Earnings Labs

Open Text Corporation (OTEX)

Q1 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 31, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the OpenText Corporation First Quarter Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity for analysts to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Greg Secord, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Greg Secord

Analyst

Good morning, everyone. And welcome to OpenText’s first quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. With me on the call today are OpenText’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Mark J. Barrenechea; and OpenText’s President and Chief Financial Officer, Madhu Ranganathan. Today’s call will be webcast live and recorded with replay available shortly thereafter on the OpenText Investor Relations website, that’s investors.opentext.com. Before today’s call, we posted press release and investor presentations online. These materials will supplement our prepared remarks and can also be accessed on the OpenText Investor Relations website. I’d like to take the opportunity to invite institutional investors and financial analysts to join our OpenText World 2024 Investor Track. It’s on Tuesday, November 19th in Las Vegas. The OpenText World Conference is a great opportunity for investors and financial analysts to learn about the latest product innovations with full conference access, allowing open dialogue with leadership, customers and partners on site. The Investor Track will be available to investors attending in person and virtually by webcast or live streaming and replay. You can contact myself or the Investor Relations team for more details and to register. In addition, I’m pleased to inform you that OpenText will be participating in the following upcoming investor conferences, including the TD Technology Conference on Monday, November 25th in Toronto with Mark, Wells Fargo Technology, Media & Telecommunications Summit on December 4th in Rancho Palos Verdes, and Barclays Global Technology Conference on Thursday, December 12th in San Francisco with Madhu. And now on to the reading of our Safe Harbor Statement. During this call, we’ll be making forward-looking statements relating to the future performance of OpenText. These statements are based on current expectations, assumptions and other material factors that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from the forward- looking statements made today. Additional information about the material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements, as well as risk factors that may impact future performance results of OpenText are contained in OpenText’s recent forms 10-K and 10-Q, as well as in our press release that was distributed earlier this morning, which may be found on our website. We undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. In addition, our conference call may include discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures may be found within our public filings and the other materials which are available on our website. And with that, I’ll hand the call over to Mark.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Thank you, Greg, and welcome everyone to today’s call. Let me start with, in Q1, we delivered to our revenue quarterly factors, as well as exceeded expectations in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. We grew our adjusted EBITDA percent year-over-year to 35% and this growth comes from sustained efficiency gains even after the divestiture of the ultra-high-margin AMC business. Over the last two quarters, we purchased and canceled 7.72 million shares at an average price of $30.43. Expect us to continue purchasing our shares. And in Q2, I’m deeply excited about our momentum. We are strengthening our competitive advantage with Titanium X, our next-generation autonomous information management platform powered by AI and security, coupled with strong investments we are making in our enterprise and SMB go-to-market, strategic partners and customer success organizations, all of which leads us to a stronger second half of the fiscal year. Further, we are reaffirming our fiscal 2025 targets and our outer-year aspirations. On to Q1. Our Q1 results include delivering $1.27 billion in revenues, well within our quarterly factor range of $1.25 billion to $1.3 billion. Q1 is a seasonally lower quarter, yet it was the largest Q1 of enterprise cloud bookings in our history, up 10% year-over-year and up 53% over three years. As it relates to our cloud business, Q1 marked our 15th consecutive quarter of organic growth of $457 million or revenues of 1.2% -- 1.3% and we expect this to ramp throughout the year. We also had strong customer wins at Raytheon, Fedex, Virgin Mobile, Alaska Airlines, Nippon Gas, The European Medicines Agency and DICK’S Sporting Goods across content, business network, digital operations and security. Financial services, technology, public sector, healthcare and biotech, and consumer packaged goods were top industries for our book of business. Revenue by geo, America is…

