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D2L Inc
TSX:DTOL

Watchlist Manager
D2L Inc
TSX:DTOL
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Price: 8.48 CAD -1.45% Market Closed
Updated: May 16, 2024

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2024-Q2

from 0
Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the D2L Incorporation Fiscal 2024 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Listeners are reminded that portion of today's discussion will include statements that contain forward-looking information. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from a conclusion, forecast or projection in the forward-looking information. Further, certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection as reflected in the forward-looking information.For identification and discussion of such risks, uncertainties, factors and assumptions as well as further information concerning forward-looking statements, please refer to the section entitled Forward-Looking Information and the risks identified in the company's annual and interim MD&A or most recently filed Annual Information Form in each case as filed under the company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. In addition, during this call, reference will be made to various non-IFRS financial measures, including constant currency revenue, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted gross profit, adjusted gross margin and free cash flow. These non-IFRS financial measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other public companies.Please refer to the company's management discussion and analysis for the 3 months and 6 months ended July 31, 2023, for more information about these and certain other non-IFRS financial measures, including where applicable, a reconciliation of historical non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS financial measures from our financial statements. This morning's call is being recorded on September 7, 2023 at 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time.I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. John Baker, Chief Executive Officer of D2L. Please go ahead, sir.

J
John Baker
executive

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining our Q2 fiscal 2024 earnings call. After the market closed yesterday, we released our financial results for the period ending July 31, 2023. You can find this information on the Investors section of our d2l.com website. Please note that the results we're discussing today are in U.S. dollars. I'm pleased to be joined this morning by Stephen Laster, our President; and Josh Huff, our CFO. And consistent with our Q1 conference call, our comments today will focus on 3 key points. The first, we're generating good top line growth and increasing profitability, consistent with the balanced growth plan that we introduced last year. Second, we're winning great new customers in all our markets and making particularly strong gains in higher education, we're seeing encouraging green shoots for further growth in the corporate market, both for D2L Brightspace and Wave. And three, we're making good progress on the evolution and expansion of our learning platform in areas such as ease of use, extensibility and artificial intelligence. This work is allowing us to solve more problems for our customers and helping to pull us away from many of our competitors. Stephen and Josh will expand on these 3 key themes in their remarks.Quickly looking at the financial performance for the quarter. Our results showed growth across multiple key metrics. Our total revenue was $44.5 million, up 8%. This was led by a 10% growth in our subscription and support revenue. Annual recurring revenue increased 13% over last year to $178.5 million. Our Q2 adjusted gross margins increased 230 basis points year-over-year, led by higher software margins. And we reported meaningful improvement year-over-year in adjusted EBITDA. These results put us on plan for our fiscal 2024 outlook and they support our medium-term model as we look ahead to next year.One of the key highlights of the second quarter was our Annual Users Conference, Fusion, which was held in Anaheim this year. The conference attracted nearly 2,000 people, including the leaders from across all sectors and from 16 different countries. There was a real sense of energy and excitement from attendees. During the 3 days, we explored key issues for the future of learning from the potential of effective and responsible use of AI, ways to embrace and implement higher accessibility and the pressing need for skills development to the workforce. These are complicated topics, and we're grateful that our clients are choosing to partner with D2L to navigate them and accelerate their digital transformation.Simply put, the many conversations with customers and prospects at Fusion reinforced our confidence in the long-term growth outlook for D2L. Recently, I was honored to attend the White House for a summit on another key issue facing our customers, cybersecurity. It was a pleasure to speak to the government, education and technology leaders and highlight our commitment to improving security and privacy for schools, students and their communities. Building on this long-standing commitment and our adherence to multiple ISO standards, we recently certified with another ISO compliance for privacy information management requirements. This makes D2L the first company among the leading LMS providers to achieve this important privacy certification. We believe our investments in cybersecurity give us another compelling point of differentiation in the market, and it creates an opportunity for additional upskilling internally for our IT professionals and for others across our organization and within our client base. Importantly, we see a commercial opportunity to develop and deliver courses to help our customers improve their cybersecurity readiness and posture.With all of that, I'll now turn the call over to Stephen to provide more color on our sales activity and other key growth pillars. Over to you, Stephen.

