Pivotree Inc

XTSX:PVT

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Dennis Fong, executive]

[Operator Instructions]

Before we begin, Pivotree would like to remind listeners that certain information discussed today may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking information reflects the company's current views with respect to future events.

Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.

For more information on the risks, uncertainties and assumptions related to forward-looking statements, please refer to Pivotree's public filings, which are available on SEDAR.

During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they are not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS.

Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including for reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures.

Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Pivotree's CEO, Bill Di Nardo.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Thank you, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our first quarter 2022 conference call. With me today, as usual, is Moataz Ashoor, our Chief Financial Officer.

This was our third consecutive quarter of strong improvement in the financial performance of the business. Despite the choppy capital markets, I'm pleased to share with you strong results and some of my perspective on how to interpret this quarter's performance and the efforts of the Pivotree team in delivering them.

Overall, this is one of our best quarters on almost every measure. And with strong bookings again this quarter, I expect many of the positive trends to continue.

In the first quarter, we had record revenue of $24 million. This is 10% higher than Q4's record revenue and a growth of 63% year-over-year. It was also another record for quarter total bookings, about $19 million.

Both the Codifyd and the Bridge acquisitions have added nicely to our base, and we believe we're seeing solid organic growth from these businesses operating under the Pivotree umbrella.

And I've said this before, the 2 businesses we acquired were predominantly Professional Services. So adding them has impacted the mix of ARR, and we are building out our Managed Services offering in each of those respective categories.

That said, we still index very high on recurring revenue at 44%. And the 40-plus percent gross margins we generate as a company really differentiates us in this marketplace.

It makes it hard to compare us easily to a peer group. Again, a lot of folks that have pushed us into Professional Services category, when you look at the people in that peer group, they don't have the kind of margins or the kind of recurring revenue we do.

So again, a lot of what you see from us rivals some software-as-a-service companies. We continue to invest heavily in product development, focused on software and Software-as-a-Service solutions.

And as we accelerate their commercialization, I expect the mix to start shifting back towards recurring revenue, which should also positively impact our revenue per employee, which I do start talking a lot about in our quarterly letter.

And I'm sure many of our investors will be pleased to see the positive adjusted EBITDA that we recorded this quarter. Obviously, with the capital markets the way they are, positive EBITDA and cash flow is important.

Now, we've shifted to a very business [ unit-centric ] approach. So we're getting more visibility to keep profit drivers and enhancing our ability to manage them. Our 3 market-facing business units are all generating positive contribution margin.

Now, we announced some of the big wins in senior talent and our new President, Chief People Officer and our new General Manager of Commerce towards the end of Q1. And there are some other investments that we've made that impact expenses, going into Q2.

But we've also decided to take a more measured OpEx spend approach for the rest of the year, which means we do not expect to spend as aggressively as originally planned, in order to bring more focus and attention to driving a balanced growth approach.

As a result, I look at Q1's EBITDA as a good indication of our ability to achieve our goal to exit the year on a sustainable positive EBITDA trajectory.

Now, I know some of the analysts have projected different things over the course of the year. What I can tell you is, I don't expect us to run deep negative EBITDA in any of the upcoming quarters. But I do expect modest swings around that positive/negative for the next two until we settle into a stabilized Q4.

With inflation and interest rates rising, it's really important for our long-term success that we have a strong balance sheet in a long runway. The capital markets may remain closed for some time, just tech stocks like ours. So we'll need to produce our own cash to support our long-term acquisition and growth requirements.

So again, that's where the focus is. It's balanced growth. It is still growth, with our great gross margins and flow-through growth adds to the bottom line, but we will be looking to manage that OpEx spend and really make sure we exit the quarter the year where we said we would. Again, some great work by the team.

And I want to really call out, and I did it in my letter, that we've done all of these record results in the middle of the integration work and really creating one Pivotree. So the results you're seeing are the effects of the team often wearing two hats and doing two jobs.

Now, despite the headwinds we're all hearing about the broader markets, from our vantage point, the pipeline of demand from large enterprise B2B and B2C has remained strong. Q1 delivered very strong bookings. We set again a new company record at $19 million.

And this mix continues to rely on the Professional Services, but again, we still had ARR bookings close to $1.5 million, and we did have that great Q4 in this area. So again, the beauty of ARR at compounds. So you're really looking at almost $5 million in the last few quarters of ARR.

Now, Data Management was once again the biggest contributor, representing about 40% of total bookings in Q1. In Commerce and Supply Chain, we had a number of Professional Service renewals as well as some Managed Service expansion activity.

In fact, more than 1/3 of our total bookings in Q1 came from existing activities from existing customers. What's noteworthy about our nonrecurring bookings momentum is that this has been fairly consistent build since the IPO.

Those that were with us from that point, I know we took a huge dip during the pandemic. This has just been a constant build, a lot of organic growth in there, combined with what we've acquired and their organic growth.

