Copperleaf Technologies Inc
TSX:CPLF
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
Copperleaf Technologies Inc
In the final stretch of 2023, Copperleaf seized investor attention by boasting a stellar 30% year-over-year increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and a 21% jump in subscription revenue. This fueled a robust 11% revenue growth, underpinned by Copperleaf’s transition to a SaaS revenue model which promises to further propel the company's revenues in 2024. Strategic overhauls in the global sales team's operating model were instrumental in sharpening sales processes, enhancing forecast granularity, and supporting the company’s ambitions for global expansion into new industries and geographies.
Copperleaf demonstrated a commitment to grow not just organically but through well-crafted partnerships. The company's Global Growth Office (GGO) initiative, which emphasized on partner ecosystem, product, industries, and value engineering, paid dividends as the company experienced increased partner traction. Moreover, Copperleaf successfully ventured into new market sectors such as ports, upstream oil & gas, and more, while also making headway into different geographies like France, Ireland, Italy, and the Middle East, reflecting a decisively strategic and global approach.
Copperleaf's first North American Asset Investment Planning Forum in Houston marked a significant milestone, gathering industry players to discuss the value of asset investment planning and management. Clients and partners praised Copperleaf's solutions for their significant role in optimizing business efficiency, setting a positive tone for the company's prospects in 2024. Such events highlight Copperleaf's commitment to not only offering value through its solutions but also fostering a strong community of practice around asset management.
Innovation has been a cornerstone for Copperleaf throughout 2023, as evidenced by four product releases filled with new capabilities and features that respond to industry's evolving needs, including sustainability-related enhancements. Notably, Copperleaf was awarded an additional U.S. patent, affirming its position as a technology leader. The company plans to continue its investment in R&D to spearhead future innovations in emerging cloud services and AI-enabled functionalities, ensuring it steps ahead of the curve and maintains technological superiority.
Copperleaf's future growth is closely tied to forging powerful partnerships and harnessing the capabilities of generative AI. The synchronization with industry giants like SAP and the nurturing of strategic alliances with companies like Siemens and Accenture point to a concerted effort to drive sales and accelerate market expansion. The integration of conversational AI in Copperleaf's offerings illustrates the company's commitment to enhancing their clients' experience and staying relevant in an AI-driven market landscape.
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Good afternoon, and welcome to Copperleaf's Fourth Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Following the call, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. Your host today are Paul Sakrzewski, Chief Executive Officer of Copperleaf; and Chris Allen, the company's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.Before we begin, I am required to provide the following statement respecting forward-looking information. During the call today, the company will make forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions and therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about the risks and uncertainties and regulatory filings that were filed earlier today. Also, the comments are today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. These should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between the two can be found in the company's regulatory documents, which are available on sedarplus.ca. or on our website. In addition, commentary today will include key performance indicators that help evaluate the business, measure performance, identify trends affecting the business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions. Such key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different than similar key performance indicators used by other companies.And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Paul Sakrzewski. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us to discuss Copperleaf's 2023 fourth quarter and full fiscal year performance. I'm excited to provide an update of our progress and to have the opportunity to share some of our plans for the future. As is our usual format, I'll make opening remarks before handing it over to Chris to provide a detailed review of the financial results. Following Chris' and my prepared remarks, we'll open the call to questions.Copperleaf's ability to generate substantial client value by maximizing capital efficiency, managing risk and clearly aligning our clients' business decisions with their strategic goals, drove continued strong demand for our solutions in the fourth quarter of 2023. This was highlighted by a 30% year-on-year increase in annual recurring revenue and a 21% year-on-year increase in subscription revenue. Additionally, and importantly, we ended the year with a record backlog of $139.5 million, marking a 30% increase year-over-year.Revenue growth in the fourth quarter was 11%, which, as usual, should be viewed in the context of our ongoing transition to a predominantly SaaS revenue model. When taking into account our revenue mix, which is shifting towards subscription revenue and that we're entering the year with a stronger backlog, we expect overall revenue growth to accelerate in 2024. Our fourth quarter results demonstrate the continuing momentum in our business and benefited from several operational changes that we're implementing during 2023.Firstly, we added focus and dedicated resources to key areas of our client-facing organization through the implementation of the Global Growth Office at the beginning of 2023. The key areas involved being partner ecosystem, product, industries and value engineering. The GGO, as we call it, undoubtedly contributed to the improvement of the scalability, effectiveness and efficiency of our global sales team during the year. In parallel with these enhancements to the client-facing GTM, we introduced a dedicated business operations function to the global sales team. And