All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alex Sklar. I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very pleased to have Everbridge back with us this year. We have Chief Executive Officer Dave Wagner joining us. We're gonna do a fireside chat. If there's any questions from the audience, I'll open it up with five or 10 minutes left, see if there are any. But Dave, thanks for joining. So I think I just want to start just big picture introduction. You kinda joined Everbridge amid a bigger transformation, history with a mass notification company. You've moved into kind of creating the category of critical event management. You joined mid that transformation, but can you kinda just talk about where we are in that today, your vision for Everbridge broadly as kind of an overall intro? Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, it's an exciting time to be at Everbridge. It's an exciting time in our customer base. You know, what we do is at the highest levels, we keep people safe and organizations running. We do that by digitizing organizational resilience, and, you know, resilience is defined as the ability to recover from a critical event. Something bad happens, we want to recover in a stronger position than we were before. And as a world, we're understanding the value of resilience, whether you read a Boston Consulting Group survey or a Bain survey or McKinsey survey, companies that invest in resilience over a 10-year span end up with stock prices that are 40% higher. And so when the team here at Everbridge before me was looking about what are the extensions, the right extension, how do we continue to grow our company outside of mass notification and beyond, the idea of moving from the world's best deliverer of messages in the event of a critical event, moving to a position where we have the intelligence and the data and the visualization available to be planful ahead of those critical events, I think was a very visionary, smart way to think about the future of Everbridge. And that's what we've been doing for the last three or four years, is taking this software platform that's integrating the best of our very scalable global emergency message delivery, and marrying that up with data visualization and risk intelligence data, creates a great opportunity. In my mind, having spent 25 or 30 years in cybersecurity, I'm seeing really powerful parallels between the cybersecurity industry and how it matured to how the physical resilience industry is maturing, is gonna continue to mature, by having a platform, having data available to make better decisions around the physical risks. Got it. So maybe just staying on CEM for the first handful of questions here. But you had the investor event in December, shortly after kind of joining and bringing some new management. You talked about the CEM market kind of being $20 billion as part of a larger TAM with some of your other solutions. Right. But can you just talk about, like, how much are you still, how greenfield is CEM as you're going to talk to these enterprises? Do they have anything in place that you're often ripping out? Is it a total evangelized sale? How should we think about kind of the market today? Yeah. So like I said, it's early market. I'd say we're early days. When we talk about the $20 billion TAM, a little over half of that is in Digital Operations. We have some good products that work in the Digital Operations, and so the physical side is a little less than the $10 million or half of it. And CEM is about half of that. We have some other products, the PSIM product and the Public Warning product. So you think about the Critical Event Management space, you know, single-digit billions. We have a really nice share. When we break out our North American share, we're, you know, by far the largest provider of Critical Event Management solutions. It's growing, you know, we're growing, you know, double digits, slow double digits in that CEM space across in our overall product portfolio. We're doing really well against our competition. To then more specifically answer your question on the dynamics, you know, we're growing really well, first and foremost, by cross-selling CEM or that visualization and data intelligence layer, that situational awareness, to our existing base of mass notification clients. So we're in a really strong position. We have 75 percent penetration in the North American companies with more than fifty thousand employees with our mass notification solution. We've been able to cross-sell about 25% of those so far into CEM, which means to me two things: We still have cross-sell opportunity in the largest accounts in North America, and when we look at the, the next segment down, the 10,000-50,000 base of customers, we're only about 17% penetrated in that base. So there's a lot of greenfield opportunity there, both in terms of maturing them with a mass notification solution to mature their enterprise resilience posture, and then to further mature them by adding additional solutions around the portfolio. So that's, that's lots of growth here in North America. You know, we would describe the international market being earlier yet than even the 10-50 segment here, and so we're working as well, primarily with large organizations in Europe for our CEM sales and our CEM growth. Got it. I definitely wanna come back to, to one of the growth vectors you just hit on in terms of that 10-50,000- Yeah ... employee market. But I, I get—staying kind of bigger picture on the demand and backdrop.... It's obviously been a tougher macro for enterprise- Yeah - software