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Thank you, Mark, and thank you all for joining us today. Please refer to the IR materials posted on our website. During Q1, we executed very well on our operational efficiencies and exceeded our plan to bring operating leverage to the P&L. We had committed to delivering on operational efficiencies, and in Q1, we led with higher adjusted EBITDA performance and delivering 35% adjusted EBITDA in Q1, excluding the impact of ultra-high margin AMC business, is a significant achievement. Now, turning to the numbers, I will share where relevant, year-over-year comparison, excluding the impact of AMC divestiture. Our Q1 results reflect typical seasonality we experienced in the September quarter. Q1 total revenue of $1.269 billion was down 11% or down 1.8% when adjusted for AMC divestiture. Q1 cloud revenue was $457 million, up 1.3%. Our cloud business continues to exhibit strong performance, with bookings of $133.5 million, up 10.3%. ARR of $1,052.5 million was down 8.4% and down 1.1% when adjusted for the AMC divestiture. ARR percentage of total revenues was approximately 82.9%. Customer support was down 3% when adjusted for the AMC divestiture. And moving to other financial metrics, GAAP net income was $84.4 million or $0.32 diluted EPS, up 6.7% year-over-year. GAAP gross margin of 71.7% was up from 71.4% year-over-year. Non-GAAP gross margin of 75.8%, compared to 77.3%, it reflects the AMC divestiture and continued investment in AI, global security and in our global cloud infrastructure. Adjusted EBITDA of $443.8 million or 35%, as mentioned earlier, it reflects our extreme operational focus during the quarter. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.93, down 7.9%, also due to the impact of AMC divestiture. Our overall working capital performance remained strong with our DSOs at 42 days, a decrease of one day from 43 days in the last quarter. We reported…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to introduce the first callers from Steven Enders with Citi. Please go ahead.

Steven Enders

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Okay. Great. Thanks for taking the questions here. I guess I just want to start a little bit on kind of maybe the demand environment and the macro and what you’re seeing out there. I guess was there maybe any shift in deals? Are you seeing anything kind of get pushed out that maybe gives a little bit more confidence in that second half that maybe is impacting things in the first half? It would be great to get a little bit more details on what it is that’s maybe going on out there in the general environment?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah. Very good, and good morning, Steven. Thanks for joining the call. We’re here in California as well. So early start to the day. Thanks for joining. The demand environment is stable. Even though I called out, we’re going to continue to monitor the volatility in the world. We see demand as stable. The drivers for us all point towards a stronger second half. We have the largest release of our software and cloud in the history of the company coming up, Titanium X or Cloud Editions 25.2. We’ve been out kind of well chronicling and well demoing all the steady capabilities we’ve been adding. So to your -- directly to your question, we see the demand environment stable. So we’re monitoring it as everyone else is. We have a very large innovation push that’s going to drive demand for us in the second half. We’ve just gone live on our new SMB platform that I highlighted. We used to -- was Project El Dorado, which is now live on secure cloud, which went live last week and we got a big product upgrade in security, XDR-as-a-Service. We have significant step-ups in ITOM for a more micro-focused acquisition and we have a very large SaaS push coming with Titanium X. And everything downstream of SaaS is just goodness. It’s faster time to revenue, higher margin and easier to expand for us. And as we noted, we have a tougher compare in Q2. It’s a high quarter for AMC and we have our one-time royalty from certain IP grants from a year ago. So demand is stable, we’re executing well and we’re looking for a stronger second half.

Steven Enders

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Okay. That’s helpful context there. I guess just quick clarification. Just the -- can you remind us what the IP right impact is for 2Q that would be embedded in that comp? And then, I guess, secondarily, just think about the second half and the execution that needs to go into that, I guess. Are there certain things that you’re seeing on either the deal environment or the go-to-market investments that you are making that gives you that confidence in the line of sight to the pipeline, the ability to kind of close on that for the second half?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah. I mean, I’ll take the second part first, which is the two things. The things that give us confidence are, as we highlight in the script, we’re on track for delivery of Titanium X. On our people side, on the sales force, we’re at capacity. As I noted in the script, it’s just an incredible thing. We’re doing incredibly well on talent attraction and retention. We’re at record rates of retention in the company. I also noted that our pipeline is up 20% for the second half year-over-year, which is very tangible. So, we’re at capacity. Our pipeline is up. We have a product release. And we’re also now live on AI internally. We’re going to demo it at OpenText World, so olli.ai, where we’re enabling our new hires and our experts in the sales force to, what could take a couple weeks to build proposals, we can now generate out of content management. So, we think that’s going to increase our response velocity and our win rate. So, those are some very tangible things, Steve. In relation to the grant of certain IP rights, it’s as we chronicled last year. We didn’t talk about the quantum because we’re always in the business of IP. And secondly, in the nature of this particular item, there were confidentially aspects -- confidentiality aspects. So, we have no new disclosure from last year and we did disclose the quantum last year.