S
Stephen Laster
executive

Thanks, John, and good morning. The second quarter saw us make meaningful progress against our priorities. I'll focus my comments today on 2 main topics, our go-to-market activities and the continued evolution of our learning platform. As John mentioned at the outset, the second quarter results were highlighted by robust new customer acquisition activity, which is reflected in our highest quarterly additions to reported ARR since the IPO. In higher education, we continue to win at a higher rate and added leading institutions to the platform. In North America, we are recently selected by the University of Southern California, a leading private research university with enrollment approaching 50,000 students. They chose D2L to upgrade their teaching and learning experience to Brightspace.In their words, it was based on our user-friendly design, robust accessibility standards and customer support offerings. Also during the second quarter, we began implementation with the City University of New York or CUNY, which is the largest urban public university in the U.S. CUNY's 250,000 students across 25 different colleges will transition to Brightspace in phases beginning this month. We're also partnering with multiple other new education customers to build better learning experiences. In the second quarter, these included 2 polytechnic leaders, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology with more than 34,000 students, and Niagara College, which turned the D2L to implement a high-quality and scalable learning experience to support their future growth.Internationally, our teams continue to diligently build market leadership in focused countries. A great example is in the Netherlands, where we now have more than 50% university market share in higher ed, following the recent addition of HAN University of Applied Sciences, which serves nearly 40,000 students. We've previously talked about deepening our commitment in India with additional investment and an expanded local presence, and we're seeing benefits from this increased focus with the recent addition of a new higher education customer with 40,000 students. And we continue to see a great reception to our offering in the region as we look to build on the more than 40 Indian organizations that have implemented Brightspace already. And in our corporate market, we are demonstrating a strong value proposition within targeted areas and seeing green shoots for further growth. Among the new customers in the second quarter, we welcomed Plante & Moran, one of the largest auditing, accounting, tax and consulting investment banking and wealth management firms in the U.S., which shows Brightspace for its elegant user experience to offer software training to customers, and iPEC Coaching, which has been providing accredited coach training for more than 20 years.Our sales and marketing teams are doing great work to bring additional focus and an enhanced digital approach to penetrate specific sub verticals of the large corporate market, areas where we've had success and that are growing their investment in upskilling. We are winning in all our markets because we provide great technology and the services and support to make the technology a success. Influenced and informed by feedback from our customers, we continue to enhance our learning platform. I will highlight [ 2 ] examples of innovation. The first is extensibility. During the quarter, we launched D2L Link. This is a one-stop integration hub into enterprise systems that provides easy access to hundreds of D2L Brightspace integrated technologies, resources and strategic partner solutions. Recognizing that D2L operates in the center of a connected ecosystem, we are excited by our investment in Link to accelerate our customers' digital transformation.The second area of continued investment is artificial intelligence. At Fusion, we showcased how generative AI can help educators with authoring questions for formative assessment as well as bring more contextualized help and documentation from within D2L Brightspace to assist learners. This builds on our long history of thoughtfully applying machine learning and AI in areas such as video, transcribing and student success. As a platform, we're also working in close coordination with partners such as Copyleaks to bring the best technology into a seamless teaching and learning experience. D2L continues to approach AI thoughtfully and carefully to make sure the application of AI advances teaching and learning and makes it easier to build more human learning moments and expand the opportunity for connection. Lastly, I want to thank the entire D2L team for their impact. Together, we're making D2L a stronger company while delivering on the mission and vision that John set out many years ago to transform the way the world learns.I will now turn the call over to Josh for a deeper dive on the financials.

