PagerDuty Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
September 3, 2024

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, folks. Sorry for the delay. We've had some technical difficulties with Zoom, but we're gonna get going here in just 2 seconds. Go ahead, Tony.

Speaker 1

All right. So apologies again for the delay. We will start with the safe harbor right about now. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to discuss PagerDuty's Q2 fiscal year 2025 results. With me on today's call are Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty's Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer and Howard Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer.

Speaker 1

Before we begin, let me remind everyone that statements made on this call include forward looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it, which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward looking statements. These forward looking statements include our growth prospects, future revenue, operating margins, net income, cash balance and total addressable market among others and represent our management's belief and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made, and we undertake no obligation to update these. During today's call, we will discuss non GAAP financial measures, which are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between GAAP and non GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings release. Further information on these and other factors that could cause the company's financial results to differ materially are included in filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed Form 10 ksA as well as our subsequent filings made with the SEC.

Speaker 1

With that, I will turn the call over to Jennifer.

Operator

Good afternoon. Thanks for your patience and thanks for joining us today. PagerDuty delivered a solid second quarter with revenue growth within our guidance range at 8% and non GAAP operating margin 4 points above the range at 17%. This was our 8th consecutive record quarter of non GAAP profitability. We increased annual recurring revenue by approximately $11,000,000 to $474,000,000 We've stabilized ARR growth at 10% year on year for a 3rd consecutive quarter as well as dollar based net retention at 106 percent quarter over quarter.

Operator

Both results were supported by improving new and expansion bookings, especially in our enterprise segment. As we've shared in recent quarters, PagerDuty is scaling by addressing the critical operations needs of the enterprise segment with our operations cloud, a multi product platform, helping the largest companies in the world improve resilience and modernize their digital operations. I'm encouraged by the signals in both the market and the business that validate our strategy. In fact, the value segment of accounts with ARR greater than $500,000 grew more than 20% as we executed a more effective cross selling and upselling strategy. During the quarter, we signed a record number of multi year agreements representing nearly a third of renewal ARR despite the volatile macro environment.

Operator

While we still experienced increased scrutiny and multiple approval levels when selling into the enterprise segment, which can lengthen sales cycles, our focus is paying off. Our enterprise segments first half dollar based net retention ended 10 points above that of our SMB segment. Many of the Global 2,000 companies suffered the negative effects of major incidents in the past quarter. When these incidents occur, global innovation and customer service get disrupted as IT teams and development teams around the world work day and night to diagnose and recovery impacted systems costing 1,000,000,000 in lost labor and lost time. For our customers and the broader market, recent major technology failures are a wake up call, a reminder that suffering negative business impacts from widespread incidents is not a question of if, but when.

Operator

Nearly 2 thirds of enterprise leaders we surveyed this year saw customer facing incidents rise 43% year over year. The systematic fragility that triggers these events exposes an existential threat we see across industries where aging infrastructure, growing technical debt and manual processes persist. This challenge is compounded by the increasing proliferation of complexity as CICD distributed architecture and generative AI co development all become mainstream. With recent global outages and technology disruptions, these recent global outages and technology disruptions underscore the pivotal role our platform plays. When the world is down, customers rely on PagerDuty to identify issues, orchestrate and increasingly automate the best possible response to quickly contain and reduce business impact.

Operator

The July 19th outage tested our platform on a massive scale. The operations cloud rose to the occasion. We saw an over 1400% increase in incident workflows initiated on that day alone. And we maintained high availability, speed and fidelity without incurring significant cost surges. Our reliability is the result of our history of investment and innovation.

Operator

And it's why companies trust us to deliver operational resilience in their most vulnerable moments. Improving operational resilience for Protect customer experience and revenues while mitigating risk and the cost of major incidents has up leveled incident management to a CEO imperative, similar to that of what we saw with cybersecurity in the past. PagerDuty's operations cloud scales resiliently to address each of these challenges for enterprise companies. Anecdotally, many of our customers have communicated a renewed preference for choosing a best in breed incident management offering and an increased sense of urgency to be better prepared for major incidents. It's early, but we expect to see some benefit in demand over time.