throughout the year, we added new internal functionality in pipeline management and visualization and also enhancement to the CRM sales comp, coverage model planning and sales team enablement. This has made a material difference to our forecasting granularity and has tightened up our sales processes as the year progressed.In Q4, we also implemented a new global structure for our client-facing services business, including implementation services, client support and client-focused development services. Leadership at an aggregated global level, in addition to the existing regional view, gives us a clear ownership of the global services revenue line as well as opportunities for process improvement and load balancing to improve utilization and efficiency on a global basis. In the end, however, it's all about the client experience and ownership of the end-to-end client life cycle will further improve the Copperleaf experience for the client and ultimately, the amount of revenue that we -- the value that we deliver and that's good for the software business.In combination with our 2023 operating model, refresh and supported by increasing industry demand for the functionality that we provide, these strategic go-to-market investments have enabled increased partner traction, accelerated lead generation, increased customer satisfaction and accelerated adoption in new industries and geographies. In 2023, this programmatic approach generated a lot of firsts that open up new market sectors and opportunities for future growth. During fiscal 2023 alone, Copperleaf expanded into the ports industry, upstream oil and gas, airports, our first oil and gas client in Europe, first water client in Asia Pacific with Sydney Water and our first transit rail client in the U.S.A. at the Houston Metro. Those last 2 sectors build on our success in EMEA and set the stage for global expansion in areas where we're already well referenced with recognized market-leading companies.We also achieved key milestones and geographic expansion during the year. Copperleaf attracted its first clients in France, Ireland, Italy and the Middle East as well as signing one of Brazil's largest integrated power utilities, establishing a new beachhead in Latin America. We also had success extending our position where we're well established. A great example of this is with the recent additions of Scottish Water and Irish Water as the ninth and tenth water companies in the U.K. and Ireland to join the growing Copperleaf community there, demonstrating the continued success in that geography and validating our industry-specific market strategy.In Q4, leading European network operator, Alliander, selected Copperleaf to optimize their asset investment planning. They joined a growing group of energy and network companies in Europe who are leveraging Copperleaf's advanced capabilities to build decision transparency, minimize risk, maximize value and face the energy transition with confidence, and that's a key theme for us. Worth also noting that Alliander is the latest in a growing set of joint projects with Accenture and in addition to the acceleration of our direct business, partners are playing an increasing role in the Copperleaf's global story.During 2023, we continued to gain traction as our partners invested in expanding their Copperleaf practice areas. In the first quarter of 2023, Copperleaf signed an Endorsed Apps initiative agreement with SAP and went on in Q2 to achieve Premium Certification, which put us on the SAP store and triggered the commencement of cooperative go-to-market activities in the second half. During the year, we also saw the deepening of Copperleaf's global relationship with Accenture as they assigned global partner resources to programmatically coordinate joint go-to-market activities across all global regions.Finally, in Q4, Copperleaf announced a strategic alliance with Siemens Smart Infrastructure, a leading provider of grid planning, operations and maintenance software and a global domain expert in power systems. Under this agreement, Copperleaf and Siemens will integrate technical planning with value-based investment optimization to help utilities make investment decisions that accelerate the modernization of electricity grids to deliver on the increasing demand to decarbonize energy at greater capacity, while maintaining reliability.During the fourth quarter, Copperleaf hosted its first North American Asset Investment Planning Forum in Houston, Texas. After successful events of the same type in Europe and Asia Pacific, we brought together organizations from the oil and gas, chemical, transportation and utility sectors to discuss how software supported asset investment planning and management can help maximize capital efficiency, manage risk and accelerate strategic outcomes. During that conference, we heard testimonials from clients and partners as to the significance of asset investment planning and management generally and the value generated specifically by the Copperleaf solution.SAP highlighted how the integration between Copperleaf and SAP solutions creates a continuous feedback loop between planning and execution, enabling businesses to choose the right work to do and the optimum time to do it and then execute that work efficiently and accurately across the asset life cycle. Accenture elaborated on this topic by describing the business benefits and value that can be achieved by advancing asset management maturity. One joint client of Accenture and Copperleaf, a U.S.