Manhattan Associates Inc

NASDAQ:MANH

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Operator]

Good afternoon. My name is Liah, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Manhattan Associates Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, October 27.

I would now like to introduce Mr. Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Bauer, you may begin your conference.

[Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations]

Thank you, Liah, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates 2021 Third Quarter Earnings Call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO.

During this call, including the question-and-answer session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates. You are cautioned that these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, are not guarantees of future performance and that actual results may differ materially from projections contained in our forward-looking statements. I refer you to the reports Manhattan Associates files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections, particularly our Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2020 and the risk factor discussion in that report as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent Form 10-Qs. We note, in particular, that uncertainty regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our performance could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We are under no obligation to update these statements.

In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors. We have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation schedules in the Form 8-K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com.

Now, I'll turn the call over to Eddie.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Thanks, Mike. Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us as we review our third quarter results, discuss our updated full-year 2021 outlook and provide some very preliminary color on 2022 and beyond.

Q3 and year-to-date results were an all-time record for Manhattan Associates. Total revenue increased 13% to $169 million and adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.71 increased 39%. Both of these metrics exceeded our expectations. Strong cloud and services demand continues to drive revenue outperformance, fueling double-digit top line growth and strong earnings leverage. Above all, our investments in innovation are paying off. Product differentiation between Manhattan and other supply chain software vendors continues to increase. And moreover, our global teams are performing exceptionally well with a laser focus on customer success.

We delivered record third quarter bookings with RPO increasing 123% year-over-year and 17% sequentially to $574 million, providing us with excellent future revenue visibility. Additionally, 40% of our Q3 contracted bookings were generated from net new customers. And our pipeline continues to be robust with solid demand across our product suites. Over 90% of the pipeline consists of cloud opportunities with net new potential customers representing about 35% of that demand.

And with strong business momentum and our increased visibility, we're providing refreshed guideposts for RPO and cloud revenue through 2024. Dennis will provide more color later in the call, but this includes moving up our milestone of reaching $1 billion in RPO to 2022 from our original target of 2023.

On the sales front, competitive win rates remained strong at about 75% as our innovation is recognized as industry-leading. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing and wholesale drove more than 80% of our bookings for the quarter, but drilling into the sub verticals, they're pretty diverse, including apparel, department stores, grocery, food and beverage, industrial, health services as well as durable and nondurable goods.

Our global services team continues to execute amazingly well, conducting over 100 go-lives in Q3. And for the quarter, services revenue was up 20% compared with the prior-year period. As we mentioned in our Q2 call, the market is extremely competitive for services and technical talent. And while we're well positioned for significant growth, we do expect demand for talent to continue to be strong, with new and existing customers wanting to accomplish more with our solutions and at a faster pace. We're very mindful of the workload that we put on our teams, and we're focused on attracting and retaining talent, which we continue to factor into our operational planning and guidance.

On the innovation front, with our R&D spend approaching $90 million annually, we're focused on providing modern cloud native applications that are architected to unify commerce and supply chain experiences. Manhattan is on the leading edge of removing numerous unnatural silos or artificial boundaries that really don't align with business workflows.

Our technology is differentiating and industry-leading and a Manhattan active SaaS solutions are scalable, versionless and extensible. And this enables our customers to quickly adapt to market changes. It can improve efficiency and leverage their data in more robust ways, including solving challenges that legacy and silo systems simply cannot. And we believe that we're still very early in our cloud journey, but we couldn't be more pleased with the market's enthusiastic response to our Manhattan Active solutions.

So let's spend just a few minutes on specific updates on products and customers. We're actually off to a great start with Manhattan Active Transportation Management, the industry's fastest and smartest multimodal transportation optimization engine. Manhattan Active TM is the industry's first self-configuring and self-tuning system built on our industry-leading Manhattan application architecture. Manhattan Active TM is joined with Manhattan Active Warehouse Management to form Manhattan Active supply chain, the industry's first unified cloud native supply chain execution platform.

