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Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Martello Technologies Group Third Quarter Fiscal 2022 Investor Conference Call. Today's call will provide information and commentary on financial results for the 3 months ended December 31, 2021. We will hear from John Proctor, President and CEO of Martello; and Kim Butler, Martello's Interim Chief Financial Officer. Following these remarks, John and Kim will take questions from analysts. If you have any questions following the call, you can reach Martello at investor@martellotech.com. First, here are a couple of housekeeping notices. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded, and we expect that the recording will be available on Martello's website today. We remind you that today's remarks will include forward-looking statements that are subject to important risks and uncertainties. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please see the reader advisory at the bottom of Martello's news release, which is on their website and on SEDAR. The company's actual performance could differ materially from these statements. We'll begin with Martello's CEO, John Proctor. John?
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I hope you and your families are all keeping well. I'm joined this morning by Kim Butler, our new Interim CFO. Kim's predecessor, Aaron Crow, left the company at the end of January for return to the world of professional sports. Aaron's counsel and expertise will be missed, but we are pleased to work with someone experienced as Kim. So welcome, Kim. The last quarter continued a very busy period for Martello. Since I spoke to you last in November, we have seen a number of very important developments. On this call, I want to follow up on a number of these, including the progress we are making with the Microsoft partnership, and I'll also provide some insight into our Vantage DX trial pipeline. About 18 months ago, we made a strategic decision to focus the company and move aggressively into digital experience monitoring. With that, we made our largest acquisition to date of GSX, a company that specialize in enterprise-grade digital experience monitoring for Microsoft. We believe that by combining this technology with some of our existing products and capabilities, we could build a comprehensive single platform SaaS solution for CIOs to monitor and manage the digital experience for employees using cloud business solutions from anywhere. And we thought it best to start with the biggest, Microsoft. We are there now. In September, we launched Vantage DX, one of the only solutions in the market that helps IT teams monitor and manage the Microsoft user experiences across geographies, at home or in the office. It took several engineering cycles to deliver on the promise to launch a solution and see how the market responded. And the market has responded extremely well and confirmed what we believe that there is absolutely a demand for this solution. We are beginning to commercialize Vantage DX, and we have almost doubled new sales pipeline generated sequentially over Q2. After only a few months, we had sold more than 70,000 users and had 500,000 users in trials. This is a mix of new customers, cross-sells and replacements, but over half of the users in trial or under subscription today represent new customers to Martello. This gives us great confidence that the solution has very broad appeal. We are now focused on maximizing that appeal. We need more people selling our solutions and our growing alignment with Microsoft have brought new opportunities here. With the announcement earlier this month that Vantage DX is now on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and sellers are now compensated for selling Vantage DX, we have a solid brand new sales channel. This is a good start, and we plan on leveraging this further through joint selling and referrals. We are also working on expanding our telco and global systems integrated partner channels, which I believe will allow us to scale faster. And just 2 weeks ago, we advanced our partnership with Microsoft from global strategic alliance to global managed partner. This move is an acknowledgment from Microsoft that there is a need of Vantage DX in the market for customers and partners globally and provide dedicated resources to make Martello successful. It offers us closer alignment with Microsoft in product, sales and marketing to bring value to customers and partners faster. Since Martello joined this program in early February, Microsoft has already made introductions to 6 global partners in the telco and systems integrated space as well as 5 enterprise customer opportunities. This deepening level of engagement speaks to our specific alignment with Microsoft's strategic priorities. With respect to our sales process, our teams are working now to accelerate our trials to booking cycles. Our early trial cycles lasted slightly longer than we would like, and we are working on ways to meaningfully shorten this to convert trials to bookings and revenue quickly and decisively. We want to assure investors and analysts that we are laser-focused on exploiting the demand for Vantage DX to scale our revenue. We have an installed base of 2.84 million Microsoft users and based on the demand that I explained earlier, we remain comfortable that we're on track to reach 3.5 million users over the next couple of quarters. Again, this timeline will be impacted by progress on accelerating our trials. I'll speak more about our outlook shortly after Kim provides a more detailed review of our financial performance in the third quarter. Over to you, Kim.