sales in general right now. You talked about that there's a, there's obviously an ROI associated with preventing or how you handle critical events. You talked about an ROI with, with the resilience in terms of 40% higher stock prices- Right How would you characterize kind of the demand environment, given there is a little bit of an ROI associated with the sale, but coupled with kind of just budgetary pressures in general? Yeah, I think it's that blended, you know, that you're talking about. There is an appetite to invest around ESG. There's an appetite among our best clients to continue to focus on their duty of care to their employees and make sure they're doing a best-in-class job there. There's also not a "the house is on fire" urgency. And so in this tougher, you know, budgetary environment, it, you know, it has been a little bit mixed for us. I think the long-term tailwinds remain really strong, and, you know, we're navigating through the tougher macro in a way that I feel good about. We've got improving. Our third quarter was our highest bookings quarter of the year to date. Our deal sizes were the highest in the year to date. Our sales productivity is the highest year- to- date. So we're, you know, executing increasingly well in a tougher environment than we'd like, but it's not a terrible environment. Got it. Just giving you-- just hit on kind of that, that deal size improvement. Can you just kind of walk us through what you did see this year in terms of deal sizes, deal velocity, in terms of those trends coming out of third quarter stronger and- Yeah, Yeah, to me, one of the most interesting things is we have, within 2% every quarter this year, our number of transactions has been really, really consistent, like crazy, in terms of, the number of transactions we're doing with our customers staying consistent. The size of those transactions, came down pretty markedly, from, 2022 to 2023, and, you know, we attribute that primarily to decreased upsell. So our clients are largely, primarily larger enterprises. Those larger enterprises haven't been adding employees or laid employees off, so they're not buying more at time of renewal, and that compressed those transaction sizes. We then saw those transaction sizes improve a little bit to Q2, improve again in Q3. They're not back to 2022 levels, but improving, which gives us a lot of confidence in, the path forward. Got it. When you kind of just reported numbers coming out of early November, any thoughts in terms of kind of fourth quarter in terms of potential for budget flush or some of those trends kind of continuing on the upward trajectory or? Yeah, the trends are what I really talked about on the Q3 call were these positive trends that we saw in Q3. I hit the main ones. I didn't hit, we had the best pipeline increase and entered Q4 with the best, also with the best pipeline of the year, which, you know, leads me to believe that, that Q4 will be another, you know, trend up in those, those metrics that we've seen since, since Q1 this year. Got it. Okay, so one of the things that you've spent a lot of time on since joining is kind of the go-to-market organization. Right. I know John was here earlier with us. The go-to-market has kind of undergone some pretty material changes. Yeah - the last year and a half. Can you just talk about kind of where you were in go-to-market structure, where we are today, how much more kind of changes you still want to make going into- Yeah - kind of next year? Yeah, that's a really good question. And, you know, one of the things that really needed to be addressed when I joined, was just the efficiency of the go-to-market, or said differently, the inefficiency of our go-to-market. You know, the metric I was most focused on, you know, when I first joined, was we had only 35% of our sellers with more than one year of tenure. That was a real problem. We exited last quarter with 85% of our sellers with more than one year of tenure. So, you know, in terms of thing one, you know, accomplished that. There were some other things, in the sales structure that were, you know, pretty inefficient. I've talked about these some, but, you know, in the comp plan for North American sellers, a dollar of professional services and perpetual sales retired the same quota as a recurring dollar, and we wanted to fix that. So we made a comp plan change in January. And then in terms of just numbers of sellers, we've, you know, we've reduced our overall headcount by, you know, nearly 300 people year-over-year. I guess, a little over 300 people year-over-year, and we're trying to preserve as many quota-carrying, but we've taken quite a lot of expense out of go-to-market. The biggest part being in the overlay sales expenses, you know, the overlay selling area. So we've taken, you know, probably, I guess you'd call it, three main actions in the sales organization. I'd say we have, you know, a couple more to go. The biggest one that, you know, John's talking about, the first thing he's focused on, is getting a customer success organization put in place. Making a partial step towards that here in Q4, but getting a modern customer success organization in Q1 that we think will make us, you know, more efficient, especially on our gross and net retentions, and it'll make us a little more cost efficient, and just some other fine-tunings. John does a really nice job of identifying, you know, the best return to expense in our different segments and making sure that we're optimizing, you know, our best segments and harvesting our less good segments together. So he's doing a real nice