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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Intapp earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions]
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Mr. Barry Hutton. You may begin.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Intapp's Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. On the call with me today are John Hall, CEO of Intapp; and Steve Robertson, the company's Chief Financial Officer.
During the course of this conference call, we may make forward-looking statements regarding trends, strategies and the anticipated performance of our business. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and expectations, entail certain assumptions made as of today's date and are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings and other publicly available documents, including those related to the impacts of COVID-19 on our business, the financial services industry and global economic conditions. Intapp disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.
Further, on today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation of comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release which is available on our website and as an exhibit to the Form 8-K furnished with the SEC prior to this call.
With that, I'll hand the call over to John.
Thanks, Barry. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us for Intapp's first earnings call as a public company. I'm here with our CFO, Steve Robertson. And today, we'll spend some time providing you a few recent Intapp highlights, sharing our strong fourth quarter 2021 results, reviewing our full fiscal year and providing insight into how we're thinking about the year ahead.
Intapp was founded in 2000 with a focus on helping law firms manage and integrate their data. In the years since, we've expanded, building from that foundation to deliver a modern industry cloud for professional and financial services firms. Leveraging this market position, we ended fiscal year 2021 on a high note with a great fourth quarter, demonstrating continued growth and strong execution across our businesses.
Our high-growth cloud business is the key driver of our overall annual recurring revenue and also of our total revenue growth, as digital transformation in the markets we serve leads to increased cloud adoption.
Steve will provide specific details and comments around our results and guidance during his remarks, but I'd like to share with you a few highlights.
Throughout the last year, we have seen professional and financial services firms accelerate their adoption of new technologies and pivot to the cloud. You can see the market's ongoing cloud adoption and our cloud-first strategy at work reflected in our results as we ended our first fiscal year, June 30, with cloud ARR of $110 million, an increase of 48% from the prior year. Cloud ARR is now 52% of our total ARR, up from 43% of the total a year ago. And our total ARR of $212 million increased 23% year-over-year.
We're pleased with the results of our first quarter as a public company. In Q4, our SaaS and support revenue increased 26% year-over-year to $39.4 million driven by continued adoption of our cloud solutions, while total revenue increased 29% year-over-year to $61.3 million.
We also completed our IPO during the fourth quarter. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the employees, clients, partners, advisers, Board members and most of all the investors who helped us reach this significant milestone. We had the pleasure of speaking with many of you during that process. But for those of you whom we haven't yet met, I'll take a few moments here on our first earnings call to share an overview of Intapp, the solutions we provide and the markets we serve.
As I mentioned, Intapp was founded 20 years ago as a developer of solutions designed to help law firms better manage their data. Since then, we've expanded our vision and our scope, and we now deliver a full cloud platform to the broader industry of professional and financial services firms. Today, we're executing a strategy to enable breakthrough performance for the $3 trillion ecosystem of private capital, investment banking, legal, accounting and consulting firms that make up the professional and financial services industry.
These firms are the central facilitators of the world's economy. And as a group, they make up a large and durable market with a serviceable addressable market of $10 billion and a total addressable market of over $24 billion. Intapp is very well positioned for continued growth and profitability.
As you are aware, nearly every industry has made or is making the transition to the cloud. The professional and financial services industry is no different. For the past decade, we have seen the shift steadily taking place in these markets as more firms look to eliminate the technical debt of legacy and on-premises solutions, flex to accommodate dispersed remote workforces and keep pace by better accessing and applying data to business decisions. All of this was happening even before the impacts of COVID. As a result, our cloud business is expanding rapidly. Going forward, we are targeting all new sales in the cloud and expect our on-premises annual subscription license business to decline slowly as a portion of those licenses are upgraded to the cloud upon renewal.
It's worth noting that unlike companies that sell physical products, professional and financial services firms sell knowledge and expertise. Digital transformation in these industries has taken a special emphasis on institutionalizing and harnessing the firm's knowledge across a large population of working professionals. Because their business is so specialized, these firms tend to experience greater challenges, successfully adopting and applying technology that hasn't been built with their specific needs in mind.
For too long, the industries that we serve have found themselves without technology systems built for the very complex and regulated way they do business. As investment professionals yourselves, you may very well have firsthand experience with this issue.
The core of the market is served today by homegrown, internally developed solutions that are expensive to build and maintain, lack modern features and are often difficult to scale. Many firms also still rely on legacy solutions built on aging architecture, with limited capabilities, usability and functionality. Legacy solutions have traditionally not been able to keep up with the needs of the business and the clients.
We grew the Intapp business competing with this part of the market, and we still replace these systems consistently, particularly as more firms embrace the transition to the cloud.
Finally, we found that the firms who make up this specialized industry struggle to make use of the traditional horizontal software systems. Traditional CRM and ERP systems were built to support traditional product companies, not for the complex needs of professional and financial services firms who rely on their people, their expertise, and their relationships to drive their business. As a result, these horizontal systems require complex and expensive customization. And even then, they still often fall short.