The business momentum was really reflected in our strong book-to-bill ratio that you can see there. On a trailing 12-month basis, nonrecurring book-to-bill was 126%, and our sales execution has been steadily improving. This is -- again, one reason, one of many that I'm very optimistic that the growth is going to continue.

At the same time, although we continue to add new businesses at an impressive clip, Q1 revenue also benefited from slower-than-expected Oracle term. We've been quite transparent about some of the headwinds in Oracle. You can also see the effects of the opposite. It's complex. Sometimes it's hard to exit and move on to those new platforms.

And this past quarter would be an example where folks we did think at the beginning of the year were going to be transitioning off, have been unable and have come back to us renewed on the Oracle platform and are asking for assistance in the transition. And so again, we're benefiting now, when it comes to the compounding effect that can work both directions for you.

Compound, it can work negatively when it's coming off and positively when it's coming on. It also really has a positive impact when it just stays. So we did extend a number of Oracle client contracts now that are going to carry into 2023. We've even had another one that is extended into 2024. But we are being prudent.

And again, I think what's really important, we want to avoid surprises. We've tried to make sure the market is clear in understanding, all this positive growth is in combination with some of the impact negatively by Oracle.

So we're being prudent. I would caution anybody to take our best nanosecond of revenue and try to annualize it. We've got a really good quarter. We're going to continue to build. And my view at the moment is, we're tracking to have the year that we've been projecting and that somewhere in there, there's going to be a couple of lumps around Oracle.

I can't tell you exactly when, but we know that there will be lumps along the way. As I mentioned in my CEO letter, the reality is, the longer that runoff extends, the more the new revenues come in and replace it. And the more we do the revenue replacement in advance of the runoff, the less you'll see those impacts in our results.

And I think you're seeing that right now. We're getting great outcomes. Our actual true growth, net of Oracle, is really strong. And again, the longer that stuff stays, the less you're going to see the impact when it goes.

We've had some great wins around our frictionless commerce strategy. And again, I expect this stuff to continue well into the year. We've had a number in each of the categories. We've had some long-time retail customers that have transitioned from Oracle to SAP that are doing more work from us in our Commerce Group. We had some site enhancements.

And again, we've extended Managed and Professional Service relationships. I think what's really important to note with most of our customer relationships, our project isn't won and done.

It tends to be longer term. We keep customers for many years. And in some respects, a lot of our professional services ends up behaving a lot like retainer relationships with our customers.

In the Data Management side, you've seen a number of the announcements. We've had a number of expansion agreements. We've been cross-selling Data Management into some of our Commerce customers. And you saw a couple of the recent large SKU management agreements. This is data- or content-as-a-service.

Probably what excites me most about this right now is this is a significant piece of our future recurring revenue, high degree of automation starting to leverage our machine learning tools, our ability to ingest, transform and enrich data using automated tools is really going to start separating us from the rest of the pack.

A number of new logo wins in this category. And I just come back from India, where a number of the initiatives are around building the software in this category that is going to create those points of differentiation for us.

So a lot of exciting things going on in Data Management. The supply chain, again, you can imagine, in this economy now, getting efficiencies into the supply chain is critical. I'm thrilled that we have this category of capabilities in many of our existing Commerce customers are now buying and asking for help on supply chain.

We're calling out the Digital Solutions group. And again, one of the things I would point out here, we don't often sell our digital solutions directly to customer. These are our recurring-revenue new products.

They often get sold with or through one of the either Commerce, Data management or Supply Chain, but this is the category to keep an eye on. This is where our new product initiatives, Software-as-a-Service packages are coming out. This is all exclusively recurring revenue-type business.

And again, we're getting some traction with a number of the products that they're working on. I think the other thing I'd point out is a number of the pieces of software they're building, really are about affecting revenue transition.

Customers that are getting certain types of services from us, maybe they're more manually intensive or Professional Service oriented. The Digital Solutions are creating products that augment the people side and transition that revenue from more manually intensive to more automated.

Again, what's exciting about a lot of the work going on in Digital Solutions, is there's existing customers that are getting problems solved in a certain way. Digital Solutions are helping us solve those same customer problems, but in a more automated fashion.

Now, we continue to see new opportunities in the M&A front. And again, we've sort of combined this slide for you in my CEO letter, I do break out some of the organic versus inorganic growth, but we're continuing to see opportunities. And again, nothing to talk about today around any signed term sheets, but we're active.

We're in 4 or 5 deals that we're moving through their paces. And I would tell you, we're still pursuing. But as I mentioned in my letter too, I think we're still waiting to see some of the privates recognize and adapt to the changing multiples in the capital markets publicly.

Some of them still think they're worth a lot more than most of our peer group seems to be getting valued in the marketplace today. Again, most of our focus at the moment is around accelerating entry into next-generation platforms. Commerce is leading. They've got quite a few acquisitions that they're actively pursuing, but each of the business units has 1 or 2 that they're all working on.

I will tell you, nothing has changed. In fact, maybe more importantly, reinforcing the behavior we started a year ago, where we weren't focusing on empty calorie growth, we have ideal target characteristics that we were looking for last year. And we're continuing to maintain that today.

