Earnings Labs

C3.ai, Inc. (AI)

Q3 2021 Earnings Call· Mon, Mar 1, 2021

$9.00

+2.39%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-18.63%

1 Week

-30.93%

1 Month

-45.55%

vs S&P

-47.28%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the C3.ai Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speakers today. Paul Phillips, Vice President of Investor Relations at C3 AI. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Paul Phillips

Analyst

Good afternoon, everybody. And welcome to C3.ai's earnings call for the third quarter of fiscal year 2021, which ended January 31, 2021. This is Paul Phillips, Vice President of Investor Relations for C3.ai. With me on the call today are Tom Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Barter, Chief Financial Officer. After the markets closed today, we issued a press release with details regarding our third quarter results, as well as a supplement to our results, both of which can be accessed on the investor relations section of our Web site at ir.c3.ai. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available on our IR Web site following the conclusion of the call. During today's call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward looking under federal securities laws. These statements reflect our views only as of today, and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward looking statements or outlook. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. These risks are summarized in the press release that we issued today. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our prospectus. Also during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our press release. Finally, at times in our prepared comments or responses to your questions, we may discuss metrics that are incremental to our usual presentation to provide greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly results. Please be advised that we may or may not continue to provide this additional detail in the future. With that, let me turn the call over to Tom for his prepared remarks, Tom.

Tom Siebel

Analyst

Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure to have the opportunity to spend some time with you this afternoon. So let's talk about the company and talk about the market. Overall, we're really quite pleased with the progress that we continue to make in the market globally. We continue to break ground as the only enterprise AI software pure play. This is a large and rapidly growing market. We continue to innovate. We continue to expand our market partner ecosystem and the associated increased distribution capacity associated with that. We continue to demonstrate technology leadership. I believe that we are increasingly well positioned to establish a global market leadership position in enterprise AI software. So let's talk about the financial highlights. All in all, it was a strong third quarter. Revenue in the third quarter was $49.1 million. $42.7 million of that was subscription revenue, an increase of 23% from a year earlier. Subscriptions have increased to 87% of our revenue mix. Services revenue for the quarter was $6.4 million or 13% of total revenue, representing a decrease of 4% from a year ago. Non-GAAP operating expenses for the quarter increased to $49.2 million, up 27% from a year ago and non-GAAP operating loss for the quarter was $11.9 million compared to $8.4 million year ago. Let's talk about the overall state of the market. When we think about enterprise AI and digital transformation, we are focused on an extraordinarily large addressable market that according to analysts was $174 billion in 2020, increasing to $271 billion by 2024. This is a significant opportunity by any standard and the largest software market opportunity that I have seen in my professional career. Digital transformation enabled by enterprise AI remains at the top of the agenda of virtually every…

David Barter

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. We delivered a strong performance in the third quarter, and we're optimistic about the growing demand we’re seeing for our software. Revenue in the third quarter was $49.1 million, up 19% from a year ago, reflecting continued business momentum and increased adoption of enterprise AI. During the third quarter, subscription revenue was $42.7 million, an increase of 23% from a year ago. Professional services revenue was $6.4 million, a decrease of 4% from a year ago. We also saw an increasing diversification of our revenue mix. Our revenue growth in the quarter was highlighted by contributions from over six different industry verticals, including some of our newer verticals, such as life sciences and financial services that delivered approximately 24% of our third quarter revenue. Geographically, EMEA and APAC drove over 30% of our revenue. Finally, it's important to note the improving operating efficiency. This quarter subscription revenue increased 23% year-over-year while non-GAAP sales and marketing expense increased 14% year-over-year. An important aspect of our model is the usage of market partners. It is a leveraged selling model that significantly extends our sales reach into each industry vertical. Our partners possess deep domain expertise in their respective vertical markets, a commitment to enterprise AI and a significant customer base that will benefit from our enterprise AI applications. This will provide us with sales leverage overtime. It is worth noting that our contract with Baker Hughes, our market partner for oil and gas, includes a very specific contraction commitment. It is a five year agreement and the total contract value is $450 million. Their commitment to C3.ai increases over the five year term of the agreement. This offers predictable growth in the years ahead. For example, the Baker Hughes commitment is $75 million in fiscal year '22 compared to…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Brad Sills with BofA Securities.