J
Josh Huff
executive

Thanks, Stephen, and good morning. Our full financials were issued last night, so I will focus on the highlights for the second quarter and year-to-date periods. Where relevant, I will reference non-IFRS measures and KPIs that we believe provide a more complete picture of our performance. As John mentioned, the Q2 results demonstrated our continued progress in balancing top line growth with improving profitability. Total revenue for Q2 was $44.5 million, an 8% increase over the same period last year or 9% growth on a constant currency basis. Q2 subscription and support revenue was $39.4 million, a 10% increase over the same period last year or 11% on a constant currency basis. This reflects new logo growth, combined with revenue retention and expansion from our existing customers.Q2 professional services and other revenue decreased 5% to $5.1 million. As we highlighted in recent quarters, the main cause of this decrease was the conclusion of a large services engagement in fiscal 2023. From time to time, we expect to see similar large projects come through, which can create short-term lumpiness in services revenue. As we continue to onboard new customers and help existing ones through their digital transformations, we're seeing good demand for professional services. We reported strong growth in gross profit and gross profit margins for the quarter and year-to-date periods. Adjusted gross profit, which removes noncash stock-based compensation expenses increased by 12% to $29.9 million in the second quarter. We're pleased with our continued improvement in this area.Year-to-date, adjusted gross profit margin has grown significantly year-over-year from 63.9% to 67.5%, a 360 basis point improvement. The biggest factor was higher gross margins on subscription and support revenue, which rose from 68% for the first half of last year to 72% for the first half of this year. This largely reflects continued progress with cost optimization efforts in our cloud technology and service delivery. For the same 6-month period, professional services gross margin was 30% versus 37% in the prior year. The decrease is attributed primarily to lower seasonal utilization within the second quarter and the conclusion of the large services engagement I mentioned earlier. Removing these period-to-period fluctuations, we would expect services margins to remain in the range we have delivered historically.Turning to the expense lines. Total operating expense in Q2 was $34.8 million versus $31.1 million in the same period last year, a 12% increase. As we discussed on our last earnings call, we expected to incur some additional expenses this quarter, including costs related to D2L Fusion. In addition, you will see nonrecurring expenses of roughly $700,000, the largest portion of which relates to the Connected Shopping acquisition and higher stock-based compensation expenses in the quarter. For the fiscal year-to-date period, total OpEx is up 4.5% over the prior year. The combination of revenue growth and improved gross profit margins contributed to a meaningful year-over-year improvement in adjusted EBITDA. We reported a modest adjusted EBITDA loss of $0.5 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.5 million in the same period last year.Again, the year-to-date results provide a helpful view of our progress transitioning to profitable growth. Adjusted EBITDA was positive $2.3 million for the first half of the year, an increase of more than $5 million from the same period last year. We continue to expect growth to ramp as we move through the second half of the year. Q2 was a strong period for cash flow following a typical seasonal pattern. Cash from operating activities increased to $22.9 million from $16.2 million in the prior year. On a year-to-date basis, cash flow from operating activities increased to $5.9 million, a $5 million increase from the prior year. And our trailing 12-month operating cash flow was $8.7 million, a positive leading indicator of the improvements we are making to enhance operational efficiency. At quarter end, we had no debt and $110.3 million in cash. With a strong balance sheet and positive cash flow, we are in a favorable position to take advantage of organic and inorganic growth opportunities.In summary, our results for the first half of the year position us well to achieve our outlook for fiscal 2024 and give us momentum as we track towards our medium-term operating model. We appreciate your interest in D2L.With that, we'd be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We have our first question comes from Daniel Chan from TD Cowen.

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Daniel Chan
analyst

Congrats on the new wins with USC and CUNY. That, I guess, gets reflected in the strong ARR growth and ARR continues to outpace subscription revenue growth. Just wondering whether we should expect subscription revenue growth to accelerate into that mid-teens growth rate that we're seeing ARR growing at?

J
Josh Huff
executive

Yes. I think, Dan, it's a good point. We certainly look at ARR growth as a leading indicator to future subscription revenue. So it's fair to draw a correlation between the 2. And then just a reminder that there is sort of a timing reality there, too, as customers work through implementation between sort of ARR addition and then that flowing through RevRec. So just a bit of a timing consideration there as well. But yes, it's a fair correlation.