Thanks, John. I'm delighted to be here with you this morning for my first earnings conference call as Martello's Interim CFO. I will now comment on Martello's financial performance for the third quarter of fiscal 2022, which ended December 31, 2021. Revenue of $4.4 million were flat compared to Q2 fiscal 2022 and down 3.8% from Q3 fiscal 2021. There are a few factors contributing to the slight year-over-year decline. Growth in Microsoft 365 Monitoring was offset by declines in legacy product revenue and revenue from the Mitel line of business. This was related to lower perpetual revenue and the impact of foreign currency conversion. Revenue quality continued to be strong. The recurring portion of total revenue was 97% in Q3 compared to 96% in the comparative period. In the third quarter, monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, was $1.45 million, a decrease of 3% compared to $1.49 million in the prior year. This slight decrease is due to a decline in royalties in the Mitel line of business, adverse currency movements and a decrease in maintenance and support revenue. These factors were particularly offset by an increase in subscription license in Microsoft DEM. The portion of Martello's revenue driven by sales in Microsoft DEM continues to grow sequentially, reaching 48% of total revenue in Q3 compared to 47% in Q2. The remaining revenue streams are Mitel UC Monitoring, which contributed 40% of revenue in Q3, flat sequentially and the sunsetting of legacy products revenue stream, which contributed just 11% of revenue in Q3 compared to 13% in Q2. Gross margin was 90% in Q3 compared to 93% in the same period of the prior year. The decrease was primarily the result of lower gross margins on Microsoft 365 monitoring due to higher hosting costs and sales and distribution commissions. Operating expenses of $5.53 million were 1.4% above the $5.45 million reported in the same period of fiscal 2021. As we have noted before, in the prior year, the company implemented a strategic cost reduction initiative in view of COVID-19-related uncertainties, including delays in filling vacant positions and temporary reduction in compensation until partway through Q3 of fiscal 2021. Increase in spending in Q3 of this year related to increased R&D and sales investment, compensation costs associated with the return to full salary, market research, office equipment and software, professional fees as well as lower government incentives. These were partially offset by a decrease in G&A costs related to optimization of support functions. Adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-IFRS measure, is a loss of $780,000 compared to a loss of $260,000 in the same period the prior year. The decrease is due to higher operating losses associated with the return to normalized operation following COVID-19-related strategic cost reduction initiative noted a moment ago. The Q3 net loss of $2.17 million has increased from $1.46 million in the same period of the prior year as a result of items noted and higher losses on foreign exchange, particularly offset by lower financing fees. The company's cash and short-term investment balance was $5.1 million at December 31, 2021, compared to $8.5 million at March 31, 2021. Net working capital was $2.3 million at December 31, 2021, compared to $4.5 million at March 31, 2021. Following the recent insider private placement with aggregate gross proceeds totaling $2.4 million, which included $1.4 million in January 2022, the company believes it has sufficient cash to fund ongoing organic growth. Finally, I would like to comment on our user count. The number of Microsoft users on Martello's DEM platform decreased slightly to 2.84 million in Q3 from 2.9 million in Q2, reflecting a decrease in Microsoft 365 Monitoring subscription. The company is focused on driving Microsoft user growth through sales of Vantage DX. This includes upgrading Microsoft 365 Monitoring customers and converting trials to paid subscription. I'll now hand it back to John to close with his perspective on Martello's outlook. John?