Operator

Our customers across verticals and regions are also increasingly subject to heightened regulation, requiring automation and controls to mitigate risk and support compliance. From DORA in the EU to diverse data and privacy oversight demands worldwide, regulation has become a long term demand driver for the operations cloud. The financial services vertical exemplified this trend in Q2 with several 6 and 7 figure strategic expansions and overall ARR growth above 20%. For example, a global banking institution based in North America strengthened their operations cloud journey by expanding usage of incident management, AIOps and automation in Q2. At over $4,000,000 of ARR, they are targeting a 30% reduction in incident duration through automated customizable workflows by partnering PagerDuty.

Operator

The ROI over 3 years is estimated to exceed 500%. Strategic platform agreements like this demonstrate the progress of our product to platform transition and the power of AI underpinning our platform. During the quarter, new products including AI ops, automation, CS ops or customer service ops and premium support contributed 65% of net new ARR. 2 additional financial services customers signed strategic 6 and 7 figure expansions in Q2. Based in Europe and Australia respectively, these financial leaders optimized for resilience at scale and chose the operations cloud to grow and protect their revenue.

Operator

We also closed a high 6 figure expansion, including AIOps and customer service operations with a large workforce management software provider to help the company accelerate their operations modernizations efforts. On the hardware side, a computer drive manufacturer and data storage company expanded the size and scope of their relationship by nearly doubling their incident management coverage and adding AIOps. With these products, the customer is targeting an ROI of over 300% in the next 3 years. The expanded feature set addresses the real time operations challenges presented by complex modern environments like machine learning, flexible data ingestion, and end to end event driven automation, environments that are common within our $1,000,000 ARR cohort of customers. During the quarter, we also hosted 5 global customer events to build awareness and educate enterprise leaders and practitioners on both the technical and financial benefits of the operations cloud.

Operator

One of the highlights of this series was the positive response to PagerDuty Advance, a suite of generative AI capabilities embedded in the PagerDuty Operations Cloud Platform, which we made generally available at the end of July. These Gen AI offerings can save enterprise teams 100 of hours equating to 1,000,000 of dollars in annual savings. For example, instead of wasting precious time updating leaders and responders as they join an in progress incident response, These coming those coming in late can use simple prompts for summarization of key incident information. And we offer tight integration with both Slack and Teams to efficiently keep work where it happens. PagerDuty Advance can also anticipate diagnostic questions and suggest troubleshooting steps for responders, automating work and minimizing the financial impact at a time when the average incident costs an enterprise approximately $800,000 per incident.

Operator

Generative AI postmortems and AI generated runbooks are progressing well in early access. Together, they further equip enterprise companies to accelerate digital transformation while automating time consuming tasks and recommended actions at every step of the incident lifecycle. We also released new integrated capabilities across the operations cloud, like the combination of dynamic escalation policies connected to incident workflows. Using our proprietary data model, this solves the common challenge of not being able to match a problem to the most knowledgeable, well equipped responder instantly. This requires deep knowledge and correlation on events, past incidents, and people, and as such delivers a differentiated, more complete incident lifecycle offering.

Operator

From a social impact perspective, we announced our 3rd impact accelerator cohort focused on crisis response services through pagerduty.org. These nonprofits provide emergency response services to support people in urgent crises, and they leverage PagerDuty to ensure availability of critical online services to their communities. These are an ideal and important PagerDuty use case. Overall, we're encouraged by the gains we have made to scale our enterprise business. This progress moderates the effects of lower growth and higher volatility in SMB.

Operator

These positive trends validate our strategy and reinforce our optimism in PagerDuty's long term market opportunity. As we progress through the back half of the year, we remain confident that we can increase dollar based net retention and professional services attach rates. From an ARR perspective, the elevated awareness of our value proposition following recent IT outages along with quarterly highs in multi product and multi year agreements culminated in a strong close in the first half. This reinforces my confidence in our ability to exceed 10% ARR growth in FY 2025. I would like to express my gratitude to our shareholders for their ongoing support, our customers for their trust and our dedicated employees and partners for their commitment to revolutionizing operations.

Operator

With that, I'll turn the call over to Howard and look forward to your questions.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Jane, and good day to everyone joining us on this afternoon's call. Unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results are on a non GAAP basis and are reconciled to our GAAP results in the earnings release that was posted before the call. In the Q2, we continued to solidify our progress in the enterprise, consistent with the last quarter, closing 6 and 7 figure multi product, multi year contracts with large companies across our U. S. And international regions.