And since launch, we've been heartened by the accolades we've received for Manhattan Active Transportation Management from analysts, partners and customers. perhaps most encouragingly, several of the Manhattan Active Transportation Management customers are also deploying Manhattan Active WM. In other words, our supply chain unification message and strategy is really resonating with these joint solution customers realizing the clear benefits of unifying distribution, transportation, labor and automation within a single application.

Manhattan Active WM, the other half of Manhattan Active Supply Chain, continues to experience pretty explosive growth. Consistent with prior quarters, we're seeing a very nice balance between net new customers and existing Manhattan WMS customers choosing to migrate to our next-generation of WM platform. In just, what is it, 16 short months, Manhattan Active WM is live or are in the process of being implemented in 11 countries across 16 different industries, a pretty good testament to its cross-vertical and international applicability.

The small sampling of either live or currently implementing Manhattan Active WM customers include a luxury retail department store and national beverage distributor, Tier 0 national grocer outside of the US and several industrial distributors across the globe. Our competitive win rate with WMS has always been pretty high, and Manhattan Active WM has helped us raise that already high bar.

Now turning now to our omni-channel applications. We continue to make strides with our Manhattan Active point-of-sale application. This past quarter saw a global apparel and footwall brand, activate a Manhattan Active point-of-sale application in two new flagship stores in New York and Las Vegas. This particular customer also runs Manhattan Active order management, and they saw a clear advantage of deploying a unified omnichannel operating platform across their digital and bricks-and-mortar operations. And from a geographical point of view, the plans call for deploying Manhattan Active point-of-sale and order management across the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe. And we believe that Manhattan Active omni is unique in its ability to provide full featured order management, contact center and store systems as part of a unified platform across the globe.

And to close out our product and customer updates this quarter, I'm happy to report that a couple of weeks ago, we were able to host several small customer events in person for the first time in quite some time. And we were pleased to host customers in the UK, in the Netherlands and finally in France for some pretty intimate events to discuss their commerce and supply chain strategies and how Manhattan Active solutions can help them progress their digital transformations. And I got to tell you, it was such a pleasure to connect in person with a group of strategic customers after such a long break.

Well, that concludes my brief business update. Dennis is going to provide you with an update on our financial performance and outlook, and then I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before we move to Q&A. So, Dennis?

[Dennis Story]

Thanks, Eddie. Nothing but accolades for our Manhattan global teams. Top to bottom, we continue to raise the bar in a choppy macro delivering strong growth, profitability, cash flow and balance sheet metrics. I'll start with a quick recap of the quarter with growth rates on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated.

Total revenue was a record $169 million, up 13%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the compression driven by our cloud transition, our total revenue was up 27%. Notably, 70% of our total revenue is now driven by cloud and services. Our Q3 operating profit was a record totaling $53 million, up 20% with adjusted operating margin of 31.3% and GAAP operating margin of 25.1%. Our performance was driven by strong cloud and services revenue combined with lower expenses driven by the COVID pandemic.

Compared to 2019, we estimate COVID lowered our year-to-date 2021 expenses by about 425 basis points and year-to-date 2020 by about 325 basis points, respectively. Adjusting for COVID or put another way, assuming these expenses remain unchanged from 2019 levels, adjusted operating margin would be approximately 24% year-to-date, up over 200 basis points compared to year-to-date 2020.

Earnings per share was a record $0.71, up 39%. Our earnings per share did include $0.06 of nonrecurring tax benefit associated with expiring tax statutes. So, normalized EPS was $0.65, up 27%, either way a record. Our Q3 and year-to-date operating cash flow performance was a record with Q3 totaling $60 million and year-to-date $145 million, both up 41% on record global cash collections.

How about our free cash flow margin? It continues to be strong at 35% for the quarter and 29% year-to-date. EBITDA margin was 32% in the quarter and 29% year-to-date. Our balance sheet continues to be rock solid with $246 million in cash and 0 debt, providing us excellent flexibility to invest for growth. We invested $20 million in share buybacks in the quarter, resulting in $80 million in buybacks year-to-date. And for the fourth quarter and full year, we estimate our diluted shares outstanding to be about 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Also, our board has approved our customary $50 million share repurchase authority. That covers the macros.