Intapp is the antidote to homegrown legacy and horizontal solutions. We are building the modern cloud platform based on a deep understanding of what these clients need.
You're probably familiar with the vertical industry cloud model and its success in the life sciences and insurance industries. Intapp is using this cloud strategy to enable the digital transformation of the market of professional and financial services firms. Our technology solutions are more advanced and purpose-built than other offerings. We'll continue to innovate and invest in the Intapp platform to sustain and grow our market advantage. There's an enormous market opportunity ahead for Intapp. For those of you who are or have been lawyers, accountants, bankers or investors yourselves, our company and our solutions are built for you.
We currently go to market with our industry cloud under 2 different solution brands. Each brand is a configuration of the same underlying platform and technology.
DealCloud is for the financial services sector and manages firm's client, deal and investor relationships, prospective clients and investments, current deals and compliance activities. For investment banks and advisory firms, this translates into enhanced coverage models, greater win rates and higher success fees. For investors, it helps increase origination volume, support investment selection and drive greater returns.
OnePlace is for professional services firms, and helps manage firm knowledge and go-to-market strategies, business development, risk and compliance and engagement delivery. This better enables legal, accounting and consulting firms to win and grow their clients to effectively manage risk and compliance obligations and to execute work efficiently and profitably.
Acquisitions have always been a part of our strategy to expand our technology capabilities. We have completed 7 successful acquisitions to date. Most recently, the acquisition of Repstor in Q4, which provides us access to Repstor's Microsoft Teams and Office 365 enterprise content management and collaboration tools, which are designed specifically for professional and financial services firms. We're confident in the growth potential of our current portfolio and in addition, are always open to new opportunities to augment our platform and accelerate our strategic plan to best serve our clients.
Today, we serve more than 1,900 premier firms in 40 countries. That number is a noticeable increase from prior periods as it now includes roughly 200 clients related to our fourth quarter acquisition of Repstor.
We're proud of the clients we serve, which include 96 of the Am Law top 100 U.S. law firms, 7 of the top 8 global accounting firms and over 1,000 of the world's largest private capital and investment banking firms.
Our enterprise go-to-market approach primarily focuses on the largest firms with a land-and-expand strategy at its core. The approach starts with our large and deeply entrenched client base, many of whom have been with us for a long time. There's tremendous room to expand within our base with more solutions, more seats and deeper account penetration.
For smaller firms, we tend to go to market with the full platform. As we move upmarket to the larger enterprise class firms, we take a more modular approach. Instead of ripping out their existing technology investments all at once, we'll focus on a key area of improvement or a goal that our clients are trying to achieve. Given the mission-critical nature of our solutions, our churn is very low. Over time, we typically add users and solutions, expanding into other portions of our clients' business. Our trailing 12-month net revenue retention rate was within the expected range of 108% to 112%.
We're also rapidly growing our client base. Every quarter, we add new clients from mid-sized firms, large firms and global enterprises across all of the markets that we serve.
As partners and professionals move from firm to firm, they often recommend our platform to their new employers, further expanding brand recognition and client loyalty. This circulation of professionals helps to create powerful network effects across the industry for the Intapp platform.
We truly believe that no one else has Intapp's combination of deep domain expertise and next-generation technology, purpose-built to address the challenges that professional and financial services firms face. We have a more comprehensive cloud-based platform with the scale, horsepower and applied AI to compete strongly against homegrown and legacy solutions. And we're now recognized as the industry leader with the brand and client trust to compete successfully with horizontal solutions as a purpose-built industry cloud for professional and financial services.
Take, for instance, our long history and partnership with Baker McKenzie, one of the largest and highest grossing law firms in the world. More than a decade ago, they implemented their first Intapp product as a single-point solution. In the years since, they have continuously embraced the platform from Intapp, and we have become a key partner in their innovation program. Today, Baker Mackenzie is a full platform client, using integrated Intapp solution Conflicts Management, time recording, Confidentiality Management, Workflow Automation and data integration.
They've improved the efficiency of the client onboarding process by 60%, cut their client response time in half, and their data is now centralized across the entire client life cycle. Perhaps most significantly, they now have a 360-degree view of their client relationships, and they're using that intelligence to drive their growth strategy and to best serve their clients. They exemplify the way our comprehensive suite of solutions flexes to support our clients as their needs evolve, and they are a tremendous example of the power of centralizing and harnessing data to inform strategic decisions and to drive growth.
Hamilton Lane is a great example of the impact and scalability of Intapp solutions. They're an alternative investment management firm, providing private market services to investors around the world. and they're a fast grower across sectors and geographies. When they selected Intapp to improve deal flow processes 5 years ago, it was because they needed a tool that could improve the deal flow process and help them manage their CRM. They also wanted to ensure the solution that they chose could evolve to support their business as they grew.
Our single DealCloud solution replaced 28 disparate systems and databases. And in the first year alone helped the firm to eliminate more than 55,000 e-mails, most of those centered around process management. In the years since, DealCloud has proven flexible and customizable to grow alongside Hamilton Lane as their business has expanded, and we're proud of and grateful for their partnership.