Speaker 2

Customers remain focused on value when negotiating both new business and renewals. Our enterprise business is strengthening and expanding with our strategic deal focus, whereas SMB remains a headwind to growth with high levels of churn and downgrade. As our business becomes increasingly enterprise focused, we continue to make adjustments to the typical rhythms and seasonality of the sales motion. The momentum in the enterprise and the strength of our back half pipeline gives me confidence in a reacceleration of ARR growth by the end of the year. Revenue for the quarter was $116,000,000 up 8% year over year.

Speaker 2

Despite unfavorable net new ARR linearity and phasing of one time service engagements, we remained within our guidance range. The contribution from international was 27% of total revenues, similar to the year ago period. Annual recurring revenue exiting Q2 grew 10% year over year to 474,000,000 dollars We delivered 106 percent dollar based net retention in line with our Q2 expectation. Our DBNR expectation for Q3 is to be at least 106% and 107% by year end. Customers spending over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue grew to $820,000 up 6% from a year ago.

Speaker 2

In addition, our cohort of logos with greater than $500,000 in ARR grew in the low 20s, up from the high teens in the Q1. Total paid customers decreased to 15,044 compared to 15,146 in the year ago period. The bulk of the decrease came from customer departures in our SMB segment. Free and paid companies on our platform grew to over 29,000, an increase of approximately 12% compared to Q2 of last year. Q2 gross margin was 86% at the high end of our 84% to 86% target range.

Speaker 2

We continue to expect services to grow modestly this year, but our current view is that gross margin will remain at the high end of our range until moving closer to the midpoint in FY26. Operating income was $20,000,000 or 17% of revenue compared to $14,000,000 or 13% of revenue in the same quarter last year. The outperformance compared to our guidance was primarily due to headcount shifting to the second half, lower commissions and marketing expenses shifting from Q2 to Q3. In terms of cash flow for the quarter, cash from operations was $36,000,000 or 31 percent of revenue and free cash flow was $33,000,000 or 29 percent of revenue. The benefit we received from working capital during the Q2 will even out during Q3 with free cash flow being near breakeven for the quarter.

Speaker 2

We expect free cash flow for the full year to be a couple of points above our operating margin. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $599,000,000 in cash, cash equivalents and investments. In Q2, we repurchased 1,300,000 shares from our 100 $1,000,000 repurchase plan. We have $72,000,000 remaining through May 2026. On a trailing 12 months basis, billings were $468,000,000 an increase of 8% compared to a year ago.

Speaker 2

With respect to Q3, we anticipate trailing 12 months billings growth to be approximately 10%. At the end of Q2, total RPO was approximately 403,000,000 dollars Of this amount, approximately $280,000,000 or 70 percent is expected to be recognized over the next 12 months. As a reminder, our remaining performance obligations disclosure includes contracts with an original term of less than 12 months as of FY 'twenty five. Applying the current definition to the year ago period, total RPO for Q2 FY 'twenty four would have been $294,000,000 Turning to our guidance. For the Q3 fiscal 2025, we expect revenue in the range of $115,500,000 to $117,500,000 representing a growth rate of 6% to 8% and net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc.

Speaker 2

In the range of $0.16 to $0.17 This implies an operating margin of 13%. For the full fiscal year 2025, we now expect revenue in the range of 4 $63,000,000 to $467,000,000 representing a growth rate of 7% to 8%. This compares to the range previously provided of $471,000,000 to $477,000,000 and net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc. Of $0.67 to $0.72 This implies an operating margin of 14%. This compares to our prior guide of $0.66 to $0.71 and $0.13 to 14%, respectively.

Speaker 2

As we look to the back half of the year, we remain confident in accelerating ARR growth, exiting the year above our current 10% rate, along with improvement in our dollar based net retention. The success we're having in multiproduct, multiyear strategic contracts with enterprise customers and a strong growing multi quarter pipeline positions us well for growth while we remain committed to continuing to expand operating margins over time. With that, I will open up the call for Q and A.

Speaker 1

All right. Thank you, panelists. Our first question will come from Sanjit Singh of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Sanjit.

