Commvault Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CVLT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Fish: Okay, fair enough. Thank you, guys. Last one from me, we’re kind of hearing different things across tech around duration of contracts, are you guys seeing customers look to lock in term deals for longer at all or shorter and how often when a customer is renewing a term deal? Are you seeing that contract deal from, let’s say a three year term down to one year term on the renewal?

Sanjay Mirchandani: In our business Jim, it’s happening, I think the fringes. We do see pressure on term length. Our average term, we’ve talked about somewhere between two to three years on an average term and we’re holding pretty well. We do see some pressure in certain spots. But we’re managing through it which gives us some confidence that our renewal businesses continue to meet expectations in the quarter and even in the outlook.

James Fish: Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please for our next question. And our next question coming from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim. Your line is open.

Howard Ma: Thank you. I have one question for Sanjay and one for Gary. So first for Sanjay. We acknowledge that increased budget scrutiny and deal pushouts, those were certainly not unique to Commvault in this environment. We also acknowledge that data protection has become an increased priority in recent years as you pointed out in your prepared remarks. But in your customer conversations, and as we consider near-term purchasing decisions, are there any signs that more recently Commvault or data protection general is being put on the back burner relative to other IT projects. I understand you said that data protection is part of broad larger IT transformations, but within the relative ranking, has there been any change in the – so that’s kind of one part. And then how are you factoring those potential demand changes in evaluating your pipeline and close rates. Thank you.

Sanjay Mirchandani: Got it. Hi, Howard, good to talk to you. So let me see if I was to part your question – and if I look at, if you looked at some of the metrics we shared on Metallic, you’ll see that the demand on Metallic is healthy. The business is growing well. We’re growing sequentially. Obviously, we’ll be growing year-on-year. We’re adding – we’ve had one of the best quarters of customer additions. So the Metallic business, which is largely cloud-based workloads, is doing really – is in a good place. And if I – and if I was to sort of give you a Sanjay thesis on where I think things are broadly with data protection to your question. I think customers – we saw as an industry, we saw a lot of tailwind over the past, let’s say, two years because of the pandemic customers’ journey to the cloud being accelerated, ransomware being at an all-time high.

That caused – we saw a lot of large transformation projects where data protection was looked at after many years from a left-to-right point of view to make sure that the entire sort of fleet of technology that was being protected was modern – it was easily protected with the modern suite like ours. Where I think we are is the first phase of ransomware protection for many customers is done. They feel like they’ve got their defenses at some level in. And now it’s a matter of optimizing and really going up the stack with the rest of the fleet. So that – so there is that, if you would, change in momentum. The second piece is a lot of customers – brought into the cloud and brought into the futures and capacity and where they were seeing their architecture go – infrastructure go.