Serving clients like these is what our team passionately pursues every day.
Turning to the most recent quarter, I'm pleased to share with you just a few of our most recent client successes and an overview of our performance. We are seeing a steady ramp of new clients, and we're committed to moving quickly from introduction to providing value in a way that helps clients achieve their objectives faster.
In Q4, we landed more than 50 net new logos organically. Balfour Pacific, a Canadian private equity real estate firm selected our Deal Cloud solution to streamline their pipeline and relationship management, centralize deal information and better leverage their data. We work with more than 1,000 focused firms of this size, and provide them a complete platform to drive their operations. From signing to go live, working closely with their team, we implemented the software in less than 4 months, speeding their time to value.
Equally significantly, we continue to expand relationships with some of the most respected names in our industries. For example, Freshfields, a prestigious international law firm headquartered in the U.K. and an Intapp client for several years, provides a great example of how our client relationships grow over time. They are a great example of the 100-or-so top-tier global firms where we have the opportunity to drive a large enterprise relationship and can solve challenges across the organization.
Having significantly grown staff through a recent acquisition, in Q4, Freshfields increased the scope of its Intapp contract to include additional seats and to cover all staff. They also selected our AI-assisted Risk and Compliance Solution to streamline conflicts review and to accelerate the process of accepting and onboarding new client engagements. Finally, they're moving existing Intapp solutions to the cloud, which will enable them to reduce the cost of ownership while staying on top of the latest innovation through automated updates.
Thompson Coburn is another example of the platform expansion and cloud migration happening within our current client base. Thompson Coburn is an example of one of the hundreds of mid-sized firms that we target with our full solution to generate meaningful revenue and valuable relationships for the firm. A full-service U.S.-based legal firm and a client since 2016, Thompson Coburn is growing rapidly, and needed to better leverage data across the firm to achieve its strategic goals and best serve its clients. In Q4, they opted to move to the cloud and to leverage the full OnePlace for legal platform. This enables them to replace their bespoke solutions and connect their internal and external data sources to drive efficiency and better client outcomes.
The above examples show the power of our land and expand execution. As of June 30, we had over 1,900 clients. 420 of those clients generate more than $100,000 of ARR, of which 31 have ARR of more than $1 million.
To summarize, Intapp delivered strong fourth quarter results to finish a year that began with the uncertainty of COVID, and ended with the validation that cloud adoption and revenue growth continue to thrive, even accelerate in these most challenging of circumstances. We're very excited about the opportunities ahead. We're leading a significant vertical market shift by helping professional and financial services firms to reinvent and optimize the way that they operate. We have an enormous global opportunity with a serviceable addressable market of $10 billion and a TAM of $24 billion, and we have a stable, recurring existing client base and tremendous growth potential in each of our subverticals.
Thank you for your time today. We look forward to getting to know many of you better in the upcoming quarters and years and updating you on Intapp's progress and success.
With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Steve Robertson, to walk through our financial results and guidance.
Steve, over to you.
Thanks, John, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.
Before I go through the numbers, I'd like to quickly review the fundamentals of our financial model. Our recurring software business is represented by our total ARR, which is the annualized recurring value of all of our new and renewal software contracts.
There are 2 components of our total ARR, cloud and on-premises. Cloud is the majority of our ARR today and will be an increasingly bigger percentage of our total ARR going forward as nearly all of our new sales are cloud sales. We believe our cloud ARR and total ARR metrics are good indicators of the growth of our annual recurring business over time, and we plan to report them each quarter.
In terms of revenue recognition, cloud ARR is recognized as SaaS revenue ratably following a new sale or renewal. On-premises ARR is recognized in 2 parts: 50% as subscription license revenue, recognized up-front at the time of the sale or renewal; and 50% as support revenue, recognized ratably and included in our SaaS and support revenue line. Because it is recognized ratably, SaaS and support revenue will generally be more predictable quarter-to-quarter.
In contrast, subscription license revenue, which is primarily related to our legacy on-premises business, can vary significantly quarter-to-quarter because it is recognized as revenue episodically when the subscription licenses are initially delivered or renewed.
We expect to migrate our on-premises business to the cloud over time and migrate the related subscription license revenue to SaaS and support revenue, which will tend to reduce this quarterly variability over time.
Our professional services revenue relates primarily to implementations of new SaaS subscriptions, migrations of clients from on-premises to the cloud and a variety of other services generally build on a time and materials basis and recognized as built.
Lastly, I would note that we began trading on the Nasdaq on June 30, but the IPO closed technically on July 2. And so our fourth quarter and year-end financials do not reflect the issuance of new shares, the conversion of preferred shares to common, the net proceeds received or the paydown of our debt. Those will be reflected in our first quarter fiscal '22 financials ending September 30.
Okay. Moving now to our fourth quarter results. Total revenue was $61.3 million, up $13.7 million or 29% year-over-year, driven primarily by sales of our cloud solutions and to a lesser degree, by increases in subscription license and professional services revenue. SaaS and support revenue was $39.4 million, up $8.2 million or 26% year-over-year, reflecting continued strength in the sale and adoption of our cloud solutions.
