Elastic (NYSE:ESTC) held its fourth-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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Summary
Elastic finished the fiscal year strong, surpassing guidance across key metrics, achieving 16% total revenue growth and a non-GAAP operating margin of 14.8% for Q4.
The company reported a 20% growth in Q4 CRPO, indicating strong customer commitments and setting up for future growth, particularly in AI transformations.
Elastic's sales-led subscription revenue grew 19%, with a record number of $1 million deals and significant growth in customers with over $5 million in annual spending.
The company's strategic focus on AI is paying off, with over 600 customers using AI capabilities, contributing to a broadening adoption across various sectors.
Elastic expects to accelerate revenue growth in FY27, forecasting 14.6% year-over-year growth, driven by existing commitments and increased sales capacity.
The company is leveraging AI internally to drive operational efficiency, aiming for a 2.5 percentage point expansion in operating margins in FY27.
Elastic's recent initiatives include a revamped metrics offering and continued success in displacing incumbents, particularly in the security and observability sectors.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good afternoon and welcome to the Elastic fourth quarter fiscal 2026 earnings results conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the STAR key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Eric Pringle, Global Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.
Eric Pringle (Global Vice President of Finance)
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Elastic's fourth quarter fiscal 2026 financial results. On the call we have Ash Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer and Navam Wilihinda, Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued today after the close of market and is posted on our website. Slides which are supplemental to the call can also be found on the Elastic Investor relations [email protected] our discussion will include forward looking statements which may include predictions, estimates, our expectations regarding the demand for our products and solutions and our future revenue and other information. These forward looking statements are based on factors currently known to us, speak only as of the date of this call, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We disclaim any obligation to update or revise these forward looking statements unless required by law. Please refer to the risks and uncertainties included in the press release that we issued earlier today, included in the slides posted on the Investor Relations website and those more fully described in our filings with the securities and Exchange Commission. We will also discuss certain non GAAP financial measures. Disclosures regarding non GAAP measures include including reconciliations with the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in the press release and slides unless specifically noted otherwise. All results and comparisons are on a fiscal year over year basis. The webcast replay of this call will be available on our company website under the Investor relations link. Our first quarter fiscal 2027 quiet period begins at the close of business on Friday, July 17, 2026. We will be participating in the bank of America Global technology conference on June 4 and the Rosenblatt Technology Summit on June 10. With that, I'll turn it over to Ash.
Ash Kulkarni
Thank you Eric and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and fiscal 2026 results. Elastic finished the year strong, beating our guidance across every key metric. This was our seventh consecutive quarter of disciplined field execution and we saw very strong commitments resulting in Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) growth accelerating to 20%. Organizations are increasingly choosing elastic for their long term AI transformations and making larger multi year commitments to standardize on our platform for the future. The acceleration in our Q4 Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) growth which reached over 28% validates the growing magnitude and momentum of our customer commitments and sets us up well for the future. In Q4 we achieved 16% total revenue growth and a non GAAP operating margin of 14.8% resulting in a full year revenue growth of 17% and a non GAAP operating margin of 16.4%. In Q4 our sales led subscription revenue grew 19% driven by continued demand for our platform for AI search, observability and security. Our highest value customers are leading the shift towards multi year deals. It was a record Q4 for $1 million deals and in FY26 we added more than 30 net new customers to our million dollar plus ACV cohort, bringing that total to more than 240. Within that group, our count of customers spending over $5 million with us annually grew 30%. We ended the year with over 1,720 customers spending more than $100,000 in ACV. This is highlighted by several marquee wins in security as we continue displacing legacy vendors in the public sector. Our partnership with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA around the Elastic Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as a service is growing with more civilian agencies switching away from competitive security offerings onto the service powered by elastic cloud. This led to our commitments mix in Q4 to shift more towards elastic cloud than in prior years which impacted our in quarter Q4 revenue. This shift to cloud will be a positive for the future as these agencies ramp their usage toward their commitment levels. The broader AI cycle is actively driving our growth. Customers rely on us not only as a context platform for AI but but to modernize