Cognyte Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CGNT) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Elad Sharon: Yes. Thank you, Mike. So our customer mission is to increase the speed, accuracy and success rate of investigations. The demand drivers are strong and solid, which means, first of all, the bad actors are more sophisticated. They’re more organized, well-funded, using the advance technology themselves and better at hiding. Customers also have to deal with data volumes and diversity that are growing quickly. And as a result, the complexity for uncovering critical insights and conclude investigations successfully and on time is becoming more complicated for them. And for that reason, they need the investigative analytics technology. It’s a race because this is not a static situation. Customers – you mentioned existing customers, for example, existing customers, have to continue and buy more in order to scale up their solutions to deal with more data and more diversified data and they also need to add more functionality in terms of more analytics, more AI in order for them to uncover more insights out of their existing data sets.

And this is driving the need of the customers. About the examples I gave earlier in the call, — so we had two significant deals from existing customers. One of them added another use case for threat hunting. It’s related to cyber threats on a national level. The other one is an upgrade of functionality and having more capacity and capabilities to generate more insights. And the third one is related to crypto currency. So you can see many different use cases. And all of them require the technology, which means fusing and analyzing data at scale with strong analytics to uncover hidden insights. So we see that many customers, existing and new ones need this technology. The traction is very good with customers and we feel good about the growth opportunity.

Mike Cikos: Got it. And while we’re on the top line conversation around those customers as well? I know in your prepared remarks, you cited those two new customer wins in the United States specifically, right? And good to hear that there were competitive wins and you guys went out on technology and the value proposition. Can you give us an update on progress in the U.S. market? How are we trending as far as building out pipeline and getting more of these deals ideally across the finish line?

Elad Sharon: Yes, sure. So first of all, about the U.S. market, we keep our decision to expand process in the U.S. We think that it presents an opportunity for us. Market penetration is obviously takes time. It’s a process. It’s not like a repeat business from existing customers. We had to adjust some – to make some product adjustments. We have to work on brand awareness. And mainly, we have to push out incumbents. So we see interest in our products. We were able to deliver already for customers from previous deals we had and in Q3, actually, what we saw is that we are able to win deals that both were competitive wins. It was in two different states. In both, it was replacing incumbents. And in both we won because of the high value our technology delivers.

We see it as a process, and we believe that we’ll be able to gradually grow the business in the U.S. over time. About the general market, I think you asked before, we do see more and more countries having better visibility into the budget. And for that reason, for this reason, we were able, first of all, to be ahead of our expectations in Q3, but also improve visibility and increase – give guidance or raise guidance for Q4 and for the year. I hope this answers, Mike.

Mike Cikos: It did. It did. And maybe one more question before I turn it over to my colleagues, but I know good to see the gross margin guidance here creeping up by another point for that 69% you’re talking to for the full year and the gross margin growth actually coming in at 20% plus on a year-over-year basis, right? So I just wanted to get a sense, is there any reason why from Q3 where you did 70.2% versus Q4, why gross margins would decline? Is there something we should keep in mind either from what you guys see in your backlog? Or maybe anything that’s more seasonal in nature? Any reason why that gross margin would be declining sequentially?

David Abadi: Yes. Mike, it’s David. In general, gross margin may reflect – in general, gross margin can fluctuate between quarter-over-quarter. But overall, as you can see, the trend is very positive. You can see that over the last few quarters, our gross margin is growing in the software and also in the – overall in the professional services. So you can see that the dynamics behind the gross margin are the right dynamics. The more revenue for software, you see the better gross margin. In any given quarter, there may be, I would say, limited fluctuation that can take place. Given the current backlog that we see in the scheduling for Q4, we are focusing now 69% for the full year. But it is always an opportunity like to improve the gross margin over time. We believe that given the strength of our solution and the technology advantage that we bring to the table, we can get gross margin on the right direction and continue with this trend over time.