Elastic N.V. (NYSE:ESTC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Janesh Moorjani : And Tyler, on the enterprise tier adoption, this is Janesh. I’ll add that we’ve continued to see strength there. We continue to see excellent customer adoption, particularly driven by features like searchable snapshots. We expect that as with features like hybrid cross-cluster search — I think I will finally learn to pronounce that someday. But with features like hybrid cross-cluster search, there you go, we expect that we’ll continue to get further traction. And so we’re excited about the enterprise subscription tier, and I think that will continue to be a growth driver for us. You’ll remember that it was 13% of total customer spend on Elastic Cloud last year, and it remains the fastest growing subscription tier for us.

And maybe just as a final reminder for some of the other folks out there that may not be as familiar with this. The enterprise subscription tier, as you know, is not a proxy for our sales progress in the enterprise segment. Many of our large enterprise customers are, in fact, on the platinum tier. So that’s just a naming thing.

Tyler Radke : Janesh, and second question I wanted to ask is just on your comments about the good contracting in the quarter. Clearly, you saw billings grow quite nicely, 35%, well above revenue. What drove that? Was there early renewals in there? And I guess just where — in terms of the strong contracting you’re seeing, is it maybe coming in a stronger on-prem mix than cloud, given that you’re taking down kind of your medium-term cloud targets? Just help us understand the kind of the disconnect between strong contracting and a weaker revenue outlook.

Janesh Moorjani : Yes. Happy to take that. So in terms of the billings, so as you know, there’s a number of ways in which we look at the business. We look at it primarily from the standpoint of revenue, and holding aside all of the reasons to look at or not look at billings, fundamentally, what we saw in the quarter was just strong sales execution. So this was not about early renewals. It was not about any particular benefit from deals from Q2 that pushed out. We always see some levels of pushouts and pull-ins. Fundamentally, the environment in terms of sales cycles and enterprise customer buying behavior has not changed. I think it was just good old-fashioned execution on the part of our sales team that did really well to adapt to the circumstances that we saw at the end of Q2.

So we felt pretty good about that. And if you then sort of think about the self-managed and cloud components within that, we saw a fair amount of strength on the cloud adoption actually in terms of contractual commitments on cloud. That came in significantly stronger. So it’s great that we are seeing that. I think that reflects customer preferences. In this environment, customers are looking for tool consolidation over time. And the commitments that they’ve made will just help us consolidate more workloads on to Elastic Cloud over time, and all of that will eventually translate into revenue because these are contractual commitments. So that’s largely a question of the timing around the consumption patterns. And what we’ve seen in the consumption patterns, as we talked about is this near-term trend towards optimization as customers are continuing to look at how to make every dollar go further, and I think you’ve seen that more broadly as well.

So that’s some of what we saw in the quarter as well, and that’s what we factored into the guide for Q4 as well as some of the early outlook for fiscal ’24.

Operator: The next question comes from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.

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