 120% in the fourth quarter compared to 103% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Within our EE&T segment, total revenue for the fourth quarter was $31 million, up 28% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $29.7 million, up 40% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $1.3 million, down 60% year-over-year.

Within our M&T segment, total revenue for the fourth quarter was $11.7 million, up 7% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $8.8 million, up 13% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $2.9 million, down 3% year-over-year.

GAAP gross profit for the quarter was $26.8 million, representing a gross margin of 63%, up from 60% gross margin in Q4 2020. Within our EE&T segment, gross profit for the fourth quarter was $22.1 million, representing a gross margin of 71% compared to the same 71% gross margin in Q4 2020.

Within our M&T segment, gross profit for the fourth quarter was $4.6 million, representing a gross margin of 39%, up from 36% gross margin in Q4 2020.

R&D expenses for the fourth quarter were $13.3 million or 31% of revenue compared to 26% in Q4 2020. The increase was driven by additional head count and payroll expenses as we continued to invest in our technology and innovation.

Sales and marketing expenses for the fourth quarter were $13.8 million or 32% of revenue compared to 23% in Q4 2020. This increase was driven by additional sales and marketing investment, including head count and personnel-related expenses. We intend to continue to invest in our sales and marketing as we expand our sales force and marketing efforts to leverage our position in the market and capture the significant opportunity in front of us.

G&A expenses for the fourth quarter were $12 million or 28% of revenue compared to 16% in the fourth quarter of 2020. The increase was driven by additional public company head count and third-party related expenses.

GAAP net loss for the quarter was $15.9 million or $0.12 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA was a negative of $7.7 million, decreasing from $1.5 million in Q4 2020. This results in line with our plan to increase our spend in order to further fuel our growth as discussed earlier.

And now for the full fiscal year results. Total revenue for the year ended in December 31, 2021, was $165 million, up 37% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $145 million, up 39% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $20 million, up 22% year-over-year.

GAAP gross profit for 2021 was $102.7 million, representing a gross margin of 62%, up from a 60% gross margin in 2020. GAAP net loss in 2021 was $59.4 million or $0.95 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA in 2021 was a negative of $12.2 million decreasing or $4.3 million in 2020.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with $143.9 million in cash and short-term investments. Net cash used in operating activity was $10.7 million in the quarter and $22.1 million in 2021.

I would now like to turn to our outlook for the first quarter and the full year 2022. In the first quarter, we expect subscription revenue to grow by 12% to 15% to between $36.2 million and $37.2 million, and total revenue to grow by 5% to 8% to between $39.6 million and $40.7 million. As Ron mentioned, these take into consideration an expected material decline in our professional services revenue. We expect a negative adjusted EBITDA to be between $9 million and $12 million.

For the full year, we expect subscription revenue to grow by 10% to 13% to between $159.5 million and $163.8 million, and the total revenue to grow by 5% to 8% to between $173.3 million and $178.2 million. Again, as Ron mentioned, we expect to accelerate our subscription and total revenue in the back half of the year and forecast our revenue for professional services to remain around flat through the rest of the year.

We expect for the full year a negative adjusted EBITDA between $27 million and $32 million.

On the expense front, our investment plans and priorities for 2022 have not changed. We plan to continue investing across both R&D and sales and marketing to drive growth and expect our gross margin to continue growing moderately towards achieving our long-term goal.

In summary, as Ron mentioned, we believe that our sales acceleration, new products and the strong retention rates will enable us to accelerate our revenue growth rate in the second half of 2022.

With that, we will open the call to questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs.

Ron, I wanted to come back to the comment you made on the change in buying merchants that you're seeing at your customers towards enterprise-wide products that you think will be best served by the second generation of your events platform. So maybe talk to us a little bit about what are the leading indicators that you see that lead you to believe that the expansion of your event platform will drive growth for the company in the second half? And how do you get comfortable that there's not an additional headwind that you're seeing from competition?