Subscription license revenue was $14.4 million, primarily reflecting renewals of on-premise subscription license business for both 1-year and multiyear periods. As noted earlier, this revenue line item can be variable on a quarterly basis.
Professional services revenue was $7.4 million, reflecting implementations of software and migrations to the cloud for our clients, including a onetime project for select cloud clients that will extend into the first quarter of fiscal '22.
Turning to our full year results for fiscal 2021. Cloud ARR grew 48% year-over-year to $109.7 million. At June 30, 2021, cloud ARR represented 52% of our total ARR, up from 43% a year ago, reflecting our cloud-first business focus and the market's ongoing shift to the cloud. Total ARR grew 23% year-over-year to $212.3 million.
Total revenue increased 15% year-over-year to $214.6 million. SaaS and support revenue increased 26% year-over-year to $144.1 million, reflecting continued strength in the sale and adoption of our cloud solutions.
Subscription license revenue was $46.0 million, primarily reflecting renewals of our subscription license business. This was a modest decrease year-over-year, in line with our strategy to migrate legacy clients to the cloud when they are ready.
Professional services revenue was $24.6 million. Our overall services activity was impacted by the effects of COVID, both at the end of fiscal year '20 and during the beginning of fiscal year '21.
Lastly, in terms of revenue mix, for fiscal year '21, 30% of our revenue was international, up slightly from 28% in fiscal year '20, and the remaining 70% of our revenue was in the United States.
Before discussing gross margins, expenses and profitability, I want to note that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward. As a reminder, our GAAP financial results, along with a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results, can be found in our earnings press release and its supplemental financial tables.
For the fourth quarter, gross margin was 70.1%, up from 67.9% in the prior year period, primarily as a function of a quarterly increase in our variable higher-margin subscription license revenue.
Overall, operating expense was $42.4 million, a $16.4 million increase year-over-year as we invested in the business to support our growth and prepare to become a publicly traded company. In addition, we paid normalized bonuses and commissions in the fourth quarter of fiscal '21 as compared to considerably reduced levels of such compensation in the fourth quarter of fiscal '20 when we were managing the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic.
Sales and marketing expense was $18.7 million, a $6.9 million increase year-over-year, reflecting increased head count and commissions as part of our investment to pursue our large addressable market.
R&D expense was $12.7 million, a $3.5 million increase year-over-year as we continue to invest in our connected firm cloud solutions.
And G&A expense was $11.0 million, a $6.0 million increase year-over-year, primarily as a result of expenses related to preparing for our IPO.
Non-GAAP operating profit was $0.6 million as compared to our fourth quarter fiscal '20 operating profit of $6.4 million, primarily reflecting the increase in operating expenses just discussed.
Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.19 in the fourth quarter of fiscal '21 as compared to $0.03 in the prior period. As a reminder, this fourth quarter fiscal '21 earnings per share calculation uses a basic share count that is prior to the closing of our IPO on July 2.
For the full year fiscal 2021, gross margin was 69.0%, up from 66.5% in the prior year, primarily driven by an increase in SaaS and support revenue and a relatively modest increase in related costs. Overall, operating expense was $140.1 million, an $18.1 million increase year-over-year as we invested in head count and other resources in support of the growth of the business.
Sales and marketing expense was $59.1 million, a $5.2 million increase year-over-year as we increased our go-to-market resources to drive sales.
R&D expense was $46.8 million, a $5.9 million increase year-over-year as we continue to invest in the product road map for our connected firm cloud solutions.
And G&A expense was $34.2 million, a $7.1 million increase year-over-year, driven primarily by expenses associated with becoming a publicly traded company.
Non-GAAP operating profit was $8.0 million, a $5.7 million increase year-over-year as operating expenses were relatively low in the first half of fiscal '21, following our COVID-related restructuring in late fiscal '20. In the second half of fiscal '21, the pace of our investments and hiring returned to normalized levels in support of the growth of Intapp's business.
Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.56 in fiscal '21 as compared to $1.11 in fiscal '20.
In terms of cash flow, our CapEx remained essentially flat at $5.0 million as compared to $5.1 million in the prior year, consisting primarily of capitalized software expense and leasehold improvements at certain facilities.
Our unlevered free cash flow was $9.4 million for fiscal '21 as compared to $15.6 million for fiscal '20 as we remain committed to positive free cash flow while investing for the growth of Intapp's business.
Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the fourth quarter with $37.6 million in cash and cash equivalents. This cash balance does not reflect the net proceeds and debt payoffs associated with the IPO, which closed on July 2.
Turning now to our guidance. For the first quarter of fiscal '22, we expect total revenue in the range of $56.5 million to $57.5 million, and SaaS and support revenue of between $40.5 million and $41.5 million. We expect a non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $1 million to $2 million and a non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of $0.06 to $0.08, using a basic share count of approximately 60 million common shares outstanding post-IPO.
