Informatica Inc. Price & Performance (INFA)

At this time, all lines are in a listen only mode and will be until the question and answer of the call.

I will now turn the call over to Victoria Haidan, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you, Kate. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining Informatica's Informatica fourth quarter twenty twenty four earnings conference call. Joining me today are Amit Walia, Chief Executive Officer and Mike McLaughlin, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, we have a couple of reminders. Our earnings press release and slide presentation are available on our Investor Relations web site at investors.informatica.com Informatica. Our prepared remarks will be posted on the IR website after the conference call concludes. During the call, we will be making comments of a forward looking nature. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied as a result of various risks and uncertainties. For more information about some of these risks, please review the company's SEC filings including the section titled Risk Factors, including in our most recent 10 Q and 10 ks filing for the full year 2023. These forward looking statements are based on information as of today, and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise our forward looking statements except as required by law.

Additionally, we will be discussing certain non GAAP financial measures. These non GAAP financial measures are in addition to and not a substitute for measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these items to the nearest U. S. GAAP measure can be found in this afternoon's press release and our slide presentation available on Informatica's Investor Relations website.

With that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Amit.

Thank you, Victoria, and welcome to everyone on the call. 2024 was a pivotal year for Informatica in our cloud only consumption driven strategy. While we experienced overall momentum throughout the year, the fourth quarter did not unfold as anticipated. I will briefly explain why, and ask Mike to provide additional details. To begin with, Renewal rates were lower than forecast.

As we work through the complexity of our business model transformation to cloud only, some execution issues related to renewals were identified. And are underway to be addressed. We have allocated customer success resources to this initiative and expect to resolve it throughout 2025.

Second, we saw a significant reacceleration of cloud modernization deals this quarter and closed a record year for on premises to cloud migrations.

This development in itself is a very positive [indiscernible] as it creates more upsell and cross sell opportunities for services on the IDMC platform. However, it has two short term dynamics. Lower net new ARR due to the accounting treatment of the subscription credits we give customers during the migration period, and the roll off of migration related self managed subscription ARR and maintenance ARR which was higher than expected.

Finally, we saw a reduction in the renewal term length for self managed subscription contract. While this does not affect ARR, it negatively impacts GAAP revenue due to ASC six zero six. This mainly arises from customers eager to start their cloud journey with us [indiscernible] It is happening faster than we anticipated, which is a positive sign again in the long term for our cloud business but it negatively impacts GAAP revenue due to ASC six zero six in the short term. These factors along with lower professional services and foreign exchange headwinds led to outcomes that did not meet our forecast. As Mike will explain in greater detail when he provides 2025 guidance, we are adjusting our expectations to account for these factors and our growth and profitability projections. Before turning to results, I'd like to take a minute to frame Informatica in the broader context of where we've been and where we are going. For those who have been with us since Informatica went public, we are now in the final phase of our transformation. When Informatica became private in 2015, we set out to create the most innovative solutions in the on the industries first and only cloud native data management platform.

We achieved this goal and started selling our IDMC platform alongside our on prem solutions a few years later.

At the beginning of 2023, we marked the start of the final phase of our transformation strategy by announcing the end of sale of our on prem products, fully committing to a cloud only consumption driven future state. Navigating this purchase has been challenging at times. Sometimes, the aforementioned factors the underlying health of our cloud business and our cloud only consumption driven strategy remains Very strong. Our large high growth cloud business is very healthy even with our declining end of sale on prem business. To give you a few examples, in Q4, Cloud subscription ARR grew 34% year over year, representing nearly half of our total ARR we expect cloud subscription ARR to hit the $1,000,000,000 mark in 2025, accounting for almost 60% of total ARR by the end of the year. In Q4, approximately 68% of cloud net new ARR in the trailing twelve months came from new cloud workloads and expansion. With approximately 40% of that growth coming from new customers to Informatica. We continue to expect the majority of our cloud growth to be net new wins for new cloud workloads [indiscernible] new and existing customers. Our cloud net retention rate was 124% in the quarter, and we continue to see a healthy cloud pipeline.

Cloud customer count grew by 8% for the year, and the number of cloud ERR customers spending more than $1,000,000 with Informatica grew by 59% year over year.

The average cloud ERR per customer was $335,000 growing 24% year over year. We closed a record year of on prem to cloud migrations, which grew 42% year over year with interim expansion sales of IPOs nearly doubling. We won net new cloud deployment to some of the world's largest customers including a U. S.-based financial services company, and an online travel technology company expansion opportunities with Nikita, Access Bank, Lumen and Yamaha modernization deals with the City Of Austin.

Name a few.

All of this was accomplished while delivering strong profitability.

Full year 2024 non GAAP operating income grew 16% year over year, and adjusted unlevered free cash flow after tax grew 28% year over year.

We continue to remain the innovation leader in the data management market We have built the best data management products on the only AI powered data management platform supporting extremely difficult operational complex workloads and use cases that are multi vendor, multi cloud and hybrid. Our position as the customer platform of choice for cloud data management is [indiscernible] by industry recognition. Including being named a leader in the inaugural 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms Report and being named the leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools for the nineteenth Hi.

We deeply engage with our ecosystem and hyperscaler partners including over six fifty GSI partners, enhancing their practices on IDMC, issuing over 15,000 certifications in 2024, up from 12,000 The prior year Lastly, we remain confident in pursuing the $62,000,000,000 addressable cloud market according to IDAC, according to IDC, sorry, and in our ability to successfully capture this opportunity through product innovation with our comprehensive IDMC platform with Care AI and Gen AI capabilities. At the end of twenty twenty four, the IDMC platform processed over 110,000,000,000,000 cloud transactions per month, grew over 29% year over year.

With our enterprise customers, we empower them to use AI for data readiness and simplify the data state with Informatica for Gen AI and Gen AI from Informatica. Which are both available on the platform.

