Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Michael Turrin: That’s helpful. Just a follow up if I may on the subscription gross margin, you continue to drive ramp, you’re now 79%. Can you just help us think through any further potential leverage there in the in the trade-offs on total gross margin between the Cloud mix and what you’re seeing there?

Jay Kreps: Yes, there’s a number of factors that contribute. I mean, there there’s kind of two things going on under the covers. On one hand, is the percentage that is Confluent Cloud has gone up and of course Confluent Cloud being you know a managed service has a lower gross margin than Confluent platform which is pure software. At the same time Confluent Cloud gross margin has been rapidly improving and that’s due to a number of factors, but in particular the improvements in Kora, more emphasis on the multi tenancy and the system, improvements in the underlying hardware profile that we use, improvements in the software stack really top to bottoms [indiscernible] drive efficiency. And so we’re very excited by the progress there. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that Steffan?

Steffan Tomlinson: I’ll just say it’s been a real bright spot, our progression in gross margin it’s a demonstration of the value that we’re delivering to our customers and it’s also a reflection of the fine engineering work, engineering optimization work and also the discipline we have on pricing. So, it’s been a real positive and we’ve been able to drive that gross margin higher both on the Confluent Cloud side and the Confluent Platform side.

Michael Turrin: Thanks. Congrats to both of you, Rohan and Steffan.

Steffan Tomlinson: Thank you.

Rohan Sivaram: Thank you.

Operator: Thanks, Michael. We’ll take our next question from Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs, followed by Barclays.

Kash Rangan: Hi, thank you very much. Jay, nice quarter. Steffan will definitely miss you and Rohan, huge congratulations. Great to watch your career trajectory over the past several years. So one for you Jay, when you look at– we thought we’re going to have a recession this year and looks like we’ve dodged one. If the economic conditions do stabilize, how do you see Confluent Cloud versus Platform, not to make it one versus the other, both the great products, but when customers start to get back to priorities, do you think we’ll get back to a more platform upside or rather a Cloud upside because in this downturn I think the on-prem component of many software companies that have hybrid business models has taken a little bit more precedence, I don’t know why and the Cloud adoption generally has slowed a bit.

Do you think that- we go back to clouded option if the economic conditions do stabilize and one for you Steffan if I could, when we look at the cloud business the use cases, are you getting basically identical use cases as to the on Prem or are you seeing a new set of use cases that really is pulling away the Cloud momentum in a different direction? Maybe it’s a different set of customers and a different set of industries, some set of use cases or different geographies? I’ll take this opportunity to ask you a bit of a technical question because we’re going to miss you in a couple of months. So, anyway, I’ll throw that out.

Jay Kreps: Yes put them to the test on the way out. I think that’s fair. Yes it’s a, it’s a great question, Kash. So yes, I mean it’s a little bit speculative. I do think that you’re on to something there though. What we have seen is two behaviors, one I already alluded to which is this very strong consumption relative to commit. So people just being thoughtful about commits, but then actually using more than more than they had committed to. I do think there’s also a set of customers that are being a bit, little bit more thoughtful about the pace of their cloud migration. So I’ve heard of people pulling back entirely. We haven’t seen that in our customer base like people are moving to the cloud, but they’re kind of trying to get the last dollar out of their on premise environments, thoughtful about which workload moves in when, a little bit more hesitant to have parallel spend.

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