For the full year of fiscal '22, we expect total revenue in the range of $241 million to $245 million, and SaaS and support revenue of between $172 million and $176 million. We also expect a non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $13.5 million to $17.5 million and a non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of $0.29 to $0.33, using a basic share count weighted for fiscal year '22 of approximately 61 million shares.
With that, John and I look forward to taking your questions.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jackson Ader with JPMorgan.
Great, and welcome to the public markets. First question is on the customer additions. If we think about organically adding about 300 customers or so in fiscal '21. So how should investors be thinking about that number going forward? And how will new, like, net new logos rank in terms of the main drivers of growth as we move forward?
John, do you want me to take that one?
Sure.
Yes. I think, Jackson, first of all, about 200 of the customers that get it to 1,900 come from the Repstor acquisition. So I wanted to make sure you note that. And our new logo count will increase pretty strongly year-over-year.
I think that on balance, we're seeing new sales and new ARR fairly balanced between new logos and net retention or upsell. It varies a little bit quarter-to-quarter depending on the dynamics, but it's pretty balanced. So we expect good strong revenue growth from new logos over time, but equally from the upsell opportunities we have.
Okay. All right. Great. And then just a follow-up on the housekeeping item on Repstor. What was the contribution from that acquisition to ARR or cloud ARR in the quarter? And then what are the expectations for contribution to the top line and profitability for the next year?
Yes. It's -- we're not really going to talk in detail about that. It was primarily a purchase that reflected the technology opportunity. We can integrate the Microsoft Teams business they have with our platform. We're excited about that. And we closed the deal on June 1, so it was only 1 month. The contribution is kind of going to be in the low single-digit millions really of ARR and revenue. And there's some good upside opportunity long term after we do the product integrations and take the opportunity to sell forward the combined ideas we have there.
Our next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.
Congrats on the first quarter as a public company. My first -- I got a couple for you. First question, you noticed -- I noticed you said 420, 100,000 plus customers and 31 $1 million-plus ARR customers. I guess what's really driving that nice expansion there on those customers, specifically on those $1 million-plus customers? That's a really nice sequential jump from the 27 from last quarter.
Yes. Well I think...
Thanks, Koji.
Yes, go ahead, John. Yes.
There's some good numbers here, Steve. Go right ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, it's a combination really across the board. We do get to $1 million through upsell, which is a huge opportunity for us with larger clients. We also land 7-figure clients out of the gate occasionally, and we're getting clients in both professional and financial services. So it feels balanced. But John, I didn't want to cut you off here.
No, that's absolutely right. And the other point that we would make is that the platform strategy is absolutely working. So these firms are expanding the footprint, taking up more of the applied AI technology, taking up more of the solutions in the platform in each of the areas, and we're really excited to see that.
Got it. Got it. And I guess taking a step back, John and Steve, a question for either of you. You guys are very well known within the markets that you serve. But curious to hear, now that you're public, has there been any change in the awareness or maybe the amount of inbounds that you're getting, now that you're a public company versus when you're private? Just curious to hear how becoming public has changed the awareness of Intapp within your core vertical markets.
It definitely is helping, and that was one of the reasons that we were excited about the opportunity, after many years as a bootstrap private company serving these markets, to go public. Many of the clients that we call on are various forms of advisers and participants in the financial markets as well. And so the IPO was actually a great marketing opportunity for us in addition to a financing event.
Now obviously, we went public on June 30, which was the very last day of the quarter in the last few years. So we're not showing a lot of that here. But I think that the opportunity for us is great as a public company for multiple reasons looking forward.
Got it. Congrats on the first quarter as a public company.
Thanks, Koji.
Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with Crédit Suisse.
Great. And great job. You talked about 48% cloud ARR growth. Can you help us understand maybe how much of that was new logos versus additional modules from existing clients?
Yes. Generally speaking, the majority of that is new logos, but we have a fair amount of good upsell in the cloud business as well. So it's slightly weighted to new logo in terms of the cloud ARR.
Great. And then as you think about kind of R&D versus sales and marketing and G&A within the context of '22 guide, should we think about it similar percentages as '21? Or maybe anything to call out around those because obviously, you're seeing really nice leverage in the model as the revenue scales?
Well, we're hiring to try to stay ahead of our growth curve and be consistent, we see opportunity. I don't see a huge move in our margins per se. I think we've been investing nicely. As we came out of COVID, we've got at normalized levels. We've been investing pretty nicely to stay ahead of our growth opportunities to make sure we field people who are trained and ready to go in sales and so on. So that -- we'll continue that pattern going forward.
Our next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist Securities.
Congrats from me as well on the IPO and now dealing with us every quarter in our questions. My first question just relates to as we've gone through the pandemic, we're hearing in some of these kind of platforms, strategic kind of workflow markets where there is the conversation around vendor consolidation. And that may not be the most innovative approach to selling, but how is that playbook working in terms of a vendor consolidation play around a lot of point solutions, maybe as part of the discussion around moving to the cloud. Just kind of curious how vibrant is vendor consolidation in terms of driving maybe expansion sales or even maybe a new logo win.