Brad Sills

Analyst

I wanted to ask about the vertical partner focus here. Obviously, you talked about some leverage that you'll see here from some of these partnerships could you help us understand for perhaps some of the newer ones like Raytheon FIS, these are relatively new verticals for the company. What kind of resources are committed from these partners? How are you going to market together? How are you expected to get that leverage through these partnerships? Thank you so much.

Tom Siebel

Analyst

I’ll fill this one because it’s kind of sales to marketing related. Well, as you know, we're going to market across three plains. We have horizontal market partners like say Microsoft would be the largest, but also IBM NVIDIA. We're building a geographic marketing organization in North America, Asia Pacific, okay, and in Europe. And then across all sectors, we have vertical market sales organizations in oil and gas, in utilities, in financial services, in precision health, et cetera. And you can get expect that each of the -- the goal is that each of these vertical markets we will align with a leveraged market partner. So the classic case is Baker Hughes. So we've aligned in oil and gas with Baker Hughes, this is a 24 roughly, I think, billion dollar oil services company that gives us access to 12,000 people now selling with us around the world. And there’s virtually not one of the largest, say 20 or 30 oil companies, that we’re not in active sales motion with, whether it's Aramco, ADNOC, Rosneft Gazprom, Shell, and 12,000 salespeople is a lot of sales capacity. If we look at financial services as you know we have a couple of -- we have very large and successful relationship in banking with Bank of America. And with a number of applications there and with Standard Chartered Bank and we’ve built a large product line to meet the needs of financial banks, whether it's anti money laundering, cash management, securities lending, Volcker Rule compliance, inter day liquidity, what have you. And so through our partnership with FIS, which I think does roughly $12 billion or $13 billion from the revenue in the banking, these people are now we have access to their I think 20,000 banking customers around the world with…

Brad Sills

Analyst

And then one more, if I may, please, the concept of embedding C3’s platform into some of these horizontal categories. You mentioned an early win with the Microsoft partnership here for C3.ai enabled CRM. Infor as a new partner for ERP. Can you remind us a little bit on kind of where you are with those partnerships? I know they're early. How quickly does it take one of these partners to ramp up from an integration standpoint and then go to market? When do you think you'll see the leverage out of those two partnerships in particular? Thanks.

Tom Siebel

Analyst

I think we did at Baker Hughes now, if I'm not mistaken five quarters. Is this about right, guys. Okay. And Dave, do you…

David Barter

Analyst

Seven quarters.

Tom Siebel

Analyst

Seven quarters. So guys, I stand correctly. Okay, thank you. And I think Baker Hughes is a large global company, and they're fully spooled up. I mean, we're building probably four products together we’re bringing to market. We have two products that we already have in the marketplace. We're fully spooled up. Granted Infor is brand new. Granted FIS is relatively new. And so you can expect us -- I mean it'll take us one, two, three, four quarters to get these things really spooled up and get the momentum going. And it's not going to turn out overnight but we're building a revenue capacity flywheel that I think, you know, once you get in, when you start looking at calendar year '22, '23, I think this is going to be a significant force to be reckoned with.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jack Andrews with Needham.

Jack Andrews

Analyst · Needham.

I want to see if you could expand a little bit on your go to market strategy around the Ex Machina product. I believe this is somewhat of a different offering from the solutions that you've historically sold. So how should we just be thinking about your strategy? And is this something that you expect the uptake to be mainly from your existing base of customers or do you expect Ex Machina to effectively draw in some brand new customers to the C3.ai family?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Needham.