their operations with our AI driven SOC and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) for security and observability respectively. Our customers using our AI solutions continue to grow. We now have over 600 customers with an ACV of over 100,000 or greater using our AI capabilities. This includes more than 40 serverless customers who were previously not captured in this count. Cumulatively, AI use cases have now penetrated more than a third of our $100,000 ACV customer cohort. We see demand ranging from the largest global organizations to AI native companies. We believe the adoption of AI will be universal, spanning across organizations of every scale. This represents a fundamental market evolution that provides a consistent tailwind for our growth over the long term. The software stack is being rewritten, large language models are emerging as the new operating system and agentic automation is becoming the prerequisite for every mission critical business process. We are capitalizing on this AI driven disruption through four foundational strengths. First, Data Gravity As AI scales, the LLM must come to the data, not the other way around. Moving petabytes of proprietary information is a non starter for enterprises due to cost, security and data gravity. We are ensuring that elasticsearch remains one of the most efficient data stores for all unstructured data and more logs, metrics, vectors, text, audio and video. By delivering massive compression and significant ingest speed ups, we provide the price, scalability and speed that make us the data store of choice. We recently introduced Cross Project Search which brings cross cluster search to serverless in large enterprises where data is scattered across teams and regions. We eliminate the need for costly centralization by allowing users to query disparate projects where they live. Second, context An LLM is only as powerful as the context it is given. We have built and are constantly evolving one of the world's best context platforms for AI. We are reducing costs while improving the relevance of AI through hybrid search, first party models like our Gina V5 Omni family for multimodal search and our agent builder now in general availability. This ensures that enterprise AI is grounded in real time business reality. In a recent blog we compared agent performance using Elastic as a context layer versus an LLM interacting with the data directly. We saw a 70% reduction on tokens used and the ability to answer questions more accurately than with naive rag alone. We are widening our competitive moat with third party data connectors that allow our search APIs to pull real time context from systems like Slack and Google Drive without the need for indexing or crawling, enabling zero friction retrieval across the entire enterprise stack. Third, Specialized Agents Traditional observability and security practices are evolving into the agentic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and the agentic soc. We were one of the first to embed AI and agents into our observability and security products and we have now automated the entire life cycle from detection to analysis and remediation. These security and observability agents and skills are designed to be embeddable in any AI tool whether our customers use anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini with Elastic serving as the data layer behind the automation. We also launched the industry's first MCP apps for security and observability, embedding interactive domain specific workflows directly into tools like Claude vs code and GitHub copilot, enabling users to investigate and triage threats wherever they work. 4th Platform consolidation as the market matures, organizations are consolidating onto platforms that can leverage AI across multiple domains at a lower total cost. We believe that platforms supporting both security and observability on a single data tier will win the consolidation race. We are accelerating the consolidation trend with a relaunch of our metrics offering. Prometheus is one of the most widely used systems for metrics monitoring, especially in cloud native environments. We now offer native support for Prometheus time series data in elasticsearch. This allows engineers to leverage their existing expertise and AI coding tools without learning a new query language. Most importantly, we are delivering this familiar experience with massive performance gains providing storage efficiency and query speeds up to 30 times faster than Prometheus. Our customer wins in Q4 reinforce these strengths. Our data gravity advantage is winning consolidation deals in the most data intensive environments in a seven figure new logo. WIN, a global provider of financial business information, is leveraging Elasticsearch for its massive repository of over 2 billion documents. We successfully displaced a legacy dual vendor setup by proving that Elastics hybrid search delivers superior relevancy for their most demanding high volume workloads. Our recent acquisition of Jina AI proved essential during the evaluation, providing high quality multilingual support across 30 plus languages. By combining these models with this BBQ to manage massive scale efficiently, the customer is reimagining the search experience for their millions of subscribers while preparing for the next wave of AI native products. Our context engineering leadership is making us the essential retrieval layer for ISVs launching AI experiences for their customers in a seven figure expansion. A leading workplace AI software firm has established elasticsearch as the foundational retrieval engine at the heart of its enterprise offerings. By serving as the essential context layer for their agentic pipeline, Elastic enables the delivery of grounded permission aware insights across massive