Yes. Thanks, Terry. It's an important factor. It's not the only factor. People are doing other digital transformation maneuvers, obviously, but vendor consolidation is important to many of these firms as they grow. A lot of the firms that we serve have a growth strategy that includes M&A of their own. And so there's a big opportunity as the industries that we call on bring in more components to their infrastructure that they want to consolidate with a company that has the scale and the platform and the history of serving them. And most of the firms we have some kind of relationship today, and they're increasingly looking at our platform as a core part of their overall technology strategy that they can consolidate around because we're expanding more and more of what we do. So it's an important aspect in addition to the overall digital transformation that they're trying to achieve.
Okay. Got it. And I guess, Steve, maybe a follow-up question. Maybe you can help us -- as we look into fiscal '22, is there anything that's kind of one-off anomaly but large in nature related to the subscription on-premise business that's a large renewal in any of the quarters or maybe just a book of business that's larger on the renewal side that we need to appreciate, and that, that could have some volatility on that line item in the model?
Well, I think what I'd say is it is variable. We have had some renewal activity already that has its own indirect effects for '22, for example. If we do a 3-year renewal this year or we did it last year in COVID, which we did, then the next renewal isn't for 3 years. And so on a relative basis as compared to three 1-year renewals, you can get the different outcome for fiscal '22. So there's nothing in particular on the books. We're trying do what we can to have these renewals be 1 year. But certainly in some cases, our clients are interested in 3-year renewal, and we work to accommodate them.
So short answer is nothing in particular looming out there. And as we said, we're trying to migrate our clients slowly but surely to the cloud and keep moving down that road.
Our next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James.
I'll echo my congrats on the really strong results. So first one for me, just there was a lot of talk on homegrown solutions. And I'm curious, maybe spending a year in the pandemic here, what have you seen in terms of customer using those solutions? And what are some of the key friction points that you guys can eliminate to really drive more cloud adoption?
Thanks, Brian. The homegrown solutions have always indicated to me the core argument for our purpose-built platform. These firms had lots of horizontal solutions available to them over the past 20 years, and yet they still invested to build internally and why is that? And the only rational answer is, well, the horizontal systems are just too expensive and too complex when you try to convert them into something that works for them. So I've always felt that the homegrown market is a great point of evidence of the market opportunity for us and our industry cloud strategy overall.
What we saw during the pandemic as people had to work from home right away is that a lot of the homegrown solutions are traditionally on-premise and stuffed with a lot of very bespoke features in them that people couldn't work into a work-from-home model very quickly. And I think a lot of the companies, bringing the cloud vertical industry systems out, have benefited from this, but there's been a real awakening among the last remaining of the market that was not really urgently looking at cloud to look at cloud now because they saw how much more agility they had to respond to that situation and to keep everybody humming with a true cloud system, plus ours is designed just for them.
So we've had a lot of interest in replacing across several different points of the firm in client relationships, deal management. A lot of compliance interest actually, which we think is a core pillar of the platform's differentiation from the traditional horizontal solutions. And then on top of that, we have a lot of AI, applied AI horsepower in the platform that's very difficult for any firm to have the scale to invest in and create to take advantage of the data that they have globally. So there's both kind of enabling folks to work from home more successfully be more agile, and then there's some additional capabilities that the homegrown solutions just weren't able to get to that we're able to bring to the market today. So those are some of the areas.
Great. And maybe just a follow-up to that. As we think about the value proposition -- and John, that was a great overview and it's interesting to see like how that adoption could play out, but I'm curious how long do you think that evolution will take? I don't think anybody really anticipated COVID kind of changing some of these dynamics. But as we sit here today, it seems like that would accelerate it. But is this a 3- to 5-year transition? I'm just curious how long you think this will take to play out.
Yes. I mean we've been working with this market for a long time. I think one of the key points of differentiation that we have is our 20 years of history building specifically for this industry and developing trust and understanding of how the market works, the industry works in each firm works. So that when they look at both their homegrown and their legacy on-premise solutions and they're responding to this variety of forces to move to the cloud, they see us as the trusted technology company that understands how to get them specifically to the cloud. So we've emphasized that in our strategy. We're working with each firm as they have made the decision increasingly to move to the cloud.
What I will say is there was already a switch going on where people saw all the benefits of cloud, and were trying to figure out how to get there. COVID definitely accelerated a trend that was already underway, and it's become much less of a strategic choice about whether they're on-premises or cloud, which it was maybe 5 or 10 years ago. And today, it's much more of a practical choice, just what's the road map to get there and how do we build a plan with each of them. And that's what we're doing with each of our firms. And we saw some examples this quarter that I talked about that had actually made the choice to move as part of upgrading to a bigger version of our platform.
So I actually think that the shift is underway. COVID has accelerated it. I don't want to quote specific years because I'm not sure, but I think that the trends are all moving in the right direction, and we're going to benefit from that.
Our next question comes from the line of Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer.
I got a question for John and then a follow-up for Steve. John, as it relates to the fiscal 4Q bookings and maybe the pipeline momentum, can you maybe unpack it across your core professional and financial services verticals, the legal, accounting, building services, if there's anything to highlight there? And then I have a follow-up for Steve.