Now let's drill down a little bit into revenue. Cloud revenue in the quarter totaled $32 million, up 53% as our new annual contract value continues to accelerate on strong market demand. For Q4, we expect cloud revenue of roughly $33.5 million. As Eddie mentioned, Q3 was a record third quarter with RPO, remaining performance obligation. Our RPO bookings totaled $574 million, up 123% year-over-year and 17% sequentially. With RPO continuing to compound positively, our visibility into future subscription revenue continues to strengthen, giving us confidence in our forward visibility and guidepost projections.

Services revenue was $88 million, up 20% as our cloud momentum continues to fuel our services revenue growth. Americas and Europe are running at double-digit growth, with APAC demand improving. For Q4 retail peak season, it's starting earlier than normal given supply chain constraints. We are forecasting services revenue to be about $82 million with year-over-year growth of 16%. As a reminder to most of you, the sequential revenue decline from Q3 represents our traditional retail peak seasonality as customers slow implementations to meet their customers' demand.

Our consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin for the quarter was 56.8%, up over 380 basis points compared to the year ago period and was predominantly driven by revenue performance and cloud operating leverage. Accounting for retail peak season and growth investments, we expect Q4 margin to be about 50.2%, resulting in full year 2021 margin of 53.5%, up 190 basis points over the prior year.

License revenue was $8 million, down 36% and maintenance revenue was $34 million, down 8%, primarily on cash collection timing. And one final revenue call out, our hardware team is in the double-digit growth gain, up 25% year-to-date. Good job, guys.

Transitioning to guidance. Barring any major global macro setbacks, our full year 2021 guidance and preliminary 2022 outlook puts us on track to deliver consecutive record revenue years. Our overarching objective obviously is to deliver sustainable double-digit top line growth and top quartile operating margins, benchmarked annually against enterprise SaaS comps.

For 2021, we are raising our total revenue guidance to $653 million to $655 million, up from our prior range of $643 million to $650 million. Our underlying total 2021 revenue growth ex license and maintenance, which removes the revenue compression from our cloud transition is targeted to be 19% at the midpoint.

For Q4, we expect total revenue of $161 million to $163 million. Full year operating margin is expected to be 25.8% to 26%, factoring in retail peak season revenue impact and including $10 million in special performance-based compensation and retention investments. We expect full year adjusted earnings per share to be $2.12 to $2.14, up from our prior range of $2.00 to $2.06. For GAAP EPS, our guidance range is $1.61 to $1.63 with a midpoint of $1.62, up 6% from our previous midpoint of $1.53. And for Q4, we expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of $0.37 to $0.39.

For full year 2021, our cloud revenue estimate is increasing to $121 million, representing 51% growth. Given our strong performance in Q3 and year-to-date, we are also increasing our RPO outlook to a range of $675 million to $700 million, up from our prior outlook range of $550 million to $600 million. The $688 million midpoint is up over 75% from our initial RPO target provided on our Q3 2020 earnings call.

For full year 2021, license and maintenance revenue continues to positively attrite on increasing demand for our cloud solutions. We expect license to be about $33 million and maintenance roughly $143 million. For Q4, we expect license to be about $7.5 million and maintenance roughly $35 million. Our CapEx estimate for 2021 is $3 million to $4 million. And for full year 2021, we expect an adjusted tax rate of about 19.5% and a GAAP tax rate of approximately 17.5%. So that covers the quarter and our 2021 outlook.

Let's cover some 2022 preliminary targets and guideposts. We are in our budget cycle currently, so we will firm up our parameters on our Q4 call. Please note, though, to facilitate a review for you all, we have added a supplemental schedule, Item Number 9 last page in today's earnings release, providing a comparison of our original geometrics and our current updated guideposts. As the schedule shows, we are moving all our guideposts for cloud revenue and RPO materially higher. In addition, our adjusted operating margins are improved from our initial color provided in February. Please note year-over-year growth rates are based on the midpoint of our 2021 guidance.

Our preliminary estimate of 2022 total revenue is $695 million to $715 million, excluding license and maintenance attrition at 16% growth. All in, our initial growth target is 8%. Our full year 2022 adjusted EPS range is $1.90 to $2.10. For 2022 cloud revenue, we are targeting $160 million to $165 million in revenue, representing 35% growth at the midpoint. Exiting 2021, including ramp transactions, we expect to achieve a three-year 2022 to 2024 compounded annual growth rate of 40% at the midpoint of our cloud revenue targets.