Steven Enders

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

All right. Well, appreciate the context there and thanks again for taking the questions this morning.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thank you.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Billy Fitzsimmons

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Hey, everyone. This is Billy Fitzsimmons for Samad. Maybe first for you, Mark, you may have talked about it in the prepared remarks. I may have missed it. But it’s been a couple quarters now since Project Athena was announced. Would be curious if you have any updates on progress thus far and maybe going a step further, is there any anecdotes around early efficiency gains or early internal feedback from employees as you’ve implemented these changes?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Yeah. Very good. Thanks, Billy, and thanks for your question. Yeah. We had kicked off a handful of initiatives. One I just talked about, right, which is olli.ai. I can’t wait to show you at OpenText World. It’s going to be main stage. We’re going to have our sales force on stage showing how we are using 10 years of data to enable our sales force to auto-generate proposals. Imagine an AE who’s doing a FedRAMP proposal, who’s new to the company. And what are all my FedRAMP solutions? What’s the best presentation? Here’s three questions. Produce me a stellar generated response to give to my client. We’re live on that now. And it’s just going to keep getting better and better as we tune it. So, the early feedback is very positive on that. Project Athena, which is for developers. So, olli.ai is for our sales force and support. And Athena is for our developers. So, we expect with 25.2 to generate our first application. And those apps will be generated on top of all our API services. So, we call our API layer. Now, our strategy is to build apps and to deliver APIs. On the APIs, we’re going to generate software on top of those APIs and that’s what Athena is going to do. And we’ll have our first production apps by 25.2 or April of next year. We’re just four or five months away. And the early feedback is fantastic. What APIs? How do I use them? What are kind of the templates to generate? Simple things. Like, how do I upload a file? How do I build a screen? How do I do security? So, Athena, in its first generation of software, is focused on basic apps. It’s focused on language translation. We deliver a product. Now, put it to the 40, localize it across 40 countries and generate the documentation. So, we’ll start to see the impacts with Titanium X 25.2. Early feedback, great. And it’s working right in the areas where we thought we could, which is app generation, localization and documentation. And that’s wave one for us, for developer experience productivity.

Billy Fitzsimmons

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

And then -- that’s super helpful, Mark. And then, if I could sneak in another, I know a couple quarters back…

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Please go ahead, Billy. That’s great.

Billy Fitzsimmons

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

…those from two to, sorry, three years to four years. Is that continuing to roughly track at four years, now one quarter into 2025? And then, just help us think about kind of the pace of on-prem to cloud conversions you’re seeing in your business in 2025, relative to what you saw in late fiscal 2024.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

And Billy, it’s Madhu here. The very first part of your question didn’t come through, if you don’t mind repeating it.

Billy Fitzsimmons

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Yeah. The first part was just, I know a couple quarters ago, cloud contract duration stretched from about three years to four years.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Yeah.

Billy Fitzsimmons

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Does that continue to track at roughly four years?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead

Yeah. Fair enough. I got it. Thanks, Billy. Look, I’d note on SAP’s earnings call, they talked about their average contract length going out to about four and a half years. And we’re -- we tow right along with SAP on our SAP business, which is an important part of our business. So, they’ve talked about extending out to four and a half years. Now, we’re about four years right now. I think we have a little better control over that ramping. We did note, as you noted, we noted a couple quarters ago that we began to see this increasing ramp in agreements. So, it has stabilized. And we’re getting a little -- and we’re also getting better control and so are our partners, right, sort of saying, okay, this is sort of the high water mark. So, it’s not continuing to ramp. I would say that it’s hit a high water mark. But we’re starting to be able to dial it back a little bit. But we’re seeing just around four years, SAP was very, had their disclosure around four and a half years. And then on the on-prem to cloud, which I think was the other part of your question, it’s all about the second half drivers for us. When I look at Titanium X and one of the design principles of Titanium X, the first principle was to have, Titanium X is designed and built for SaaS and that’s why we’re calling it out. So, it is SaaS for our major pieces, core content, service management, digital operations, developer experience and XDR-as-a-Service is only a SaaS offering. And so, I think we’ll continue to see in a very controlled way, customers continuing to move from on-premise and we’ve done great into the private cloud, and Titanium X will give us now the next growth swim lane, which is to move on-prem into SaaS. And continue to do this in a very controlled way.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Perfect. Thank you. Mark, since we’re in this new AI world, like, how do you think about adoption patterns between like your Aviator offerings, et cetera, and kind of the more kind of initial steps with the Microsoft Copilot, et cetera? Like, how do you think that will play out in what you, when you’re talking to customers in terms of like, adoption cycles, adoption patterns? Is that like, at first you kind of do the standard kind of Microsoft type Copilot stuff, then you come to you, is it going straight to you because the value-add is so high? Can you speak to that, what you’re seeing there in the marketplace?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Yeah. I mean, I’ll speak first. Thanks, Raimo. I’ll speak first to us, which is we’re just seeing steady progress. We’ve been -- this is our third quarter, fourth quarter of having Aviators in the market by Titanium X. We’re going to have 15 Aviators and a hundred plus agents and it’s commonplace. It’s like having a search button on a screen, right? We have an Aviator button on screens now and over a hundred agents permeated through all of Titanium X. And so it’s easier to use, it’s easier to deploy, and it’s getting less expensive. Still a little expensive. When you look at the platform providers, you either sort of buy by the drink, right? Or you make multiyear commitments. Interestingly for us, we see customers working on big problem sets. And so there’s -- and we’re like, we’re very close to like breakthrough moments on very big problem sets. So it’s steady as we go. It’s in every conversation. We’re so delighted with Titanium X and the world will see it live here in a couple of weeks, where it’s almost like a search button on every screen. We had 20 wins directly related to our GenAI Aviators in the quarter. And we’re just going to keep making steady progress and it’s all going to support our bookings aspirations of the 25% bookings growth. It’s going to support our cloud growth, revenue growth of 2% to 5%. But I think it’s just steady, steady, steady, and then there’s a step up at some outer point. But we’re making really good progress on making it easy-to-use, deeply embedded, radically focused on driving down the cost and making it a button, an agent button on all our major processes.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then one thing I do like, if I look at the margin performance this quarter was very strong, guidance is really healthy there. Is there anything that we should be aware of in terms of timing that, some of the costs got pushed out in the second half or is this just all kind of, you’re doing your job and controlling what you can control? Thank you.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thanks, Raimo. We are doing our job and beyond our job and I’ll explain that in the last couple years, since the close of Micro Focus transaction, we have taken a lot of cost out and we’ve been reporting that to you systematically, right? We also announced the business optimization plan in early July. The implementation of it was also very early to provide us the benefit throughout the year. What’s really happening in the second half is very consistent for OpenText. Our annual merit increases are January 1st. And as I said, we are seeing, that could employee retention, as well as sales capacity we mentioned. So that’s really what you’re seeing in the second half of the year. But having a great start on adjusted EBITDA in Q1 is what’s really supporting us and the confidence to maintain the 33% to 34% for the year.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead.

Erin Kyle

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Hi. Good morning. It’s Erin Kyle on for Stephanie Price. I wanted to ask a question just on the revenue growth, excluding AMC, which was negative 1.8% this quarter. So seeing as this is all organic now, how do you think about organic growth at Micro Focus post the AMC divestiture and what are the key lines of business that you expect that will drive you towards achieving organic growth?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Yeah. It sounds great, Erin. Thanks for being on the call this morning. Let me start with that we’re maintaining our outlook for the year, which is constant to a 1% growth. And we look at our business by market area today. So in particular, for what we acquired from Micro Focus, deconstruct that into security, into digital operations and into the developer, if you will. We are deeply excited on the security side. And as noted, our XDR-as-a-Service is taking what we acquired from Micro Focus, plus components from other parts of the business, like Forensics, like Verkada on the network side, plus our email security from Zix. And we’re bringing it all together in a unified, composable offering called XDR-as-a-Service and we’re quite excited about it. So we see security being a growth driver for us. Second piece is what was historically called ITOM, what we now call digital operations. And I’m just really excited about the product offering around discovery, which feeds into security, by the way. What do you secure? You’ve got to discover the assets. Observability into the infrastructure. Observability across multi-cloud. Financial ops management. Sustainability in green computing, which has been our priority. So the product has just made incredible strides, if you will. We’ve got a little more work to do on the developer side. It’s more of a complex area. So we stabilized historical Micro Focus last year, as we talked about. We are now on a platform where we’re looking to grow Micro Focus, particularly in security and digital operations. We’ve got a little more work to do on ADM and we factor that all into our constant to 1% organic growth this year.