We want to see a strong history of growth that's evidence of customer adoption. It's got to fit our strategic profile. Gross margins have to be in excess of 40%, ideally above 50%, and there's got to be a healthy mix of product or Managed Services. So I can tell you with very few exceptions, everything we're looking at seriously has all of those criteria.

And we've also guided the team away from any businesses that are burning cash. So the reality is, we have a goal to exit the year in Q4 in positive EBITDA and trending to positive cash flow. We don't want to go buy a business that's going to be a drain on that.

So those are the characteristics we're looking for. You can imagine the more characteristics we have, the more you have to get in the funnel to find the one you really want. And again, I think our business development team is doing that.

So I think what's really important to point out here is, we do believe in the discipline of how we allocate capital and manage solution, and we drive sustained growth and shareholder value over time.

So I talked about a number of different metrics in our letter, but one of those is revenue per share, and we continue to improve that metric. We climbed to [ 387 from 350 ] and again, I track this regularly. And this is really to help demonstrate the capital efficiency of growth and reflect how we're using our funds that we raised during the IPO.

We also started talking last quarter about gross profit per share as this is the best leading indicator of future profitability. And so you can see, we're constantly climbing that number up. And again, that's a combination of buying good gross margin businesses but also growing that top line and sustaining gross margin.

So our gross profit per share, I think, is getting healthier and healthier. And again, this is going to be one of those metrics that we track over time. And the last thing I'm going to talk a bit about is our revenue per employee, and we are, I think, going to make this a formal metric in the coming quarters.

But this is an area I keep pushing our team on. This is a real demonstration of leveraging software and automation in the way you run your business. Most of the new products that we're building are about providing leverage for our employees, making them more efficient, being able to do more value creation for customer and rely less on billable hours to do that.

We get great insights from the Professional Services work we do. We see opportunities to create that leverage. And so this is why I continue to reiterate, we do Professional Services because it's strategic, not just because it produces cash for us.

And again, as we build more of these products and we start to commercialize them more, you're going to see that effect both in gross profit, but in revenue per employee. This, to me, is the best leading indicator.

Again, I don't want to leave the impression that next quarter, you're going to see us double it. But this is a number over the next 5 years, where I want to be a leader in whatever peer group you collectively and the capital markets decide to put us in. This will be one to watch that separates us from the rest of the peer group.

Again, this is about our belief in the use of software and automation to create frictionless Commerce solutions for our customers. So again, we're tracking a little over $150,000 of revenue per employee. Some of that came as a result of investment last quarter and highlighted with some of those new hires. But I expect us to be driving towards $200,000 of revenue per employee.

And again, the conversations with my own team are really think carefully about adding that next person. If there's a way to automate or make every employee a little bit more efficient, then let's look at making those investments because increasing productivity on 600 people is going to be worth far more than adding 1 more person and what they might be able to represent in revenue.

So there's a heavy emphasis around the world from our team now of really looking hard at how we drive value from every single expert that we've got running in the business. And we've got a lot of them, and we'll continue to add to them, but we want to really create leverage for them.

With that, I'll turn it over to Moataz to talk more about our financials.

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Great. Thanks, Bill. We're really pleased about how the quarter has turned out. I'll start my financial review, as usual, with the top line. Both acquisitions were strong off the gate in 2021, and we've seen acceleration in revenue opportunities since we've transitioned them into our business units.

Adjusting for the estimated revenue from the acquisitions, we had 10% organic growth in overall revenue as compared to Q1 of last year. In the nonrecurring Professional Services, we estimated the organic growth was 31%.

This reflects some of the revenue synergies we are driving in new categories by operating these business units under the Pivotree umbrella, as well as the growth in project activity we've had in new commerce areas investments we've made last year like VTEX.

On the recurring side of the business, we delivered 3.7% year-on-year growth. Sequentially versus Q4 2021, we had a reduction in spend from existing customers, contributing to the decline in recurring revenue to $10.9 million from the [ 11.2 ], which largely is from seasonality and up-spend during the peak periods.

Q1 also benefited from slower-than-expected Oracle churn, as Bill had mentioned, having experienced some planned departures getting delayed and retaining the revenue longer than forecasted as some of the clients are looking at -- also looking at options to delay migrations to a new platform.

But as we've stated before and Bill has stated, future churn and melt could still be a bit lumpy, and there could be quarters when client migrations have a bigger impact on our [ MRR ], but we are encouraged that the new [ MRR ] that we've been adding to offset this decline in Oracle, as shown by the growth year-on-year in recurring revenue that we had over [ last year June ].

Now, Slide 10 shows our P&L in more detail as you've seen in the past. But also, in the past few quarters, we had waterfall charts to show the impact of Oracle churn had on our business. As we lap that impact and as our revenue streams have grown, the impact has become less material.

We are seeing many good reasons to manage this business with the right balance between growth and profitability and the success companies can have when they are generating the cash flow to control its future. We communicated in Q1, our desired goal was to exit the year on a sustainable positive EBITDA basis.