With Informatica for Genai, we now have about 100 customers using Genai K2 capabilities on IDMC IDMC capabilities these customers use for Gen AI include data ingestion and processing. Including unstructured data processing. For RAG pipelines connectivity to LLMs and AI app orchestration. Informatica has previously announced AI blueprints for all hyperscalers plus Snowflake and Databricks. Over the last four months, these customers have executed 270,000 calls of prompts to LLMs excluding ClearGPD. Use cases we are seeing include business process optimization and automation. Business insights and decision support, sentiment analysis, enterprise data retrieval and augmentation, to name a few.

To give you some great real life customer stories, one is a leading global biotech company, which is building an AI agent framework with IDMC and Google Cloud.

Enabling users to quickly gain insights from internal systems. Utilizing IDMC's out of the box recipes for rapid deployment, or development, these accelerate access to data driven insights, enhancing decision making and speeding up business outcomes. An insurance company is using our solutions for claim analysis and claim processing. A healthcare company is using Informatica products for patient engagement with a holistic health and program support. In California based non profit, developing a RAG solution using local community data and resources, powered by OpenAI and IDMC This helps support center executives access relevant resources quickly, reducing cost and enhancing service quality. These are all pilot programs [indiscernible] will move to production over time. With GenAI from Informatica, we recently expanded Clear GPT services across EMEA, Asia Pacific and Canada and 10% of our customers are now using ClearGPT outside United States.

We are pleased to announce the extension of Care GPT services at no additional cost throughout '25.

This continuation of our 2024 promotion demonstrates our commitment to providing advanced AI capabilities while maintaining cost effective solutions for our customers. Our product innovations are expanding on the IDMC platform with AI, and Gen AI capabilities and we look forward to sharing more at our Informatica World Customer Conference in May.

In closing, we achieved significant progress in 2024. While we have much to execute in 2025, as we look to scale to a billion dollars cloud ARR business, I am incredibly proud of the Informatica team. I would like to thank our partners, [indiscernible] and shareholders for their ongoing support. With that, let me turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Amit, and good afternoon, everyone.

The fourth quarter of twenty twenty four did not meet our expectations with key metrics falling short of our forecast.

Before diving into the numbers, I'd like to begin my remarks with a high level discussion of the factors driving the multiple factors did not play out as we expected. First, our renewal rates were lower than forecast. What we refer to as natural churn, which excludes the impact of customer migrations, increased by roughly two percentage points versus our forecast for both cloud and self managed subscriptions and by approximately one half percentage point [indiscernible] Second, we saw a significant reacceleration of cloud modernization deals this quarter.

As a result, the contribution of on premise to cloud modernization deals as a percentage of total new cloud bookings was significantly higher than expected. Modernization deals were over one third of our new cloud bookings in Q4 compared to the mid-20s in prior quarters. While this result is consistent with our long term cloud only strategy, and a good thing overall, in the short term, it results in lower net new ARR because of the accounting treatment of the maintenance and subscription credits we give to our The third key driver of lower than forecast total ARR in Q4 was higher than expected roll off of modernization related self managed subscription and maintenance ARR. This reflected the success of our customer cloud modernizations being completed on time, which is a positive long term trend. In addition to these three factors that impacted ARR, GAAP revenue was further impacted by a greater than four forecast reduction in renewal term length for on premise self managed contracts. We saw this happening in Q2 of this year and we reduced our revenue forecast at that time to reflect the trend.

But in Q4, the average renewal term length continued to decline more than we expected. As Amit mentioned, we believe this reflects the fact that more of our which we expect will be positive for us in the future. Finally, lower than forecast professional services revenues impacted GAAP revenue and unfavorable FX due to the strengthening of the U. S. Dollar in November were a headwind to both GAAP revenue and ARR. So with that, now let me get to the Q4 numbers, starting with total ARR. Total ARR finished the year at $1,730,000,000 an increase of 6.1% over the prior year, The growth was driven primarily by new cloud workloads and strong cloud net expansion with existing customers as well as accelerating migrations from our on prem base to cloud. Foreign exchange rates negatively impacted total ARR by $2,000,000 on a year over year basis for fourth quarter and $3,800,000 on a year over year basis for the full year.

Next, cloud subscription ARR was $827,000,000 a 34% increase year over year. Cloud subscription ARR now represents 48% of total ARR, up from 38% a year ago. This result was about $9,000,000 below the midpoint of our October guidance, primarily driven by the lower renewal rate of cloud subscriptions this quarter and the higher than expected contribution of on prem to cloud modernization deals as a percent of total new cloud bookings this quarter. Approximately 68% of cloud subscription net new ARR in the trailing twelve months came from new cloud workloads and expansion, with approximately 40% of that growth coming from new customers Informatica. Modernizations accounted for 32% of our trailing four quarter cloud subscription net new ARR, up from 24% last quarter.

Our cloud net retention rate was 124% in the quarter and our cloud gross renewal rate was in the low 90s. Foreign exchange negatively impacted cloud subscription ARR by $716,000 on a quarter over quarter basis and $1,900,000 year over year.

Self managed subscription ARR, which we no longer actively sell, declined in the quarter to $447,000,000 This was down 5% sequentially and down 13% year over year due to the effects of natural churn and the roll off of migrated on prem workloads to the IDMC Cloud platform. The third component of total ARR is maintenance for on premise perpetual licenses sold in the past, which now represents 26% of total ARR. Maintenance ARR was down approximately 9% year over year to $451,000,000 a somewhat greater decline than we expected. Most of the greater than forecast decline was due to more roll off of modernization related ARR as projects were completed. The natural churn rate of maintenance was slightly higher than forecast about 50 basis points. Subscription ARR, which is simply the sum of cloud subscription ARR and self managed ARR, grew 13% year over year to $1,274,000,000 As we indicated last quarter, beginning in Q1, we will no longer provide summary subscription metrics including ARR, customer count and renewal rate. Modernizing our on prem customer base to Informatica's IDMC is an important part of the strategy. As of the end of Q4, 9.4% of our maintenance and self managed ARR base has been modernized to the cloud or is in the process of modernizing.