Erin Kyle

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Okay. Thank you. That’s helpful color there. And maybe if I could just ask one more question just on capital allocation. So you did $85 million in buybacks this quarter and I noticed targets are unchanged for the year. So I just wanted to clarify if the strategy is still to focus primarily on that organic growth and return of capital to shareholders and whether M&A fits into the picture at all?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Yeah. So a couple of things there. We’re excited about delivering a record amount of capital this year to shareholders. So we are -- we’ve announced plans around approximately $570 million of return of capital will be the highest in the company’s history and delivering that amount by the end of this year, we will have delivered $3 billion over a decade and we’re on target to have the highest capital return in the history of the company this year. We’re also looking at M&A. And so, with the stabilization of Micro Focus, the divestiture behind us, Titanium X coming into the market. Yeah, you can expect us to continue to look at M&A, a small- to medium-sized cloud company, profitable, generating ARR for us that fit into our current strategic thesis.

Erin Kyle

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Okay. Thank you very much.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Mr. Treiber, your line is open. Perhaps we should move on. The next question is from Erin Kyle with CIBC. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Richard Tse with National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.

Mike Stevens

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Hi. Good morning. This is Mike Stevens on for Rich. Just more broadly, you touched on M&A there, but are there any further opportunities to streamline the company for growth, a la the AMC divestiture?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Yeah. I mean, our whole script and our whole narrative is on driving organic growth, right? So -- and having some M&A is what was the question. So, yeah, I mean, it’s all about the second half and what we’ve talked about. It’s bringing Titanium X to market, which is across all our Business Clouds. It’s driving growth in our new AI offering, Business AI, and Business Technology, in particular security. And as we noted, we’re at a high watermark for sales capacity. Our pipeline is up 20% year-over-year for cloud and AI. And the main thrust of the company is all focused on organic growth.

Mike Stevens

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Okay. That’s helpful. Additionally, with the Aviator, you mentioned the number of wins on the quarter. How much approximately would that represent of bookings and where do you see that kind of going forward?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Yeah. No. We didn’t break out of the 10% bookings growth, how much of that was related to Aviators, if you will. But clearly, was in -- it was in the large deals and in the bookings growth that we had within Q1. So it’s a main part of how we sell today, right? So we go to market today and our strategy, again, we start with our Business Clouds from content all the way through the developer. We go-to-market around, support it right underneath there, a multi-cloud offering and then coupled with security and AI. So it is now a coordinated part of how we go to market. And I expect steady, steady, steady progress every single quarter. Q1, 20 direct wins related to AI. We’ll have direct wins in Q2. It will add to our targets of going from 10% up to our mid-20%s, 25% cloud bookings growth for the year. So it is contributing to the bookings growth, for sure.

Mike Stevens

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Okay. Appreciate the insights and I’ll pass the line. Thank you.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · National Bank Financial. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thank you, Mike.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Thanos Moschopoulos with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Hi. Good morning. The cloud revenue growth was due this quarter and I understand you’re looking for that to accelerate for all the reasons you cited. But just in terms of the quarter in particular, is that a function of the deployed deal ramp dynamic that you called out? Is it anything to do with SMB or what are some contributing factors?