Of course, positive EBITDA starts with strong gross profits. We had a record quarter of gross profits, up 7% versus Q4 and up 55% versus last year same quarter.

Gross margins declined to 42.5%, but this Q1 result doesn't concern us. We had a few -- we had a couple of timing issues of revenue deferrals associated with client milestones that were deferring the revenue into Q2, but no concern there and we should be able to recover that.

On a normalized basis, our gross margin is closer to 44% we've been recently averaging. The costs associated with the declining Oracle business, as we mentioned in the past, combined with our [ MRR ] growth that utilizes heavier cloud infrastructure has constrained margin expansion within the Managed Services that's been the same message from the last few quarters.

The Managed Services team is also looking at our mature business and working on a cost optimization plan that aligns with our revenue trajectory. Based on early identified savings and efficiencies, I expect our gross margins to improve over the year. As we've mentioned before, we are building a business that can deliver over 50% gross margins.

Now dropping to the EBITDA performance. We delivered positive adjusted EBITDA this quarter, which was ahead of plan. We exited 2021 with a plan to invest heavily in our growth in 2022, but the year-to-date spend through Q1 has been less than budgeted. And our revenue was ahead of expectation for reasons we covered on the previous slide.

As Bill mentioned, we had some hiring and investments late in Q1 that will put some pressure into Q2 EBITDA. But again, as we stated through this session, we -- our plan is always to exit the year with a strong Q4 sustainable EBITDA that takes us into 2023.

We expect our operating business units to run between 15% to 20% contribution to the overall business of EBITDA. With 50% of that, we would manage and invest back into product development and incremental growth spend, again, really managing our cash flow to drive and fund our investments, going forward.

Now turning to the balance sheet. The primary use in cash in Q1 was delivered by the net changes to the working capital balance, which we typically see in the first quarter of the year. It included certain prepayments of third-party software vendors and annual accrued bonuses.

We expect this to normalize and track closer to EBITDA performance as we move through the year. Cash at the end of the first quarter was $20 million, and we still have $25 million of undrawn credit facility with [ Bank of Montreal ].

Managing our growth investment and producing positive cash flow will be our priority as we exit this year. I'm going to turn it back to Bill now for a closing summary.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Thanks, Moataz. So I really want to end on a positive note. We had our strongest quarter ever on virtually every metric. We still have some work to do with our new products and service offerings to drive up that recurring revenue. But we've acquired some great talent that are working on solving interesting customer challenges.

We have a pristine balance sheet, strong cash balance and a business that's tracking to produce consistent positive EBITDA at a time, we're clearly now the capital markets value positive EBITDA.

One thing that pandemic taught me is, Pivotree is a very resilient organization, with a team that can adapt relentlessly. We're already thinking through now how to help our customers manage what could be a challenging economic period in front of us.

Again, we're an essential service for most of these customers. They sell and move product that drive their top line, bottom line with the services that we provide them. We think we're very well positioned to continue supporting these folks through what again, could be a challenging economic period.

Now, with the world opening up recently, I took the opportunity to start visiting our offices around the world. And I most recently spent some time with our teams in India, where we have 4 office locations and over 300 skilled and talented employees. The initiatives being worked on today around products and services that are fundamental to frictionless commerce journey were inspiring.

Our folks around the world have all really bought in to, understand and have their own take on what frictionless commerce is. And they've got some phenomenal insights driven from their experience with customers.

What I love about our new approach with the businesses and the business units, folks making decisions are the ones that are working closest with our customers. They understand the problems, they're solving for customers, and they're helping build products and services and solutions that, again, are going to automate and ultimately deliver better outcomes for our customers.

That was -- it was truly inspiring, seeing the depth of understanding around the organization. I was so impressed with the energy and the excitement coming out of India. And in a number of cases, employees who are just becoming pivoters through the acquisitions, but really embracing it. I think we've got some great cultural momentum.

And I expect, actually, in the next couple of quarters to come back and start talking about a center of excellence that we're creating in India, with remarkable talent that are really excited about what we're doing.

Our vision, combined with exceptional people, are going to change the way commerce is done. And I think we've now got an operating business that will allow us the patience to do it the way we had decided we wanted to when we first went public.

Again, as a parting comment, we published our third shareholder letter, along with these results that I hope you find useful. Again, I could probably have been more enthusiastic, given the outcome, but we've got a lot of work in front of us, and we are trying to continue to balance optimism with the practical reality of changing the way people shop in the world.

And we've said this for some time, this is a decade-long journey we're embarking on, and I think we've set the foundations really strong to do that. And again, I hope the capital markets recognize we can do both. We can change the way the world shops, and we can deliver good financial results in the process.

I think we've made significant progress, both in revenue per share, gross profit per share and creating that strong revenue per employee. I believe we're building shareholder value, and we're going to continue to be disciplined about how we use our balance sheet.

So with that, I'm going to leave it there, and I'm happy to take questions from the analysts. And for many of you that I see on the call today, I'm also always happy to answer your questions if you want to reach out.