complex data sets. This partnership ensures that their AI services remain performant and secure, providing a scalable foundation for their next generation of AI driven products. Our specialized agents are driving the largest platform consolidations we've ever seen. We secured a key eight figure win this quarter where we are redefining the modern SOC experience. A Fortune 50 global financial services firm is modernizing their security operations by consolidating their disparate cyber data silos into a unified AI driven siem. By migrating mission critical workloads from an incumbent to elastic, the firm is leveraging our platform to dramatically improve data retention and accessibility while optimizing their long term infrastructure costs Additionally, their Cyber Incident Response Teams will be deploying our AI driven capabilities including Attack Discovery and AI Assistant to proactively mitigate threats and realize significant productivity savings. By leaning into our four foundational strengths, we are setting ourselves up to be an enduring part of the infrastructure for the AI driven future. Finally, as a company, we've always focused on building a strong and durable business while continuing to innovate for our customers. As AI transforms how work gets done across every function, we are evolving how we operate internally to accelerate innovation, increase capacity through automation and move faster as a company. As we evolve the organization to better align our teams with working in an age of AI automation, we expect to simplify how we operate, reduce operational complexity and scale even more effectively as our business grows. As such, we expect to expand our operating margin meaningfully in FY27. Navam will address this topic in more detail. Importantly, these changes do not slow down the growth in our sales capacity and our ability to capture the opportunity for growth acceleration ahead of us. While the structure of our organization will evolve, we will expect to grow our total headcount on a net basis this fiscal year. These organizational changes support our continued top line growth momentum and ability to scale effectively as we grow and we remain on track to deliver our midterm growth targets. Strong sales performance throughout FY26 with accelerating Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) has set us up to accelerate our quarterly revenue growth trajectory in FY27. The continuous innovation across elastic and the increasing adoption of AI reinforce my confidence in our future. We enter the new fiscal year energized and are ready to drive our momentum forward. I want to thank our customers and partners for their trust, our shareholders for their partnership and our employees for their dedication. With that, I will turn the call over to NAVAM to review our financial results in more detail.
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you Ash. I'm also incredibly proud of the team's FY26 performance. Not only did we beat our guidance throughout the entire year, but importantly, we laid the foundation for revenue acceleration in FY27 by growing customer commitments in FY26 as evidenced by our growth in both CRPO and RPO over the course of the year. Our sales led. Subscription revenue continues to be durable and we've consistently delivered strong growth including a 20% growth rate in FY26. Our total revenue for the fourth quarter was $451 million, growing approximately 16% as reported and 14% on a constant currency basis. Sales-led. Subscription revenue in the fourth quarter was 375 million, representing growth of 19% as reported and 16% on a constant currency basis. We saw another quarter of strong customer commitments alongside stable consumption patterns, a direct outcome of our sales strategy focusing on high potential mid market and strategic enterprise customers. Our sales team continues to meet customers where they are in terms of deployment preferences be it self managed or cloud. Each quarter will show some variability in customer preferences between self managed and cloud and those variances impact in quarter revenue. This quarter our sales team delivered a significantly larger mix of cloud commitments compared to historical patterns partially driven by the US Public sector agencies increasingly adopting CISA SIM as a Service. We anticipate US public sector cloud momentum will continue in FY27. The variability in cloud commitment mix is important to keep in mind in the context of our revenues reported here in Q4. As you may recall, revenue from cloud commitments ramp over the course of the year, whereas self managed commitments have a portion of revenue recognized upfront when the license is delivered with the remainder recognized ratably over the subscription term. The sustained strength in customer commitments is now visible in our accelerating constant currency Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)). In Q4 we grew Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) to 1.2 billion which was 20% growth both as reported and on a constant currency basis as compared to 15% on a constant currency basis in Q3. FY26. The acceleration in our Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) is a direct result of customers increasing their commitments of search security and observability solutions. The acceleration of Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) is also what gives us confidence in our expected revenue acceleration over the next 12 months as increasing commitment volumes accelerates constant currency Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) and constant currency revenue in that order. While there continues to be noise and questions in the market regarding AI's impact on software, there is clarity among our customers with respect to elastic being an essential long