Up from 6.8% last quarter. We have a life to date average 1.9 ARR uplift ratio on these modernizations, down from two point zero last quarter. Over the past four quarters, our average modernization up This reflects a lower average uplift ratio for power center cloud addition modernization which were over 80% of modernization deals in Q4. We had been expecting this decline in the average uplift ratio and we expect it to decline a bit more in 2025 to approximately 1.5 to 1.7.

We are very comfortable with this lower uplift ratio as we have found that cloud modernizations typically drive significant net expansion sales upfront, have healthy expansion in term and they have better renewal rates than non expansion than non monetization new deals. Now I'd like to review our revenue results for the fourth quarter.

GAAP total revenues for the fourth quarter were of 2024 were $428,000,000 a decrease of 3.8% year over year. Foreign exchange rates positively impacted total revenues by $2,000,000 headwind to revenue compared to our forecast FX rates at the beginning of the quarter. Total revenues were approximately $30,000,000 below the mid point of our October guidance due to four primary factors: lower upfront revenue per ASC six zero six accounting standards for self managed subscription renewals due to the lower than expected renewal rate lower average duration of self managed subscriptions that did not renew, that did renew lower professional services revenue and the strengthening of the U. S. Dollar in November. Cloud subscription revenue was approximately $187,000,000 or 44% of total revenues growing 33% year over year. As a reminder, due to the timing difference between revenue recognition and ARR, the relative growth rates of these two metrics will differ from period to period. Self managed subscription support and license revenue and declined 32% year over year. As mentioned before, the impact of upfront revenue recognition of the license component of our on premise contract renewals and new bookings has a significant impact on our reported GAAP revenue.

In order to help provide more clarity to investors on the impact of the upfront recognized revenue, we've added a new table to our investor materials, which breaks out the upfront ASC six zero six revenue from our ratably recognized software revenue. As you'll see from that table, upfront recognized self managed revenues declined by $46,000,000 versus Q4 twenty twenty three and for the full year upfront recognized revenue declined by $73,000,000 We will be providing this disclosure of upfront recognized versus ratably recognized revenue [indiscernible] Maintenance revenue was $111,000,000 and represented 26% of total revenue for the quarter. The maintenance renewal rate was 92%, down about three percentage points year over year and 2% versus last quarter. This renewal rate decline was primarily due to greater than forecast modernization [indiscernible] Professional services revenues, which includes implementation, consulting and education, were down about $1,300,000 year over year dollars As a reminder, our implementation services revenue has been declining as our services partners assume a greater share of that work for our customers and we expect this trend to continue in 2025.

Turning to geographic distribution of our business, U. S. Revenue declined 6% year over year to approximately $264,000,000 representing 62% of total revenue. The decline in U. S. Revenue growth is primarily attributable to the year over year decline in self managed license and support services, International revenue declined 1% year over year to $164,000,000 representing 38% of total revenue. Now I'd like to move on to our profitability metrics. Please note, I will discuss non GAAP results unless otherwise stated. In Q4, our gross margin was 84%, 1.5 percentage point higher year over year.

Remain focused on maintaining healthy gross margins as our business transitions to the cloud. Operating expenses were lower than our forecast for the quarter but operating income was below the midpoint of our October guidance by approximately $10,000,000 due to lower revenue.

Operating margin was 37.9% a 150 basis point improvement from a year ago. For the full year 2024, operating margin improved by three eighty basis points over the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA was $166,000,000 and net income was $129,000,000 Net income per diluted share was $0.41 based on approximately $314,000,000 outstanding diluted shares. Basic share count was approximately $3.00 5,000,000 Adjusted unlevered free cash flow after tax was $180,000,000 $24,000,000 above the midpoint of our guidance. Primarily due to lower cash taxes and forecast and unrealized FX gains on U. S. Dollar cash balances held in foreign subsidiaries.

Cash paid for interest in the quarter was $32,500,000 consistent with expectations.

I'd like to provide an update on our share repurchase activity. During the fourth quarter, we spent $103,000,000 to repurchase 3,800,000.0 shares of Class A common stock at an average price of $26.66 through open market purchases. Additionally, from January 1 through February 12, we spent $27,000,000 to repurchase another 1,100,000.0 shares at an average price of $25.36 In total, we have reduced our total share count as of yesterday by about 1.6% as a result of these repurchases.

And earlier this week, our Board approved an additional $400,000,000 stock repurchase authorization, bringing the total authorization to $800,000,000 Taking these repurchases into account, we have $670,000,000 remaining available under our $800,000,000 share repurchase program we intend to continue repurchasing our shares in the open market for the remainder of this quarter targeting similar dollar volumes as last quarter.

We ended the fourth quarter on a strong cash Now I'll turn to 2025 guidance. Based upon the dynamics we saw unfold in our business at the end of Q4, we have lowered our forecast for 2025 relative to our prior expectations. We've set our forecast and guidance assuming lower renewal rates than we had previously expected for self managed cloud and maintenance higher on prem to cloud modernization deals as a percent of our total cloud bookings, a slightly lower average modernization uplift ratio, shorter self managed renewal term lengths and the continued decline in professional service. These changes to our forecast assumptions result in total ARR and total GAAP revenue growth several points lower than we had previously planned. And our operating income and free cash flow margin will not expand as expected due to lower revenue. We expect total ARR and total revenue growth to increase in 2026 but not to the levels provided in the medium term guidance we first offered at the end of twenty twenty three. We are not providing new medium term guidance at this time, but we expect to do so later this year. Taking all this into account, we are establishing the following guidance for the full year ending 12/31/2025, Note that all growth rates refer to the midpoint of the guidance range.