-based multinational energy company that embarked on the journey recently to improve asset risk management and increase investment efficiency, that company is realizing reductions and improvements not only in capital spend, but also in O&M costs, asset downtime and outage duration. The success of this implementation led Accenture to include both Copperleaf and SAP solutions as foundational components in its Intelligent Asset Management offering.We're excited about the ongoing development of the partner [Technical Difficulty] products, and I can clearly see the potential for incremental sales growth and deal acceleration of these partnerships deepened as we build references and as our pipeline of joint pursuits increases and matures. Innovation remained at the forefront of our business in 2023. As usual, Copperleaf delivered 4 product releases during the year and added numerous new features to the solution. Our fourth quarter product update added several innovative features such as improved scenario organization for those clients managing large numbers of what-if scenarios in their systems, the ability to create investments in Copperleaf portfolio directly from predictive analytics and a new tranche of ESG-related value models, which relate to greenhouse gas Scope 1, 2, 3 emissions.In addition, we were recognized for our innovation with the grant of an additional U.S. patent in Q4. Our strategy is to continue our investment in R&D to maintain a risk forward-looking road map of future innovations, including the introduction of emerging cloud services and AI-enabled functionality. These innovations increase our technological leadership and are also an opportunity for client engagement as we work on functional enhancements with existing clients through our Copperleaf Labs initiative.ESG, as we talked about earlier, and in particular, decarbonization are hot topics in our core industry sectors. And Copperleaf is increasingly seen as a key enabling technology to assist clients in achieving their goals. At Copperleaf, we've been helping organizations turn strategic ESG objectives into action by offering a practical way to value and incorporate ESG metrics into company decision-making. We've also been practicing what we preach in ESG, setting our own serious commitments to how we operate. In 2023, we released our inaugural ESG report for the year-ended December 31, 2022. This report details our responses to the recommendations outlined by the task force on climate-related disclosures, TCFD and shares Copperleaf's progress and plan to address important ESG issues, including the impact of our software has on our global community.Overall, as a result of our continuous commitment to product innovation and sustainability, our refreshed go-to-market model and increasing partner traction, we expect continued robust ARR and pipeline growth in 2024, weighted again this year towards the second half. These factors, along with our accelerating revenue growth and disciplined approach to managing costs, position us to make material progress back towards profitability this year.Lastly, the fourth quarter marked the completion of my first year as CEO of Copperleaf. It's been a busy year and I'm very pleased with the progress that we've made as a team. Our new operating model has begun to demonstrate effectiveness, which I think is reflected in the strong fourth quarter results. Our business is growing again well, and I believe that we're on track to meet our strategic goals. I'm confident we've made the right investments and that we have the right strategy. We'll remain focused on prudently managing cash and innovating across our entire business with the aim of driving execution in the near to medium term and leveraging the global business foundation we've established over the past few years for future profitable scaling and growth.I'll now turn the call over to Chris to review our financial results in some more detail.
Thanks, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased to report that our fourth quarter 2023 results continued to deliver growth across our key financial metrics. Revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $21.2 million, an increase of 11% compared to $19.2 million in the comparative period, driven primarily by an increase in subscription and perpetual revenue and partially offset by a decrease in professional services revenue. Our subscription revenue was $13.6 million for the quarter, an increase of 21% from the prior year, representing 64% of Q4 revenue as compared to 59% of revenue in Q4 2022, highlighting our continued transition to SaaS.Subscription revenue continues to increase period-over-period, thanks to a steady increase in new clients as well as the expansion of existing clients. Professional services revenue for the fourth quarter was $7 million compared to $7.6 million in the prior year and this segment represented 33% of Q4 2023 revenue. And finally, perpetual revenue for the fourth quarter was $0.6 million, a 93% increase compared to $0.3 million in the prior year and this segment represented 3% of Q4 2023 revenue.Our annual recurring revenue at December 31, 2023, was $60.2 million, a 30% year-over-year increase compared to $46.4 million at December 31, 2022. As of December 31, 2023, our net revenue retention rate was 111%, reflecting expansion within our client base on top of our strong renewal history. As Paul mentioned, revenue backlog was a record $139.5 million at December 31, 2023, a 30% increase from $107.3 million in the prior year. Moreover, of the $139.5 million of backlog, $78 million is due to be recognized as revenue within the next 12 months and this is an increase of 46% compared to $53.3 million of 12-month backlog in the prior year.Gross profit for the quarter was $15 million, representing gross margin of 71%, a 2% decrease from $14.7 million and a gross margin of 76% in Q4 2022. Gross profit margins decreased temporarily this quarter due to an increase in subcontractor costs and increased headcount. The decrease in gross profit margin for the full year was also due to a lower mix of perpetual and term-based software license revenue. We reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $5 million for the quarter compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million in the prior year. Net loss for the quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $5.5 million or a loss of $0.08 per share compared to a net loss of $2.4 million or a loss of $0.03 per share in the prior year.We finished the quarter with a strong balance sheet with $34.1 million in cash and equivalents and $92.3 million in short- and long-term investments, placing us in a strong financial position to build on our advantage and further penetrate the investment planning and decision analytics market. With our strong unit economics, we remain focused on making thoughtful long-term investments that will drive accelerated growth through 2024 and beyond. As we continue to expand our reach, we're confident that our focus on operational excellence will drive best-in-class margins, expand our leadership position in the growing decision analytics market and accelerate our path to profitability.That concludes our prepared remarks. I'll now hand the call back over to the operator and open it up for questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Dylan Becker from William Blair.