Thanks, Kim. As I explained a few minutes ago, the launch of Vantage DX in September was as a consequence -- as consequential as we hoped it would be. We've had some performance challenges over the last year with longer sales cycle related to the pandemic, but we are now extremely well positioned for growth and very focused on exploiting the demand by accelerating trial booking cycle. The management team and the Board remain very confident about the future for 3 key reasons: first, our increasing alignment with Microsoft and their increasing support to an interest in Martello; second, the increasing number of large global partners engaged with us; and third, significant growth in our Vantage DX sales pipeline. These 3 indicators tell us that the market needs Vantage DX, and we are well positioned to execute on that growth. We put action behind this confidence by investing in the company. Insiders invested at approximately $2.4 million in the last 8 weeks, more than half at an 80% premium to the market price. We are all in on Martello. I am here to answer your questions. As start -- as I said at the start, as Kim has only been in the role for 3 weeks, we prefer not to put her on the spot at this stage. If you have specific financial questions, regarding assumptions or modeling, we will set up a subsequent meeting to address those questions. Operator, would you please facilitate the Q&A part of this call?
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Christian Sgro of Eight Capital.
The first question I wanted to ask today is about the Microsoft user counts. It sounds like from your prepared remarks that the 3.5 million target is still intact over the next couple of quarters. The first question I want to ask is if there's any color you'd add around a slight sequential decrease? Could the December quarter be one where there aren't renewals? Or is there anything else you'd add maybe a one-off customer that canceled? Something to help us understand the slight sequential decrease as you target the 3.5 million goal.
Yes. I mean, Christian, you're spot on with one large renewal, they were Gizmo customers or a GSX customer. What is interesting is they've moved into a Vantage trial. So we will make that -- we are fully intending to make that back up. But they basically looked at Gizmo and said, "Yes, we don't need as much of it as we thought we did."And we said, "Okay, fair enough, but this is our new product." And -- I mean, the line we got from -- and this is a huge enterprise customer. The line we got from them was, "Oh, this is what we always wanted along the way." So they've moved into trial. It's -- one of the nice things for us as well was our ability to trial this brand-new product in December in an environment of that scale is fairly limited until we actually put it in an environment of that scale. And it has scaled. I'm extremely proud of the work the R&D guys did, but it's scaled to that scale of enterprise customer. So the decrease is to that one renewal where they went from slightly less seats on Gizmo than they had before, but they've now moved into a Vantage trial. So I'm -- and given our conversion rates so far of Vantage trials, which is over 70%, when we got people into trials in the new products, we have a 70% success rate of closing that deal, I'm confident we can pull that number back.
That's great. That leads into my next question, John, on the conversion there that greater than 70% is positive from the launch to date. So my question was going to be, if you're confident that 70% could sort of continue, if that's what you're seeing from the 500,000 trials? And what you'd expect from a time line there? I guess you're working actively to shorten that cycle. But do you think that could be over 1 quarter or 2 quarters or is it more of a discussion with customers?
So I mean, it's a new product. There's always an education step at the front end. It's -- that's kind of the first hurdle to get through. But yes, I mean, we see these numbers coming up. As I said, we expect to be at 3.5 million in the next couple of quarters. And the exciting piece is Microsoft. We are, as far as we know, the only DEM solution that Microsoft has pulled through into this partner program. We've got weaker cadence now with Microsoft themselves. And as I mentioned with this partner program, we now have -- and literally, as of last week, dedicated resources inside Microsoft who are responsible for making Martello successful. That's a huge jump for us and one that sort of can't be underestimated. So we're focused on that. And I think that's where I'm very confident on the 3.5 million users in the next several quarters.
And I'll ask just one more question. And that's if you have any insight into the usage of customers? It seems like the world is still in a bit of a hybrid mode. Are you seeing elevated usage of Teams and other applications on the platform? Is that still the case into 2022 here?
Yes. I mean that's such a good question. I mean what we're seeing also is as people return to the office, they're realizing when you're in the office, you've got a much more complicated network environment, including the phone system. And your network -- I mean, if you're -- I'm assuming, Christian, you're either in the office or home. So when you go on to Teams at home, it's fairly simple, it goes on to the ISP, right? And it goes straight to your -- wherever you're going. The problem is when you use your cell phone and you're on Teams, you're actually on that of traditional phone network, which is way more complicated because if you're on a bell phone, suddenly, you're trying to get on to the Rogers network simultaneously. The irony here is if we didn't have this deep expertise with Mitel, we wouldn't be able to see both sides, and that's an absolute unique capability for us. I know there's some -- a little bit of competition out there. Like I said, none that Microsoft is pulling through at the moment. But none of them have that capability to see both sides, and this is where -- so for instance, this large enterprise customer I talked about on day 1 when we actually installed Vantage in a trial, they saw the problem they had with Teams had nothing to do with their network, it was all to do with the phone system, the session -- what they call the session border controller, which is the connection between the network and the phone system, and that's where the problem lay. And we were the first people to be able to indicate to them. And they've spent weeks on that, and that's money. We solved it in one day, which is why we're fairly confident on the trial.