[Dennis Fong, executive]

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question is from Daniel Rosenberg from Paradigm.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Congrats on a great quarter. My first question was around the legacy churn that you mentioned around Oracle. Is there any other color or insight to help us think about how net retention revenue plays out over the course of the coming quarters, years that you could share with us as it relates to legacy versus customer repeating spend with you?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes. I think, Moataz and I probably can tag team this one. I'll give you my high-level perspective and then maybe Moataz can jump in with a bit more of the detail. But I think where we're trying to be cautious, Daniel, as you know, the first time we got burned as a company was some unexpected churn that we hadn't effectively forecasted.

And that's a little bit of the nature sometimes with the smaller customers, where their ability to move or the ones that went out of business that was unexpected. We're not seeing that as much anymore, right? We're now down to some of the biggest remaining. It's a bit more of a planned transition.

And so I think what you're seeing is quite likely predictive of the next 24 to 36 months, a slow runoff. And again, as we are replacing revenue with those same customers with other recurring, I think we can expect to hover between that 85% and 105% of recurring revenue -- net revenue retention.

But again, as we talked about, it is a little difficult sometimes when it's a recurring revenue that then goes to a project-based revenue with that customer before they return to recurring. So the key for us is, we keep the customer and we move them across different types of revenue profiles, whether it's different categories or different services.

I think the key for us, and we need to start figuring out how to better report that, is, are we keeping the customer regardless of revenue type? Moataz, I don't know if you want to add to that?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Yes. Maybe just to give you some -- I think it's similar to what I've kind of shared in the past that the percentage of Oracle that we're worried about, is kind of continues to be a smaller portion of our overall revenues. I don't think there's anything, I would say, outside the legacy in Oracle. That's kind of gone as to the net revenue retention that we've reported.

So those are so kind of the main messages and kind of continues to be the headwind. And I think just going forward, I would say, over the next 12 to 18 months, there's a cohort of Oracle customers that have been able to describe it as -- there's -- it probably are around single digit, mid-single digit as a percentage of our total revenue that we're watching, and we're just talking to them.

And some of them are talking about delaying. Some of them are asking for another 12 months and to help them figure out their next landing destination. And some, we're watching because we want to make sure they don't surprise us as well and how do we make sure that we're part of that discussion.

So I'd say that the percentage has gotten smaller. I'd say, it's about kind of mid-single digits as a percentage of our total revenue over the next 12 to 18 months that we're keeping a close eye on, an active discussion with the [indiscernible].

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

And then in the broader market, we've seen some retailers speak of inflationary pressures and the potential of a weaker consumer. So in terms of their budgets, I know you had mentioned you've seen no sign of slowdown.

Maybe you could speak to some of the differences between where you see budgets that are a necessity and kind of won't change versus some of the more discretionary spend and kind of how you're positioning the company towards a potential risk along those lines.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes, I think it's a great question, Daniel. And I think one of the things that has always given me confidence, even you saw us through the pandemic when everyone went into a panic, and we did see some of our Professional Services drop off unexpectedly. But what picked up was Managed Services. Managed Services are essential.

Like every single customer that runs a store that we're in charge of, that's probably their single biggest store in their ecosystem as they start to pull back in OpEx spends around their universe. I think the area you're going to see as potential upside for us is projects slow down and Managed Services increase.

When a retailer or operator, again starts to constrain their OpEx, I think IT departments become challenging places. And as a result, you start to see more outsourcing.

And again, with our leverage, with our concentration ratios of people skills, I think our emphasis inside our place is making sure that our PS folks are capable of making that shift towards delivering more of a managed service in the same category.

I think you're going to see our Managed Services benefit from the inflationary pressures, risk of recession. I think all those things are going to result in folks pulling back on people spends in their companies and outsourcing and looking for cost savings.

And I think we can deliver those in spades. And the more we have of automated solutions, again the more value we're going to be able to create for customer when we're not trying to sell billable hours into this economy. So again, I'm really optimistic that a lot of our core capabilities are going to play well in this next economic cycle.

[Dennis Fong, executive]

Our next question comes from John Shao at National Bank.

[Meng Shao, analyst]

Congratulations for a good quarter. My first question is, I understand that the results are pretty strong, especially on the organic side, so is there a line of business that's actually outperforming the rest of the lines did you drive the strong organic growth this quarter? Or is pretty much balanced across the board?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

No, I think it is -- we've been, I think, reasonably transparent. Our Data Management business has been a house on fire. And again, when I look at the problems we're solving for customers, the value proposition we're communicating.

And frankly, again, while some of our customers may still not use the words "frictionless commerce", what they're beginning to understand is all of their infrastructure and all of their commerce systems rely heavily on good data, the speed of data and the ability to get data into a system and back out to customer or back out to their various published points.

That velocity of data is a critical value driver for revenue and cost management, frankly, too. So what we're seeing really is more companies recognizing the value of data, the transformative nature of it. And again, our -- that business is really tracking well ahead of plan.