Thank you, Gabriela, for the question, and thank you, everybody, for joining the call. I'm going to give you a few examples of things that we've been seeing over the last quarter that are supporting the notion of starting to see sales cycles, but that they are longer. We had a top tech company that's been a 20-year Kaltura customer -- I'm sorry, a top 20 Kaltura customer for more than 9 years with us that awarded us their event business for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 events, meaning the smaller and intermediate sized events, not the flagship events. But that's going to take them a while until they physically contract that. So we have already a verbal and it goes through the motions and we're expecting that later in the year.

Another example is a very well-known technology company who's not been our customer to date. They joined us when they've done 2 smaller events with us, have defined us POCs, have defined that we're one of the 2 final candidates to do all their events. We're discussing thousands of potential events. And they go through a prolonged process as we go through these initial events to assess the quality of the product and make final decisions around where it's going to be deployed.

By the way, the reason for the first one for choosing us was the enterprise-ability of our platform, the fact that we could address integrated workflows across the entire organization. The reason for the second leading position that we are right now is the fact that we could address complex event templates, which could be easily replicated. For example, they run training events that require robust content management abilities. We're the only platform that could support these things.

We can give you a couple more. A new tech company customer for this past quarter, that ran with us their annual customer event, received their users the highest scores in 5 years for virtual event experiences and that's for both physical and virtual events and the rating was off the chart. And a health care organization that's been a customer of ours for 8 years is starting to do stuff.

So we're seeing definitely the pipeline build and the need come in, but the decision-making process of a platform that caters not too very large flagship events that need to happen immediately and happen once, rather many, many intermediate sized events is just a longer process. And so we are seeing the market say that we are a very strong offering there and their interest, the cycles are just longer. Does that address your question?

Yes. And maybe a little more detail on what you're seeing in the existing book of business? You mentioned the one customer where you're seeing a partial loss of business. Are you seeing additional customers that have downsized their contracts with you as they figure out their longer-term plans? Because perhaps the nature of their events have -- are changing real-time. Maybe just a little more on whether you're seeing a downtick in existing customer spend or any other example of that parallel to one customer that you pulled out.

Yes. Happy to address that. But first of all, we did discuss one of our major customers that reduced part of their business as well as the revenue during the quarter. They've since renewed various projects, et cetera.

I will say, first and foremost, that they have multiple projects and they are growing the other side of the project. So there were some projects that were canceled and the rest are ongoing and growing.

As for the other ones, as we did state outside of this specific customer, our gross retention metrics in 2021 were close to our historical average, both in 2020 and in 2019. And then the dollar retention rate remained high. So we're not seeing any massive change in our gross retention or in the net retention behavior.

I will state that as it pertains specifically going forward into the flagship events, is there a possibility that some of the other folks that just use us for flagship might either replace to the full or do a partial? That's potential. But that's not a huge part of our revenue, and we are seeing the migration into additional bigger projects as well. So we're not expecting a major change in our gross retention metric. Does that address your question?

Yes.

Our next question is from DJ Hynes with Canaccord.

Ron, thanks for all the color on current trends, I appreciate the transparency. Ron, I want to ask, look, if you're seeing sales productivity declines within your existing team, what makes you think throwing more resources at the problem is the right solution now?

So great question, and thank you, DJ. So first and foremost, this has not been a very prolonged process. I remind you that we've seen increase in productivities before COVID, during COVID and that sustained all the way through kind of the end of last year. We know that Q4 was a bit of a different duck. Even through Q3 that there was some mild reduction, we're still forecasting for the year based on the actual pipeline that we should be fine for the year.

So that change really was a few deals that slipped at the end of the year that just took longer. And most of them -- almost all of them, the statement is we're absolutely doing this. You've got a verbal, this just takes longer. So we're not feeling that there is a slowness overall in the demand nor in the underlying market.

The other one is I mentioned we've been adding the types of product that will enable us to continue to address this trend and this change and this elongating of these deals. And we're -- it's not that deals are stopping, it's just the closing of the deals take more time. So bringing more salespeople to work on the likes of the deals that I mentioned, as well as many others, is something that's absolutely worthwhile. It does not necessarily mean that they translated into closing the business immediately.