Nice job here. Maybe starting with Paul, you called out kind of the building out of the partner ecosystem. But I wonder how you think about that kind of comprising that more end-to-end perspective around the asset life cycle, as we move beyond just implementation and decisioning to that opportunity for more kind of real-time and predictive maintenance. It sounded like maybe some partners were highlighting this at the conference, but -- and that value proposition would compound, right? But how do you guys think about that opportunity over time?
Yes. Thanks, Dylan. Good to talk. It's a rich topic. And that is evidenced by the amount of activity, I think, associated with asset management and managing the end-to-end asset life cycle amongst our friends in the digitized environment. So there's a chain of asset management modules or products that go from system of record in the [ EAM ] space. You then go to things like asset performance management. Generally speaking, the industry has traditionally gone from system of record, where are our assets and what do they look like, then you go into some predictive analytics in the APM space, it throws off a laundry list of things that you should do. And then it goes through a committee process that decides the timing and the alternatives associated with each of those necessary interventions. And then it goes straight into work order management. So you can notice a gap in the middle there that Copperleaf fills very well.And traditionally speaking, we've been very focused within our envelope. But more and more, we're integrating with the things on either side of us. So, on one side of this, we've effectively got ATM on the other side of this, so we've got EPPM tools, we dovetailing very nicely with those. There are a lot of competitors in those other spaces and there are very few things that look like Copperleaf. So companies like Accenture particularly have picked up on that end-to-end necessity, linking up all of those things on an end-to-end basis and also the huge value in using software support like Copperleaf to make sure that you're executing on these things in the highest value way.So portfolio optimization against all of the different opportunities you have for intervention and then passing that into the execution tools like Primavera and EPPM downstream of us that then go into work group management. And so Accenture is linking up all of that end-to-end. There are alternatives for most of those other software elements as you go through that end-to-end chain other than Copperleaf. We're really the only ones that work in that space. And I will take the opportunity to embellish a little bit on that, where we -- you mentioned the word sustainment and asset sustained, Dylan. We can do that and we're best-in-class with that specific thing, the end-to-end asset management chain.One of the key features of Copperleaf though, is that we can also introduce at that point, optimization within the same portfolio of future asset-related spend, so assets that are going to be introduced either because of technological redundancy of current assets like, for example, in the case of decarbonization or just expansion-related future assets. So we can bring all of that in plus actually non-asset-related investments compete all of that per share of wallet at the enterprise. And we are starting to see that amongst some of our clients where they're starting off in asset statement, but they're starting to branch into putting in all of these things that demand capital and operational expense and human capital and all of the different resource types, you can imagine, competing all of that per share of wallet at the enterprise level. And that's something that really sets Copperleaf apart.
Maybe it's a good kind of segue to the second question, maybe for you and maybe for Chris as well, too. But given, again, these use cases are expanding and you're seeing incremental traction into some of these kind of newer verticals and around kind of some of the go-to-market investments we've made. Are there any kind of early stage correlations that you can make and maybe some of your more mature markets like water, which continues to seem to track exceptionally well that's giving you kind of early indication of, hey, we've seen this playbook play out and this is an early indication of a similar kind of adoption curve in aggregate as that seems to be another kind of valuable component here as well?
Yes. It's another good question because we are seeing -- this is kind of an emerging space, the best practice around how you think about things like asset risk models and how you accelerate your -- the way that you think about assets from -- and initially, it's a time-based replacement process and then you think, okay, what condition of my assets in, then you start thinking about risk. On that evolutionary curve, Copperleaf is right up at the top end where you're really thinking about the value that those assets generate and you think about your interventions and how much you put into those assets based on how much value they generate. So, I think what we're starting to see is that the industry sectors and verticals in countries, particularly where the thinking on this is a little bit more advanced. The U.K. is one of those, Australia is one of those. They're starting to standardize around asset risk models.So for example, in the distribution industry in the U.K., there's a standard for asset risk models called CNAIM. It's a standardized set of risk models. We coded for that a number of years ago as we were starting to roll out at DSOs in the U.K. But we've seen that because we have those codes and we've coded public domain codings, so we put all of that into our value model library, we've seen demand for that in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. So, some of these best practice areas where we've been there for the journey and we've helped to develop that best practice and certainly helped to ensure that, that best practice thinking is practically applied to the company's decision-making. We're taking that and we're seeing that there's huge demand for that expertise and best practice knowledge internationally and that's helped us in a number of our accounts globally. We're seeing the same thing in water. I think we can expect to see the same thing in rail and transit and it's an emerging space and we feel like we're at the forefront of it.