Speaker 3

Thank you for taking the questions. So I guess the theme of this call, it sounds like the underlying fundamentals of the business seem to be improving on the enterprise side. And at the same time, guidance had come down by just under 10,000,000 So I was wondering, Howard or Jen, if you want to take it, sort of can you just bridge us between the cut to the revenue guide and it seems like on the ARR side, more stability and your confidence in sort of exiting the year with acceleration.

Operator

It's a great question. Thanks, Sanjeet, and thanks, everybody, for your patience as we work through a technical issue at the beginning of the call. So first of all, I hate taking down guidance. I'm not happy about it. And it's largely a timing issue.

Operator

I want to walk you through this. So the larger multi year, multi product strategic deals that we're doing are driving less linearity than we had seen in our land and expand transactional business and increased seasonality more so than the past. We saw a little bit of that in Q1, but thought it was an anomaly, but Q2 was quite back end loaded and we're expecting more of that in Q3 and Q4. And that also results in a lag in professional services attached. So it's really just timing from a revenue perspective.

Operator

Having said that, you know, just reconfirm our ARR guidance is unchanged. We still expect ARR to accelerate in the back half. Even with SMB, while we're seeing improving trends that that market is yet to stabilize. And I'll remind you, that's mostly tech startups for us. And we know that funding in tech startup land continues to be under pressure.

Operator

So we're taking some of the risk out given this timing issue, but ARR growth is expected to improve through the year as is DBNR. So ARR growth above 10% for the full year and DVR above 100 and or at 107% for the full year.

Speaker 3

Got it. And I think

Speaker 2

and sorry, I would probably just add to that, Sandro, that in many respects, as we focus more on the enterprise, the linearity and the seasonality that we're seeing starts to reflect more like other enterprise SaaS companies.

Speaker 3

Understood. Jen, when you talk about the underlying backdrop, just more incidents and these incidents getting more costly, What is that is that just sort of how does that translate ultimately to better growth for PagerDuty? Is that something that would turn into better inbound for you? Or how do you go sort of prosecute the opportunity in this sort of current environment?

Operator

Yeah. Anecdotally, it's already driving a higher level conversation at the CEO level, at the audit committee level, in the board, which I think over time will improve our ability to get to budget and ensure that budget is set aside for this much in the way we've seen cybersecurity budget be prioritized. Because when when business leaders realize the financial impact of a major, you know, 3rd party or worldwide outage, they are forced to think through what I'm what precautions am I taking? What infrastructure investments do I need to make? How do I prioritize my tech debt burn down?

Operator

And what we saw during the incident that took place in July was a lot of senior leaders reaching out to us for best practices for support, not just in the response, but for advice on where to go from here. We also saw, you know, the differences between customers that have adopted the operations cloud and matured their operations, who found, who discovered the issue very early and were entirely back online by the time the sun rose. And customers who were manually processing secondary and tertiary incidents that took days to get back, you know, full in full operations, which has a huge cost of revenue, not to mention, you know, lost time and excess OpEx in terms of labor. And so I expect that we'll continue to see more and more of these strategic deals show up in the pipeline. And I expect that we'll that we will see more protection around investment and the budget for PagerDuty.

Operator

That's what we're anecdotally seeing. It's too early to see it really show up in pipeline, but it's already showing up in customer conversations.

Speaker 3

Understood. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Next question will go to Bank of America. Koji, please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Yes. Hey, guys, thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask maybe some thought process into into fiscal 26 from a very, very high level. You know, just thinking about the billings growth decelerating this quarter, but the guidance implying acceleration in the second half and confidence in the ARR. But then, Jennifer, also you mentioned a little bit more of seasonality versus linearity.

Speaker 4

How should we think about kind of the exit rate of calendar I'm sorry, fiscal Q4 this year into next year and do those seasonality type trends continue?

Operator

Yeah. Well, the good news is some of that seasonality is driven by the fact that we're doing more multi year, multi product deals that require different level of approval and scrutiny from the customer base. And so we're seeing as a result, we saw a record number of large multi product multi year deals this quarter and we also renewed 30% of our ARR available to renewed in multiyear, which takes pressure off of retention in the future, enables us to focus on growth. So I think fundamentally that puts us in a better place, but I'll let Howard comment on 2020, 2026.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Koji. So we haven't provided any specific guidance yet on FY 'twenty six, but our expectation is that that ARR growth rate will be above the 10% mark. If we look at where we think trading 12 months billings will be, that does actually pick up to approximately 10%. If you're looking at the billings number for Q3, we look at it on a trading 12 months basis. And the way that I would think about it is, to Jane's point, from a retention perspective, the efforts that we have made around doing multiyear arrangements with customers removes some of the downgrade and churn risk out of the success of the year, which creates a really strong platform for future growth.