We expect GAAP total revenues to be in the range of $1,670,000,000 to $1,720,000,000 representing approximately 3.4% year over year growth or approximately 4.6% on a constant currency basis. We expect total ARR to be in the range of $1,755,000,000 to 1,795,000,000.000 representing approximately 2.9% year over year growth or approximately 3.2% on constant currency basis. We expect cloud subscription ARR to be in the range of $1,019,000,000 to 1,051,000,000.000 representing approximately 25.1% year over year growth or approximately 25.3% on a constant currency basis. Expect non GAAP operating income to be in the range of $546,000,000 to $566,000,000 representing approximately 3.5% year over year growth adjusted unlevered free cash flow after tax today in the range of $540,000,000 to $580,000,000 representing approximately 3.3% year over year decrease. Our guidance for the first quarter ending 03/31/2025 is as follows. We expect GAAP total revenues in the range of $380,000,000 to $400,000,000 representing approximately 0.4% year over year growth or approximately 2.1% on a constant currency basis. We expect total ARR to be in the range of $1,730,000,000 to $1,697,000,000 representing a approximately 3% year over year growth or approximately 3% on a constant currency basis. We expect cloud subscription ARR to be in the range of $840,000,000 to $82,000,000 representing approximately 30% year over year growth or approximately 2929.7% on a constant currency basis.

We expect non GAAP operating income to be in the range of $98,000,000 to $112,000,000 representing approximately 3.9% year over year [indiscernible] The press release includes the table showing the expected negative FX impact for Q1 and full year 2025 on a constant currency basis. For modeling purpose, I'd like to provide a few more pieces of additional information. First, we expect adjusted unlevered free cash flow after tax. For the first quarter to be in the range of $140,000,000 to $160,000,000 Second, we estimate cash paid for interest will be approximately $30,000,000 in the first quarter and approximately $118,000,000 for the full year, using forward interest rates based on one month SOFR and a credit spread of spread of two twenty five basis points. For tax rates, we reported a full year 2024 non GAAP tax rate of 23% and we expect to be we expect that to be non GAAP percent, which reflects the normalized taxes in the jurisdictions where we operate, and under currently enacted tax laws. Cash taxes in full year 2025 are expected to be $70,000,000 to 75,000,000 which is about $5,000,000 higher than our cash taxes in 2024. [indiscernible] Lastly, our share count assumptions.

For the first quarter, we expect basic weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately $3.00 4,000,000 shares and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately $312,000,000 shares. For the full year, we expect basic weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately $3.00 9,000,000 shares and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately $316,000,000 shares. Please note that these share count forecasts do not include the impact of the share repurchases we intend to pursue between now and the end of the quarter. And with that, I'll turn the call back to Vic for Q and A. Vik, before we start Q and A, let me take a moment and step back.

Look, throughout the year, as I said, we had steady momentum. Although the fourth quarter did not go quite as planned. We've identified the areas that need improvement and we are actively working on addressing them. The fundamental health of our cloud business cloud only consumption driven strategy remains very strong. And we're excited to be on track to reach a remarkable milestone for $1,000,000,000 in cloud subscription ARR in 2025. [indiscernible] let's proceed to Q and A. Great. Thank you. Operator, let's open the lines to questions, please.

Absolutely.

Will now begin the question and answer portion of the call. The first question will come from the line of Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research. Alex, your line is now open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question.

Amit, maybe just help us understand a little bit about retention rates on the cloud side That was one of the areas I felt like I just wanted to get a better understanding of kind of what happened there on these renewal cycles and cohorts. Are you fixing that And what are you embedding for the full year in guidance? Because I think everybody wants to basically understand Given the issues that you faced in the quarter, what's the level of confidence and the level of conservatism that you've embedded August sale at that point I just asked across the board.

Sure, Alex. Thanks for the question. Let me take the what happened and Mike can talk about how we big that into the guidance part.

Look, we [indiscernible] the cloud renewal rate, we had two kinds of issues. One was more operational, execution operational issues and the other one was more organizational incentive driven issues. And to give an example of that, look, we've identified the operational issues and I'll give you an example of that. Look, typically our team, this is a team that has outperformed and has delivered high renewal throughout has a very good sense of what the potential orange or flashing orange science could be. A particular renewal, and they do a fantastic job of working on it ahead of the time. And renewals have to be worked ahead of the time, right? But great example is that in some cases, and look, kind of like we don't have 100 exact precise answers, but we know relatively directionally quite well. A great example is that, look, exec sponsor changes. And in a lot of cases, if the exec sponsors changed upfront, basically the new person comes in, and they have a new strategy. They may delay a particular project or shelve it for a period of time and may want to come at it later. And things like that. And our teams didn't catch it.

And by the time they caught it, it was late. And at that point, I think that particular renewal comes to risk. That's a great example of something that happened as an operational one. We know how to solve it. Know we'll be able to solve it. And the other color I'll give is that not every churn is a loss of the customer 100%. In a bunch of cases, it's a partial churn also. Like customers said, look, I have other issues going on and I'm only going to do a little bit of it now. So the renewal is not a full renewal, it's a partial renewal. So those are the kind of things and our team does a fantastic job of predicting those upfront and making sure we can make it happen, but in these cases, we felt short.

Some examples of organizational incentive issues are in some cases, you know, Exactly the example I gave you where in this case, success team, the renewal team and in some cases, the account team had to be plugged in together, like for sponsors changes, the account team would know. But they would not know that the renewal team does not know that and it's important for them and it fell through the cracks. We have fixed that through putting the right incentives in place for everybody to be working together a lot more. And those are the examples of these are all the things that we know. Again, this is a very, very stable team that has done very well. We have work to do to solve them. But those are examples of that, Alex. I'll give it to Mike to say how we baked that into the 2025 guidance.

So Alex, we cited on the prepared remarks how much the renewal rates were worse than what we expected and we've basically pushed that through into the full year of 2025 without assuming any increase that are result of the actions that Amit described. We're hopeful that they will have a positive impact, but we're not putting it in the guidance. We're going to work as hard as we can to improve those renewal rates, but in 2025, they are consistent with what we experienced in Q4 of twenty twenty four. Got it. And then maybe as a follow-up, for both of you or for either of you, if you think about just the kind of the demand environment versus the execution framework versus kind of competitive elements in the market as projects evolve and technology is changing. Maybe StackRank, is it is it all three? Is it mostly one of the three? And again, kind of embedded typically after these types of events, there's probably [indiscernible] changes or management changes that kind of occur? Have you embedded any conservatism with respect to any of those elements into the guide?