Last thing I would state is that even if you look at the reduced productivities, they're still higher than 2019 on average for 2021. And even if you take the run rate from the second half of the year, it's a portion of that, that's still from kind of an LTV to CAC, it's still a favorable number on the second half of the year. And so we're not at the levels that we would argue that it's not an efficient operation, but we're keeping an eye very closely on it and we're not going to add all the people in one sunny day. And as we ramp up throughout the year, we're going to continue to make decisions on it.

And one more point that I want to add, DJ, is that when we look on the pipeline, obviously, we are not sharing pipeline numbers. Definitely, we see a nice development in the pipeline especially around the new offerings that Ron mentioned. So we do feel that we will be able to convert into bookings using the new salespeople.

Yes, yes. Okay. The other question I suspect I'm going to get is, look, we've had 4 straight quarters. I think net revenue retention has been kind of 116% to 121%. You're guiding 12% to 15% subscription growth in Q1. I think the bridge is probably this large customer attrition that you talked about. Can you just give us a little more clarity on what's happening there? Like what did they not renew? What are they now adding? What is the financial impact? I think that would help folks get comfortable there.

Sure. Happy to do that, and thanks for asking. Look, this is a customer -- again, we're trying to keep the privacy of our customers and confidentiality of the situation, so we can't get into the nitty-gritty. Like I said, it's a major customer. They have a fair amount of business with us. They do quite a few of events. It's a lot of event-focused situation. From our understanding for internal reasons with conversations with their teams, they decided to switch to another option on part of their business. It's not related to our immediate product or services altogether, it's a few of the big events that we support them.

It did translate to a fair amount of reduction, by the way, more on the nonrecurring than it is on the recurring, but in both. But it's important to note that we're anticipating anyway a drop in professional services from them, given all the trends that we have stated and that we are currently forecasting to catch up on the subscription revenue from additional deals that we're doing with them.

And so they are remaining a large and important customer. We are renewing projects with them, we're discussing additional ones with them. That's kind of the sum of it. Yaron, you want to add something, go ahead.

Yes. And one thing that -- we are not sharing booking numbers, but I can tell you that even in the first quarter of this year, we definitely saw a very nice momentum in booking around this specific customer. So looking into the rest of '22 and the conversion into revenue, we do feel that this customer is going to be -- continue to be a very, very significant customer for us.

Our next question comes from Michael Funk with Bank of America.

Yes. I wanted to go back to your comment about the sales cycle and that lengthening. And just wondering if this is the new normal, in your view, or if it's a reflection of customers maybe shifting course mid-negotiation around uncertainty on kind of the product and the use cases and what they actually need. So just trying to get a sense of what's driving that length in the sales cycle and if this is the new normal.

Yes. Michael, thanks for asking. So look, we always thought that post COVID, the cycles are going to be longer than during COVID. I think that's not the question because, again, a lot of it was spur-of-the-moment decisions that people needed to have done very quickly.

We are seeing now some of the cycles taking a bit longer than what we would anticipate. I think part of that is that quarter 4 coming out of this crazy year and some people taking more time off might be longer than usual, potentially macro situations around budgets. But I think beyond that, it's really a point of that transition of the type of product into a more thoughtful, longer-term strategic decision around events for the entire organization.

And I think that 2 things are going to happen. Number one, if the beginning gets delayed, it's like a traffic jam that you're at the beginning of it. Once it starts rolling, then you have the flux of the deals that we do close now. So that interim period of that delay is probably creating a bigger impact than later on even if sales cycles remain a bit longer.

But I do expect that they're going to become quicker for various reasons. Number one, I think people are going to understand exactly what they're looking for. It's still a rather new shift. The second thing is that we are going to have more of that product available. We just launched it in Q4 the additions, the modifications, and we're going to do more and more of it and more and more success stories. Like I said, we have quite a few initial success stories. And I think we'll be in a position to sell these things quicker.

I will note again that even if you look at productivities and where they're at, it's decent productivities. And so we're hoping that if it's following on what happened in the second half of the year, it's still going to do well. We're hoping it's going to do better.

It's hard for us. We are a long sales cycle company. It's not a transactional SMB quick sale, albeit that we are coming down market. We cannot look at one specific quarter and be able to say for sure exactly how things are going. We're going to need to monitor this in the next few quarters and update you.