Speaker 2

So we would expect that as we go into next year, we're in a better position from a fundamental perspective, but also that the seasonality that we started to see emerge as we focus on the enterprise, that's likely going to remain. And that will mean that the 3rd month of every quarter is going to be more heavily weighted. And it would mean that as we progress through the year, like other companies, probably your Q4 ends up being the biggest quarter.

Speaker 4

Got it. Thank you so much for taking the questions. Appreciate it.

Operator

Thanks, Koji.

Speaker 1

Next up, let's go to William Blair. Perfect. Thanks, Jake. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thanks for taking the questions. Just from an expectations perspective, is there anything different about the guidance you're putting out today versus last quarter as it relates to kind of when those large deals start to close or some of the SMB churn that you're seeing? Just trying to understand if there's kind of different puts and takes that you've put into the guidance plan to kind of account for some of these issues.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I can break it down a little bit, Jake. I'd say the one element that is led to a change in the guidance is this lag that we're seeing in professional services attached, which is now happening later as these deals with longer sales cycles are happening. It means that our ability to deliver that revenue gets delayed. And that's taking a couple of $1,000,000 out this year. When we look at some of the phasing that we had even within the first half of this year, some of that linearity change led to less revenue being recognized in Q1 and Q2.

Speaker 2

And so we have taken that out of the full year. But then when we look at the back half, we are expecting that Q3 is probably going to have a similar complexion in terms of net new ARR as we saw in Q2 and that there will be again more of a weighting to the 3rd month in Q3. And we expect that for Q4, it will be a bigger quarter, not enormously so, but certainly a bigger quarter than Q3. But again, with that weighting towards the back half.

Operator

Yes. And I'd just add to that, Jake. We do have very good visibility to the pipeline in place to deliver the back half. I think our visibility is improving as we've gotten used to these sales cycles with larger, more strategic deals in them. We also, as you know, have been evolving our go to market organization over many quarters, and we're really starting to see, the execution behind all of the enablement we've done around top down outbound land and expand the multi product multi year platform versus a bottoms up start with incident response, expand service area, and then start adding new products.

Operator

The success, you know, there has led to a very strong quarter for AI ops growing over 20% or about 20% year on year and customer service ops growing over 50% year on year. So we're seeing that evolution in addition to now having new leaders in place in some of our largest markets where they're hitting the ground running and driving both improvements in churn and more productivity around some of these renewals. And that's in EMEA, in North American enterprise and in federal. So just feeling like we're coming from a stronger foundation as we look towards the back half of the year with, like I said, quite a bit of confidence in the pipeline, but also, you know, seeing that cadence of large deals, our growth in the

Speaker 1

customer value segment spending over 500 ks was

Operator

more than 20% value segment spending over 500 ks was more than 20%. So continue to see that momentum there in enterprise. And over time, SMB represents less and less of the total ARR.

Speaker 5

Okay. Yeah, very helpful. And then just it is really interesting comment about the 1400% increase in incidents during the quarter. Sounds like there's been some good top of funnel activity since the CrowdStrike outage, but just given it's still kind of early days, when would you expect those that that early pipeline to start actually layering into the business? Is that kind of a first half of next year, back half of next year, just would love to kind of understand how you're thinking about that traction?

Operator

We're not modeling in, you know, new pipeline as a result of, of what we've seen in the last quarter in terms of major incidents. You know, what I would anticipate is first, we'll see it in conversations, we will see it in approval processes and just the breadth of what customers are buying. And one of the trends we've already seen is that when a customer really understands the cost of, of a major incident on average, dollars 800,000 an incident, if you can compress the incident duration by half and that becomes $400,000 like that is real financial business and customer, you know, end customer value. So the faster leadership understands that the faster our champions can often move to get a multi product multi deal done. And so the biggest, I think, tailwind that we've already seen is just awareness, just now CEOs and CFOs really understanding that if you scrimp on infrastructure and on having platforms to really detect, orchestrate and automate the response when these major incidents happen, because they will, you're going to pay for it in spades later.

