Rimini Street, Inc. (NASDAQ:RMNI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Seth Ravin: Sure, Brian. I think you have a few things that came to effect One, we had a really good, very strong renewals year. The fourth quarter was strong, and I think for a lot of the same reasons as the sales were frozen, remember, we talked about 2 sides of the coin. If people aren’t doing anything, part of what they’re not doing is even switching off of our service to a next generation or any kind of evolution there. And so you saw a lot of customers who had plans to make changes to their systems and they didn’t. They extended their contracts instead. So it gave you a very strong renewals. And at the same time, we had a lot of those held up deals freed up. We also saw them free up earlier in the quarter, which gave us a revenue pickup versus plan.

Because we did get that done earlier we got more days of earned revenue. So I think that, plus, as you know, our fourth quarter tends to have a certain amount of revenue holdback that’s released because of the way the contracting cycles work. And as you know, we’re doing bigger contracts, more global contracts, which gives them more attributes that can hold back revenue or delay revenue rack. And we’ve traditionally, as you’ve seen over the last few years, had a bit of a pickup in the revenue due to those holdbacks in the fourth quarter. So I think a combination of those items came together to give us the sequential increase.

Brian Kinstlinger: And just to be clear, you’re talking about strong renewals. I’m trying to reconcile how that helps grow revenue further. Is there price increases? Are there price declines? Is it — or were you assuming more churn?

Seth Ravin: I think we were assuming a little more churn than we saw. We saw, again, for those reasons, customers extending they’re driving more value out of their systems. So our basic thesis not only held but improved even over the last few quarters. Whenever we have volatility in the markets, Rimini Street remains a strong player because of our ability to optimize spend and we help customers spend their money better. And we now have more services to meet those needs in different areas. So the combination of that, again, I think, is why you hear the level of optimism, not only as we were talking about through the fourth quarter, but as we see in the results. And while, again, while we’re playing a conservative number, in our guidance, you’re hearing a lot of confidence that we believe we fixed the issues internally and people are adopting our products.

They’re adopting a wider set of them. And we’re seeing that at the pipeline level. We’re seeing it at the closing level. And we have sales reps who could do a better job of getting out and closing business. So I think you add all those factors together, they started in the third quarter. You saw the negative billings growth in the third quarter because that was already set in the mold. When you have a six to nine month sales cycle on your primary product, you’re not going to turn the ship that fast. But we said on the third quarter call that we should start to see some results of that work coming in the fourth quarter, and we should see that hopefully accelerate in future quarters as we start moving through that sales cycle. So I think Q4 was just representative of the turnaround work that we’re doing and the fact that we’re seeing those economics change with customers moving forward.

Michael Perica: And Brian, it’s Michael here. I would like to add, particularly Q3 to Q4. Year-to-date, I noted in the prepared remarks, FX was a negative $1.5 million for the full year. Quarter — year-to-date, I’m sorry, Q3, it was over 2%, around 2.1%. So we had a little bit of an FX benefit, you can pencil that out, so to a lesser degree than Seth noted, but that was also an element to rationalize this.