Great. And just to clarify, I mean, I think you mentioned that although the sales cycles are lengthening, the deal sizes are actually getting larger as customers think about and address kind of like whole company needs. Is there any way to quantify that change in deal size? And is that just going to, to your point, add more potential lumpiness to quarters, but like the pig in the python, once it works through, you end up at the same point at the end of the year. Was that your point?

I would hope. I mean it's -- so first of all, over the years, we've increased our ARPU and average MRR. We've seen an increase also in the past year of the average recurring revenue per customer quite significant. We did post the number of customers that are over $1 million and $100,000 growing, respectively, by 75% and 25% in the passing year.

And so we are getting bigger ticket items. Some of the deals that I mentioned now that are in play for thousands of events across organization are quite large. So yes, the expectation is for this to grow.

The other thing is not just the size of the deals, but also the structure from a recurring subscription versus professional services. The flagship events were also requiring a fair bit of nonrecurring professional services because they would come alongside our ability to provide branding and very close work with very, very large deals. In part also because we didn't have the automated product to support that just by way of our product. Now we're going to have more recurring, more subscription and less professional services.

So I think hopefully, what we're going to see is rebound back to faster sales cycles, more demand as we strengthen our product, larger ticket items and higher gross margins and faster transactions with more transactional product. Again, we will monitor this in the quarters ahead and update.

Our next caller, Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo, has a question.

This is Austin on for Michael. I just wanted to touch on RPO and cRPO. It looks like both were up double digits sequentially, but ARR was down sequentially. Can I understand customers downsizing might result in a downtick in ARR, but what's driving the divergence between those 2 metrics there?

Yes. First of all, the big increase in the RPO is mostly, not just, but mostly related to the fact that we added some of the big deals that we had in media and telecom, which are definitely contributing to the growth in RPO. By the way, some of these deals will be converted into revenue at just the second part of the year 2022. But it's definitely going to push growth rate up, hopefully.

In terms of the sequential and what happened in this quarter, yes, the slowness that we saw in productivity and the specific reduction of this big specific customer, which, as I mentioned and Ron mentioned, it's mostly for the short term and not so much for the rest of the year as these customers continue to renew and book more transactions during Q1. There was a pressure, a short-term pressure, that we felt in Q4 going into beginning of the year on the RPO.

Okay. That's great. And then just as a follow-up, just wanted to unpack the revenue performance on a geographic basis. Were there any callouts related to specific geos that might have driven the lighter performance on revenue during the quarter?

No. The short answer is no. The trends are basically the same trends. North America is still our biggest region, followed by Europe and then Asia Pacific. There are some small tweaks and shifts, but it's remained mostly the same.

Our next question is from Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank.

Maybe 2, if I could. First, on churn. Maybe if we can get any more color on how customer churn is trending, and I guess more focused on customers within EE&T that may have joined sort of earlier on in the pandemic. So if there's any color you can give us in terms of how that cohort that joined roughly 2 years ago, how churn has been trending there?

And then secondly, if we try to sort of unpack the revenue guide for subscription within 2022. Is the implication here that subscription revenue growth stays relatively flat in the second quarter and then sees a little bit more of a ramp in 2H as you start to see some more bookings from new salespeople? I'm just trying to sort of figure out the trajectory during the year.

Yes. Thanks, Matt. So on the churn side, again, we do not see any specific, other than that individual customer that we discussed, any behavior that is significantly south. Like as mentioned, it's aligned with the last couple of years. And some of the departures are new, but I think a fair bit of them are not. And at the end of the day, the gross churn number, albeit that we don't represent it and we don't discuss it as a KPI, we just do the net dollar retention, is within best practice for the enterprise.

So we're not seeing it. I did put that caveat that we need to keep our eye open on what's going to happen with these flagship events. Like I said, there is a good potential for us to move from flagship to full event platform. We are seeing with some. In some other cases, it might change. We're going to keep our eyes open over the next few quarters. And it's not a big chunk of our revenue. If it was big, it was mainly that single customer that had the biggest piece of it.