And your next question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather from Cormark.
We're kind of doing a bit years on from the big ramp in the sales force. So, I thought it would be a good time to check in on the productivity of the expanded team and whether that's tracking to expectations? And maybe you can just touch on kind of the pipeline in this cohort entering '24.
Yes. Thanks, Gavin. Tracking to expectations. Our expectations are pretty high. I would say that it's improving and getting better through the year. I would say that we're getting better at tracking some of those metrics as well. The improvements that we've made in our business operations function, which at the moment is effectively a sales operations function. The folks that we've put in there are very experienced in enterprise software sales and so a lot of these metrics, we're tightening up on and tracking. So, I would say that it's improving as we go through the year. We're certainly not at the point where we've tapped out capacity. And so I think that there are good productivity gains to be had within the existing sales force, which is good for us from a cost management point of view.And we've seen just anecdotally, we've seen some of our newer account executives deliver their first deals well ahead of the average for Copperleaf as we calculate it and often in new industries and sometimes in new industries and new geographies. So, I think there are a few things playing into that. I think we're getting better at sales enablement. I certainly think that our brand is improving, our reference cases are better, but also I think that potentially we're getting better at hiring the sorts of people that can tell the Copperleaf story the best. So, all of those things have to happen in concert and by no means are we meeting our own internal expectations, but things are certainly improving.
And you touched on sales enablement, which I think is a front for the Global Growth Office. Are you finding that the value engineering and industry expertise that sits within offices is kind of moving the needle on sales cycles and helping some of those earlier deals kind of move faster through the funnel?
Yes. And the way that we're structured, you're inadvertently conflating 2 things there. So sales enablement sits more in the business operations group. Our Global Growth Office has value engineering. So, it's still fairly early days for both of those things. But we've obviously been working on sales enablement since we've had salespeople. I think we're becoming a bit more programmatic about it and we've got dedicated resources associated with that now. People who effectively live and die by the effectiveness of our sales force and improving those metrics. So that's in the business operations function. Value engineering is moving the needle and absolutely will move the needle.We're really asking our clients to make a very big confident bet on Copperleaf. And it's largely focused on ROI and the value that we generate and they need to believe that value and that doesn't come from a simple calculation of these numbers. You've got to have really compelling value cases which are built out of client data and expressed in language that the clients can really understand. So, it's not something you can take a cookie-cutter approach to, especially if the large strategic enterprises that we work with. So, you have to build bespoke value cases. We've now got dedicated resources associated with that and that is moving the needle. And it will help us with -- it always helps. If you've got terrific referenceability and it's in your core industry, those references are the key tool for convincing new clients to come into the system. Where you're a little bit new and you don't have huge referenceability or you're looking for your first client in a new geography or a new industry vertical, the value engineering really comes into its own because it's just that next level of proof of the value of the system.The other thing about making a decision to go with Copperleaf is that as you go through the sales cycle and you understand what it is, you're really being asked to make a pretty good cultural shift in your business. So, there's a lot of business process reengineering that's going to be inherent in a Copperleaf implementation. Things don't stay the same. And while there's huge value in that, you have to demonstrate that value because the -- people are always a little bit nervous about big change and they really need to understand that there's a great big payoff at the end of it. And I think we're getting better at articulating that through value engineering and through the training of our sales force to make sure that they can articulate that value proposition.
Just lastly for me, maybe just checking in on services. I think you called out in Q2 and Q3 some project delays impacting billings. And then we saw subcontractor mix has impacted margins and utilization. So, what's the outlook kind of entering 2024 for kind of billings and utilization and margins on that services business?