So Ex Machina is a product that we've had in the market for some years, and we've been working and where we are now is we are releasing this and we've done all the work with the documentation, the stack overflow, the online training, the community, basically offer this as a mass market product. You can think of this as serving the same market needs that’s currently served by Alteryx, which is basically associated with the democratization of data science, this is allowing people who would normally be doing analytics with pivot tables, okay, on an Excel spreadsheet to be doing a no code, low code, WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, point and click drag and drop data science. And what we've released here is kind of a 21st century version of that solution. And the democratization of data science is something that has to happen. I mean, for when we see the expansion of AI, this is not all going to happen through people hiring, 50 PhD level data scientists from MIT and a quarter million a piece, it's just not going to happen. So we're going to have to provide the tools where mere mortals can apply data science to their business to achieve the benefits, and that's what Ex Machina is all about. And so think about it, I think, Alteryx is a fine company. I'm sure it'll proceed, it'll continue to be successful. But it has some -- but it serves that same market need. Now Alteryx has some constraints. It'll run on any computer you want as long as its on premise on a Windows machine. And Ex Machina will run on any computer that supports a browser. So it's entirely cloud native. Alteryx will use any amount of data as you…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Turits with Keybanc.

Michael Turits

Analyst · Keybanc.

So I was really pleased to see the Fortune 500 deal. In the Microsoft partnership, I was wondering if you can fill down a little bit on that and tell us what the value creation was there and why that seems promising going forward? And I've got a follow up.

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Keybanc.

I mean, we have a number of significant partners and we go to market with AWS, we go to market with Google, we go to market with a lot of these guys. But I would say the organization that is kind of that, as the DNA most aligned with ours is Microsoft, or these guys are really strong and enterprise selling. And so we've been able to align with them. Some of the largest organizations in the world, and the United States government with Shell and with others, I mean we're on speed dial with these guys, they are a great partner. And it looks to me like as it relates to cloud computing, I mean, these guys are going to be a force to be reckoned with, because they really do understand the enterprise and they know how to sell there. And I think they come to believe that we're not entirely unfamiliar with that process also. And so we get along with those guys really well. And we're selling with them in oil and gas, we’re selling them in utilities, we're selling with them in banking. I guess some place around here there's a whole pipeline of transactions that we're doing with Microsoft enterprise transactions, but I'm confident it’s hundreds of transactions that we're working together [Multiple Speakers] they don't hesitate to spool off the big guns, so if they need to close a deal or make a commit to a customer, they'll roll out Satya or Judson or JP or whoever they need to make the commitment and make sure the commitment gets met, they're really strong.

Michael Turits

Analyst · Keybanc.

And Tom, if I could just get you to be macro prognosticated here for a minute. You did 20% sequential, almost 9% sequential growth in the quarter. But that's the most you've done in seven quarters. And is this an indication that from -- I mean, obviously, you're doing a lot of things right. But from a demand or macro perspective that people are opening up to these kinds of larger projects that you do?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Keybanc.

Well, I think I think our subscription revenue was like 24% growth, wasn't it? And so it’s really pretty healthy. And that's what we're focused on and we're really not focused on the services line. And you want to keep our services line under control and we give you guys the courtesy of disaggregating those two, so there's no question as to whether we're a software company or a services company. Okay. Now, let's talk about -- I mean, coming in to January of 2020 and we were blowing and glowing. I think, our growth rate last fiscal year was 68%, I think top line, okay, and -- 71%, okay, thank you. 71%. I mean, it was we're blowing and going. When COVID came in February, I mean our world just stopped. And understand back then our average transaction size as you know was like, what did I say $21 million. Okay. And so London closed, Paris closed, New York closed, Chicago closed. God knows San Francisco closed, okay, and even the beach in Lower County were closed, I mean, there was nobody else for business. So we hit a speed bump, okay, in the first two quarters of, I would say, in the February, March, April, May timeframe, we hit a speed bump. Okay, then the all of a sudden, you start getting, all the stimulus starts to take place, people start focusing on digital transformation, they start focusing on AI. And we began to see a significant acceleration in our business once you get in June, July, August, September, which mean it’s feel comfortable talking to you guys about the idea of making this a public company. I mean, there's no question that we're seeing an acceleration. And we believe that as we get into fiscal year '22 and '23, we will see accelerate -- we will see increased growth rates. And so this is a healthy market. And I believe we know how to grow a business rapidly and we're pretty optimistic. But I think the overall growth rate in this year, this fiscal year, David, which will be what?

