Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Gleb Budman: Yes. So for everybody to just remind, cloud application is a functionality where a customer can keep their data in one region inside of Backblaze B2 and then choose to keep it in another region instead of Backblaze B2. So we launched that in the middle of 2022. It was a soft launch because the choices that the customers had were to keep the data in the U.S. West Coast region and in Europe and those are the two choices. At the end of this past year, we launched the East Coast data center, which now gives people the choice of keeping their data on the West and the East Coast of the U.S. or also in the Western Europe or Eastern Europe. We do expect that, that is a benefit to customers. We have certainly heard from customers who have said they do want to replicate, but they want to keep their data inside of the U.S., so they want it replicated inside of the U.S. and that gives them the ability to do that.

We have also actually started standing up additional programs for Marketing Cloud application, including functionality inside of the product itself that helps explain how to set it up for customers as well as targeted outreach to customers that we have to educate them on the ability for them to do this. So, like I said before, we don’t expect cloud applications to be a hockey stick type of approach. It is something that we see as a value for customers gives them the opportunity to keep data closer to wherever they want it to be. It lets them fulfill insurance requirements that allow often for data to be geographically distributed. It allows them to add additional resiliency. And it is only continue to see growth in, but we expect that to be continual, gradual growth in the offering.

James Kisner: Thank you for all those great questions from the sales setting analyst community. I would now like to read questions that come from investors that were submitted on the technologies platform. I want to thank those investors that submitted questions. I think we have kind of addressed some of them, and we are going to try to address some of the more popular ones right now. The first one is for Rank Frank. Really, it is actually, we had a couple different forms of this question. When can we expect to get paid dividends, Frank?

Frank Patchel: Well, we are a growth company and beyond that a growth technology company, and we have so many growth opportunities in front of us. Remember that our core market is over a hundred billion. So the best use of our cash right now is to invest in opportunities that get us parts of that market, and that is what we are doing. So we don’t have any plan to pay dividends consequently, because these other opportunities can be so lucrative for us.

James Kisner: This is actually the combination of really think about five of the questions on the platform. In some form or another, folks are asking, what are the main goals of the company, both in the next 12 months and beyond, like, what are we focusing on as a company? What goals and objectives have we set for the long haul? I will have ask Gleb that question.