[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital.
I had a question around your partnership channel sales program. So you mentioned introductions into 6 global system integrators and telcos. I was wondering if you could just speak to the sales cycle there. How is it different from what you've done previously? What are the timelines like the key milestones to achieve before we could start seeing some user growth from that channel and sales from that channel?
Yes. I mean, Christian, (sic) [ Daniel ], yes, you're absolutely right. I mean we launched our sort of initial partner program in June, and we worked with some smaller partners. What we really didn't anticipate as we spun-up Vantage with this increase from very large global telcos and system integrators, and we've really had to focus on that because as you can imagine, that's the rapid scale-up part. That's like adding 2 Mitels every quarter-type process. So thanks to our growing alliance with Microsoft, we have become aligned on these global SIs. And I mean, Microsoft pulls into the conversations that they wouldn't have with us. And I have a couple of good examples of how even Canadian telcos were sluggish to respond to us. But when you walk through that virtual door with Microsoft at your hip, suddenly, they're much more welcoming and are willing to have a conversation. So we're very much focused on that. We still got a couple of the smaller partners. We're still supporting those guys. They're still looking at opportunities. But getting some -- a global SI or telco who is looking to white label you into there, and it's called Operator Connect. There's a thing called Microsoft Operator Connect, which is not everybody, not every telco. So for instance, in Canada, you'll only see Rogers on there, for example. What that is, is how Microsoft connects into the phone system, getting aligned into that and become the tool of choice for those providers or those partners of Microsoft in the Operator Connect world will be key. So we're focused on that. From a timeline perspective, yes, because it takes a little bit more time to do paperwork and spin those guys up. But ultimately, that's significant scale that we can achieve with those guys.
Are there any specifics you could share with traction? I mean introductions are great, but I would love to better understand any traction you're seeing with any specific ones. I mean [indiscernible] but...
Yes. I give you an example. I've got 1 -- certainly 1 global systems integrator. We're through legal terms or into commercials right now. So if I can get these -- we can get these commercials agreed to we're off to the races this quarter. But certainly, we're through the Ts and Cs and we're into commercial. So that one is really exciting. And as I said, my push is getting it done this quarter. And ideally, we'd have gone and sat in their office until they signed, but sadly with COVID, they're not even in their own offices. So we're doing as much as we can, but that one is really exciting. And Ts and Cs are done, we're just into commercials.
And switching to the Mitel division. I just wanted to understand any -- I don't know if there's seasonality impacts or onetime impacts within the quarter. It seemed like year-over-year, it was a bit less -- we saw less growth within that division. Just how should we think about it maybe annualized? And I know you had mentioned some FX impacts in the quarter, so just something to better understand what's going on with the growth cadence within Mitel?
Sure. I mean, again, with the RingCentral piece, many things have changed. But I think the Mitel revenue stream has really been quite resilient. And I know that the -- when we talked about this start of pandemic, suddenly every moved on to video conferencing. But we just have a large renewal from a large global car manufacturer. They're not getting rid of their desk phones. So particularly in sectors like health care, where telephony is being used alongside Teams, we can provide a complete picture. So I think, again, that resilient revenue stream is still there. It contributes 41% of our total revenues, very high gross margins. And we're working with Mitel on a couple of sort of analytics feature releases during Q3 -- which we delivered in Q3. And again, I think, again, we do have a pipeline of NPA deals with them. The other thing that's interesting is the RingCentral deal at Mitel hasn't significantly impacted us. If anything, it's opened up more conversations with Mitel because they are more focused on the business line that we make revenue from, which is that on-premise. So again, there's potential to see modest growth, but certainly, I don't see Mitel's revenue going anywhere in terms of huge change at the moment in the short term.