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Daniel Chan
analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then you did mention the subscription gross margin that was expanding nicely, stayed above that 70% mark. How much more do you think you can achieve as you continue to optimize the platform on the cloud?

S
Stephen Laster
executive

Yes. So we continually are investing in the optimization. And so we don't have an upper end bound, but we continue to, each quarter, take a bit of our development capacity to work to expand that.

Operator

We have our next question comes from Maxim Matushansky from RBC Capital Markets.

M
Maxim Matushansky
analyst

I just wanted to touch on the fiscal 2025 targets. Should we assume that's kind of being reiterated? And related to that, do you have better visibility now that we're in September into how you expect fiscal '25 to play out or will it take a few more months or quarters before you get that better visibility?

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Josh Huff
executive

Yes. Thanks for the question. We certainly feel like we're trending in the right direction. We've -- as discussed with Dan, ARR is certainly an important leading indicator to sort of the growth profile leading into next year. And I think, really, you'll see what is fair to assume sort of an OpEx neutral environment or flat where you'll see further scale and efficiency as the business matures. And I'd say more specifically as a bridge between sort of today and then you can anticipate further leverage from continued gross margin improvements, from operational efficiencies and heightened productivity in many different areas. So net-net, we continue to track against plan, and we're really pleased with specifically the ARR growth in the quarter as well.

M
Maxim Matushansky
analyst

Got it. Should we expect to see the professional services [ tick ] up over the next few quarters as a result of the CUNY and USC deals and maybe some of the larger deals or how should we expect the services side to play out?

J
Josh Huff
executive

Yes. I think those -- so those individual engagements are certainly helpful. But we do have, obviously, a fairly significant customer base. And then so one individual customer isn't necessarily going to move the needle sustainably. So I think the guide we provided in the past is a reasonable way to look at it. And professional services continues to be a helpful input from an ARR perspective, too, as we look at retention and stickiness of customers.

M
Maxim Matushansky
analyst

And maybe can you provide an update on the different segments? I know you noted that you're winning customers, most notably in the higher education. Is corporate still the fastest-growing segment? And then maybe any update on the growth in the corporate and K-12 sides?

J
John Baker
executive

I think the only nuance probably this quarter is we saw a tremendous performance from our higher education group. We still anticipate, given the size of the market, corporate will still outpace long-term, and we are seeing great growth internationally. So fairly consistent with a good boost in terms of our higher education group really outperforming in the quarter, and that's really a good sign, considering that's our largest segment of our business today.

Operator

We have our next question comes from Doug Taylor from Canaccord.

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Doug Taylor
analyst

Yes. The ARR growth was obviously a highlight this quarter, speaks to some strong pipeline conversion. Maybe I'll start by getting you to speak to how that pipeline sits and is shaping up through the back half of this year and whether we should expect continued ARR sequential additions at the pace we saw here in Q2?

S
Stephen Laster
executive

Yes. We continue to see strong pipeline development in all of our major verticals. We think the additions we've made with our CMO earlier in the year and the way the teams are operating and market conditions are favorable for us. And so we're pleased both with pipe and with pipe conversion as we look out into the remainder of the year.

J
John Baker
executive

Yes. And maybe just to add to that a little bit, Doug, just coming off the back of our conference and traveling with a lot of different clients over the course of the last few months, it's very clear they're sort of shaking off the pandemic, reenergized, looking to us to help them with additional challenges, opportunities for growth. So there's a good renewed sense of energy in the market, which I'm pretty excited about.

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Doug Taylor
analyst

Okay. I appreciate that. By my math, hitting the bottom end of your annual guidance here in terms of revenue growth would actually suggest you the growth rates decelerating from the 8% year-over-year growth that you showed in Q2, and that's a little inconsistent with what you said in that you expect growth to ramp in the second half of the year. So I guess my question here is, I mean, how should we think about the timing considerations with respect to your ARR converting into top line growth? Or is there -- is that a professional services related issue as you translate this 12% ARR growth into first growth in the second half of the year and then the 12% to 15% growth that bogey next year?

