Martello Technologies Group Inc

XTSX:MTLO

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Martello Technologies Group Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Investor Conference Call. Today's call will provide information and commentary on financial results for the 3 and 12 months ended March 31, 2023. We will hear from John Proctor, President and CEO of Martello; and Jim Clark, Chief Financial Officer. Following these remarks, John and Jim will take questions from analysts. If you have questions following the call, you can reach Martello at [e-mail].

First, here are a couple of housekeeping notices. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded, and we expect that the recording will be available on Martello's website today. We remind you that today's remarks will include forward-looking statements that are subject to important risks and uncertainties. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please see the reader advisory at the bottom of Martello's news release, which is on their website and on SEDAR. The company's actual performance could differ materially from these statements.

We will begin with Martello's CEO, John Proctor. John?

[John Proctor, executive]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before Jim and I review the quarter, I'd like to offer my perspective on the 2023 fiscal year overall. Martello is made up of 3 distinct business lines in very different stages of growth which contributes to our overall financial performance. The first is growing rapidly, Vantage DX. This software was launched just over a year ago to monitor Microsoft Teams performance and user experience. We saw quarter-over-quarter double-digit monthly recurring revenue growth from Vantage DX throughout fiscal 2023.

The second is a stable Mitel Performance Analytics business. The [ fault ] in performance management software we provide to Mitel customers continues to generate a high-margin recurring revenue base of more than $7 million annually.

The third is creating a headwind from Martello's top line revenue, our Sunsetting Legacy products, which by design are declining. The decline was steeper than we expected in fiscal '23 driven by the parting of ways with a partner whom we inherited through our acquisition. With absolute focus on our clients, we are actively pursuing the best fit to retain legacy customers on existing or new products.

With that context, I'd like to speak a bit about our key growth business, Vantage DX. More than 1 million Microsoft 365 and Teams users are now monitored by Vantage DX, and MRR grew by more than 600% in fiscal 2023. It is the Microsoft recommended Microsoft Teams and 365 Monitoring solution. And I want to restate that the recommended Microsoft Teams and 365 Monitoring solution by Microsoft.

We have enterprise customers, including some Fortune 500 names across a number of industries, including government, financial services, insurance and consumer packaged goods. They chose Vantage DX because they need a comprehensive out-of-the-box way to understand Microsoft Teams performance problems and what is causing them.

Having Microsoft in our corner brings a significant advantage. Our sales team is increasingly plugged in with their counterparts of Microsoft to identify accounts where Vantage DX will bring the highest customer or partner value, and we continue to participate in Microsoft events and meet ups around the world to build awareness of the solution.

Subsequent to Q4, sales pipeline generated in Q1 fiscal 2024 by Microsoft and co-sell activity, exceeded the number generated by this channel in all of fiscal '23. Again, to reiterate that, in the last 3 months, Microsoft has generated more pipeline than in the previous 12 months.

Another important channel for us is our partnership with Orange Business Services. You will recall together that we closed the Vantage DX deal with one of the largest food manufacturers with 80,000 employees earlier this year. At the end of fiscal 2023, we expanded the partnership by helping our Orange deliver Vantage DX as part of a managed service offering. This has led to an expansion of our sales pipeline with several new opportunities, half of which are in North America, with some large finance and manufacturing enterprises.

Our partnership with Paessler continues to provide a steady stream of revenue that's been exceeding our forecast. The OEM are part of our solution to add value to their monitoring offering. Our partnership with Mitel continues to expand. We recently launched software and voice quality monitoring in our NPA software, helping them to drive adoption of soft phones for hybrid work. The anticipated acquisition of Unified by Mitel is expected to double Mitel's user base. This represents a significant new opportunity for Martello as Unified has no NPA solution or similar. As Mitel celebrates its 50th anniversary, we have been very active as their key partner and customer events globally.

We are actively investing in the Vantage DX platform to align with the pace of Microsoft Teams innovation. Half of the world's knowledge workers are now working remotely or in a hybrid model. That's why innovations like Microsoft Teams Rooms, or MTRs, exploded in popularity. MTRs provide meeting experience to put in-room and remote attendees on an equal footing. In our March 2023 Vantage DX product release, we delivered MTR monitoring features that ease the IT challenge supporting hundreds or thousands of MTRs. According to customers like Unum, a Fortune 500 insurance company, businesses can reduce the time they spend troubleshooting MTR issues dramatically, ensuring business to maximize their return on investment with strong adoption [ usage ].

Our team is laser-focused on driving Vantage DX MRR growth through the acceleration of direct and channel sales as well as the retention and expansion of existing clients. I'll speak more about this in a few minutes when I close my perspective on Martello's strategy and outlook on fiscal 2024.

For now, I will hand it over to Jim to provide a more detailed review of our financial performance in Q4 and fiscal '23. Jim?