So we saw good activity across all of our markets in Q4. I think, Steve, you've shared that we've been pretty balanced both in new logo acquisition as well as client expansion and also pretty well balanced between the financial services markets and the professional business markets.
Yes. And...
[ That we certainly did ] in Q4.
We've tended not to break that out, but legal is certainly the biggest of the professional services. It's fair to say that, but we don't tend to break those out. But yes, pretty balanced.
And then the follow-up question for you, Steve. It's just thinking about your philosophy for guidance since it's the first quarter. Listening to the commentary from John in the Q&A and his introductory comment, it sure sounds like the sentiment is improving out there. People are feeling really good in your end markets about cloud computing and driving adoption.
And -- but if I look kind of the initial guidance, it does suggest that, at least from my eyes, that maybe that sentiment might not sustain. So I just wanted to ask you a question about your forecast. Are you assuming that, that kind of improvement, buying improvement in the settlement continues? Or are you thinking about, hey, we've had a couple of good quarters. Let's them sign up the deals, get them in contract, and then we'll think about raising numbers for all of us after it happens. So just wondering how you think about that when you think about setting up your guidance.
Well, I would say that, look, we are seeing good, strong momentum, and it's continuing, and we believe it will continue. Cloud is growing very nicely. Our total ARR is growing nicely. And over time, we certainly think that our revenue growth will align reasonably well with those ARR growth rates. So no, I feel like we've got a good long-term opportunity here, and we're firing on a lot of cylinders, and we're going to keep rolling here. So this is our first moment out of the box. So we're making sure we do the right thing, but we feel pretty good about it going forward here.
Congratulations on a great quarter.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from the line of Tom Roderick with Stifel.
Congratulations on all the recent successes. I think this is probably going to build on Brian's last question there, but I think it's an important point, just looking at your end markets, I mean, they're, generally speaking, all on fire. And that's a great thing on one hand, the fundamentals are there and the finances are there, and maybe awakening, John, that you talked about is happening in real time.
We've seen in some of these other end markets that are on fire that it's hard to get the proper attention to make some of these transformational shifts. Would love to hear just about some of the strategic conversations you're having with perhaps some of your larger customers, some of the 7-figure deals that came through. What's that final catalyst that gets them over the hump to make that upgrade a, to the cloud; b, perhaps from some legacy home-build solutions they know they've needed to for a long time, and maybe COVID was a part of that. But would love to hear what you're hearing from your senior level discussions as to what that catalyst is that's getting them to make that move? And how sustainable that is?
Yes, it's a great insight, and we're definitely serving firms that are serving the deal economy. And as you all know better than anyone, how well that's going right now.
Firms are looking for ways to capitalize on the success that they're having. A lot of the conversations that we're having have to do with firms' interest in laying the foundation for the next years and using this great time to put themselves a wrong information position and modernize a lot of aspects of the firm. It's harder to do when times are tight. Your point is well taken about the attention span, but what we've actually found is there's a lot of appetite at the moment for people to put systems in that are really going to help get the most possible potential out of the people platform that they've assembled and/or assembled to go compete in the market and they want to help their professionals, their deal makers, to be more competitive, armed with the best possible information, armed with the full insight of the collective knowledge of the firm globally. And they know that, that can make a difference in winning the deals in the marketplace.
So there's actually a fair bit of encouraging conversation going on with the strategic leaders and the IT leaders of these firms that now is the time to make the shift. And I think the COVID switch, too, has caused people to say, maybe our strategy is a little bit less about real estate and creating the environment in the big cities and more about enabling us technologically wherever we happen to be. And so there's definitely a conversation about shifting budgets a little bit from the traditional real estate, which was always one of the biggest expense items in these professional firms, a little bit more towards IT which only accrues to our benefit. So I think there's positive signs.
Excellent. I'm certain everybody on this call would beg for more efficiency, automation and intelligence. So it's the right place at the right time.
Steve, I guess the proper follow-up for you on that question is just in terms of looking at the demand out there, how aggressive are you being or do you want to be with bulking up the sales force? How far ahead of the curve do you think you need to add new heads? Or do you feel like a fairly linear approach to sales head count addition is the proper approach relative to the demand you've been seeing? In other words, do you need to accelerate the investment in sales and marketing? Or is it properly aligned right now?
Well, I think it is pretty well aligned. I mean we're not going to be extremely aggressive, but we certainly are hiring ahead of the curve because we want to be ready for all the opportunities and ready to drive the opportunities we see. And it does take time to ramp people up and get them trained and get them out there with the client base in the most productive way. So yes, we're continuing to forward invest to make sure we're ahead of that, but we're mindful that we want to make sure everyone who hits the field is ready to go and ready to sell.
Excellent. Congratulations.
Our final question comes from the line of Arvind Ramnani with Piper.