David Barter

Analyst · Keybanc.

In April, I think, yes, we would be in the mid point of the guidance [16%].

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Keybanc.

Mid point of the guidance is like [16%], okay, fine. But we’re dragging Q1 and Q2 like a boat anchor of this fiscal year, it may hurt us. But COVID has turned from a massive decelerant to an accelerant salary. And we're -- I’d like to say COVID was behind us, hopefully, it will be behind this soon, so we all get together for a cocktail in New York. Yes. We're optimistic about the next two years.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Ives with Wedbush. Your line is open.

Dan Ives

Analyst · Wedbush. Your line is open.

So Tom, could you maybe talk about your conversations have changed with customers over the last six to nine months, when I compare it to a year ago. I mean, maybe there it really feel like it almost went from more of a push to a pull. I mean, can you just maybe talk about some of the drivers and some of the anecdotal conversations with the CEOs and CIOs? Thanks.

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Wedbush. Your line is open.

I did not anticipate the effects of the IPO on the brand. And I guess I should have, because all the papers tell you it’s going to it, and this is going to be important for your business. I just look at it as financing event, to finance growth. And so, I guess I'm kind of slipping, because the effect of the IPO and the associated PR really has been huge on the perceived credibility and gravitas in the business. And so we're seeing a much substantial increase in the growth of the pipeline, conversations are happening faster. The default position of the companies are coming into discussion is that it works and how are we going to make it work. There's virtually -- you know, if we want to hire a senior executive today, there's virtually nobody who won't return the call. And so the effect of the company has been extraordinarily positive. We do -- when you go play on Google Analytics, sometime, and you go do a search on like enterprise AI or C3.ai and look at what has happened in terms of kind of where we are in search frequency in these terms, I mean, we've moved way, way up in the list. So it's -- as I say since the IPO things that -- I think the IPO contributed, I think the global economy is contributing. I think the fact that the government is trading $100 billion a day, this government is in hurry and the focus on digital transformation and AI. So I think we're in the right place at the right time. We have a good solution and I think things have changed significantly.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Murphy with JP Morgan.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Tom, we have seen quite a bit more excitement about a commodity super cycle and in particular in oil because of the pandemic recovery and response. I'm wondering how different is your energy deal pipeline today versus a year ago. I don't think you've commented on PETRONAS in the script. Wondering if you can comment on that. And just how different is that pipeline, and does a typical oil and gas company feel more pressure to modernize during tough times, or maybe more inclination to spend into a super cycle?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Well, Mark, I don't pretend to be an expert in energy market, as you know, but it's been fascinating to watch. And first of all, the relationship with Baker Hughes is extraordinarily positive. And it's kind of funny that it would be because you couldn't find two companies more culturally different. This is old school oil and gas company, and there’s a new school high tech company but these guys are pretty switched on. And yet today -- I mean, we must talk between the two companies, so 100 times a day, and we finish each other’s sentences. When we first -- you get into February, March, April, oil was negative $37 a barrel. You think that might have a little chilling effect on the energy business, holy moly, I mean these guys were just reeling, right? And they couldn't figure out how to lay off people fast enough. And then after they kind of picked themselves and dusted themselves off, I think they started looking at the reality situation, we had companies like Shell, which is, as I recall, roughly a EUR300 billion business, I think the fifth largest company in the world. And they look at the economics of -- you look at oil futures at the time, nobody was predicting oil over $50 a barrel, I believe it might be over $50 a barrel today, but it wasn't being predicted to be over. And there's a lot of downward pressure on oil prices for all the reasons that we both know. And I think if you look at a barrel of oil, there might be one company in the world that can make money, okay, at $50 or $45 a barrel, and that would be Saudi Aramco because they have no lifting cost. I think that stuff comes out of the ground at about $6 a barrel. So then you have the rest of these guys, whether it's Rosneft, Gazprom, Exxon or Shell, who are running these large global enterprises and they have the choice to either reinvent themselves or slowly go out of business. And so I mean you get to places like Shell, these guys are not -- I mean, these are highly educated and really bright people. They've made the decision to reinvent themselves. So I think the oil pressure and oil fluctuations are proving an accelerant to the use of AI as these companies -- you really focus on renewable. I mean Shell is turning itself into a renewable energy company. And with the bulk of -- I think their revenues are they going to be coming from electricity in the future. It's a big change. But we see this Rosneft, Gazprom, Aramco, ADNOC, they're -- all the big guys who are thinking about this and we're at the table.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And David, as a quick follow-up, could you clarify how did the GAAP RPO or backlog behave sequentially in the January quarter? I'm just not sure if I heard that number correctly. And I know there's a few different layers on that cake for you. So just how did that GAAP RPO behave sequentially? And then I'm just wondering, do you have the current RPO or the next 12 month’s portion at your fingertips by any chance, or perhaps do we see that later?