[Jim Clark, executive]

Thanks, John. Good morning, to all. Before I review the Q4 and fiscal 2023 financial results, I would like to share my perspective on the company's performance. We've built a strong Vantage DX base of more than 1 million users within some of the market's top leaders within their sectors. While we address the short-term headwinds of legacy churn, I believe that our continued sales and partner development efforts will bring strong net accretive growth. Without a doubt, Martello has the right product at the right time, partnering with market leaders to provide proactive and meaningful insights to maximize productivity through optimal systems performance.

Let's move into the financial discussion. As always, we have posted our financial results and the related press release to SEDAR, where you can review them in more detail at your convenience. Revenue in fiscal 2023 was $16.1 million, representing an 8% decrease compared to fiscal 2022. Q4 fiscal 2023 revenue of $4.03 million represents a 6% decrease compared to $4.27 million in Q4 of fiscal 2022. As Vantage DX revenue grew at double-digit rates each quarter and Mitel revenue remained stable, our Sunsetting Legacy product revenue declined more rapidly than anticipated in fiscal 2023, causing the decline in total revenue.

In fiscal 2023, Vantage DX annual recurring revenue grew by 612% to $1.92 million with 1.1 million Microsoft users monitored by the platform. Total Vantage DX revenue in fiscal 2023 was $1.25 million compared to $0.08 million in fiscal 2022. Sunsetting Legacy product revenue declined by 25% or $2.51 million in fiscal 2023 and $0.68 million in Q4 of fiscal 2023 compared to Q4 of fiscal 2022. Legacy product revenue is Sunsetting as planned, with the exception of offboarding a large legacy partner, which is now complete. The company is executing on a strategy to convert legacy customers to the Vantage DX platform.

The Mitel business line remained a stable and profitable source of recurring revenue. Q4 fiscal 2023 revenue increased by 1% to $1.8 million compared to $1.78 million in Q4 of fiscal 2022. The increase is attributable to favorable currency conversion. Mitel revenue in fiscal 2023 was $7.15 million, a 1% decrease compared to $7.25 million in fiscal 2022, and Mitel represents 44% of total revenues in fiscal 2023 versus 41% in fiscal 2022.

Revenue was 99% recurring in fiscal 2023 compared to 98% in the prior year. Gross margin as a percentage of revenue was 88.5% in fiscal 2023 compared to 90.7% in fiscal 2022. The decrease is primarily attributable to the higher cost of hosting software products on the cloud and an increase in the cost of inventory related to third-party software resale. Hosting costs continue to improve as the company executes a multiyear action plan including continued Vantage DX growth coupled with technological advances towards optimized multi-tenancy.

In Q4 of fiscal 2023, our total monthly recurring revenue was $1.33 million compared to $1.41 million in the prior year, a 6% decrease attributable to the declining subscription maintenance and support on Sunsetting Legacy products, as discussed. MRR is a non-IFRS measure representing average monthly recurring revenue earned in a fiscal quarter.

Operating expenses normalized for the Q3 2023 asset impairment loss decreased to $18.6 million in fiscal 2023 compared to $21.72 million in fiscal 2022. The decrease is primarily attributable to the cost optimization exercise executed in Q2 of fiscal 2023. Management remains focused on value for spend in all areas of the business. The Q4 fiscal 2023 net loss of $1.33 million represents a $0.83 million or 38% improvement compared to the net loss of $2.16 million in Q4 of fiscal 2022. In fiscal 2023, excluding impairment losses, the net loss decreased by $3.12 million. The improvement in net loss is attributable to the items just discussed.

The adjusted EBITDA, a non-IFRS measure, losses decreased by 23% to $2.21 million in fiscal 2023 compared to $2.86 million in the prior year. This again is attributable to the cost optimization exercise undertaken by management as noted. The company's cash and short-term investments balance was $2.22 million at March 31, 2023, compared to $5.02 million at March 31, 2022. Working capital of minus $8.24 million at March 31, 2023, compared to minus $2.27 million at March 31, 2022, reflects the Vistara loan of $6.3 million being reclassified to current liabilities plus the addition of the $2.23 million Wesley Clover International subordinate loan being added to current liabilities.

On May 26, 2023, the company announced an extension of the Vistara loan. Under the terms of the extension, Martello will make a series of payments to Vistara which will pay off the debt in its entirety by September 28, 2023. The company also announced the extension of the WCI subordinate loan.

To close, I remain confident that management is effectively responding to the strong market opportunity through our continued focus on the evolving value chain from lead generation, partner enablement, sales cycle time and a high-value product offering, all while continuing to improve our operational performance.

I will now hand it back to John to close with his perspective on Martello's outlook. John?