And lastly for me, I just want to confirm, I heard you're reiterating the user targets for 3.5 million by the first half of fiscal year '23?
Yes.
Our next question comes from Kevin Krishnaratne of Desjardin.
I had a question for you just to go back to the large user that dropped off. I think you mentioned they've gone to a trial on Vantage. When did that happen in the quarter? And sort of was it prompted by them coming up to renewal? Or was it -- what really prompted it? And also, how many seats is that user?
Yes. So they were a Gizmo customer that was coming up for renewal, and they did renew but for a lower headcount. And we had a bit of warning of that. We did the usual what incentives can we give you to stay where you are, et cetera, cetera. And they basically said, "No, we just don't see us needing that much of visibility into that number of users." And then we moved them into the Vantage conversation, which is where they are now in trial. So it was part of a sort of regular renewal cadence. It wasn't a, "Oh, my god" issue. It was very much part of sort of that renewal cadence. But now they're in Vantage trial, and there are over 120,000 seats if all up. Obviously, they reduced it when they renewed Gizmo, which is what that impact is. But if they come back to full seats, they'll be back over the 120,000 users.
So they were 120,000 users?
They were over 120,000.
Okay. Got you. And so can you -- just to maybe double-click just into this customer, what would have -- what was the rationale behind not thinking that they needed to have as many users covered? I'm just trying to understand the rationale because I think from your perspective, you -- Martello's view is that Vantage or GSX is quite important for many users in an organization that have enabled just given where we're going with remote and hybrid work. So was there something specific to this customer that they had, definitely users are not going remote, they're just going to be in the office or just sort of -- just trying to understand the behavior of that particular customer?
Sure. So because they are on Gizmo, Gizmo being the slightly older product that we acquired from GSX, right, gave a very specific picture on Office 365. It didn't have the depth of Teams that Vantage does. So they've moved everyone to Teams. But Office 365, for the majority of people in the company, seem to be okay. And you're justifying a spend that's all a operational productivity problem that not everybody in the company was observing. However, some were and some were just important people who couldn't afford any impact to Office 365. So those guys were -- that's who they focused their Gizmo spend on. And like any company during a pandemic, if you're told to tighten to find -- find ways to tighten your belt on the IT spend, it doesn't mean you got rid of Gizmo, you just focus it where it actually has to be, right? Where it's a aspirin, not just a vitamin. So they focus themselves down to reduce their own IT spend. And we see that with many companies, right? There's a pandemic. They see sort of some uncertainty in risks, so they're limiting their IT spend and they tighten the belt. However, with Vantage, because of what it does in Teams, and as I said, we found the problem they've had with teams across the company within 24 hours of getting the full trial up and running. Suddenly, there's a -- everybody uses Teams. And one thing we can actually say, and this is going to be new, where we're rolling this out this quarter, we have what we called it ROI template. So if you're in trial, we will send you a piece and you can put -- we can put the data from the trial into that template and into a dashboard. And it shows you the return on investment. In other words, we will see the number of outages you are having on a regular basis. We'll see that. And then based on some sort of Gartner and Forrester costings, we will give you a prediction of the cost of that impact to your company and then we can show you that the cost of buying Vantage is smaller than the cost of the impacts of Vantage was sold. In other words, we can show an immediate return on investment on Teams and Office 365, which overall reduces the total cost of ownership. So that will be coming out. But that was sort of the step that we needed to show this, this enterprise customer was we can improve the productivity of Teams across the whole organization so much more than sort of SharePoint and [indiscernible] which is where they hadn't seen as much potential impact, but certainly, they have seen impact on Teams.
Okay. Understood. And again, just does this change happened towards the end of the quarter? I'm just kind of curious on the timing. You're...
Yes. It was December. Yes.