David Barter

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Well, you'll see the current RPO in the Q, but the current RPO is $131 million.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And then what was the sequential change just in the total GAAP RPO?

David Barter

Analyst · JP Morgan.

So when you actually look at our total GAAP RPO, you're looking at it from last quarter, it was 267, and it's 247.5. So 267.4 to be precise, 247.5 is the GAAP RPO.

TomSiebel

Analyst · JP Morgan.

One of the changes that's happened here, Mark, is that back in the old days, like, say, pre-December, we were ruthless about the way that we engaged -- we did software transactions, okay? If the commitment from the customer was not irrevocable, nonrefundable commitment to buy, okay, over multiple years, we did not give business hard stop, okay? Now that we have a -- now we're kind of holding our position where we're focused -- and what we're doing, and we were doing our best to finance the business, and we did a pretty good job, okay, without ringing a lot of doorbells on Sand Hill Road. Another business is pretty well capitalized. We're focused on market share, okay? And we've gone towards more, I would say, market transactions, where we are willing to consider engaging in multiyear transactions with organizations, where some percentage of the transaction is cancelable based upon performance. Well, you could be sure that we're going to bust our assets to make sure that nothing gets canceled. But it does that -- but that decision did have a negative effect on RPO, okay? And I think it's the right decision to make for the business. But we've become -- we're doing -- engaging and we're being more flexible and easier to do business with in order to get contracts signed. And it does have some downward pressure on RPO, but I think it will have upward pressure on revenue prospectively.

David Barter

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And Mark, with that in mind, the cancelable piece went from 37.1 to 48.4, so sequentially up 30%.

Mark Murphy

Analyst · JP Morgan.

So if I'm hearing you correctly, there's a little more inclusion of cancellation clauses in the contracts, so that just the RPO is kind of the mix is shifting a little off the long term and a little off the GAAP piece because it's rolling a little more into the cancelable piece then but it's netting out positively for revenue. Is that a fair estimation?

TomSiebel

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And it's also positive -- RPO plus cancelable, it's increased year-over-year…

David Barter

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Year-over-year, it is up. Sequentially, it was off a little bit.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville with Deutsche Bank.

Patrick Colville

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

So I guess I've got a two part question. I mean, I think we just touched on it just now, but I just want to just clarify. So the delta between RPO and billings, just help me understand that. Because if I look at billings in the quarter, I think it was off about 5%, whereas the adjusted RPO was up 16%. So just help me understand why that might be?

David Barter

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Well, I think -- and I tried to include it in my prepared remarks on billings was, I think you're looking at perhpas in deferred revenue. Is that correct?

Patrick Colville

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Exactly.

David Barter

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Yes. And so I think what we tried to highlight in our remarks is that in almost in line with Tom's comment on being more flexible, there were some pieces of our deals that are not flowing through deferred. And I called out a portion of what happened at the end of the quarter where $4.1 million isn't flowing through deferred. So I think that that is, to an extent, that's what's impacting your math there.

Patrick Colville

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

And are you prepared to call out the Baker Hughes contribution in the quarter?

David Barter

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

The Baker Hughes contribution as part of RPO?

Patrick Colville

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

As part of revenue.

David Barter

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

The Baker Hughes portion, I think we will actually be including in our 10-Q. And so that's where that revenue will be published.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of DJ Hynes with Canaccord.

