Cognyte Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CGNT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Elad Sharon: Yes, sure. Thanks, Peter. So, we see a healthy demand and positive momentum and it’s over the last two quarters already. We continue to win large deals. The backlog is strong as we discussed before and also our customers saying – most of our customers are saying that actually they are more confident about the budgets and the plans. And we also expect the demand for our solutions to continue and increase and there are actually few drivers for that. First of all, we discussed it earlier in the call that customers challenges are becoming more complex and growing. So, in order for them to be able to do the job, they need [monolithics] [ph] more and more capabilities related to dealing with big data and it’s really important for them to get this technology.

Also, our customer’s objective is being able to accelerate in time the investigation, this is one. Second, to improve the accuracy of the investigation. And third, to make it successful. Make it successful means to reach conclusive outcome. So, it’s about time, strength of the insight that they generate from the solution, and being able to conclude investigations. And more analytics and more AI capabilities are extremely important for them, and actually present even greater value over time. So, for that reason, we see the demand of customers improving along the way. And we believe that the recent developments will also generate more demand. I can give you an anecdote just to give you more color. We participated an industry tradeshow a couple of weeks ago in Europe, big one.

And actually, we saw that is well attended more participants than we used to see before. Many requests for meetings and demos, lots of interest in modernizing the technology with more analytics, more AI, customers are now unlike last year that they were talking about pressing current needs. They were talking to us about future needs and what else needs to be done in their side in order for them to be able to accelerate their performance. So, all of those are very encouraging signs. So, I feel good about where we are today and I feel good about being able to continue growing in the long-term. I hope this gives you some color about the dynamics of the market.

Peter Levine: Yes. Thanks for the color. And maybe the last one is, good to see free cash flow tick higher. Maybe just talk about the levers that you’re pulling internally on the sales and marketing side, R&D side, what’s the trade off? I mean, if you’re going to deliver a little bit more leverage, maybe talk about what the trade-off is or maybe just, again, just emphasize on, kind of where you’re cutting costs while still being efficient in terms of growth? Thank you.

David Abadi: So actually, just to make sure that we understood the question, the question is about our margin expansion and the ability to trade-off between increased investment on OpEx versus growth. Is that correct?

Peter Levine: Correct.

David Abadi: So, last year we had like to make a lot of decision about our cost structure and versus the opportunity. And when we look at, we believe that the opportunity is here. We are playing in this market for a long time. We’re market leader. We know our customer base for a long time. Our solutions are very innovative and customer love what we provide them. We need to think about like cost structure and what is the right thing to do, you need to balance between your short-term and long-term. I think that we build a very well organized organization that allow us to be there when the growth will come and capture it. I think that you can see that in Q1 the results we are growing, we are improving our margin, and then we look that it will continue over time.