Many minute question, Araceli, kind of give you of the answer across the board. First of all, the reward demand for us was pretty good. Actually, as I said, this is all tied to renewals. We actually ended the year with the same demand cycle that we talked about throughout the course of the quarter, where incoming pipeline creation or incoming deals that we closed would remain steady as we expected it to be. So that did not see anything. Out anything that we did not anticipate. If anything, I give you examples of how we saw the 100 customers using Gen AI project that we suit through telemetry. In fact, as we sit here, we're looking at the pipe create, which is about we saw a healthy 4x increase in pipe attributable to Gen AI, which our customers said, hey, we are looking at IDMC in the context of Gen AI as we come to do POCs and demos show us that we are seeing that. As we look at the pipe for the first half of the year.

We didn't see any any change to that. That area. And in terms of order resistances, look, I will repeat that we have a very, very well oiled machine on that side of the world.

We have a leader who's been there, who's run our renewals for twenty eight years in this company, has a team that has performed significantly while delivering some of the best renewal rates in the industry. I think the team has identified the issues We have made operational incentive related changes I'm very confident that over the course of the year, they'll work it through. Like Mike said, we have not baked in any improvement assumption we are about to do [indiscernible] full end to end answer to your questions.

Perfect. Thank you, guys.

Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Koji Apita with Bank of America. Koji, your line is now open.

Yes. Hey, thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to maybe follow-up on on the renewals. And so I'm just trying having a hard time squaring why renewals are are a little bit more difficult right now considering that Informatica is we view it as pretty mission critical out there. We've heard that from a lot of your customers and partners. So I just kind of don't get it. Is the competition getting better? Is pricing an issue? I mean Amit, you mentioned other things going on. I wanted to dig into that comment a little bit too. I mean, are budgets being shifted away from Informatica Informatica something else? I'm just trying to understand what is going on with renewals? Sure, Coachee. [indiscernible] I think let me further pass through what I was answering for Alex.

And look, There's always going to be a portion of it that I may not have perfect answers for you today. We did not see As we went through all of it, like I said, we saw a ton of operational execution issues of our own internal that we can fix. By the way, like I said, the churn or increase of reduction in renewal did not mean that it was a 100% loss of a customer. It could be partial loss of a particular project or a particular so the customer will still be with us, but if they had $1 with us, it may be $0.5 or $0.75 or $0.25 whatever it is, like mathematically, it comes out to whatever average is. There's a lot of that. We, from what and I've talked to a bunch of those and we have dug into a lot of those, as you can imagine, Koji from the first of Jan to now, we've gone through absolutely looking at every opportunity and everything that is in our book of business over there. We didn't see any increase in any competitive dynamic over there.

And I'm not going to sit here and say, accounting wise 100% true, we haven't seen anything that is different than a quarter before or two quarters before or three quarters before in the book of business. Like I said, saw a bunch of little, little things adding up where we took our eye off the ball. And look, the other one is that this is a part of the engine that has come very well and sometimes we To be honest, take it for granted. And we tend to focus at the end of the year a lot on the net new business and trying to close out the year. And while these things are happening, I think all of us did not take that, I would say, as as we should have done and it happened to us and now we know what to And just to add a couple of things, Koji.

For additional color. Remember, the renewal rates for subscription self managed subscription cloud came down on a blended annualized basis by about 2%.

So when you're talking about an overall business that's growing six or seven, that is a big impact. But it doesn't in our view reflect fundamental change in nature of the business, the stake in us of the product or the thesis overall. Can make your own judgment, but that's how we see it. The Secondly, as we've mentioned in the call, the real rates in the cloud are still in the low 90s. Not going to get more precise than that because there's too much noise quarter to quarter versus the signal.

But it was 2% higher that we expected, but it's still in the low 90s and we think that's pretty good with room for improvement for a software company like ourselves.

Got it. Thank you, Mike. And maybe a follow-up for you, Mike.

Why is GAAP total revenue So [indiscernible] To guide to. And I know in the press release, you laid out four reasons and two of which I totally understand. The push for professional services and FX and I guess it's more of the other two. You know, we did talk about renewal rates, just now, but also durations is another issue. And so the question is, I'm just trying to really understand the GAAP total revenue guide aspect. Thank you.

Yes. Look at the end of the day, it's really hard. And let me just explain why. It has to do with the ASC six zero six upfront accounting standard. And it's primarily around renewals, because we don't actively sell [indiscernible] new self managed, some of it sells itself as we've talked about to government customers and so forth. But that's a small piece it. It's really about the book of renewals. And so if something doesn't renew and this we talked about, our renewal rate for self managed was about two percentage points lower than we had forecast. It's an outsized negative impact on revenue versus forecast because you're not just recognizing one year, of not renewal or there's not a negative of one year hits anywhere between 6075% of the TCV of that contract, which was recognized upfront at renewal or not recognized on non renewal. And those numbers get big really fast. Then the second piece is Term Life. That it's the same basic concept. Upfront revenue recognition is based on the total contract value of the renewed contract.

And if it's a two year deal for $100 a year, that's a 200 TCD. If it's a year and a half, that's 150 TCV and your upfront revenue goes down by that amount. Or more actually because of the way the percentages work. So it's just very sensitive variables, the renewal rate and the term length.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your questions. The next question will come from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC. Matt, your line is now open.

Sure. Thanks guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess on the migration deals, were some of these modernization trails driven by PowerScout Cloud Edition? And I guess how should we think about the pace of these modernization deals through the balance of the year?