David Hynes

Analyst · Canaccord.

Tom, when you think about building domain expertise as you enter new vertical, how much of that falls on C3 development efforts and how much of that is influenced by the Lighthouse account with which you're partnering? I'm just trying to think about how you replicate the model as you continue to grow into new markets.

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Canaccord.

And one of the real gems of the story that really is not realized yet by a lot of the market is that across all of these markets, whether it's AI-based predictive means for the Air Force, whether it's customer churn at Bank of America, whether it's process optimization, AI based predictive maintenance for paper manufacturing at Georgia-Pacific, or whether it's hydrocarbon loss accounting at Shell, 99% of the code we're installing is the same across the entire installed base because that's the beauty of what we've done. So you don't need to know -- we don't need to know first principles of how a turbine works -- a gas turbine works in order to build a digital twin for the turbine, or build predictive maintenance model for that turbine. 99% of the code is exactly the same. All the changes are the data sources, the machine learning models and the user interface. So we agree that the user interface is trivial. We have true realized this idea of aggregating very large data sets into unified federated image. For example, this is what Palantir calls an ontology. This is what Palantir does, okay? Palantir is a large services organization that takes -- it's a big business, right? Taking, I think, at ENGIE and now we've aggregated 100 trillion rows of data from 50 enterprise data sources, 27 million sensors. And then with regard to the extra price for weather and train social media, that will -- we will update weather, train and social media, 62 billion times a day. And when you aggregate that into the federated image, this is what Palantir says that every sentence of their presentation is ontology, ontology, ontology. Look it up. It's not quite that magic, okay? So we rather do that through services, we…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Peggy Yu with Morgan Stanley. .

Peggy Yu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

First, to touch on the pipeline, you've mentioned seeing greater customer interest and the pipeline has continued to grow pretty substantially last quarter. Wanted to see if you could give us a little bit of color on pipeline conversion trends, especially as we go through the year?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

I'm sorry, pipeline conversion trends? Peggy, I don't have that answer. And it's a legitimate question. Next time we will talk, I'll have the answer. I don't have it. And so anything I would give you would be misleading? It's a good question. And I'm sorry, it's very, very rarely, I get caught absolutely out of my heels and you caught call me.

Peggy Yu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

My apologies.

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

Yes, you win the price for the day.

Peggy Yu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

So I guess, could you talk about the trends around margins as we go head into Q4? Looks like the margins -- so Q3, obviously, you saw a pretty good improvement, and Q4 seems to be slightly down. What are some of the puts and takes there?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

Q4 margin is down? How was that 100 what…

David Barter

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

I think the non-GAAP operating loss that we highlighted in the guidance table.

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. .

I think one of the things that is going to contribute to a little bit margin compression in Q4 is, I mean we are focused on being a software company. We're not focused on being a software services company, as lucrative as it could be in this particular market. I know. Okay? I look at Yahoo! Finance every now and then too, okay? That being said, we're going to supplement in order to facilitate our customers and not be in the professional services business, we're going to outsource professional services work with some third party providers that we've enabled. So we have this large ecosystem of third party providers, like IBM’s Global Services, and I think there's about 20 others. And so we will actually give a piece of our contract to them, which will put some downward pressure on, I'm sorry, upward pressures on cost of goods sold and a little bit downward pressure on margins, at the same time, you know keep me out of the services business. And so that's what -- it's not a macro trend, but that's what that's all about.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Arvind Ramnani with Piper Sandler.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

I have a question on your vertical partnerships. As you indicated, it's a very important part of your strategy. And I wanted to understand how you're tracking progress with these partnerships, particularly with the newer ones versus the ones that are more ingrained? Are you looking at deals or pipeline? And are there certain trigger points that will get you to switch from NFIs to Fi service as the partnership isn't quite working out. So just kind of conceptually, how you're managing success at these important partnerships?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