For RPO, we are targeting a three-year CAGR of 35% at the midpoint of our targets of $1 billion in 2022, growing to $1.7 billion in 2024. Those are big numbers. In 2022, we are also targeting services revenue of $362 million to $370 million, which represents 9% growth. License revenue of $13 million to $15 million and maintenance revenue of $137 million to $140 million as we continue to expect a longer attrition tell for maintenance. Our consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin is expected to be about 54%, and we are pegging 2022 operating margins at 22.5% to 24% and are targeting an annual 75 to 125 basis point expansion annually starting in 2023.

The factors impacting the inherent leverage in our model and driving the 2022 year over decline in operating margin include license attrition of 57% and to $14 million with maintenance revenue attrition at 4% as customers shift to cloud, totaling about 200 basis points of margin impact. Wage inflation and labor market trends accounting for about 200 basis points in margin investment.

As we've previously discussed, demand for technical talent is high, and we expect the labor market to continue to be very competitive through 2022. Continued investment across our company fueled by customer demand, we are investing in R&D, services and sales and marketing and the continued return of COVID impact expenses such as travel, our annual momentum customer conference, employee appreciation events, contractors, et cetera, total about 100 basis points. We also expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 22%, and our diluted share count will be approximately 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity.

So, lastly, I'll summarize our 2023 and 2024 guideposts that should better assist investors' assessment of our future cloud growth and earnings trajectory. Remember comparison of our guidepost versus historicals are located in our earnings release.

For 2023, we are targeting RPO of $1.25 billion to $1.4 billion, representing 33% growth at the midpoint. Cloud revenue of $220 million to $240 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint. And introducing 2024, for RPO, we are targeting $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, representing 28% growth at the midpoint. Cloud revenue, we're targeting $310 million to $345 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint.

So that covers the financial update. Thank you very much, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Good report. Dennis, thank you. We're very pleased with our strong third quarter and year-to-date results. And while we continue to operate in a pretty turbulent global macro environment, business momentum is very positive. And of course, we're very encouraged by our accelerating RPO and associated revenue growth. As we look forward, we're confident in our ability to deliver success for our customers and help them drive their digital transformation. As a result, we anticipate long-term, sustainable and profitable growth for Manhattan Associates.

And with that, Liah, we'd be happy to take any questions.

[Operator]

All right. [Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

[Terry Tillman, Truist Securities]

Yeah. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats. Exceptional results. I guess maybe - and hi, Eddie, Dennis and Mike, I should have said that to begin with. Maybe, Eddie, I'll ask you a question. Congrats on the hiring of the CMO. I'm curious, I know it's probably still early days, but what kind of impact do you see her in terms of having on the branding, marketing and just continuing to evolve go-to-market activities?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah. Yeah. It's early, Terry, but without putting too much pressure on and we're obviously very pleased to have her on board. And at the end of the day, we think, frankly, as well as we've done, we've still got some of the industry's best kept secrets, and we're anxious to be able to get that message out. So, I think we have the opportunity to share our stories with a broader community, drive awareness, particularly for our newer products. And just overall, frankly, get the message out that we're here to do business and help our customers in the industry with digital transformation.

[Terry Tillman, Truist Securities]

Understood. Well, maybe some healthy pressure is good, though, for Ann. So, maybe there's somewhere in the middle there, but okay, that's great. It was great to see the 40% contracted bookings from new logos. So this kind of like closes the loop because you have been building the pipeline in terms of new lower activity has been picking up. So now you see the conversion going on. What I'm curious about is, is it something with certain of the active cloud products that is getting you into parts of the retail or the e-commerce-oriented markets that you haven't been before, whether it's DTC or just other types of kind of micro segments? I'm just kind of curious because it is a striking number. Any more color you can provide there?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah. I don't think there's any specific micro verticals or sub verticals, Terry, but I do think that there has been some - a little bit of pent-up demand with the industry waiting for the real next generation of cloud native or next generation of solutions to emerge, those, in this case, being cloud-native, very innovative access to new innovation on a regular basis. So we're definitely seeing some uptick out there from customers that we haven't done business with before. We're fortunately seeing some nice takeaways from some of the older competitors that are out there. But it is - but it's quite broad and not focused on any given industry.