So yes, 80% of the modernizations that we booked in Q4 were Power Center Cloud Edition. The remainder were mostly Master Data Management, migrations, which is an increasing portion of the mix. As customers are now ready to move that as well. But in terms of the pace of those in future quarters, it's going to be lumpy.

And Exhibit A is what happened in Q3 versus Q4. Of total bookings more than a third in Q4 was modernization that was about 20% in Q3. Going forward, we have forecast about a thirtyseventy mix of modernizations versus net new customers and workloads. Before we had the results we had in Q4, we were expecting something in the mid-20s. So we've adjusted our forecast to reflect what we now see as a stronger momentum, stronger growth, bigger pipeline of modernizations in full year 2025. But the quarter to quarter variability will be noticeable. Over the full year though, we're expecting about a thirty, seventy Bx.

And I think, I was just going to take a step back again Sorry, Mac, on this one. While obviously, we are sitting here not meeting the anticipated forecast we have, But modernization, while it has a handicap that Mike talked about in the short term, as you can appreciate, landing a customer on IDMC has its natural benefit. First of all, within more deals also come a portion of non mod NMD because the new bookings because customers want to do other stuff also and plus the IPO expansion part of the platform is a very well oiled machine as we've shared. [indiscernible] it's a good thing. It obviously has other related accounting issues in the short term for us, which which is what we see.

Got it. Okay. And then maybe just on the slightly lower uplift I think you said 1.5 to 1.7. It sounds like that was expected. I guess is there any reason to think that that could continue to drift lower in the future? Or do you think that's like more of a stabilized range here at this point in kind of the migration path?

We think it's stabilized, but let me answer the question a little bit. More broadly just so everybody understands that movement and how we view it.

Modernization is a Modernization is a big opportunity. It's a big part of strategy for Informatica. And we view the economic value of that modern as opportunity on a customer lifecycle basis. And the customer lifecycle value of a modernization deal has a number of moving parts. One is when or if the customer modernizes it all. So the sooner they modernize, the better it is versus later. The terms upon which we strike that initial modernization, the Uplift the amount of credits we give away and so forth. And what happens to that modernized customer after they're on the cloud? It turns out in that third category about what happens to the customer once they're on the cloud, a lot of good things happen. And Amit referred to this, but I'll repeat it. The modernizations typically drag additional new bookings sales in addition to the modernization of apples to apples requirement at the time of initial signing.

So they need 100 IPUs to replicate their modernization. They typically will buy more than that because all of the features on AMC offer them advanced data quality and governance and data access control and they realize that there's more great stuff they can do with the platform so they buy more IPUs would just be required for the modernization. That's point one. Second, once they're up and running, the utilization is very good and the net expansion during term is very healthy. Again, overall, it's 124% and we see that to be consistent with modernization deal as well. And then third and very importantly, we have found now that we have a significant a what we think is a statistically significant cohort of modernization deals that have renewed, We find that they renew at a much higher rate than a nonmodernization. Deal does because those workloads are implemented and they're sticky and they found new things to do. So when you put all that together and put it into the life cycle value equation, we're very comfortable with that somewhat lower initial uplift ratio because that's only a part of the picture. Now customers don't modernize primarily based on price.

We've talked about that a lot, but primarily modernize when they're ready. There's a lot of planning, there's a lot of budget, there's a lot of organization that has to happen. The price does impact their willingness to modernize in a particular period. And so on the margin, that's somewhat lower uplift multiple that we are accepting is reflective of the fact that We're happy to get customers to modernize under those terms because of the customer lifecycle value. We think that range that we forecast for $25,000,000 will be pretty stable. We're going to continue to look at it every quarter and every year and in the context of life cycle value and we may choose to have it be different in future periods.

Got it. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Brad, your line is now open.

Great. Thank you very much. Amit, I appreciate why you'd look internally at the root causes underlying these results and what's within your control. And the execution issues you've identified related to renewals, I think we kind of understand that, but what are you doing specifically to address this How much disruption is factored into the guide? Because it's common as we all look at software and various other companies that go through similar things, that transitions like these could take several quarters to get right, especially if you're having to swap out people or make dramatic change?

So two, three, two, one comment I'll make and then again I'll let my comment the guide as to how we've taken that into the guide. We actually do not are not making any disruptive organizational changes. The changes that we are not And I will repeat that, we have a very, very well oiled team. That team has successfully delivered some of the best in class renewals for us throughout. And by the way, the leader of that team has been there with from very beginning, whether it was when we transitioned from maintenance to multiproduct maintenance to subscription to cloud, all of it, wow. So in a time like this, we've gone through and the team has collectively gone through the whole detailed deep digging to basically uncover the issues and we have a plan to fix it. Now as you can imagine, like I said, renewals are not necessarily a quarter base. It takes time. So we are going to [indiscernible] time that we're going to take us to make that happen and not just make that happen to fix what happened, but also take the opportunity to make the changes to basically take us to a whole level of better execution going forward.

So we are not looking to make wholesale changes over there. We are basing So let me repeat that and for the reason because we know what the team has delivered. Throughout day in, day out. For us.

Incentives or other process changes that we have made definitely. Like how do we make sure that cross coordination happens, people have the incentives, so on and so forth, and that's already been baked in how we are tracking the business and how we are doing a lot of operational and financial tracking of the business that trigger that has obviously increased manifold. And that's what we are doing. So that's with all that stuff happening, I think I'll hand over Mike, but Mike just said that we haven't we have rolled forward what we in Q4 for the year for the guide. So we do not not want to over expect anything to happen sooner. We want to make sure that we are properly Giving the time for all those changes to have happened over the course of 2025. I have tremendous confidence that that we will be able to get there as we And the only thing I can add to that is that as Amit mentioned that changes that we're implementing in the additional processes and procedures and systems ads that we're making are not disruptive in the way that you're talking about, they're additive. And so I don't see being a risk of any of the changes that we're implementing making things worse, it's an opportunity make it better.

