Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Alex Sklar of Raymond James.
Alex Sklar: John and Dave, two-part question on DealCloud. You did some brand consolidation efforts last year. There’s some nice wins that you announced in the prepared remarks this quarter. So John, first for you. Can you talk about how much DealCloud drove those wins versus kind of what your prior offering was to the professional services market in the past? And David, any financial benefit you’ve seen so far in the model from that brand consolidation?
John Hall: Thanks, Alex. Yes, we consolidated our brands. At the time of our IPO, we had a branded professional services called OnePlace that had a history that a lot of firms knew — but the technology that even it represented was DealCloud technology and we got — we started getting a lot of inbound calls from folks in the legal, accounting and consulting industry is asking for DealCloud by name. So we just made a pragmatic decision to say, “Oh, we can simplify branding here and get some leverage word-of-mouth on DealCloud across our whole market.” And so, it was a change for some of the people who had gone with the OnePlace brand initially but it wasn’t a technology change. It was a brand change. And there’s a lot of excitement now because we have a broader community of DealCloud users that are coming together at our events, our user conferences, our advisory boards, who are all sharing best practices across these firms.
There’s been a lot of enthusiasm that we actually have uncovered an underserved community here who have different professional specialties with a lot of deep expertise in each area. But if you actually step back and look at the way that the firms go to market, they pursue opportunities in the marketplace, they pursue clients, the huge network of relationships among all these people. It’s not a linear sales model. All these firms share a very networked model going to market on covering opportunities through referrals and each other. They love talking to each other. So I actually think the brand consolidation has turned out to be a net positive for DealCloud and we were excited to be able to name a bunch of firms this quarter who I’m very grateful said, “Hey, you can talk about us because there’s a growing community of folks who really see this as the next generation.
And now that we’re bringing the applied AI in, in relationship intelligence which I talked about specifically but more broadly to the DealCloud platform and the rest of the offerings that we have, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for DealCloud coming in. So, you’ll see some more work on the brand simplification as we come out on February 22 because we really want to help everyone sharing that word-of-mouth across the marketplace. That’s working for us.
David Morton: And I would say that’s probably where you’re going to see that manifest in the P&L the most. is that opportunity cost of winning and being able to focus all your efforts as we continue to cross-sell and upsell across our various industries that we serve using the same technology.
Alex Sklar: Okay, that’s great color. We’ll look for more there in the coming quarters then. John, the other thing you mentioned on the new blueprint strategy, or the somewhat new blueprint strategy, initial win rates, is something that you’re seeing track higher as one of the few positive early developments talked about in the prepared remarks. Can you just elaborate on what you saw in terms of win rates versus prior quarters from that strategy?
John Hall: The experience when you come in and you show a blueprint that specialized — in the previous quarter, we talked about private credit and this quarter we expanded our fund to funds blueprint. You’re getting more and more specific to each of the professional teams and the way that they talk and the way that they work and recognize — they see that you have a solution that really understands them. And not only do you have a broad universe of 2400 clients but you’ve got 100 clients just like them and the types of work that they do. And it just makes a huge psychological impression at the first moment to really appreciate our industry expertise. But then, it also gives confidence that we’re going to be able to deploy and get them up and running quickly.
And so, a lot of it is time-to-value for them as well as the confidence that we’re going to be able to support them and enable them over time. So we have seen strong responses both at the early end of the funnel and in any competitive conversations that come in later in the process when people need to show that they’ve shopped. There’s just nothing like what we’re showing to this type of professional as we deploy. So we’re very enthusiastic about this blueprint strategy and we’re going to do more. It helps on win rate, it helps on time to value, it helps on services and getting our costs down to help people be successful and that’s part of the model here. So we’re big believers in where this is going. And then, now, the whole applied AI strategy is rolling under this blueprints idea.
So we really want to bring applied AI out specific to each of the professionals workflows.
Alex Sklar: Okay. That’s super helpful context.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia of Barclays.
John Hall: Saket, it’s good to hear — talk to you.
Saket Kalia: John, Dave apologies in advance here if some of these questions have been asked, just to kind of hopping to a couple of calls. But John, maybe for you. I guess I wonder how you think about the seasonality here in the cloud business, particularly as we look at net new ARR. We have really strong start to the year. Net new ARR was down a little bit sequentially. Is that sort of in line with kind of the shape that you think about in the business? Or in line with sort of your customer spending cycles? Just a little bit of color on how you think about the shape of that, based on kind of typical seasonality? Does that make sense?