As for guidance for subscription, go ahead, Yaron.

Yes. As we said, most of the headwinds that we felt, we felt it with an impact for the short term and it did create some pressure on the growth of subscription revenue, especially the specific customer that, as we mentioned, we saw a pressure on top line, but at the same time we are booking more and more deals with them. So we see the turnaround point happening as we speak. And at the same time, we believe that also most of the impact of the productivity is going to turn around in the second part of the year. And by adding then more people, we do believe that we will see very nice acceleration in the growth of subscription revenue going into the second part of the year.

And yes, if you look on the guidance that we have provided to Q1 and which you can see that the remaining of the year in order even to reach the guidance, even if we are not going to beat the numbers, showing a very nice sequential growth in also -- mostly in subscription revenue. And as we say, the pressure on professional services will continue. It's going to be mostly flat for this year. So most of the upside and the impact that we will see in the second part of the year quarter-to-quarter and on a sequential base is going to come from subscription revenue. And we do see it in our internal model right now.

Our next question comes from Steve Enders with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I guess just from a vertical perspective, I guess, is there anything to break down kind of what the demand environment looks like across each of the segments here. Particularly on the EE&T side, I think it sounds like ed tech has been a little bit more impacted. It's just what we've heard in the market. But just any kind of breakdown from a vertical perspective on what you're seeing out there?

Yes. Sure, Steve. So first of all, contribution was coming from all segments in the quarter and the largest contributor continues to be enterprise. We spoke about geography. I mean I can give you a few examples of things you're asking about ed tech that we have a large multicampus private university that serves over 20,000 students a year that basically selected us from a very highly competitive test out there around the different options.

There's, around the world, a large university in the Netherlands, that's serving 35,000 students that took us to replace their full video technology stack. We've got another very large prestigious privately owned university in the Philippines that's serving 30,000 students that's leveraging our capabilities to do all of their on-prem or local and hybrid remote classroom work. We have upsells across our organizations, a large California-based engineering university double down on their transcription capabilities with us. So we're still seeing good action coming from education.

Do I think that the tick up in education will continue on the same velocity that had jumped up at the height of COVID with some more consumption? Might be lower, but the good thing is that we have a good hedge across all the different elements.

So one example of that, for example, is media and telecom. You remember that in 2021, there was a record jump in booking. It grew by 100%. And in the second half of this year, we're going to get a lot of that benefit on the revenue side. So a good portion of the growth, by the way, is already in pocket with stuff that happened.

So enterprise is running forward with events. Education is doing well, it might do another big jump. One of the things that we're looking at is selling the event platform for education. A lot of folks are coming to us and are saying they want to use that for various events the universities are using. So again, we're keeping an eye on that one.

I guess maybe asked a little bit differently. I mean you're not seeing an impact on the ed tech space from classes going back in person or anything on that front?

No. Because we're not a usage-based charger on that side. So to remind you, the content management systems we've been selling for education for years, including plug-ins to LMS and Lecture Capture, we're an FTE-based model. And so the more people use this, we didn't necessarily get paid more.

So insofar as what's happening if there's a bit less consumption after COVID doesn't affect our revenue. Are universities even more clear that they need to use the systems? Yes. One thing is that during COVID people needed to use this very quickly for COVID, but they didn't rethink about their strategy going forward for a full flip classroom experience where people could come to the campus to do their drills and training but really consume the actual lecture content back home. It's called flipping the classroom. And we're seeing more and more universities saying, okay, we understand the new standard and we need to start preparing for more video capabilities in this new standard.

So no, I mean companies that really popped were consumption-based companies in COVID. They went up and they go down. We didn't have that in EDU. So that's not a problem for us. Does that address your question?

Yes. That's helpful. And then I guess just on the cloud go-to-market partnerships with AWS and Oracle. Just kind of any update on how those are how those are ramping versus your expectations and kind of any contributions those drove in the quarter?

Yes. Happy to address that. So we're continuing forward with partnerships, both with Amazon and with Oracle. To remind you, Amazon has been a long-term partner for us and we are in their marketplace and working on selling more. We have a fair bit of deals that are coming and opportunities that are coming through the Amazon partnership and they're continuing forward.