Operator

And so that sort of, I think that short term thinking is going to manifest to more long term, investment and in long term investment mindset. And then, and then I expect that after we see it in terms of sales cycles, we'll start to see it in, in ads. But I, you know, I can't predict how long that's going to take to manifest. Some of our customers move really quickly on the back of an issue like this, you know, coming, recovering from a major incident has long been a primary use case for PagerDuty. And some of our customers take longer to transform their thinking internally.

Speaker 5

Thanks for taking the questions.

Speaker 6

All right.

Speaker 1

The next question will come from T. D. Cowen. Andrew, please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks, Tony. Hey, guys. We'd love to hear how the flexible enterprise pricing is tracking. What has feedback been from customers?

Speaker 7

Has this helped drive any expansions in the quarter? What are you expecting from this in the second half to help with those deals?

Operator

Feedback's been, very positive and it's really enabled some of the big deals that we shared in prepared remarks. And I know some people some time to get into the call. So we talked about a North American global bank, that was already a 7 figure customer that it's expanded, beyond that to add AI ops as well as customer service ops. We've talked about, the global nature of the financial services industry that's under heightened regulation around customer service incident response regulation like DORA in the EU and increasingly diverse regulation around data and privacy. That means the genesis of incidences is emerging or is evolving and changing.

Operator

And that is leading to leadership coming to us and saying, look, we, you know, we now kind of understand the value of doing this. How do we expand with you? And it's less about it's just this many users and this, you know, price tag for those users. Our AI ops, business, which like I said, grew, about 20% this quarter, that's consumption based pricing. So we're getting, I think, a warm reception to that, but also flexibility in terms of thinking about how customers are going to grow their adoption across products and services.

Operator

Howard, anything that you want to add there?

Speaker 2

I think you've covered it, Jane.

Speaker 7

Okay. Thanks. And then, Howard, I get the I think we all understand that you're more Q4 weighted now. But how have you factored in the fact that these deals are larger and taking longer to close and anything you've changed as far as your assumption on close rates for Q4? And then how have the renewals tracked as well versus your expectations?

Speaker 2

Yes, sure. So from a guidance perspective, part of the reason why we made the adjustment to our guidance was because we took into account our most recent history in terms of seeing how these deals are closing and their timing and also anticipating that some of these deals may end up taking longer. So that's been accounted for. That being said, the approach that we're taking in terms of how we're managing our pipeline is certainly around our sales team being incented to get these deals closed within the timing and within this year. And a lot of the sales disciplines that we put in place over the past year have really been about improving the level of scrutiny and the quality of those deals.

Speaker 2

So that's improving our level of confidence as we think about it. So we have good visibility into the deals that are in play, both in Q3 and Q4 and into next year. Fundamentally, like from a renewals perspective, we started the initiative about a year ago in earnest to really it was actually Q4 of last year, it was in earnest to get customers onto multiyear arrangements at renewal, not just when we did a new deal. And that is starting to bear results in that when we look at what's available to renew within Q4 this year, it's a lot less than what it was in Q4 of last year. So that means that we're in a position to manage any potential risk on the retention side more effectively.

Speaker 7

Great. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1

All right. Next up, Craig Hallum, please. We will go to Jeff Van Rhee.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks, Tony. Hey, guys. Couple of questions for me. I just want to read this back to make sure I understand that the guide at the midpoint is reduced by $9,000,000 I think Howard, you mentioned if I caught it that you think PS is a couple of 1,000,000.

Speaker 6

You mentioned seasonality and a bunch of other factors, but just simply put, we're seeing longer cycles in years back end more back end loaded, but you're going to get to the same ARR just going to happen later in the year. Is that a fair readback?

Speaker 2

That is correct. With the exception of the revenue that's specifically professional services related, our expectation is that in terms of what we would expect to book in terms of net new ARR will still get us to above the 10% growth rate by the end of the year from a downward perspective.

Speaker 6

Yes. Got it. Okay. And then from a competitive win rate, when you look at deals that are just incident management, I realize you're going with a much broader proposition. Jennifer, you talked about the attach rates of some of the incremental products.

Speaker 6

But when you're in just an incident management deal, what do win rates look like now versus a year ago?