job, making incremental improvements, and I would expect to continue to see incremental improvements this year and next. I'd be unfair to John if I didn't also talk about the product improvements, and I don't know if you have another question on that, but I'll just intersect. You know, we're doing a lot of work at the platform level on the product to make the sales job easier. And so the first really big deliverable around that was Everbridge 360 and the user interface to make that cross-sell motion and new customer motion cleaner. And so, you know, we're working together as one Everbridge, both on the product side and on the go-to-market side, to drive sales efficiency. Well, why don't we just stay on that for a second? So Everbridge 360 just officially launched, I think, within the last two months or so. Right. You know, it basically... I think the simplest way to think about it is it kind of unifies your CEM offerings under a single pane of glass. But maybe just tell us a little bit more about Everbridge 360, and I don't think that's the end. I think there's more solutions you're hoping to kind of fold in there over time. So how should we think about that kind of, that- Yeah, that's exactly right. So, the product organization has taken a real architecture, you know, view forward, you know, making sure that our platform is one that's really extensible, you know, to be able to integrate the very, you know, great set of broad set of solutions we have today and, you know, make it more open for our customers to be able to work into their existing workflows and the other applications in their environment. So Everbridge 360 is really, as Alex said, focused on bringing together inside core CEM the organically developed mass notification incident management with the acquired visualization and risk intelligence parts of the platform. So they're completely seamless in their UI. The workflow has been reworked, and again, the target architecture is identified, so that all of the other integrations we'll be making over time now have, you know, the technology stack has been set, the fonts and colors have all been set. And so then over time, we're continuing to bring more of the suite together in the core platform. Another, you know, one we happened to also deliver in the September timeframe was the desktop notification capability from the SnapComms, also was delivered inherent in the core platform, to be able to consume as an alternate delivery method, and we'll be working. You know, next year, one of the key focuses is gonna be on that smart security you've been hearing us talk about. You know, bringing that closer into the platform and making those capabilities increasingly available, you know, in the cloud as well. Got it. So this kind of combines some of the things we've already been talking about, but one of the other areas of investment you've been talking about is almost slimming down this kind of the platform as you sell to that 10,000-50,000-employee base. You know, I know one of the other areas of investment's been on the digital channel. Right. So you've got two different factors here. You've got a new kind of digital motion- Yeah ... you've got a slimmer product. Can you just talk about that growth vector of... It's not really downmarket, but I'm gonna call it- Yeah ... moving downmarket- Yeah ... as you talk about the 10-50,000 employee base. Yeah, so that next segment of relatively large clients is one that, as I talked about, the opportunity we have there. The first thing, you know, that our Chief Revenue Officer is really focusing the resources on that segment, making sure that our marketing, demand generation motions and our selling motions are focused. Our product development is also going to focus on that. You know, that buyer needs a simpler product, and so they need a more prescriptive set of answers. They don't have as many people to, you know, to investigate as many different threats. They, they want to really be honed in on what's most important, and we're gonna be able to help them do that, before product changes early now, and then, you know, mid, late next year, we'll be introducing product changes that will make, will make the product, you know, even more prescriptive and more dialed in for those customers who don't have quite as large of teams dedicated to the physical security application. So those will kind of come together. In this case, I think our go-to-market's gonna be a little bit ahead of our product as we get the right package and product configuration for that next set of customers. Maybe we just follow up. Just take it all together. We've talked about some of the go-to-market changes and the platform investments. Like, what's the right way to think about growth over the medium or long term for Everbridge? Maybe on the subscription side, because I know that's where your focus is. Yeah. But, like, what's the right way to think about that growth algorithm? Yeah, so on the subscription side, you know, we've, we talked about the overall $20 billion TAM, and the two main elements both have good growth characteristics. That, you know, the digital side is growing, you know, low double digits. The CEM, when you bring risk intelligence and visualization and, you know, mass notification together, is also, from a market, long-term market growth perspective, you know, low double digits. We're seeing ARR this year with the macro in the 7%-8%, and, you know, we've done a careful study. We're not losing share. We're, our win rates are staying, and, you know, we're not seeing 2024 as a... We're seeing 2024 as an