[Terry Tillman, Truist Securities]

Got it. And just my final question, and I appreciate Dennis and Mike, the figures are at the end that helps us a lot in terms of the guidepost. But I had a question actually on cash flow, Dennis. The cash flow was strong in the quarter, a lot stronger than expected. As you think about 2020, I know you don't usually guide on cash flow, but could we see a similar pattern whereby free cash flow margins are higher than operating margins? Just anything else you can call out on any onetime things or CapEx things into 2022 and just thinking about free cash flow.

[Dennis Story]

Yeah. No onetime items, great quality of one quality of earnings and quality of cash flow. So I'd expect we're going to post up another record free cash flow year next year, this upcoming year. And yes, definitely the potential to surpass EBITDA margin and as well as potentially operating margin.

[Terry Tillman, Truist Securities]

Got it. Thanks. Congrats.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Terry.

[Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations]

Operator, we'll take the next question, please.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Anybody there?

[Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations]

Operator? Operator, we'll take the next question. Liah, are you there? Liah, can you hear us, Liah. Everybody on the call, the operator just told us that she's having some technical issues. So, standby.

[Operator]

Once again, we have a question in queue from Joe with Baird. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.

[Joe Vruwink, Baird]

Great. Can you hear me, okay?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

We can, Joe. Apologies to everybody for the short break there that appeared to be a little technical challenge with the call service. But please fire away, Joe.

[Joe Vruwink, Baird]

Okay. Great. I'm wondering when customers are making a commitment to WMS, are you seeing any changes in interest going along with the WMS and integrating other of your solutions within the same engagement. So are WMS deals carrying over into order management or TMS in a bigger way. And I'm curious if that's the case, are the deal sizes getting bigger. So I'd imagine RPO, there's a good quantity of activity, but is the size of what you're winning also going up?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah. Great question. Just overall, clearly, our strategy is to partner with our customers to develop a digital transformation road map. And frankly, whether it starts with transportation, inventory, warehouse management, omni solutions and so forth, we really don't care where we get started. We certainly are seeing some multiproduct implementations. We launched Manhattan Active transportation management just a few months ago. We've got several customers and half of them is are implementing Manhattan Active WM as well. So it's great to see Manhattan Active TM and Madden Active WM coming together to provide that unified solution for our customers.

But I think across the board, when you look at our order management system customers, our WM customers and our transportation customers, they are all great prospects for the other solutions for upsell and cross-sell. As we've said historically, across the approximate 20 products that we have in our portfolio, the average number of products that any one customer owns is about 304. So we've got a lot of cross-sell and upsell potential. As far as your question around larger RPO opportunities for multiproduct, yes, is the answer to that. Do just bear in mind, though, that when you implement either a WM program, a TM program, an order management program and inventory program, they're pretty big. And customers can only bite off so much at once. So they tend to be a bit more serial than in parallel. But we certainly are seeing some joint unified programs.

[Joe Vruwink, Baird]

That's good color. And then, Eddie, I think the win rate disclosure you typically made this quarter, it went up relative to what the win rates have been trending at. I'm just wondering if you can kind of carve out where you're seeing the improvement? And maybe one of the things that was noticeable during the quarter is the geographic breadth of where the announcements are coming from it's not so much Americas or Europe, it's global, and you mentioned your global teams a number of times on the call. So I'm wondering if there's maybe anything new happening in the sales activity that can help explain kind of the improvement and what you're seeing.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

I think it's the continued investment in innovation that's really driving the win ratio when it comes right down to it. We will see that bounce around a little bit. But I think when we look at - when we talk to our prospects that have turned into customers about why they chose us and so forth. I mean it tends to be because of the innovation that we brought to the market. And certainly, the great experience we've got across our teams and all the other things, the attributes that we bring play a role, but the innovation in our product delivery, I think, is number one.