Again, what excites me about that business is, there's some terrific operators who are also seeing the opportunity to leverage automation into the work that they're doing. And I can tell you, the more automation, the more enhanced the value proposition is for customer. I think, that just creates a further acceleration. So that business is really exciting right now.

Supply Chain, again, it was -- it's right category, right time, good team. We've just got to get some more heft into the team to help them be able to pursue all of the revenue opportunities that are there.

So I think Supply Chain has the same ability to hyper-accelerate, based on market need. But it's the smallest of our categories and has a little bit more the growing pains that come with that. But we're very confident it's going to display the same trajectory.

With Commerce, you saw we hired Joseph Lee, Again, this is a really, really sharp operator with a strong revenue orientation, customer orientation. I don't think he's been in the city since we hired him. So we're seeing a dynamic change. He's in front of customers every single day.

And I expect Commerce, you'll start to see that explosion in Q1 of next year as the groundwork that Joseph [ Lang ], some new partners that we've just brought on over the next 6 months, I think you'll start to see that one fire even harder.

[Meng Shao, analyst]

Okay. And the other question I have is, I'm just wondering if you can give us some additional colors on your new locations in India, I mean, what is the function of that new locations that the R&D center like -- or delivery centers? And how should we think about the impact on your gross margin because given it's essentially offshoring activities?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes, I'm going to say two things on that front because you picked the hot button for me. Number one, we've been in India for years. So we've had them in Delhi or Noida and Pune for quite a number of years. We have used them traditionally offshore, and we've been able to improve margins in some categories for doing that. We get 24/7 coverage.

But the one thing I would caution anybody to think long term about is, we have increasing -- and this last trip to India just reinforced that. This is not about offshore. This is not about lowering costs in the long term. We have incredibly talented people. I tell you, walking into the Mumbai office, you could have been anywhere in the world, you could have been in San Francisco.

Just quality environment, high-energy folks. I had presentations from all the groups that rivaled what we do and how we communicate here in North America. And I saw investments in really talented folks. The fact that the labor rates right now are much, much lower has a midterm benefit.

But my long-term message to everybody is, talent like that is not going to tolerate long term, getting paid a fraction of what their peers around the world are getting paid, you're going to see globally people who want to get paid for the value they create, not the city they live in. And that's why it's so important to me that we think about revenue per employee globally.

And that's been my message to the team in India as well. You've got to focus on revenue per employee, not cost per employee. And I think this team is going to run with that. That group delivers a lot of our -- in Mumbai, a lot of our MDM solutions, and they're doing a lot of the work facing customers.

The margin in that category is terrific. We'll tell you, without a doubt, we've benefited from cost-effective labor, but that is an incredibly talented labor team over there, deep insights around customer requirements and an ability to [ reflect ] that codified change.

So I think what you're going to see over time is a shift not just in that, let's move labor there. It's going to be a shift in expertise, and centers of excellence are going to crop up. Particularly in the machine learning area, we're hiring some real talent over there that I think are going to accelerate what we do in data transformation through machine learning.

[Dennis Fong, executive]

Our next question is from Jesse Pytlak at Cormark Securities.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

Maybe just to kind of come back to one of Daniel's questions on kind of the macro and kind of the risk to meet your customers. I understand your remarks about potential for greater outsourcing and the benefit to your Managed Services business to that. I guess, is there any risk though to your existing customers downsizing their environments? Or is that too much of a simplification?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Look, again, I think part of what makes us a resilient and adaptive organization is we're paranoid. So it's not like we're sitting on our hands going, "Oh, it's going to be great." It's -- the team is working on what are our customers going to need, how do we adjust the service offerings, how do we start thinking about helping customers that are going to face a challenging environment.

So I would caution anybody to think that we're so optimistic, we're doing nothing. I'd say, it's the opposite. The reason I'm optimistic is we got out in front of it. The team is looking at all the different ways we can help and how our customers may need help. And if that includes downsizing some environments, then we'll be prepared to do that and make sure that we manage the cost appropriately. There's a real value to the fact we've shifted so much from bare metal environments that scaling up and scaling down is much more elegant for us and our customers and costs track much more closely to revenues now.

And so again, that ability to be more flexible for customer is one of our value propositions. Do I think it's likely that someone who runs $1 billion of revenue transactions through an environment is going to downsize that environment?

No, I just like -- it's not easy to just shutter a store that's performing, you might close stores that aren't performing in a down environment.

Again, remember, it's not like we're running 50 online stores for a customer. We run a single-commerce ecosystem. That's not the store you close and when things get tough, you close the underperforming ones. And I would suggest to you that not a single one of our customers has an underperforming digital presence.

In fact, I think you're going to see, as we've seen for a decade, it's just going to continue to increase in overall importance in the revenue mix. And I think you're also going to see, they want to leverage that same kind of automation and technology to make their in-store environments more efficient.

So on a probability basis, I think the probabilities are very high. The services we offer will remain in demand. But from a planning perspective, I can tell you that our leadership team is already planning for the worst and figuring out what the different scenarios look like, so that we don't get caught with a surprise that we can't manage.