Yes. Well, thankfully, we're taking a pretty good backlog into the year. So, we've got a lot to execute on. As you've probably seen from our gross margins, our utilization has been a little low as we've been going through the 2022 and 2023 market conditions, they're starting to get a lot more utilized as we go into 2024. So that's a good thing. From a macro point of view, you'll have noticed that we left the macroeconomic environment description out of our talk track today and out of most of the releases that we've made in this cycle. We're a bit tired of talking about it, to be honest. We're not economists. And we're not 100% sure whether it's going to improve or get worse depending on all the different factors. But we are getting better at executing on it.Going back to the value point, just making sure that our clients really understand the value of what we do versus everything else that they're doing is also a help because there'll be less apt to delay something that's off to higher value. And if they understand the value that comes out of the Copperleaf implementation, it would obviously be the first thing that they do. And I think we're getting better at that. Client engagement is another thing. Our client success managers, we're pretty well covered in our installed base. So, we have advocates that are working hand in glove with our clients to make sure that they're happy and we're leading them through those processes.So, I think from a client engagement point of view, we're getting better at influencing that agenda, but we're not seeing any difference, Gavin, if that's what you're asking in terms of whether their capacity is freeing up or whether the macroeconomic environment is improving to the extent that they're going to be opening their wallets and driving forward and all of these things in parallel. We're not seeing a huge number of delays and I think it probably is decreasing, but it's hard to unpick it from just the general market environment and us getting better at advocating for ourselves with the client.
And your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from the BMO Capital Markets.
Paul, with respect to SAP and the partnership ramp, I know it's a global partnership. But at this stage, are there specific geographies, specific verticals where you seeing the most traction? Or are there pockets of success across multiple geographies and verticals?
Good question, and it depends a little bit on which partner. I would say, generally speaking, the engagement has been pretty broad-based globally and we've been deliberately trying to drive it in that direction, generally speaking. We do -- and it does depend a little bit particularly when you come to an Accenture, which is a very large organization, it's called the same thing globally, but quite often, there are different approaches and different strategic emphasis locally. So you can engage globally, but you also need to engage locally. And I think it comes down to sometimes the chemistry between the local players. But we are trying to drive global programs.Siemens is just a little bit different where we're co-innovating with Siemens and we've selected some clients which are largely North American-based because that's where it's easiest for Copperleaf particularly to bring -- it's where we're most established, more recognized, but we also have more resources so that we can bring the best of Copperleaf to those test cases that we're building with Siemens. So that one is just a little bit different. But most of them, I couldn't pick a pattern necessarily as to where we're strong and where we're lagging a little bit. But it comes down to the relationships on the ground that the global relationships are very strong and programmatic.
Great. And I guess from a vertical perspective, could you provide maybe some more color qualitatively or quantitatively, just regarding how the mix is evolving utilities versus other verticals. And clearly, the verticals are growing, but would you still say that utilities might be 3/4 of the pipeline? Or how do you think about that ratio?
Yes. The utilities are still front and center for us. It's -- it will take a while for those other things to catch up. And largely, it's about referenceability. We get a start and you've got one reference. By the time you've got 2 or 3 or 4 references spread across global geographies, you start to generate a bit more momentum. Obviously, we have that in the core sectors and those are still largely utility focused. We're also seeing the following wins in those utilities, particularly the power sector. Power is going through a 100-year cataclysmic change. The globe is -- the whole global economy is electrifying and those power utilities are really front and center as the energy transition. And most of them are now coalescing around numbers like they need to have 3x or 4x the capacity and the distribution and transmission grids and they need to decarbonize as they do that.These are huge challenges and challenges that are -- you may as well just design them exactly for the problem that Copperleaf solves. So, I think we're well referenced in those industries, but also a lot of the key issues facing the world at the moment are concentrating into those utility industries as well. So, there's a couple of mutually sustaining trends there that are extending the life of our utility businesses plus where [ group ] hardly penetrated globally. We still need to remember where we are, where even in our core of core, in our core markets, we're still looking at largely white space.
And your next question comes from the line of Paul Treiber from RBC.
I just wanted to -- if you can make a high-level comment or just sort of your perspective on your comment about making material progress to profitability. How should we think about the balance between driving towards improved profitability versus the need to continue to make growth investments here?
Yes, it's a great question. And I'll invite my colleague, Chris to jump in here any time, but -- and to keep me honest on the comment. But it's, quite honestly, a discussion we constantly have internally. Thankfully, we put in a fair bit of capacity well ahead of the curve. So, we used the IPO funds for that purpose and that was always the strategy. And it was the reason, quite frankly, one of the very key driving reasons that we IPO-ed was to have the resources to ramp up and accelerate. We put in a fair bit of capacity. We're all aware that the economy in 2022 and 2023 wasn't everything that we wanted it to be. And so we still have a reasonable amount of that capacity and we've deliberately retained the capacity rather than making any adjustments because we feel like we made the right call. And it takes a fair amount of time to come into Copperleaf and ramp up. We know that the market is accelerating and the market is coming back to us.So, keeping the team together was exactly the right thing to do and it lands us with good tenured, experienced capacity to prosecute on a big chunk of 2024 and a good amount of 2025. We'll need to start adding some capacity to the quota-carrying sales force and billable consultants and the people that directly support those efforts. But those are largely revenue generative. The other thing I would say is that from the IPO funds and post the IPO and even slightly prior, we made this decision to globalize. And we put in the structure that we need with the leadership that we need in most places globally, including all of the enabling functions like business partners for finance and human resources and contracts and other out in the regions. We put in the super structure that we need to run a global business. Adding capacity underneath that, we can do that much closer to the curve and generally speaking, at much less cost that does not increase in a linear fashion with our revenue.So, the path back to profitability for us feels very clear. And also based on our history, the unit economics of our deals have always been good. We ran for a decade, 50% CAGR growth of our balance sheet effectively. And so profitability is actually where we've spent most of our careers at Copperleaf. And so it's not unusual territory for us. So getting back there after a period of building out a global structure is something that we're pretty confident about. And we've had an extreme focus on cost over the past 12 to 18 months to make sure that those revenue shortfalls aren't falling to the bottom line. We've managed to offset quite a lot of that.Chris, anything to add on that?