In terms of seeing an improvement in both EMEA and APAC this quarter. There's no question we've seen in EMEA and APAC lag just a little bit in terms of, I guess, we'll call it, the COVID recovery. And we're seeing a good bit more movement and momentum in Europe, number one, and then follow closely behind in APAC. So feel good about bringing a bit of balance back to the performance.

[Dennis Story]

Yeah. Joe, we are having some nice cross-sell upsell deal closures as well, about $60 million of bookings impact in the quarter.

[Joe Vruwink, Baird]

Okay. Thanks, Dennis. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. Very good. Thank you, Joe.

[Operator]

And your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Please go ahead, sir.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on a really strong quarter. So two for me. Obviously, we're seeing the guidepost gets raised. I'm curious if we had to think about, I guess, 9 to 12 months ago, obviously, you're outperforming your expectations. If we had to kind of stack order rank what drove that from like a product or market perspective, what would you say are the top one or two key drivers?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

I think we have been pleasantly surprised by the uptick of Manhattan Active WM, number one. I think certainly it's early days, but the momentum we're seeing around Manhattan Active Transportation Management. And then thirdly, the bounce back of Manhattan Active omni. We saw some subdued shall we say, activity in Manhattan Active omni, and that's back to picking back up. So that would be the top three, I think, on my roster, Brian.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

Okay. And I'll follow up on the WMS side, Eddie. So we're 16 months into Active WM. And obviously, I think we're hearing the win rates are good, the performance, everything sounds really encouraging. But I'm curious that the cloud or referenceability, is that a friction point for some customers? And to the extent that you have customers up and running, does that actually make the next 16 months like a lot brighter than the first 6 months. I'm just curious to get your thoughts there. Thanks, guys.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

We hope so. But we've certainly got great implementation activity going on, good referenceability and so forth. I'll tell you that the friction or the resistance to being early or an early adopter or no, whatever you want to call it, hasn't really been there. As you know, we had a beta customer when we launched. We already had a customer live, very successful, already been through a bunch of kind of versionless updates and so forth. So we had a great reference point to get it started and didn't see a lot of friction. But no question, success breed success. And as we continue to drive across verticals, across geographies and get more referenceability across all those dimensions, I think we certainly have the opportunity to continue to see success.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

Great. Thanks, Eddie.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Brian.

[Operator]

And your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel from Loop Capital [ph]. Your line is open.

[Mark Schappel, The Benchmark Company]

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions, and good job on the quarter. Congrats on that. Eddie, starting with you, I just want to revisit your prepared remarks around the hiring environment for your professional services team. And I just wonder if you could just give us a sense of where you're at with respect to your hiring plan for this year. Are you on plan for the most part, a little bit behind plan? Maybe just give us a little color there.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah, we're a little bit behind, Mark, where we'd like to be, frankly. It's a tough sledding out there from a talent acquisition perspective. But we've obviously got a great success story here. We've got a fantastic culture in the company. No question that people like to be associated with a successful company that is doing meaningful work for Tier 1 companies around the globe. So we're doing pretty good on that front. But if I could wave a magic one, there's no question we'd be a little further ahead with a higher in trajectory than where we are. And obviously, that's driven by demand.

[Mark Schappel, The Benchmark Company]

And with that said, given that demand is tight and as you said earlier, you expect it to continue to be tight for talent. Is that changing the way that maybe you're approaching R&D as far as prioritizing certain projects? In other words, maybe putting in some features and capabilities in your products that just make them a little bit easier to install and it doesn't require as much professional services time.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah. We're always focused on that, Mark, frankly, trying to make it. We're trying to drive down always the total cost of ownership for our products. We want to be feature-rich. We want to be able to provide the greatest innovation to our customers. But by the same token, we've got to continue to focus on total cost of ownership, speed of implementation, cost of support and so forth. So we've always been focused on that. I'll be honest, I wouldn't say that we've taken any particularly specific steps to focus on that in the last six months or so, but we remain focused on driving total cost of ownership bank. And obviously, you bring up a corollary point there with such a tight labor market for distribution centers, truck drivers and so forth, certainly, the capabilities that we bring to market, focus on blending, automation, robotics and people in the warehouse and so forth certainly is very helpful for our customers.