We have very, very impressive instrumentation here on kind of what's going on in the business, what's going on with business activity with each partner, with each of the vertical, what's the rate at which we're growing pipeline, what deals are working together, what's the next step of each deal, what's the expected revenue, what are the revenue goals for this year, next year, the year after, by quarter. So we have very tight metrics on that. Fortunately, we haven't gotten to the point where one is not working yet and we need to replace it. We're still focused on making every one of them successful. And we believe that with the partners we have, that we can. That said, are we going to get to the point where one doesn't work? We will. But sometime, Arvind, when you're here, I mean we could kind of show you the metrics that we have for tracking this and sales operations. I believe that we have a finger on the pulse of this business as it relates to the AI enabled CRM system that we have deployed that is absolutely state of the art.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Pat Walravens with JMP.

Pat Walravens

Analyst · JMP.

And if I can, I'd like to ask two. The first is, for investors, as they look at this, C3 grew 71% in fiscal '20. You hit COVID. And then in fiscal '21, revenue at the midpoint is going to grow 16%. So how should we think about sort of the durable long term growth rate for this business?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · JMP.

We believe the growth rate will expand.

Pat Walravens

Analyst · JMP.

So Tom, can you talk a little bit about the deal with the US Army that you won with Raytheon? I mean, those things are typically super competitive, right? Who is the competition? And then just more broadly, how big or talk about the opportunity that C3 has with the defense industry?

Tom Siebel

Analyst · JMP.

Now this is our -- I know that everyone on this call believes that I close every deal that we do. And I can assure you, that's not true. As a matter of fact, from August 13, 2020, until like December, about 21st. I did nothing but talked to you guys for about 21 hours a day. And I never talk to a customer or prospect. So as much as I would like to talk about that deal with Raytheon on that particular transaction, I don't know anything about it. And we can somehow hold the session to talk about it. How big is the opportunity in defense and Intel, it's freaking huge. And as it relates to applying AI to military and defense, this is going to be a major initiative for the United States government, and you have China spending tens of billions of dollars today, year on AI. And we're -- in the United States, government I think been historically under investing there’s a lot of talk about it and very little action. I think now we're seeing, I think, going forward, as it relates to defense and intel, that market opportunity is going to be virtually limitless. And I think we're in a position to have -- make an impact there, which is why you see Danny McGinn, the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Rick Ledgett, former Deputy Director of the NSA, joining our advisory boards to help us figure out how to navigate that beyond the phone on Friday with one of the immediate past secretaries of one of the three branches of the US military, to get his advice and how we should structure this going forward. But you can expect us to be making a very, very substantial investment there. I mean, will this ever be anything like 50% of our business? No way, no how, okay? I mean, we're not going to become a federal contractor. But do we expect that they're large and rapidly growing segment of our business? Yes, we do.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time…

Tom Siebel

Analyst

I think we might be at the last -- we might be about to wrap this up. Is that correct?

Operator

Operator

Yes. There are no further questions at this time.

Tom Siebel

Analyst

Okay. Let me just provide a couple of closing comments, and then we'll put a wrap on this. So first of all, thanks, everybody, for your attention and your thoughtful questions. And to the extent that I think there were two questions that I didn't have the answer to. One was from Pat and one was from Morgan Stanley. And I apologize. So we'll figure out a way to -- I guess I can't get back to you, we need to figure out a way. Can we follow-up? In the world of Reg FD, we can do this [Multiple Speakers] Okay. So we'll do this. I think that we're really pleased with third quarter results. We think they illustrate the power and potential of this highly differentiated model driven architecture that is enabling enterprises across a wide range of industries to rapidly and efficiently develop and operate complex predictive AI applications to scale. We think we are really well positioned to address this rapidly growing greater than $200 billion addressable market opportunity. And as we enter our fourth fiscal quarter of 2021, I believe that C3.ai has never been more strongly positioned in the market. I believe that we are demonstrating clear technology leadership in enterprise AI. We are building a powerful brand. Our human capital resources are second to none. Our customer and market partners' successes speak for themselves, and the competitive landscape does not appear to be limiting. So thank you so much for your time. We look forward to sharing our progress with you in the months and years ahead. And we wish you all a great day and a great week. So thank you for the courtesy and your time today.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.