[John Proctor, executive]

Thanks, Jim. As I mentioned earlier, our focus is to grow Vantage DX MRR while retaining and expanding as many legacy customers as we can. In this, our partnerships with Microsoft and Orange will be key. And we are seeing extremely good indicators of future growth in these channels with developing sales opportunity pipelines. We also have a number of new partners in the pipeline, which we made public shortly.

I'm really pleased with the momentum we're seeing with Vantage DX and remain very confident that we are in the right market at the right time. Microsoft Teams is a large and growing market of 300 million users and IT teams globally are facing escalating pressure to manage Teams performance for a mix of remote and office-based users.

I see some strong opportunities for upside in the medium term. The most important is our promotion to top-tier Microsoft partner status, which happened earlier this year. This place us -- places us in a much smaller group of partners with access to joint marketing activities. And more importantly, it provides Microsoft sellers and has an awful lot of them, with a higher incentive to sell our product to their customers. We are already seeing the impact of this with more and more Microsoft sellers reaching out to us.

We're doing everything we can to increase the velocity of our Vantage DX sales cycle. We introduced a lighter and more standardized trial to reduce the time each prospect spend evaluating the product and introduce paid professional services for those who require extended trials. Several recent product innovations are providing increased day 1 value to accelerate the trial period.

I want to draw your attention to comments from our Chairman, Terry Matthews, in last evening's press release. Terry has been a strong supporter of Martello. He provided $2.4 million through a private placement that was completed last week and has extended repayment of the Wesley Clover subordinate debt to May 2024. Having founded or funded more than 100 tech companies, Terry has an outstanding track record of capturing a market opportunity in executing. He is absolutely steadfast in his belief that Martello has a unique solution that addresses a growing need in the market for Microsoft Teams monitoring.

Mitel continues to be a strong and valued partner, and we do see some upside in this channel in the future, particularly as they expand with the Unified acquisition. We remain focused on growing Vantage DX MRR by executing our Microsoft and channel strategy as I discussed, targeting key legacy customers, the conversion of Vantage DX, maintaining a regular cadence of product innovation, continuing to build a pipeline of direct sales opportunities and streamlining our sales process to accelerate time to revenue. We are appropriately resourced today to achieve these objectives, and we'll continue the disciplined cash management that Jim spoke about earlier.

Jim and I are here to answer your questions. Operator, would you please facilitate the Q&A part of this call.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Kiran Sritharan of Eight Capital.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

To start, I'd like to unpack your partners. First with Microsoft. Can you further discuss the changes in your recent partnerships with their sales team specifically. Like are there any types of sizes of customers that they're adding to your pipe?

[John Proctor, executive]

Yes, I'll go on that one. So initially, we are a gold partner, then we're a managed partner and then we jumped to the single top tier. And top tier is interesting, and I [ say ] that because what it means is now the sellers get comped. And one of the first things when you reach out to a Microsoft person as they ask back and saying, where do you fit in the Microsoft ecosystem. So for example, we now have the -- these are the 8 things that are advantageous to you, Mr. Seller, when you help us close a deal. So not only do they get Azure relief because they all have an Azure [ closure ], but they did now get compensation for [ closing ] us. And that's part of this top-tier program, which we weren't in until beginning of this year, this calendar year, I should say. So that's part of that. As I said, we're seeing a big acceleration now in terms of opportunities that Microsoft. And I use that sort of generic term Microsoft, it makes it sound like it's a giant organization [ views ], but the Microsoft sellers or the Microsoft client facing, we are seeing much more interaction with those guys.

And these are enterprise sized deals. These are 40,000, 50,000 person organizations sort of Microsoft sized. And what I mean by that is the -- the client executives they have, the client solution architects they have or CSMs. They are focused on their big enterprise clients, and that's where our solution fits. If an organization is big enough to have an IT team, then they're big enough to have our solution. If I look at a smaller company and let's go down sort of sub 1,000 people, that's really where we would see the partners running it themselves. That's really a managed service offering. The partners would run those clients themselves. We have a few of those ourselves. We run a few of those, but they are distinct and unique. And we actually picked those fairly early on in the life advantage. We'd rather make a mistake with a [ 550, 800-person ] customer than we would a 10,000-person customer. So we deliberately targeted a couple of those early on to make sure we got it right at the front. So the Microsoft relationship is growing, being in top tier helps. And as I said, the new pipeline generation from the Microsoft client focusing team is starting to pick up dramatically.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

That's helpful, John. And I think, secondly, we'll focus on your other channel partners like Orange. They had a good win there this quarter. Has there been any recent changes or trends that you're seeing on the pipeline? And also you mentioned there were new partners that are coming online. Are we expecting to see them onboarded as early as this year?