That's good to hear, Mike. If I could ask just a follow-up, you called out less tenured self managed as being higher churn than the legacy base. Why shouldn't we expect that the same thing will happen in cloud? Are the new customers in cloud that you're adding going to be less sticky as well? It's completely different, Brad, because the self managed has been end of sale for two years. We're not innovating to it and customers realize that they have to get off it at some point. And so everybody who is on prem with us realizes that there's no future in it. And don't have to move today. And we're not doing anything dramatic or punitive to force them off, but they have to get off. And so very, very different from the cloud where we are innovating, we have the best products, we have the only platform, we've got a growing market behind us and then sticky use cases.

And to add to that, all of the AI capabilities are available only in the cloud. Where customers have the ability on that same platform to do non AI and AI workloads at the same time. So all these examples I gave on AI, they're all on the products.

Thanks for that. That's very helpful and very logical. Thanks for taking the questions.

Thank you for your questions. The next question will come from the line of William Power with Baird. William, your line is now open. [indiscernible] Power. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to follow-up on questions ago about the lower uploads ratio that you're expecting going forward. And definitely appreciate the comments on how the postmodernization activity can actually be even more important than the initial uplift ratio. But I just wanted to be clear on the reason why you're seeing the lower uplift ratio. In the prepared remarks you alluded to the higher concentration of the power center cloud addition deals. Is that what's informing the expectation just a higher concentration, what's informing our expectation? For the lower uplift in 2025 or are there other elements that play there? Any color would be great.

Yes, sure. Thanks. It is primarily about the concentration of that. In the mix. But some of it is price discovery as we have more experience with it, to finding the sweet spot of where we are providing enough financial incentive for folks to move, but not so much that we're just giving away value and not really causing customers to modernize any faster. So it's a combination of the mix, but we actively watch the pricing and the pricing behavior of the field in terms of what works and what doesn't. To achieve the outcome we want in terms of the pace and volume of modernization and that's why it's gone to where it's gone.

Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Howard, your line is now open.

Great. Thank you. I guess for for either Amit or Mike, the 40% of IDMC net new AR that's coming from new customers Can you just clarify, are those net new to Informatica? And if so, can you give us some more color on these customers? Where are they coming from? What's the mix of these customers in terms of size or industry vertical and which IDMT product families are they landing on?

Well, yes, they are absolutely that new. And by the way, you'll see in our investor materials, the annual disclosure of our cloud customer count.

And it was up 8% over year. We're not going to give that every quarter, but once a year, he'll get a a glimpse of that and that's that 40% basically is what counts for the 8%. Customer count growth. And in terms of the I'll let Amit pile on, but it's highly varied. It's a really broad, diverse and I think healthy mix of folks that are that are coming to us. But I'll let you Yes. I think I'll give examples of that. I think, yes, first of all, very diverse. It's not necessarily tied to a particular industry vertical. Of course, you can expect the core verticals. Like, we have the words the company the semiconductor company that is The most news is that the whole journey I built out They basically are leveraging our platform to basically manage their visibility into the supply chain. In fact, eight of the top 10 semiconductor companies around the world are our customers, right now and a couple of them are net new customers. So similar to that, so it's across the board, it's not just financial services or healthcare, which end up being the largest seats. This is insurance companies, things like that.

And of course, there are international companies as well into that mix as well. So those are the kind of companies. And you think about the use cases, like I said, it's more use cases than we think of products because as I always say, multiple products get used on the IDMC platform, this company is looking to manage the supply chain and that includes both master data management and data quality as well as data ingestion. Those capabilities and then some of the other use cases around analytic that includes integration, cataloging, quality, both app integration and data integration, those kind of capabilities. So those are what we see.

And they tend to be large customers. Yes.

They always tend to be large customers.

So in our case, [indiscernible] I wouldn't say always, but the predominance is the large enterprise and as you can see also from our best of materials that our average cloud ARR per customer grew 24% year over year and is now close to $350,000 per customer. So the smaller mid market customer that needs to do simple data transfer from a few apps to one data warehouse. That's not our Got it. Thanks. And as a follow-up, the lower uplift ratio, the 1.5% to 1.7 times, Mike, you mentioned in your explanation earlier that there are additional IPUs that are dragged along. If you were to and I'm assuming that's at the time of uplift, but it's not included in that 1.5 to 1.7. If you were to include those so is that true? And then if you were to include those, would it make the initial migration whole, if you will, relative to the two times prior?

Yes, I think I see what you're getting at.

So first first of all, the uplift drag along sounds like a bad word, but I mean in a good way is at the time of signing the initial modernization. It's not later, It's when they first sign up to modernize the workload. They realize there's other great stuff we can do with IDMC, so let's buy some more IPs to use that additional stuff. That's over and above what we need to apples for apples run the migrated on prem or cloud. So hopefully that's clear.

The $1,500,000 to $1,700,000 Okay, sorry, go ahead.

The 1.5 to 1.7 or historical ratios do not include that additional time of signing uplift. It's only the apples to apples on prem to cloud modernization uplift ratio.

That's super helpful, Mike. And sorry for the additional follow-up, but I just see I think the natural follow-up to this is if you so you're guiding to $1,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 in CloudAR now, right? And I think initially it was probably closer to like 1.4. If you were to because you lose out on a little bit of the Cloud AR like the forgone amount at time of migration, But and as the migration mix becomes bigger, that amount gets bigger. Like if you were to have you tried sizing how much? I think I know you I think you know where I'm getting at like if you add on that to the $1,000,000,000 like does that help close some of that gap versus that $1,400,000,000 like the amount you get later on upon contract renewal Yes. Look, the $1,400,000 is I don't know where you got that number. I I don't want to endorse that. But you're right, directionally, and we try to get at it in the prepared remarks that the bigger contribution that modernizations have to the total gross amount of software, cloud software that we sell in a period, the less that translates into ARR because of the accounting rule that we have to debit the maintenance and subscription credits that we get for the old on prem stuff against the new cloud deal for the entire term of that new cloud deal, which happens to be of average two point five years.