No, I think you've covered all the things I was going to comment.
Does that answer your question?
Secondly, around the cadence for growth, seeing ARR accelerate up to 30%. It's the highest it's been for, I think, a couple of years now. Really good to see. Should we think about that as SaaS -- driving SaaS growth up to that 30% level? Is there something unusual about Q4 that maybe raise that ARR to a high watermark than maybe we shouldn't expect to pull SaaS out going forward?
I'll take a crack at that one, Paul. So, Q4s are typically our big quarters. That's where it's pretty normal for us to book 40% to 50% of our business. So, it's not abnormal for us to see a bit of a tick up in the Q4s. I think what you're looking at is it's a year-over-year comparison and 2022 just wasn't a stellar year for us as far as the bookings year. But where we are operating here the last couple of years, high-20s, 30s is where we belong. Really considering the opportunity that's in front of us, the TAM, the white space, the expansion opportunity because that ARR is really a pretty healthy dose of both expansion of existing clients and the addition of brand-new clients. And so we should expect that to continue.
And your next question comes from the line of John Shao from National Bank.
So, it seems like a lot of activities in a partnership ecosystem so far. So, regarding the new customer win announced recently, so how much of this is actually coming from partner or partner influenced?
Sorry, I kind of missed the middle bit, you glitched a little bit on the middle bit of your question. So, I think I missed the key piece. Can you reiterate? Sorry about that, John.
Yes, for sure. So it seems like a lot of activities in a partnership ecosystem in the past couple of quarters. So, regarding your new customer wins announced recently, so how much of them are actually partner influenced?
Quite like an increasing number of our deals are partner influenced. I don't think that we're quite seeing yet the uptick in partner initiated or partner originated deals from the new partnerships. Our average deal cycle from start to close on a broad average with very wide margins on the extremes is around about 19 months. So, most of these things happened during the course of last year. And so we're yet to see the fruits of that. I think other than the fact that the pipeline for joint pursuits with those new partners is building.But we've been at the partner game for a long time. Companies like Accenture and PwC and Capgemini and Black & Veatch and others, these are not new to us and we've been building our ecosystem almost since the inception of the company. And so partner influenced deals are increasing generally speaking, year-on-year. Chris, I'm not sure whether you want to put any more numerics around that. We're differentiating, John, between partner influence and partner initiated, mainly due to the new push to make sure that we've got those partners around us and we can jointly go into market.
And so Paul, in the past conversation, remember, you talked about the client capacity constraints. Just wondering any updates on that front?
Yes. Like I was saying before, I think we are probably getting better at advocating for ourselves at the client. I mean we're competing with other software implementations and, in fact, other initiatives that they have from a management bandwidth point of view. I think the more we articulate the value of getting a Copperleaf system up and running and make sure that the management, the decision makers that our clients are bought into that value, I think that we will see our implementations come to the fore and be prioritized. So, I think we're getting better at that.So, it's a little bit along the same theme, John, as the sales effort. We compete per share of wallet against other things that the client wants to do. We compete for share of bandwidth against other things that the client has in the pipeline and need to do particularly in the IT departments where they are pretty overworked with migrations to the cloud, etc. But I think under those conditions where our clients are constrained, we are getting better at making sure that we had a prioritized task.
Your last question comes from the line of Todd Coupland from CIBC.
I wanted to circle back to the questions on growth. The takeaway from, I guess, the answer just before the last question was, it's not a change in the market. It's a low comp in '22. Is that the messaging?