December. Yes, because your revenue for monitoring was up -- subscription revenue was up quarter-over-quarter. And...
Yes. It was a classic NGA renewal.
Yes. Yes. Okay. And so you said that you had some sort of -- you sort of knew that this was a potential coming. Are there any other sort of customers up for renewals that you could see something similar happening in the next quarter or 2?
At the moment, I mean, again, we're tracking fairly closely. We've already had some customers convert from Gizmo to Vantage, one without trial, right? They just said, no, we like to look at Vantage, right, we're going straight across. So that's really our focus at the moment is we've got folks on Gizmo, we're pushing the story of Vantage. We've now got Microsoft Marketing on our webinars. We did -- and again, a good example, we did a webinar before Christmas. We had over 900 registrants for a webinar. We've never had 900 people registered for a Martello webinar, but that's because Microsoft are on there talking about the value our product brings to the Office 365 and Teams environment. So pushing those things to customers, trying to get -- moving them from Gizmo into Vantage, and we have an absolute campaign to do that. So as renewals come forward, we're going to make sure that, that's the focus, which is get -- you've had Gizmo for a year, 2 years, we want to move you into this brand-new product called Vantage, and this is why. And I think that will be the message going forward.
Got you. You've got 70,000 Vantage out of your current base. You've got 2.8 million for -- you've got a target of 3.5 million over the next few quarters. Do you have a view on a goal for the number of Vantage within that mix?
No. Not at this stage. And again, it's going to be on the uptick, right? It's -- I mentioned we've got this, we're in commercial with a global systems integrator. That will make a difference all by itself, right? If I can get that done this quarter, will -- Q1 will be focused on bringing in clients and Q2 will start to be pulling clients to those guys. So I think, again, there is so much opportunity in front of us with Microsoft. It's managing the opportunity in an efficient way, it's keeping -- making sure that IT, the costs managed in Martello while dealing with the scale of opportunity coming our way, we want to head towards that proposition where if we can reduce the sales cycle, we can speed up these pieces, we keep our costs down but increase the overall user count and revenue coming in. And I think that's going to be an absolute focus going into the next quarters.
Okay. The last one for me, maybe just switching over to pricing. Can you -- on the product on Vantage and the monitoring product, can you remind us how you think about pricing, maybe Vantage versus the monitoring, the existing Gizmo on a per user basis has sort of gotten the mid-teens cents range per month? And related to that are you seeing anything in relation to some of the pricing increases that Microsoft has put in for sort of some of it to versions of software?
Yes. So I mean, Vantage is for a customer, it costs more than Gizmo. So yes, there is an upsell. I look at the customer, we are dealing with them on the enterprise customer, right? We are discussing the cost of Vantage with them and the upsell. So it costs more. We're certainly aligned, right? There are 3 tiers of Vantage. The cheapest one, again, it varies. I mean it's not a great deal for user, right? It's somewhere between $0.25 and $0.50 per user per month and depending on discount what we're going to do. So we can roll that out on fairly quickly. There's not a huge impact on the IT spend, but it makes a difference to us. But when you start heading up to the sort of the enterprise variant and you brought up Microsoft piece, we're aligning into Microsoft. And if I look at some of what we want to do, the more Teams users we are aligned with, the better because as Microsoft prices shift, then we can go with them, right? And we will be that lockstep in Microsoft. As I said, we're on weekly calls with them now. We're talking to the marketing folks, we're creating business plans with Microsoft to be much more aligned [indiscernible] and how they're focused. So again, all of this speaks that absolutely, as Microsoft adjust their prices, we will adjust with them.
This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to John Proctor for any closing remarks.
On behalf of all of us, thank you for your continued interest in Martello. As I mentioned earlier, you can register to receive our upcoming newsletter in the Investors section of our website and a recording of today's call available on our website later today. You can reach out to our Investor Relations any time by e-mailing investor@martellotech.com. And I hope you've enjoyed both the update to what's going on at Martello. And if you have any questions, please do reach out. Thank you very much for your time.
This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.