So yes, in the short term, the more migrations we sell as a percent of the total, the lower the near term ARR contribution is going to be, But the greater the the potential to unlock that hidden ARR when it renews. Because the customer is paying the full amount customer sees the full amount, they don't understand or care about the accounting back end that requires us to show less ARR than they're actually paying. So when it comes up for renewal, if we renew it, even without a price lift, that's a that's an uplift to what the actual contract value is. So the more we do, the more of a drag it is in the short term, but more of a unlock benefit it is in future periods as those things renew. Thank you for clarifying. Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Patrick Coldfield with Scotiabank. Patrick, your line is now open. Hi. This is Joe Vanderc on for Patrick Colville.

Amit, I think you mentioned 100 enterprise customers using Informatica for Gen AI. What will it take for more widespread adoption here And then given 2025 is the year of AI agents What does AgenTek AI mean for Informatica?

So two different questions. Number one is that always remind everybody that because customer counts can be one of those things where everybody can get wrapped around the For all practical purposes, we end up serving enterprise customers. So these are not any small customers that are trying to do any very small use cases. These are enterprise customers trying to solve mission critical problems and they are in the POC phase right now to figure it out. Like for example, I gave examples of a healthcare company trying to basically doing the work over there to figure out a better patient engagement that's a large healthcare company or biotech company building their own AI framework leveraging us and Google Cloud to get insights on the internal system. So 100 can be 100 can look small, but when you think of large customers, these are meaningful customers that obviously translates into bigger upside over the course of long term when they go into production. To your question on the agent, they look Given that, and I think it's a great let me remind you, we launched Care in 2018 when we were in the ML world, So one of the benefits of that has been that as we were able to hold Clair over the last many years, when Gen AI came by, we could instantly get to the world of Copai and we could pull the Care GPT out for preview and then it got launched.

And obviously, we talked about the customers using Clear GPT as well. And stay tuned. Obviously, more coming on the ClearGPT in terms of many, many more exciting announcements. I think you will basically get to see them at Informatica World, which I'm hopefully you'll see All of you did. Thanks.

Amit.

And if I could sneak one in for Mike.

How much of Informatica's business is U. S. Federal government and how should we think about that segment in 2025? Thank you. Yes, it's less than 5%.

And we have no indication that It's any different today than it was yesterday. We're watching it.

Thanks so much.

Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Miller Jump with Truist.

Miller, your line Your line is now open.

Hey, thank you all for taking the question. I'll keep it at one. But just you mentioned partial renewals and talked about $1 going to maybe $0.5 or even $0.75 Just curious like is that something that remains in the pipeline with a chance to recover it? You mentioned no change in competition. So just curious where that is going?

Look, I think the answer is yes. I mean, our TOs don't ever give up. I think that's absolutely right. And I think not losing a customer is a very important thing because it's not like had many cases where over a period of time the team will basically work their way back and present new use cases may emerge for them to basically use the platform differently. So the answer to that is yes, which is why I was important in reminding that higher lower renewal rate did not mean that in all cases we lost the customer. In a lot of cases we just partially reduced the footprint over there. So yes, of course, like but at the same time, that As I said, team doesn't lose sight of what other use cases they are customer.

And the ability to do that, to recover some of that in future periods is made completely frictionless buying the pricing model we have, the Informatica processing unit. When they reduce or they down sell themselves of renewal, not giving up specific products or rights to do certain things, they're just buying less IPs. And later on, when we help them find new use cases and they need more, they just buy more capacity, they don't have to negotiate for a new contract or a new service.

Understood. Thank you.

Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from the line of Austin Dietz with UBS. Austin, your line is now open.

Hey, Mike. It felt like we were talking about a return to double digit growth previously. And sounds like you might update that framework a little later this year. But just given the percent constant currency ARR guide for the year, like any initial thoughts on how we should be thinking about the overall growth equation at Informatica going forward? Yes. We're not providing additional guidance on that at this time as what we did say in the prepared remarks is that we do expect both of those metrics ARR and revenue [indiscernible] Have higher growth in '26 than '25 off a lower base than we had thought prior to the end of Q4, of course. But beyond that, we're not providing any additional guidance.

Stay tuned. We do expect to do so later in the first half.

Okay. Thanks so much.

Then just on the 2025 cloud ARR growth guidance, for growth to go from I think roughly 34% this year to 25% next year here in 2025, it's a decent sort of deceler on the growth rate to where and I know we're sort of talking about more migration deals coming to cloud this year as well. So I think we've hit on some of the factors, but maybe if you could just talk through the moving pieces to the 2025 cloud ARR growth guide?

Yes, sure.

So we always expected that the growth in 2026 sorry, 2025 for cloud is going to be lower than 2024. Right? We had expected 35.5% growth 2024, we landed at 34.1 Even if we had been at 35.5, the guidance for '25 would have been lower than 2024. So start there. Versus what we hypothetically would have guided had we not learned the things we learned in Q4. There are two things that are different. That lowered the guidance versus what we would have guided otherwise. And that's renewal rate, we talked about that and that's higher contribution of migrations to the total gross amount of software bookings that we are forecasting for 2025. Those two are the primary two drivers and they account sort of fifty-fifty for the reduction guide the guided cloud subscription ARR growth in 2025 versus what we would have done had Q4 ended exactly as we expected. Thanks Mike.

That concludes the Q and A session. I will now turn the call back over the management team for final remarks.

Thank you. Well, look, I appreciate everybody dialing in. Look, as I said, we didn't end Q4 as we anticipated and of course the fiscal year. Having said that, like you heard from me, We know what are the issues that we need to work on and the team is all over it to to work on it. You heard from Mike as we've thought about 2025. I think I stepped back and I looked at it that in spite of all of that stuff, we are walking into 2025 as a landmark year when our cloud business actually hits $1,000,000,000 ARR mark and with a 120% plus NRR growing heavily our average ESP, the growth of $1,000,000 plus customers and of course the profitability profile that we continue to have. We remain committed to continuing to execute against our commitments and thank you all for taking the time today.