So I think -- again, I mean, you're talking about the ARR question and just the cadence of ARR. If you look quarter-over-quarter, this whole year, 2023, it's all high-20s, Q4 ended at 30%. And as we were just -- I was indicating to Paul, I think that's where we live. I will make -- I did make the connection back to Q4, which was probably a disappointment for us as far as bookings for the year. But as SaaS continues to increase as we move away from perpetual and towards SaaS and as we continue to execute on our overall strategy and penetrate the markets that we're in, we absolutely see the mid- to high-20s to 30% ARR absolutely achievable over the longer term.
And then the 40% increase in the backlog, what's the takeaway on that or the 39% increase in the backlog, what's the stake of the market?
It was a 30% increase in backlog overall. I think maybe what you heard on the conference call, I alluded to the next 12 months. So, our total backlog ending December 31, the total backlog is $139.5 million. So, it's a -- we're happy with the results. So, Q4 bookings came in largely as we expected. So that's a good result as compared to December 31, 2022. So that's good. And in addition, what I pointed out in the call was that if you look at our remaining performance obligations in our financials, what is due to be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months is about $78 million and that is an improvement, again, compared to December 31, 2022, for what was going to be recognized in the next 12 months at that point. So again, total bookings in 2022, Q4 of 2022 wasn't necessarily what we wanted. We entered the year, as we said on previous calls, with a lower backlog that we wanted, whereas in contrast, exiting 2023, we're entering 2024, with a very good backlog.
And the question on OpEx is it's ticked down over the course of the year. I think I got the numbers right, $26 million to $21.5 million in Q4, Q1 to Q4. Is the run rate in Q4 a reasonable number to think about? I mean, you talked about how you had capacity. You just needed to incrementally add salespeople where needed. Just talk about whether or not that's a good run rate number to use.
No, it will definitely pick up in Q1 again. So, as Paul mentioned and as I have mentioned in previous calls, clearly, we've been managing the business. The cost management has been a key focus for us throughout the year, but with -- it's a new year. So obviously, CPI for all our existing headcount, full run rates of all that headcount, full incentive contribution -- or incentive compensation accruals for the full year. So, we'll definitely see a tick back up in 2024 for Q1. But again, overall, we see 2023 being a peak loss year for us and making way our way back to profitability in 2024.
And then, sorry, last question. You talked about how generative AI discussions had gotten away in some decisions. How is that -- how did that play out at the end of the year and into this year so far? Just talk about the impact on deal close rates? And any comments on product road map would be helpful as well.
Yes. I mean I think the proof of the pudding is in the bookings for Q4. I mean, we forecast our bookings we pretty much landed where we forecast. And so that's a positive sign in and of itself. I think the discussions about generative AI getting in the way of decisions and potentially creating confusion in the minds of our clients as to whether we would be somehow replaced by a magic AI tool. Those were concerns rather than things that we actually saw in the market. And these were concerns that we were naturally highlighting from a business risk point of view at the peak of the fever of the introduction of things like ChatGPT-4 in the middle and early days of last year. I would say that they didn't really eventuate. I don't think that we've seen situations where conversations around generative AI have delayed any deals.If anything, we've been having good discussions with clients about how -- and just segue into the second part of your question, how we might employ generative AI to make their lives a little bit easier. And in past telephone conferences, we've talked about bringing generative AI and the power that they have to affect natural language interfaces with the occasional user. That's certainly part of our forward-looking journey. And we continue to invest in that and we expect it will come out with some product enhancements in 2024 associated with that. From a product road map point of view, we're very focused on ensuring that we're taking full advantage of all of the micro services that the cloud hyperscalers have to offer and making sure that we have a cloud strategy that is applicable to the majority of our market segments and that's an emerging space in and of itself.The cloud partners, I think they are becoming more and more accepted even by companies and potentially geographies that have been a bit conservative in terms of moving into the cloud and away from the on-premise implementation. We're still seeing an ongoing migration and an ongoing comfort with moving on-premise to the cloud. That's obviously being driven by the big ERP companies and the big technology companies like SAP and Oracle and Microsoft and IBM. So, we're part of that trend as well. And we're working hard on ensuring that we're just absolutely well placed to take advantage of all that brings us. And there are certain specific aspects of our software that do lend themselves very nicely to taking full advantage of some of the cloud micro services and generative AI, particularly for the occasional user who comes into the system every 6 months and requires a very intuitive user interface, which is more a natural language than it is the super user experience. So, all of that is part of the product road map coming forward.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Sakrzewski, please proceed.
Yes. So thank you, everybody, for running through our full fiscal year 2023 and Q4 results. I appreciate all of the great questions. And we'll see you again when we announce Q1 results for 2024. Thank you, all.
Thank you. That concludes our conference today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.