And I'm sure that's true for every great organization out there. They're planning for what could be a tough road ahead. And the ones who aren't, are going to have really negative surprises, and they're not going to be able to react.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe shifting over to gross margin. I know you already touched on the timing issues in the milestone-based revenue deferrals. Just wondering if you could just maybe elaborate and quantify the impact on revenue this quarter.

And then, I think you mentioned that should be recognized during the second quarter. So should we expect to see gross margin strengthen here in Q2? And then, how should we think about the outlook for the rest of the year on gross margin?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Yes. I highlighted to you, but 44% of the normalized Q1 that we look at with some of the timing differences, I think to your point, yes, as you took the deferred revenue and got most of the work done, expecting to see an uplift in Q2.

But normalizing for those two, there's really two areas. Obviously, the growth value pricing that we're putting out there in the market and then also the what I mentioned around our Managed Services and building a cost structure that is aligned with our revenue trajectory for Managed Services.

And we've already seen, again, some early indication that there's some cost efficiencies and optimization in place that's starting soon and expect that to improve over the year.

So those are really two reasons that we expect our gross margins to improve over the course of the year. You will see a Q1 and Q2 timing that would be normalized. But overall, the trajectory is still margin improvements quarter-over-quarter.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

Okay. Got it. And then just lastly, any commentary you can provide on just bookings momentum here in the second quarter?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

I mean, what we have is the decline in Managed Services. And what we've initially forecasted in Oracle has worked in our advantage as we highlighted. So some of what we expected kind of going from Q1 to -- Q1, and we'll carry on a few more months.

But obviously, we want to stay conservative and make sure that we don't overpromise on this one, but expecting that to carry forward to a slight improvement.

But again, always with project spend and project bookings, I think the burn against the project budget and spend will impact our Q2. We've had a strong Q1, strong -- coming off of strong bookings, expecting Q2 to kind of continue and obviously, replenishing it. Our backlog is going to be our focus and make sure bookings continue to stay strong in the nonrecurring mix.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

I think, Jesse, what your question around like just bookings momentum is, I think we've got -- we've reached new highs, right? And I think what's important for everyone to recognize is, there's now kind of a new floor standard.

And I would say, an average of 16 is probably the baseline of what we would expect every quarter. And then when we have these peaks, I think [ 19 ] was a remarkable quarter, given everything that's going on. There's been a significant investment that you didn't see in the Q1 results that will be in Q2, around more sales folks.

And the reason for that is, we want to hit a new sustainable level. I think we want to get to that point where we're up above $20 million a quarter of booking. I wouldn't say that you're going to see the impact in Q2 of those investments, but that's got to be the target, moving forward.

We start -- we need to crest the 20 and then sustain above 20 as we move forward, if we're going to grow the business at the rate we want to grow the business. So I think 19 is exceptional. And I think 16 would be what we would consider baseline.

And so I'm confident we're not going to drop below the 16, and I think we're going to hover between 16 and 20 over the next little bit until that sales team really starts hitting and firing on all cylinders, combined with some of these products that I think are starting to get traction, those are the things that will help us break through the 20 threshold.

[Dennis Fong, executive]

Our next question is from Robert Young at Canaccord.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Maybe I'll start with the macro. Seeing some concerns going into the current quarter on hardware, given some of the shutdowns in China. And so you said you're less dependent on bare metal. But are you seeing any risks to the ability to access servers or other hardware technology? Or how dependent are you on that?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

No. I mean, Rob, we effectively exited the hardware business a few years ago. And a lot of our data center stuff now is just slow runoff decline. We don't add a lot of servers, frankly. And you can see that in the CapEx spend. We -- even in some of our dedicated equipment comes in environments like IBM Software.

And so again, we haven't seen any supply chain issues affecting our ability to deliver vast majority of the Managed Services. And recurring work we do sits on top of public cloud now. And again, we haven't seen any inability on their part to manage the demand that we're giving them.

So we're not seeing the impact yet. It's a fair question that probably should factor into all of our disaster planning. But again, I think with the ability for us to move through public clouds, there's a lot more flexibility and agility in our business in that regard.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Great. Okay. And then, maybe you could help a little bit with the cadence of revenue through the balance of the year. You said -- you cautioned against annualized in Q1. And I think Q2 is normally a bit of a weaker quarter, seasonally. But you said there's some revenue deferrals.

And so I'm kind of a little bit -- I would love some help on how to understand the year because the second half is usually bigger. And so if we're not annualized in Q1, how should we think about the cadence of the year?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Consider this, a gun-shy CEO of overpromising after having been punished aggressively for overpromising and underdelivering a few quarters ago. So I think what I'm really trying to do, Robert, is manage expectations to. We're confident, we're optimistic, but we're trying not to be too brazing.

In light of lumpy miss that we expect around Oracle, we're just really trying to condition folks of -- this is a good quarter. It's representative of what we think we can do, going forward.