[John Proctor, executive]

So I'll start with Orange and then the other partners. So Orange, absolutely. The -- we transitioned from a what was pretty much a reseller agreement. We had the big client, they wanted and they needed a tool. We move fairly quickly through that. What we then did was spend some time on a managed service partnership agreement, which is far more complicated as a partnership agreement, but we've got that done now. That opens up to a much broader because what Orange have been doing primarily was focusing on us on their new pipeline. And by that, I mean as they had a new deal in the pipe that had Office 365 times associated, they would be able to potentially bring us in, which limits you to only new deals. It doesn't mean you're going to talk to their legacy customer base. And by their legacy, I mean, current customers. As we moved into the MSP agreement, it means we can go and now talk to their managed service customers and bring something new to them. So it's actually opened up another side of their business because they have 2 different teams. One is out trying to attract and hunt down new business and the other is running the current business. We now can step into the current business side, which we haven't been able to previously. So that's why the Orange transition is important to a managed service agreement because it brings us that whole other side of the company.

On the other partnerships, certainly, yes, I'm expecting at least one of them to be announced certainly next, I would say, next 4 to 5 weeks. We'll have one announcement out. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't because we know where it is. But there, again, I've been surprised in the past. But then, yes, we've got a couple of others. In a way, we have an awful lot of demand from partners at the moment. We're actually trying to manage that because again, the team isn't huge. Partnership management is a very specific skill set, and we want to make sure that the partners we do have, we are operating efficiently and effectively as possible. So we're making sure that we actually onboard at our pace. In reality, I could sign an awful lot of people very, very quickly, which would overwhelm the team we have got and would mean we're not managing the partners we have as efficiently and properly as we could.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

Understood. And on the legacy business, we saw some lumpiness this year. Do we expect anything similar in the forward churn? Just curious how you recommend we model this?

[John Proctor, executive]

Yes. No. I mean as we mentioned in the call, we had one partner we've inherited. And the executive relationships really weren't -- didn't exist or weren't as strong as they should be. So when they started to look at saying, do we really need your tool? It became very, very hard to have that conversation because the people we're talking to actually couldn't make any decisions. So that one sort of timed out as it were. There is nothing like that in front of the moment. We never managed to get our arms around that partner having inherited them as part of an acquisition. So when they display it away, it was very, very hard to hold on to them and we couldn't but there's nothing like that in the future for us.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

That's helpful. I'm good to know. And finally, one last one from me, for margins. I'm -- looking ahead, -- can you discuss -- you did mention there was a multi strategy in place for optimization. Can you discuss how you're rightsizing this cost base besides beyond the scale benefits that you see with cloud on the top line expanding?

[Jim Clark, executive]

Yes, sure. I'll jump in on that. So we are looking at really a multitiered approach to improving our margins. The focus would be on rightsizing both our production and our development environments. So as you can imagine, in the rates to stand at Vantage DX, there's just a mountain of code that's established. And therefore, part of that exercise is really rationalizing that back down to manage costs effectively. We have introduced a new observability platform that's going to help us. It's going to be a much more cost-efficient way to look at our cost consumption within the cloud. And then the other key one, and this is a bit of a longer poll item that we'll be tackling in this fiscal year, but it's not something that we've been able to jump on right now, is migrating our workloads that currently run in Windows containers to move them over to Linux containers. The added benefit of that is stability of the environment and quality. So we're pretty anxious to get that one complete.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to John Proctor for closing remarks.

[John Proctor, executive]

Thank you. And to wrap this up, I want to reinforce a couple of things. The first is, if I look at Vantage, in our first year of life of this product, we have added 1 million users. And if anyone knows sort of the SaaS world and what is it, in the first year of life of a product, adding 1 million users is a fairly significant milestone to achieve. So we're very proud of that, and it talks about the trajectory. The other thing, and again, having spoken to a number of the analysts, we're not the easiest company to analyze. We are in 3 pieces. We've got this Vantage piece. It's growing, and as I said, 1 million users in the first year. We have Mitel, which is holding steady, and then we have our decreasing legacy. The exciting part, obviously, is Vantage growth. And as we can see, with that level of growth, at some point, the decreasing legacy gets outweighed by that Vantage growth. And that's absolutely the focus. If I look at our approach coming through, we're going to go Vantage as fast and as strong as we can. We're going to improve it as fast and as strong as we can. We're going to hold Mitel ideally add and with Unified coming, that becomes exciting, and then we're going to manage that decreasing legacy. So again, we can maintain as much revenue and MRR from that as possible by spending -- however, spending very little money on it because Vantage is where the growth is, and that's where we need to put our horsepower. So that's our focus, and that's what we're going to do. And as I said, we're very proud of what Vantage is doing. We're proud of our status with Microsoft and that we're proud of the growth of this first year of its life.

So on behalf of all of us, thank you for your interest in Martello. The recording of today's call will be available on our website later today. You can reach out to our Investor Relations any time by e-mailing [e-mail].

Have a great day, and thank you very much for your time on the call.

[Operator]

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.