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thanos, it’s Madhu here. I’ll pick up the question and Mark can chime in, of course. So think of cloud revenue as it is recurring, but certainly in our third and fourth quarters, we do see a lot more of the volume and sort of the variable side of the cloud revenue picking up. So we had over 3% growth in Q4 of last year and that’s typical of our sort of end of fiscal year strength. And Q1, the growth is right where we expect it to be on revenue. As Mark outlined earlier, no further sort of expansion of where the cloud contracts are. They’re still around the four-year mark for what we do and slightly longer when we look at SAP. So nothing has changed there and I would look at Q1 cloud revenue as more of Q1 light seasonality.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Great. And then, Mark, can you comment on SMB? So I know there have been some timelines there to go back a few months. How has that been looking and you alluded to a new platform you’re launching for SMB. If you can expand on that. Thanks.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Thanos. And yeah, I mean, as Madhu noted, we had our quarterly factors for Q1 and we delivered right to what we said we’re going to do on revenue. And that’s inclusive of cloud, seasonally lower quarter for us, and inclusive of SMB, right, in all those numbers. So we’re excited. It’s a different year for us in SMB than it was last year. And we now have our partner platform live and in the market, what we call Secure Cloud. So we’ve gone from Project El Dorado to the actual service offering called Secure Cloud. We’re live. And the platform allows us, allows partners to be able to buy from us, allows partners and now we can easily add new products, like our Pillr acquisition, which is on Secure Cloud, and allows partners to then go sell to their customers and then to be able to monitor their install base and usage. So it’s sort of a PRM. It’s a partner relationship management platform that allows us to sell, partners to sell and partners to manage. And it’s now all built by OpenText, flexible, customizable and we’re just delighted with it. So that’s an enabler for us. Second is we’ve gotten closer with our biggest partner in this area, Microsoft. And Microsoft is one of their biggest investment areas for the year. And then thirdly, the demand is starting to pick back up. So we think those three factors, we have gone from a headwind, if you will, to just steady as you go, and I think, we’ll pick up some tailwinds throughout the year. So we’re quite excited about it.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Great. I’ll pass it along. Thanks.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Adhir Kadve with Eight Capital. Please go ahead.

Kiran Sritharan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Good morning, all. This is Kiran Sritharan for Adhir. My first, I just want to touch on the cloud growth range again, between 2% to 5%.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Yeah.

Kiran Sritharan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Following this quarter, what are factors you’d call out that contribute to the bottom and the top end of that range?

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

I would say three factors. First is SaaS. Customers adopting our SaaS capabilities and Titanium X. Two, seeing Aviator and our AI contribute revenue. And then some product-specific pieces. In particular, I’d call out security, XDR-as-a-Service. Those are three things that are going to drive us to the top end of the range.

Kiran Sritharan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Thanks, Mark. And then I’d like to zoom in on the investment in the sales and go-to-market. Where are you in the hiring cycle of these AEs? And maybe you can also comment on the experience levels and the pace at which this cohort would contribute, just given the refreshing go-to-market strategy? Thanks and I’ll leave it there.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thanks for the question. Yeah. As noted, we’re having great success in going to market, attracting and hiring very qualified account executives and solution consultants. And we’re at sort of our capacity, if you will. And that’s driven by a few things. So, first of all, we attract skilled professionals. We don’t tend to look for kind of the fresh grad to come into enterprise selling. I mean, we do hire those straight out of college, maybe into inside sales and then to grow in the organization or account development executives. So, it’s a great place to enter OpenText and then to grow. But what I was talking about was the qualified sales executives that have been in the market seven years to 15 years joining OpenText. So, we’re just having great success in doing that. We’re at capacity. We’re also, our employee engagement is incredibly strong. We’re at our highest retention rates for employees. So, our employee value proposition is very strong. Strong for the new hire, kind of entering OpenText as inside sales or account development and then to grow your career. Get your first job out of school and grow with us. And then the skilled professional seven years to 15 years out of enterprise software companies that has brought us to the top of our capacity. And I’m going to help them both with AI. Both cohorts with AI and olli.ai.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

And if I could just add here, when Mark mentioned we’re at capacity in Q1 early part of the year, I mean, that was a very important conscious step we undertook in order to have a strong second half given all the product innovations that are coming through. And then when I spoke about the second half year expense of, continuing to invest, keep in mind that that’s also needed for our fiscal 2026 and beyond. So, there are really two parts to the sales investment.

Kiran Sritharan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Thanks for the call, guys.

Madhu Ranganathan

Analyst · Eight Capital. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

I will now hand the call back over to Mr. Barrenechea for closing remarks.

Mark Barrenechea

Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead

Okay. Very good. Thank you everyone for joining us today. And we’ll welcome your feedback if you like the early morning call or the afternoon call. So, we’ll welcome your feedback on that. We hope you’ll join us. We hope you’ll join us at OpenText World November 19th and I’ll be live and in person at the TD conference November 25th, and as well as all the other conferences that Greg and Madhu highlighted. So, thanks for joining us today and we’ll look forward to seeing you in person soon. That ends today’s call.

Operator

Operator

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