Operator

We haven't published our win rates, obviously, but that part of the market hasn't changed meaningfully. I think that customers are more price sensitive in some in the lower end of the market, particularly SMB, but also to some extent, mid market. And they also is like we aren't seeing the level of head headcount growth that we've seen in those segments compared to the past. So that puts some pressure on both growth and renewals. But from a competitive standpoint, like it's not a zero sum market.

Operator

And I think what you saw, you know, with a major outage, like, what happened on July 19th, one thing that works in our favor, even in, incident management as a standalone offering is there are still a lot of large companies out there that have manual processes, that use very little automation and detection that have more than 10 observability players that are not correlating that information, right. And need the support of a platform just to even get to responding more effectively. And then I would also say that even our incident management platform is built, on the, on an AI based foundation on a proprietary dataset that is distinctly different to anything else that's out there and that we have data on the events coming in the incident workflows themselves. And then also, more and more automation around the response, including the generative AI based features that I mentioned in prepared remarks. One of the things that is that I think was really interesting about the July event is, you know, we saw, like I said, a 14,000 percent increase of incident workflows running on the platform and suffered no disruption, and no cost surge.

Operator

And there isn't another player incident management notifications, alerting observability that can, I think, attest to that kind of pressure live when the rest of the world and the largest companies in the world are suffering a major outage? So I think that reinforces our resilience at scale and the security of our platform, even under a significant, you know, global outage or worldwide outage. The last thing that I would say is, you know, we have taken steps to try and support SMB and mid market customers that are more price sensitive. Free is one of those. We've made some changes to pricing.

Operator

But at the end of the day, even in this tough macro, you know, I think we're controlling the controllables and getting there. And, and, you know, I am somewhat of an optimist, like the tech industry will come back. We will start to see venture funding back in SMB at some point in time. I'm just not calling that in, in our expectations. Like we expect that to continue for the current conditions to continue.

Speaker 2

Sorry, I'm Jen. I'm going to have to do my CFO thing and say it was a 1400%, not a 14,000.

Operator

Sorry, good point. I added an extra 0.

Speaker 6

I like your numbers better.

Speaker 2

Yeah. The 40,000 sounds fantastic. Let's go ahead. It is pretty impressive, you know. Yeah.

Operator

So let's not. Let's use the appropriate number. Thank you.

Speaker 6

One last for me, if I could sneak it in on the SMB side. Just two clarifications. Howard, on the numbers, on the customer count number, I know there's some pretty different trends within enterprise versus SMB. The overall customer count was down, but can you give a little more granularity of SMB versus enterprise? And then just to be clear, on the SMB side, it feels to me maybe I'm splitting hairs that where there's a little more of a message of stability prior quarter and the bottom was in on SMB and it feels slightly more pessimistic if I'm reading it correctly, but you tell me if I'm wrong there.

Speaker 2

Yes. So SMB has remained we've had elevated trend downgrade there now for 4 quarters in a row. In fact, it's the 4th consecutive quarter of that contracting year over year. And so it's been a real headwind to growth. What I would say is that from a stabilization perspective, we see like elements or signs of some level of stabilization from 1 quarter to the next, but then that can reverse fairly quickly, right, in terms of movement.

Speaker 2

Now from a customer count perspective, our customer count went down year over year. Again, the bulk of that churn is actually in SMB by far. The number of accounts that are outside of SMB, the churn is actually relatively small. So this is part of us also focusing more on the enterprise where landing enterprise and mid market logos is more important. And so given the volatility, if you like, within the SMB market in general, not specifically for us, that means that we do expect to see high levels of churn.

Speaker 6

Yes. Okay. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Speaker 1

All right. Next, we'll go to Canaccord Genuity in Kingsley.

Speaker 8

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. So just want to return a little bit to competition. We've seen some of your smaller competitors combine and some larger competitors reintroduce their products with a couple of new bells and whistles. So just want to hear more about how the competitive environment has evolved and then more specifically, how you think about that affecting relative enterprise strength versus relative SMB softness?

Operator

Yeah, I would say, most of the again, not a zero sum market. Most of the competition that we see is in the mid market or below in SMB. And that is because the competitive offerings that are out there don't scale effectively into enterprise or purely price led versus feature led. And I think if anything, what we've seen in the last quarter with worldwide outages is that this is an area where performance does matter. And I think that will serve as a competitive driver for us in the future.