I'd say at the Oracle front, when we made that extended partnership earlier this year was first and foremost around moving our OEM relationship into OCI. We're making headway on converting and enabling to run our OEM relationship on OCI and doing more things that we have to go-to-market together.

So I think that the impact will be building up throughout the year of 2022. I think that towards the latter part of the year, once the OEM and OCI are running stronger, we could expect a lot of good things from there as well.

Our next question is from Ryan Koontz with Needham & Company.

On the timing of your large customer churn, was that more of an impact to Q4 or Q1? How should we think about the kind of step down there and that impact on the numbers?

Yes. In terms of the revenue, it's obviously an annual contract with -- on this specific event or situation. But most of the impact was on Q4 and Q1. It's going to turn around because of the fact that, as we mentioned, we are signing and closing more deals with them -- with these specific customers. So by the end of the day, the bottom line is that most of the impact is on Q1 and -- Q4 and Q1 of this year. And then going into the second part of the year, we already see this customer ramping up. And as we mentioned, it's still going to be a very significant customer for us.

I'd just say that from a professional services revenue, the bigger reduction was in Q4, albeit that there was a nice reduction in Q1. And from subscription, because it kind of builds up from the end of Q4, the bigger impact was in Q1 than it was in Q4.

But the run rate on subscription revenue that we see with this specific customer in the second part of the year is basically the levels that we had before the specific situation.

Got it. That's helpful. Great. I hear you on the longer sales cycle, but on your hiring plans and your head count and productivity, can you help us out there as far as how you feel like you're positioned now and how much more you need to see? Ron, any more kind of color you can give us there is helpful.

Sure. So we ramped and we noted more than 40% year-over-year growth in the total count of ramp salespeople from Q4 '20 to Q4 '21. We're expecting to do the same this year. When we count that ramp is in, it's 6 months after for sales and 4 months after for CSM, for customer success managers. And obviously. At this point, and given longer sales cycles, it doesn't mean that they're 100% yielding already and for sure revenue comes in gradually after because this is the beginning of booking.

And so it's -- that 40% is a nice increase. For years, it's been at 0. And then within 1 year, it grew by 40%. But it's under the number that we were planning and we're catching up on that delta. I think that in the coming year, 2022, we're going to enjoy both. So the increase that we had in 2021 is going to bear fruit because they're going to be in place for longer, they're going to be addressing all these cycles that they're sitting now and selling against. But we're also going to have the new guys that are coming in 2022.

Last thing I'd say is that we've launched also the inside commercial sales initiative and ramping people there to address low-touch products as well. So that's supposed to help us as well.

Our next question is from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities.

I actually have two. Ron, first of all, I guess I wonder, is the hybrid world playing out sort of the way you thought it would? So for example, in my kids' schools, I would have expected that they have the classroom set up so that if you have to stay home, you can still watch class. But in fact, that's not what they're doing in the public schools, they went all the way back to in person. And if you miss class, you miss class. Likewise, if you look in our industry, a lot of these investor conferences, you would have thought it would have been hybrid, but a lot are actually going back all in-person. So they're either all hybrid or all virtual or all in-person. So I just wonder if maybe our expectations around hybrid were overblown. What do you think?

That's a good question. I think, first of all, that you're talking about K-12 school, I assume, when you say your kids' school. It's not college or is it...

Yes. That's eighth grade. No, that's eighth grade.

Yes. So I think, first of all, K-12 takes longer than the higher ed just by the nature of things. I think that higher ed is changing quicker and has changed prior and K-12 will continue to do so.

I think that insofar as the large events, investor events, et cetera, I think the game in town is not so much hybrid with mix so that when people are consuming, regardless of where they are, it doesn't really matter. They're going to be consuming the same content because many of them might not be coming. So it's not one or the other. It's both.

And I think that there's going to be more of that, that there will be this ubiquitous solution that regardless where you sit, if you're sitting on stage, if you're not, you'd be able to consume the exact same thing. So you could do one day at home and then appear for the second day or you could be out for the entire days. And both the networking, engagement, follow-ups and everything else will be equally done for all.