extension of 2023. We're not seeing, you know, I wouldn't call anything a rebound. So we're looking at, you know, kind of steady state in a 7% ARR growth as the kind of trajectory we're seeing for next year. You know, we'd like to see that expand. We're investing to make that expand. You know, the key market that's driving, you know, the management team and I is profitable growth and towards this, you know, Rule of Forty in 2027, which we feel very much on track to deliver, and so we'll be able to deliver that at, you know, at 10% growth and 30% EBITDA, or 15% growth in 2025, or if it's on the other end, 7% and 33%. We're working to keep that dialed in and feel very much on track to do that. Got it. So you kind of just alluded to this, but one of the things that is a lot more in your control, the profitability side- Yeah. You've done, you've done some pretty heavy lifting already. Yeah. So I think we're exiting the year in the low- to mid-30 20% EBITDA margin business. You've already given a target for next year of 25% margin growth. Like, what's the right way to think about kind of the profitability outlook for Everbridge under that Rule of 40 framework, and what are some of the big kind of sources of operating leverage from here? Yeah. So just specifically that, it's a 25% increase in the EBITDA margin dollars is, you know, what we're talking about. This next year, as like we've been talking about, a lot of the go-to-market sales and marketing will be the biggest contributor again, to the increasing margin. We've been holding total R&D spend, including the capitalized part of R&D, pretty flat since I've been here, maybe a little bit down. We're expecting to hold that flattish, you know, through all of next year and into 2025 because we perceive this virtuous cycle, I call it, where, you know, as you deliver things like Everbridge 360, it makes it easier to sell. We're working on, you know, this next year, as we talked about, the features for the 10-20 segment. We're working on additional features and function for the public sector, especially here in the US, additional security features for the US market, then there's product and platform integrations. And as we do those, we get increasing velocity and increasingly, you know, feeds the revenue growth. And so we expect then the R&D to be contributing, not just on a dollar basis, but on a percentage basis beginning in 2025. And then all along the way, you know, G&A has improvements to make as well, and that'll be contributing. It's smaller numbers, but they'll be contributing to the overall expansion of the margins. If you were to see some outperformance next year on the revenue side, is there any areas where you would look to put more dollars behind it based on what you're seeing in terms of some of the green shoots? Yeah, we are putting a good amount of R&D already, you know, you know, into the AI and the efficiency we're gaining in the platform from our data intelligence sector. That's a place we're leaning in. I alluded to the federal government places. I see. We see real opportunities there. If we could, you know, pull some investment there, we might lean in a bit. And I think, you know, quota carrying reps will be the next place we're looking to invest, and that's probably a 2025 investment, the way I see it today. Got it. So I did want to hit on other uses of cash, and then maybe open it up if the audience has any questions. But you've been paying down the converts. Yeah. We just kind of talked about some of the maybe AI investments- Yeah - that you're spending on that are incremental, but what about other uses of cash? Is there anything else that you're looking to do with the cash flow you're putting off? Well, you know, I'll take that back and just take credit for the work that we've done, you know, making sure that we do have our capital structure well in control, and we'll be exiting the year with our guide of $84-$85 million of EBITDA. We'll be you know right at 3x net debt to EBITDA, which I think is good. And, you know, we'll be continuing to focus on you know paying down debt as our priority. So that, you know, that is what we're primarily focused on. We've been able to opportunistically repurchase our convertible debt. It's possible we might opportunistically repurchase some of that, but we're really focused on, right now, paying down debt. Got it. I'll open it up if the audience has any questions. All right. Yeah, yep, go for it. Yes, so just on some of the international opportunities, how have those progressed over time? I know there was some optimism around this coming on board, you know, some country-wide deals and thinking about different governments. Where are we in that space? Yeah. So, you know, this year is going to be... It looks like it's going to be an all-time low in terms of the public warning deals. We are, by far, the leader in that segment. We have over half the countries. We have 26 countries who have nationwide alerting programs with us. You know, the European ones are all stalled, you know, with all of the, you know, the war on the edge of Europe right now. Those are all stalled out. And we have a couple in Asia that, you know, are in the pipeline that continue to do well. For the longer term, you know, we're excited about what the UN is doing and make this program called Early Warnings for All, where the UN is working to get funding from developed nations to developing nations to put public warning systems like ours in. You know, those right now tend to be smaller. We won Trinidad and Tobago and Seychelles, and we'll have some opportunities like