Operator

The other players that are out there have, much less functionality, very little, AI supported throughout their platforms and are not proven in enterprise, which is very clearly our focus. And so, I think we're, I feel confident and believe that we are going to continue to outpace the other players from an R and D perspective. And in terms of just delivering, the operations cloud platform, not just in detection of incidents, but also the intelligent correlation of those events and orchestration them to the right teams and increasingly the right agents as AI starts to take more and more whole, more automation of the actual troubleshooting and diagnostic with the help of both traditional AI and generative AI and faster resolution that compresses these large enterprise, great incidents that we're seeing on a global basis.

Speaker 8

Great, really helpful. And then one for Howard, you've really made strides in expense efficiency over the past year. You're close to your long term model. The business has changed a lot since that was put out. And I would say that your 85% plus gross margin profile suggests you could have an attractive terminal margin.

Speaker 8

So just any more thoughts on more efficiencies you could find from here would be helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks for the question, Kingsley. As you know, we've always taken a structural and programmatic approach to how we think about improving our productivity and our efficiency as a company. And we've laid really good foundations for that in terms of both our location strategy, our use of technology, our internal use of AI, all of these things contribute to this. So I think you'd expect what you can expect to see more of the same.

Speaker 2

So leveraging on those areas that we've already made those investments. And on the sales and marketing side, we continue to look at how can we more efficiently raise our brand and how we can more efficiently drive demand, Jen, and at the same time, drive efficiency into our sales team. So I think the areas where for the longer term, where we still have the most obvious opportunity is around G and A and then sales and marketing. And then obviously, from an R and D perspective, our goal is to try and maintain high levels of investment in R and D to support our innovation strategy.

Speaker 1

Okay, helpful. Thank you. And our final question comes from Scotiabank. John, please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Hi. This is, John Gomez on for Nick Alman. Thanks for taking the question. So when you talk about deals taking longer, there can be a lot in there that's driving it, you know, larger deals, the macro focus on enterprise customers. So what has been the biggest driver here?

Speaker 9

And how are you guys feeling about the overall sales cycles relative to prior quarters?

Operator

I actually feel feel good about the sales cycles. I don't actually mind that the deals are taking a little bit longer because they represent much larger average deal size, multi product, which is stickier, more flexible pricing, which also I think, engenders like a long term partnership and relationship with the customers. So it's a very good investment in the long term foundational growth and strength in the business. And as I said, like our change in guidance is really about the timing, this kind of small transition to revenue taking a little longer because of the less linearity and more seasonality. But at the end of the day, long term, it's a tailwind because we are seeing more and more highly referenceable customers doing multiyear deals.

Operator

So the guidance change is really about derisking the full year and articulating some conservatism, but also, you know, we are very confident in the ability to accelerate ARR through the back half of the year and end the year at $107 race net retention. And as as more and more of our business shifts to that focus on enterprise, I think that is that's good for customers and and good for shareholders long term. So I hope that's helpful.

Speaker 9

Super helpful. And, obviously, the SMB has been challenged. But when we look at the second half for ARR, can you talk about the underlying assumptions for ARR from SMB? You know, should we expect that to continue to downtick or should that stabilize? Just any color on the anticipated ARR mix would be super helpful.

Operator

Howard, you're on mute.

Speaker 2

We're expecting the bulk of our growth to be coming from the enterprise and mid market segments. We have the trends that we have seen around SMB being negative. Whilst we expect to see some stabilization, we still see that as being a bit of a headwind even in the back half.

Speaker 1

Okay. Let's turn it back over to management for closing comments. Please go ahead, Jen.

Operator

Well, first of all, thank you for your patience as we got off to a little bit of a late start with some some technical glitches of proof that these incidents happen all the time and everywhere. And thank you to my team for a terrific incident response. I appreciate it. Thank you all for joining us today. The increased recognition in our value proposition following the recent high profile IT outages cup coupled with the record numbers of multi product and multi year agreements really underpins my confidence in our ability to surpass 10% ARR growth for the fiscal year.

Operator

As Howard said, we're going to continue to work on improving efficiency and most of all, continue to focus on building trust and long term relationships with our customers. So thank you very much for your time and have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 1

With that, our call concludes. Thank you very much.

Powered by Quartr
Earnings Conference Call
PagerDuty Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00