And I think that, that is the future. I think that while people don't know if 20% are going to show up physically or 80% are going to show up physically, people don't want to disqualify those that would not be coming physically. And I do think that, that is the future.

I think that for a long time in technology, people are trying to build a faster horse, not a car. And now people are thinking how you do this better. So it's going to take a bit of time. We're still very close, but it's shifting.

And then my second question would be, I mean, look, at 1.5x EV-to-revenue, obviously, people are going to be knocking on your door. So what are the key points that you would want to share with investors in terms of how you guys are going to respond to and how you think about strategic interest from other people who'd want to buy you?

Got it. Look, I mean, the reason -- and I'm not going to get into price and what's a fair price or not, I don't think that this necessarily is in line with our forecast and where we're going and definitely not with the strategic value of the company. We've been growing and bringing a certain business, there's a certain shift for a short period and then it's going to change yet again. I think it's more reacting to the very short-term quarter next quarter.

But pertaining to your general question about reaction to strategic interest, we'll be sitting with folks and having whatever discussions we need to do to best represent value for shareholders. But we are absolutely looking forward to what this company is worth not in this quarter, not the next quarter, but in the quarters to come. And it has nothing to do sometimes with the short-term situation. We're very bullish and very excited about the general direction of video and about the general direction of the company, and there's a lot of growth drivers in place to support our growth.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Param Singh with Oppenheimer.

This is Param Singh on behalf of Ittai Kidron. Sorry to beat a dead horse, but really want to understand the dynamic in the subscription revenue. When I just look at your guide, it looks like your 12% to 15% in 1Q is higher than your full year 10% to 13%. And given all the color that you've given, one would expect that it would pick up through the year and accelerate. So why this type of guide? And what are the dynamics that we're missing here? And how do you reconcile your productivity and the sales coming back with this type of subscription growth that is decelerating?

Yes. Thank you, Param. It's not so much decelerating. I mean one thing to be careful about is these are looking at year-over-year growth rates, I think the best way to try to look at this is on sequential. And sequential has come down. We got a nice hit from the departure of projects from one of the customers that, like I said, is doing more business with us and is growing again and we have the partial slowdown.

But if you look at what we're expecting throughout the full quarters of the year, we're expecting sequential to gradually pick up. And so it's -- we're not slowing down. It's just that when you superimpose that on last year's revenue and the behavior of last year, there could be various levels of growth. At the beginning of the year, we'll show some slowdown year-over-year, then we're going to see a big jump in year-over-year. So I think what we need to keep our eye on is what this means by way of sequential. Yaron, you want to add?

Yes. I will not get to the specifics because obviously we're not going to give guidance for the second part of the year. Definitely, we see a very nice acceleration in the sequential growth based on the fact that, as you can see, the first part of the year is basically flat -- almost flat. And therefore, the second part is definitely accelerating quarter after quarter on a sequential basis.

Got it. And then, again, following up on one of the earlier questions, the work-from-home dynamic that's changing, I mean, have you seen any of the companies change the way to think about the number of virtual events that they're doing, the dollar spend that they're going to do? Anything you could share with that would be really helpful.

I think that people understand that the spend on a virtual event is far, far lesser than on a physical event by order of magnitude. And there is an eagerness to use these platforms in order to increase ROI on these events. But I think it goes far beyond that is just the increase in reach and the quality of the engagement.

The degree of analytics, and that's one of the things that we win by, again, coming back to why Kaltura wins on virtual events, it's a degree of integration that we have into the different systems, the quality of the analytics that we could generate, and of course, the quality of video being a leader from the video space. There's folks in this industry that didn't have really video capabilities that were doing physical events, and we've come with this extremely powerful video side. Now coming back into the statement around not just ROI and reach, but the degree of data and analytics that could come out of it is really, really high.

So yes, we're -- there's very little doubt that there's going to be a lot of these events. It's just a question of where do we fit within this ecosystem and this shift from flagship into full events, medium and small-sized sales cycles that are associated with it. I think that's a bigger question.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.