J
Josh Huff
executive

Yes. Thanks, Doug. So there is timing for ARR to convert into RevRec. So as customers kind of work through implementation launch, et cetera. And then as you mentioned, the difference between subscription and services is another important area of focus. So you do see some nice ramp on the subscription line, in particular, as you look out. And I think, again, ARR is a sort of nice proxy to that as well.

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Doug Taylor
analyst

Okay. And then maybe I'll finish by asking a question about the OpEx, which was elevated in the quarter, as you said, due to some onetime. Maybe for the benefit of the audience here, I'll get you to just be a little more specific if you can about what exactly you see as onetime versus a sustained increase in OpEx and what we should be thinking about in terms of the cadence of your OpEx through the balance of the year and into next?

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Josh Huff
executive

Yes, absolutely. So Q2 was a higher period than normal. Therefore, I wouldn't consider this a run rate for quarterly OpEx go forward. As we signaled with Q1's call, we did anticipate higher operating expenses in Q2, and probably 2 main reasons I'd summarize, Doug. I think the first is the Fusion Conference occurs in the quarter, and so that's a big expense for us. It helps drive pipeline and future growth, but it's a big expense. And secondly, some onetime costs, including the Connected Shopping transaction-related costs. So if you remove those costs, that run rate is a fair way to look at OpEx over the next few quarters and directionally an OpEx flat environment. And so as we look to year-to-date results for the first half, at $2.3 million of EBITDA, we're on track with our plans, and we'll continue to focus on operational efficiency in the back half and go forward.

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Doug Taylor
analyst

Do you want to wrap a number on those onetime costs, just so it's clear for everyone here?

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Josh Huff
executive

Yes. So some of them you can see within the MD&A, but you're talking in the realm of sort of $500,000 to $1 million.

Operator

We have our next question comes from Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO.

T
Thanos Moschopoulos
analyst

Can you speak to pricing? I mean just given the inflationary environment, is there an opportunity to push through some price increasing either in terms of new customers or on the existing base? And in general, as well, I think the perception that your pricing is a bit below your competition. So does that also imply maybe similar amount of pricing front?

J
John Baker
executive

Yes. I think there's maybe a couple of ways that we're approaching that. One, there are natural price escalators within our contracts to account for the additional R&D and the additional value that we're bringing to our customers. And then secondly, we're really putting a big effort into bringing on these additional products that we can take to market with our clients. So solving additional problems, helping them reduce other software costs elsewhere in their delivery, if you will. And that makes a big difference for us. So if we're leaning into net revenue retention, it's going to be largely focused on us upselling Creator+, Performance+, Course Merchant, which is a new acquisition and then also driving significant revenue through Wave as that product really ramps up.That's our primary focus, really driving this additional value. And then there's R&D that we're doing that will create another bit of pipeline of additional technology that we can bring to market for our clients, always constantly adding value. One that Stephen mentioned during the conference call was D2L Link, which I think is going to be a game-changer for us in corporate, in particular, where integrations have been a bit of a block in terms of us entering certain sub-segments within that market. And this opens up a whole new addressable market for us that was largely closed prior to that introduction of that product. So those are going to be the primary focuses for us. And yes, there are small step functions that we can make within existing pricing with clients as we continue to add value to the core product as well, too.

T
Thanos Moschopoulos
analyst

Great. And then looking at professional services, there was an uptick in cost of goods relative to last quarter. Is that just indicative of some hiring in that group?

J
John Baker
executive

I think that's a bit of a -- just a blip in terms of summer vacations for some folks, just a bit of a cycle in terms of client projects ramping down, new projects ramping up. I would anticipate, if you look back previous quarters at the margin, that should be what we're aiming for as we go forward into the future. So I think it's a bit of a blip.