What we said last year, at the end of the year, we said at the beginning of this year, the kind of growth that would come from the numbers that you guys have sort of suggested is good growth, something that we would be happy with.

I think what we're really saying, Robert, is there's pretty strong evidence of an ability to outperform this year. But we're still in the early innings, right? We still have 3 quarters in front of us. We've got lots of promising things that suggest this could be the run rate. And there's still a couple of headwinds that might slow it down a little bit in one of those quarters.

So I'd just say, be cautious about getting overly optimistic too early. We'd like to continue to positively surprise you guys with good results and good outcomes.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. That's great color. Should we -- I mean, should we think of Q2 as a seasonally weaker quarter? I mean, the last couple of years, it has been. But I mean, there's been acquisitions. Should we -- is that still the expectation?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

I mean, Robert, I'd probably say we had a $19 million record booking right? And I think you take that, I think that's probably going to counter a bit. But I don't -- I wouldn't say it's going to be in -- but I think it will help the Q1 and Q2 trend. I don't think you would -- because of the record booking that you'd see that drop off of the Q1 level.

So I think where we are today, record bookings, obviously, with any nonrecurring PS business, we got to repeat that to continue that run rate. So I would -- to Bill's point, setting expectation in Q1 and Q2, I think the $19 million booking helps avoid some of that trend that you've seen in Q1 to Q2.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay, great. And then, great to hear the comments around EBITDA. So it sounds as though you're expecting to see EBITDA negative and maybe Q2, Q3 and then back to positive in Q4. And then, is there any targets that you might share on maybe where EBITDA margins might be in 2023 if the target is to have sustainable EBITDA, going forward?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Yes. I mean, we haven't gotten in the habit of giving specific guidance to give you direction. We are -- yes, to kind of what you highlighted in Q2, we've got kind of the hires coming in late Q1 that will kind of make an impact. I think, that's some of the merit increases that hit in Q2 as well.

So yes, what you highlighted around [ Q2, Q3 ] is kind of reasonable and fair. I think going into next year, I think [ our role ] model and discipline that we're putting in is kind of what I shared earlier. We expect each of our business units to generate positive EBITDA individually, 15% to 20%.

And we would take about half of that and reinvest it back in through sales, marketing product to drive future and longer-term growth. So that's probably the way to think about our business and where we're headed towards. We don't give [ estimates to ] 2023, I think you'd start seeing some of that impact in 2022.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

I think maybe just to encapsulate all the questions you're asking, Rob, is we're looking at balanced growth. And so I think kind of the $24 million we're running at right now is a reflection of investment and spend to drive an accelerated top line. And you saw another good quarter of results. And so you probably can predict Q2 is likely going to be a decent quarter.

And then you've seen an emphasis by the group now that says, "Hey, if you take a $24 million run rate business, how are you going to produce more consistent EBITDA?" And so as we go to exit the year, do we start to see a little bit of a slowing on the growth of top line? Not a lot because I think it's been good growth, but do we start to see more of the emphasis drop to the bottom?

And look, we've talked about this step function. You don't go from negative to super positive in a quarter. I think you're going to see us continue to step through gates of consistently breakeven, modest profitability, exit the year kind of in that 5% EBITDA range and start moving towards a 10% target that we've set for ourselves for next year. And so I think those are good sort of ballpark estimates.

And again, if the more emphasis we want to put on producing cash, you start to trim a bit off that top line. And so I think those are the trade-offs we're managing right now.

We've got good growth momentum with good margin that is flowing through to the bottom line, and you've got a CFO now who's helping our team understand the importance of OpEx constraints and being able to sustain reasonable growth with a focus on the bottom line.

So I think we're stepping towards 5% fairly quickly. And I think our goal would be to get towards sustained 10% into next year.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Thanks for the color.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes. Look, we -- I think one of the things we've been hesitant to do is just tell stories without showing results. So I think the fact that we had modestly negative or neutral last quarter, we're positive this quarter. I think we're showing -- when we say we're going to hit positive EBITDA, we're proving we can do it.

We've done it in the past. We're doing it again and you're going to see us now -- again, without whipsawing the company, we've got them focused on a 10-year vision. We're talking about minor tactical changes about how we manage some of the interim periods towards modest growth with modest EBITDA. But the business is capable of producing as we're showing right now.

[Dennis Fong, executive]

We have no further questions. Bill, I'll turn it back to you to close the call.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Again, thanks for everybody joining this morning, continuing to take an interest in the business. We're really excited, and I'm remised for not leading with it, but just again, thank you to all of our employees, who have been able to do what they did in the first quarter of really unifying underneath the [ One Pivotree ] brand and delivering record results.

I'm really excited to see what this team can do when they're not having to worry about integration initiatives in combination with delivering great customer outcomes.

So those of you on the call that are investors in the business today, I think you have a great opportunity with terrific upside on this business. I continue to be a big believer and continue to invest in this company. And we're thankful that you're sticking around for the journey. So thanks, everyone, and we'll talk to you again in a quarter.