that, but those are six-figure deals, not seven-figure deals, you know, in that market. You know, longer term, we do like our position as, again, having the highest market share and having won many of these large countries that, you know, as they come up for renewal, I think we'll have, you know, an opportunity to raise the price on those as they come back through. So it's a business that we like in terms of how it fits our brand. There's a lot of tech reuse, but it's not a real focus, you know, of our business that, you know, when we're at, you know, whatever billion dollars, five or seven years from now, it's gonna be a decreasing percentage. We're really focused on driving our recurring SaaS business. Has there been any change in willingness from some of these countrywide or large state deals in the pipeline to be more of a SaaS subscription basis, or is that? We have one SaaS customer already, and there is a willingness to do that, especially in these smaller countries. It's the way we're trying to shape those smaller deals. One up here. Okay. Sorry, I just sort of on the mass notification side of it. I know historically, it's been the spearhead for you guys. Can you guys talk a little bit more about the importance of mass notification going forward? I know it's been a little bit diminished with CEM, but- Well, no, I think it's a really important point you bring up around mass notification, and the question is, it's typically been the point of the spear and talk about it. That's one of the things we've done is, you know, CEM is the focus. It is our future, that broader solution set. But, but in SaaS selling, we're focused on, you know, building a platform and bringing our customers on. If they wanna purchase one solution to start, we wanna take their business and grow their business over time. And so, it hasn't been a big shift, but, you know, the mass notification, you know, year-over-year growth a year ago was, you know, minus low single digits. Now, it's plus single digits. We're making, you know, modest but meaningful investments in our public sector product to, you know, to make sure that we're meeting those customers' demands on the public sector. And as we move to that 10-50 segment, and, you know, a lot of those customers are still greenfield on mass notification, that's the absolute right entry point. So, you know, we absolutely still are focused on mass notification. It's a core part of CEM. So maybe one other area of the business we haven't hit on too much yet, but the IT Alerting, you acquired some assets there. Yeah. You had an Everbridge product before some of the acquisitions, but it's still a good chunk of kind of the overall ARR base. Yeah. What's been the trends? What's your focus on that part of the business today? So our sales efficiency in that part of the business is above average, and so, you know, you know, we're planning to add headcount. One of the things that we did earlier in the year was, you know, whereas we're trying to consolidate things, that's an area where we set aside a separate set of sellers. It's a different buying center, the CIO versus the CSO, and that's been yielding early fruit. You know, one of the... Another area of the xMatters acquisition that's paying off really well is, you know, they have a really, really good engineering team. And the services, the microservices that work to deliver resilience, incident management, mass communications from an IT side and from a physical side, there's a lot of technical overlap. And so we're bringing together the in our microservices architecture, reuse of those products and getting, you know, we'll be getting increasingly technical synergy between, you know, those product sets. So, a lot going on there that we're excited about. Got it. One last thing before we kinda wrap up here. I want the partner channel is something that you've been talking about in recent quarters, is kind of adding more partners, particularly internationally- Yeah ... I... I think, is the focus. How important is that partner channel to kind of the overall growth equation? It's really important. You know, you know, I'd like to be partner first. John likes to be partner first. It's an area where I'm really proud of our high level of recommending partners, Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others. We have some really strong partnerships there. I think we have, as you've heard me say, we have more partnerships we can develop a little bit closer to the customer, a little bit closer to getting transactions done. And then, especially in Europe, we wanna reframe our go-to-market internationally with getting the right local partners. Got it. So you talked about earlier, kind of we're working towards the Rule of Forty- Yeah ... 2027 targets. As we go into 2024, like, how should we think about what you're the one or two areas you just are absolutely focused on getting right, as we think about that longer term, the longer-term targets? Well, you know, this year, and it is just always top of my mind is Gross Retention, Net Retention, and driving those numbers higher. And so, you know, everything, you know, everything we're doing is recognizing our current customers and retaining them and delivering more is the best value and the best return. So that's really the number one focus, and then I think I've hit some of the number twos. But, you know, this 10-50 program is where we really see an opportunity to drive more incremental new business now next year. All right. I think that's all the time we have. Thanks for joining us, Dave. All right. Yeah, thanks, Alex. Thanks.