J
Josh Huff
executive

Can I just -- operator, I just wanted to circle back, just to add additional color, just to Doug's question there. I had interpreted not the inclusion of Fusion sort of in the question, but more fully, if you include Fusion and the onetime costs that were referenced, you're talking about something in the realm of $2 million to $3 million in Q2 OpEx. So I just wanted to provide that sort of fullness for everyone.

Operator

We have our next question comes from Christian Sgro from Eight Capital.

C
Christian Sgro
analyst

Just to start here, can you give us an update on the progress and the current maturity levels with your channel partners?

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John Baker
executive

Yes, we couldn't hear the question. Do you mind repeating it?

C
Christian Sgro
analyst

Yes. I'm just curious on an update with your current channel partners and your -- and their maturity levels. Just your thoughts on it.

J
John Baker
executive

Yes. I'd still say we're fairly early stages with channel partners still. We're seeing good progress. We've got channel partners that are helping us open up different parts of the market. So for example, small- to medium-sized corporates. We've got a good channel partner there that's adding a good number of logos. And then we're also leveraging channels in international regions, such as India, where we're seeing very good growth, picking up a large number of the different universities that are now putting their programs online and starting to digitize those universities. So it depends on the region. It depends on the market that we're pursuing, but overall, making progress and continue to think that's going to be a bigger part of our future as we continue to scale that program.

C
Christian Sgro
analyst

And for my second one here. With the conference season now behind us truly, have you seen any competitive responses from the legacy players?

J
John Baker
executive

Well, I think today, we're in a stronger position even compared to last conference season last year relative to our competitor set. If you look at our core product, Brightspace, our win rates continue to go up in our most competitive markets. And that's largely because we're not only delivering on the product expectations that our clients have, but we're providing the right level of support, we're providing the right level of care for making sure those implementations go really well, and that's driving that success. Universities some in California or CUNY or others are great reference points to our strategy working very, very well there. We've not seen a big competitive change there. I haven't seen any new product announcements or new enhancements to fixing the core issues that they've got with their products. So I think we're in a spot where we can continue to pull away as we lean into the research and development to really make sure that there's a clear leader in this market that we're competing in.

Operator

We have our next question comes from John Shao from National Bank.

M
Meng Shao
analyst

In terms of your international markets, it seems like that market has been growing at a much higher pace than the North American market. So I'm just curious where you see the trend is going and also the sales mix in international?

J
John Baker
executive

Yes. I think that international is a tremendous opportunity for us. You've got to remind yourself that 80% of the different opportunities that we see internationally are all running on legacy technologies. So I think on-premise, not mobile-friendly, not accessible. These are very dated-looking technologies. And so the ability for us to move that to a cloud, help them reduce cost in many cases and drive a better impact for student experience is a very compelling value proposition. And so international is, I think going to play a big part of our growth as we look into the future. And then the channels, I think we're still early days there, but that's showing some signs of promise. And most of our international is still a combination of direct and channel, and that combination seems to be working very well.For example, I just got back from South Africa, where we have a great channel partner down there that's helped us bring together a number of the key universities across the region. That event was a fantastic event. And I think there's tremendous opportunity for us to grow, not only in South Africa, but in the broader region. Thanks to that combination of direct and channel.

M
Meng Shao
analyst

You have a strong balance sheet. So from a capital allocations perspective, could you give us any updates on your plan to better use the cash on hand?

J
John Baker
executive

So we are still very diligent in terms of making sure that if we are making investments in terms of M&A that we're looking at technologies that really help our clients solve really important problems and give us the ability to take that technology and scale it to hundreds of clients, very similar to what we're doing with Connected Shopping, where in that case, as we've integrated that technology now into D2L and the people have come on board, we see that being a tremendous opportunity for our clients to reach a new audience of learners, these sort of nontraditional learners that are looking to upskill. And that push for us is just beginning as that acquisition was just completed. And now as we look forward into the future with the capital that we do have, if there are other opportunities similar to that one, we will take a look, but nothing in the pipeline at this stage to talk about it today.