I wanted to go back to one of the questions you addressed earlier about sort of being the sort of post-IPO world. You provided some color on some of the customer conversations. Can you talk a little bit more about the -- essentially the existing kind of mood of the workforce? Are people kind of looking at this exit and kind of saying I'm cashing out, I'm going to kind of just basically kind of retire, take a step back? Or are people kind of charged up? And then the second part in terms of kind of recruiting talent, what kind of progress have you seen on the recruitment side?
Thanks, Arvind. It's great. So I think one of the things that we benefit from, that's a little unusual even for companies in Silicon Valley, is that we've been doing this, building the company together as a team for a long time. We built it as a bootstrap financing strategy. We never raised a dime of venture capital, and we did it by working closely with these firms to figure out what they needed and to build a purpose-built industry cloud platform today that is unlike anything else in the marketplace. And there's a lot of team commitment to building the great company that's going to transform this industry today. And I think that spirit runs through the whole organization. We've assembled a group of professionals who come from 7 different acquisitions over the years. We've integrated them slowly and carefully and built a single culture that is really driving towards being the winner in this marketplace. And I think there's an infectiousness to that and a vision for that.
Certainly, the IPO is successful. I'm very glad that we're able to say thank you to everybody who's helped build the company as we should, but I also feel like we have an incredible, unusual bootstrap culture here that's going to drive this business forward. So I'm optimistic about that.
And we've actually seen that, to your second question. A lot of the folks who have been with the company for a long time, who are -- have joined the company recently pre-IPO and who are joining the company now just after the organization has gone public, are all saying that the IPO has incredible -- presents an incredible opportunity for us to build a great company here and use the public standing business to the benefit of the clients and the organization. And we're actually recruiting some incredible talent.
I also would say there's a lot of broader discussion in the market about people thinking about their lives and what they want to do and all those sorts of things. And we're benefiting from that. A lot of folks are looking at the company and applying. We're getting some unbelievable resumes coming to us saying, "This is an incredible story. I want to be part of it." So I'm encouraged about what the IPO has done for the talent base and the enthusiasm of the organization.
Perfect. So just a quick follow-up on that. You talked about kind of some of the work you're doing with AI and kind of data science and some of the newer technologies. And I think it's really no secret that hiring AI talent is expensive, difficult, and a lot of them are locked up with some of the larger software companies. But with that said, now that you're -- have a higher profile and it's kind of bigger, better brand name, are you -- and of course, kind of even kind of the stock and all of that. So are you able to afford and are you able to recruit a lot more of this AI, data science talent that can really kind of sharpen the kind of the offering around AI and automation?
I'm very proud of the AI team that we've assembled. We have some incredible talent that has been working with the company for quite a while now, and that team has recruited more AI talent into the organization over the years. And I think we've got a particularly differentiated angle on it, which is that we're looking specifically at applied AI, how do we bring the real value of potential AI into the specific needs purpose-built for this set of industries.
So there's this very interesting combination of broad AI talent and industry-specific knowledge that are developing these applied AI solutions that are really making a difference in our platform and for our clients generally. And for this set of industries, the professional and financial services firms that are made up of these large groups of highly educated knowledge professionals who sell their expertise and their advice on deals and other engagements, we've always felt that this is an incredible market for AI to be applied because it's so knowledge and information and data rich in the first place, and yet they've been underserved by the technology industry.
So this is one of the simple reasons why AI is such a central component of our overall strategy. It's differentiating. It's -- the time is now, but it's also for this market, it can have an incredible return for all the firms that put it in. And so a lot of the folks who are looking at us and looking at the opportunity here, if you really love AI and you really see potential work, this is an incredible place to apply your skills to some of the most high-value applications that you can imagine out there. So I really look at AI as a centerpiece of our story going forward.
Terrific. And just last question for me. Certainly, kind of the demand environment has progressively improved through the year. But with some of these kind of COVID-related concerns of the Delta variant and all of that, has that -- has there been a distraction with existing clients or with your pipeline? Or is that people are just kind of moving on and forward and demand seems still pretty good as you look ahead?
Well, I think we went through a pretty significant work transformation the way the whole world did last February and March 2020. And it's true that we were looking at more time in the office later this summer and autumn, and everybody was. And we knew it was going to be a more flexible environment. We were never going to go all the way back to the model that we had previously, and there actually was a lot of benefit in productivity that people discovered from this work-from-home market, particularly in both the markets we serve and in our own operation.
So I think the fact that tragically Delta has arrived and is shaking up plans for everybody. It, in theory, could have slowed things down, but I think in practice, what has happened is we've just continued to execute in the work-from-home model. There is an opportunity in our teams for folks to work from offices if they need to, and we have some folks who are doing that, but we haven't required it. And we'll see how it plays out just like everybody else does.
But I think from a productivity and an execution standpoint, we benefit because both our end market and we work perfectly fine in both total work from home and hybrid. And so I actually think that this is one of the silver linings of a tragic a couple of years is that we found a working model that really works well, and we're doing well in it.
I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the call back over to John for closing remarks.
Okay, everybody. We really appreciate your attention and support for us. We have a great Q4 behind us, and we're excited about year ahead. If there's anything that we can do to talk to folks as a follow-up, we're happy to do that. Thanks for your time today, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.