[Mark Schappel, The Benchmark Company]

Okay. Great. And then just going back to your earlier comments around the bounce back that you're seeing in your active omni business and product. Maybe just talk a little bit about what you think is driving that so-called bounce back.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

I mean stores were closed, right, for a couple of quarters, number one, the acceleration of the digital transformation that we're all seeing personally and professionally. So we're seeing a combination of the stores reopening and the need for store systems and very strategic omnichannel initiatives that are driving growth for retail and wholesale customers alike.

[Mark Schappel, The Benchmark Company]

Great. Thank you. That's all from me. Thanks.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.

[Operator]

And your next question comes from the line of Matt Pfau from William Blair. Your line is open.

[Matt Pfau, William Blair]

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Wanted to first start out on the supply chain challenges that I'm sure many of your customers are having. How is that impacting your business, if at all? Because I imagine it could drive demand as well as perhaps create some distractions with customers or prospects.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I would say it's got a slight positive to it, Matt. We're obviously involved largely in the finished goods side. So on the import side of things and all those boats sitting off the port of Long Beach and everywhere else, we're not necessarily managing that sequencing and so forth. But when the finished goods hit sure, there is a great need to accelerate the movement of that inventory, have the inventory in the right place at the right time and then get that inventory in the hands of the consumers in a timely fashion. And of course, again, our solutions creating that speed and that dexterity and that agility for our customers to be able to manage through these or help manage through these very, very tough times and the need to be able to manage inventory at very, very high levels.

[Matt Pfau, William Blair]

Got it. Great. And any update on the point-of-sale solution?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

I'll put a few comments in my prepared remarks about point of sale. But yes, we've seen a couple of terrific go-lives in recent weeks and recent months. And in terms of closures, a couple of other nice real important wins for us in the quarter. So continuing to see that forward momentum, frankly. And looking forward to getting more and more and more referenceable customers there. And as Brian from Ray J mentioned, the more referenceable customers that you've got, the less friction than might be in the sales cycle. So these couple of go lights we had in the quarter are important to us and as are the new sales and new bookings that we've seen in the quarter too.

[Matt Pfau, William Blair]

Great. And last one for me, just in terms of the dynamic of RPO growth and cloud revenue growth, maybe you can just remind us again about the timing differences between the two. And now that you've given us this helpful multiyear outlook, we can kind of see how cloud revenue growth accelerates and then RPO growth comes down a little bit off it's high. But how do we sort of think about the timing differences and how long those discrepancies take to resolve?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Well, I mean, I don't know, one of the reasons for providing those supplemental schedules and the guideposts and so forth was so that you can see how that dynamic shapes up. If you were to kind of pin me down on how long it takes for those things to normalize, it'd probably be the 18- to 24-month time frame. And of course, by the same token, we're going to continue to drive new RPO. - it'll have the same dynamic built into it. So - but I think 18 to 24 months before you see that kind of really normalize.

[Matt Pfau, William Blair]

Okay. I guess, maybe another way to look at it is with the Active WM implementations, which I think are the main things driving that discrepancy with the implementation rollout. What would the typical rollout for your Active WM deployments be? Because if I understand correctly, that's the primary driver of sort of the timing differences between those two items?

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Yeah. Well, so the thing to really be aware of there is a lot of this ramp, as we call it, is driven by multisite rollouts. So the average duration, typical duration to get an Active WM site up and running, let's call it, the six-month kind of timeframe. But when you're dealing with a global 10, 20, 30 distribution centers or more distribution centers around the globe, that's what takes time to move through that deal moving through the snake.

[Matt Pfau, William Blair]

Got it. Okay. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Certainly, Matt.

[Operator]

And your final question comes from the line of Mark Zgutowicz from Rosenblatt Securities. I'm sorry, but the question was withdrawn. Please go ahead, presenters.

[Eddie Capel, President and Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. Very good. If that's all of the questions for today, we'll say thank you very much for everybody's time, your support, and we'll look forward to seeing you - or talking to you on our Q4 call in about 90 days or so. Thanks, again. Bye-bye.

[Operator]

And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now all disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.