Operator

We have our next question comes from Brian Peterson from Raymond James.

J
Jessica Wang
analyst

This is Jessica on for Brian. I just was wondering across your market segments, are customers still viewing potential deals with higher scrutiny? And as we're moving into the new school year and following your Fusion Conference, are new and existing customers considering any shifts in their priorities?

J
John Baker
executive

So I didn't quite catch the first part of that question. Well, additional scrutiny on deals, I think it was what you're referring to. Is that right, Jessica?

J
Jessica Wang
analyst

Like in the past, some customers potentially, like some deal cycles potentially were a little bit longer because customers were a little bit -- or were considering deals a little bit more scrutiny. Just wondering if that's still a dynamic going on right now?

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John Baker
executive

Oh, I see what you're saying. There is still that in pockets where buyers are taking a little bit longer cycle to actually get through the entire deal. They still want to get it done. They just take a little bit more time. But we see that starting to lift. Clients tend to be today a little bit more reenergized, shaking off a little bit of that, that struggles with the pandemic and are now pretty motivated to get the next wave of implementation of these types of technologies put into place, so that they can support a better experience for students. You've got to remember that the demand shifted tremendously post-pandemic, where students were largely using Zoom or remote learning technologies to now back to class using our type of technology and also for online learning also using our technology.And so putting in place a better online and face-to-face experience is critical for campuses. And many campuses pre-pandemic were just using technology to support a face-to-face experience that really didn't invest in that online. And that's where I think we're seeing the biggest shift in demand from those customers is being able to support face-to-face, drive engagement there, but also to now build out these online programs at a more rapid pace. That will drive both products and services. And that combined with these additional products that we brought to market. So Creator+, which we launched in November of last year, is seeing tremendous demand from customers. For example, I was just chatting with 2,500 faculty at a college at West, and it was very clear that the ability for them to have a tool that helps them create interactives and practices and creates questions for students to help them understand if they're on the right track for success or not. Any tooling around that area was going to be tremendously well received by our client base. Yes. Does that help, Jessica?

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Jessica Wang
analyst

Great. Yes.

J
John Baker
executive

And then I think Stephen is giving me a nudge here on like on one other point, which is, well, 2 extra points. So we are seeing faster deal flow starting to happen now in corporate. So as that market is looking for these types of technologies, we are seeing the speed starting to pick up there. And then two, if you look at our core client base, ease of use and engagement with students is the 2 key priorities. So the ability to make it easy for folks to leverage these technologies to do all these new use cases. So our work that we're doing there is really helping us tremendously. And then the ability for you to engage students with things like Creator+ and feedback and other mechanisms that we've spent a lot of time on over the course of the last 2 decades is also having a big impact to improving educational outcomes for students. So those are a couple of trends to take a look at.

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Jessica Wang
analyst

Got it. That's really great. I also want to follow up on your announcements regarding the Indian market. What's the high-level time line that you're considering for ramping up your investments in this space as well as when you might see returns on those investments?

S
Stephen Laster
executive

Yes, so we've already ramped up investment in this space, and we're seeing nice demand, nice pipe and nice deal closure in that. So we -- it's begun and we expect it to continue and the progress is tracking as we imagined, and we're pleased with it.

J
John Baker
executive

Yes. So keep in mind, we have dozens of people down in India. We've got our entity set up. We've got cloud provisioning in India. We've built out a great channel partner structure there. And we've really implemented all the key standards that are required for success in India in the education market. Being able to go in and localize our offering to that region is critical, and we're doing it better than I believe anybody. And so I see tremendous opportunity for us to continue to grow and be the right partner for that country for the long-term.

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We have no further questions from the line. I will now hand back to John Baker for closing remarks.

J
John Baker
executive

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us on today's call. We're looking forward to updating you following our Q3 results. And in the meantime, have a great day, everybody.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.