term component in their AI infrastructure. This sentiment is reflected in their multiyear commitments. These multi year commitments are visible in our Q4 remaining performance obligations or Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO). In Q4 our Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) accelerated to 1.98 billion growing 28% as reported and 27.4% in constant currency. This was an exceptional quarter for multi year commitments driving our highest year over year growth in total Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) over the last four years. If we look at Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) beyond the 12 month horizon, the strength of our long term positioning becomes even clearer. Our non current Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) which represents Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) less our current Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) or the portion of Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) that will be recognized beyond 12 months grew 43% year over year in Q4. The noncurrent Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) has been progressively improving over the last year. This increase underscores a deepening of customer relationships as they increasingly execute contracts with multi year commitments. We secured these multiyear commitments without any material change in our discount practices, underscoring the genuine customer commitment to our products and its associated value. We also saw continued deal momentum with higher value customers. Customers with more than a million dollars of Annual Contract Value (ACV) grew approximately 14% where we added more than 30 net new customers this year. We are particularly pleased with the growth of our greater than $5 million in Annual Contract Value (ACV) customers which grew 30% as we continue to see strong expansion among our customer base. Turning to margins and profitability, I will discuss all measures on a non GAAP basis. We successfully expanded our sales capacity to capture the AI opportunity while simultaneously improving margins across the board. We continue to demonstrate the efficiency of our underlying model by balancing these strategic investments with discipline. During the quarter, we exceeded our guidance and delivered an operating margin of 14.8%. For the full year we delivered over 120 basis points of operating margin expansion finishing at 16.4%. Note that this quarter our GAAP net income was impacted by a valuation allowance release against the Netherlands, UK and certain US state deferred tax assets. The release created a one time benefit of $435 million to our GAAP net income. This did not impact any of our operating results. Non GAAP Diluted Earnings per Share Adjusted Free Cash Flow or Cash and Cash Equivalents we maintained a strong adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 20% in FY26. Together, our FY26 adjusted free cash flow margin and total revenue growth is 37% and well on the way to reaching our midterm target of Rule of 40, an important milestone that validates our strategy of driving durable growth and compounding value for our shareholders. We also continue to make significant Progress on the $500 million share repurchase program that we announced in October. During the fourth quarter, we returned approximately $40 million to shareholders representing purchases of approximately 650,000 shares. As of the end of the fiscal year, we have used approximately 68% of our $500 million authorized amount of putting us ahead of our goal of using half of the authorized amount in FY26. Since the beginning of our repurchase program in October, we have repurchased approximately 4.4 million shares. As I discussed at our Financial Analyst Day in October, our current capital allocation strategy is to return 50% of our free cash flow through share repurchases unless we have attractive acquisition opportunities that require us to use cash. Looking ahead to FY27 we closed FY26 with a foundation that positions us to accelerate revenue growth while expanding profitability throughout FY27. Our Q4 Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) reflects the significant buildup of committed backlog that will fuel our next phase of revenue growth. We expect both revenue and sales led subscription revenue to build momentum throughout the year, with Q1 showing the lowest quarterly growth and Q4 showing the highest quarterly growth. This growth comes from two specific drivers, namely Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)), which turns into recognized revenue through the year as well as increasing ramp sales capacity which drives new commitments. The high value commitments that we secured in FY26 will drive acceleration throughout FY27 as reflected in our constant currency revenue and sales ledge subscription revenue guidance. With these assumptions in mind, for the first quarter of FY27, we expect total revenue in the range of 469 million to 470 million, representing 13.1% year over year growth at the midpoint or 12.8% year over year constant currency growth at the midpoint. We expect sales led subscription revenue in the range of 392 million to 393 million, representing 15.9% growth at the midpoint or 15.6% in constant currency growth at the midpoint. We expect non GAAP operating margin for the first quarter of fiscal 27 to be approximately 14%. We expect non GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of $0.57 to $0.59 using between 106 million and 107 million diluted weighted average ordinary shares outstanding. For FY27, we expect total revenue in the range of 1.985 billion to 2 billion, representing 14.6% year over year growth at the midpoint or 14.5% year over year constant currency growth at the midpoint. We expect sales led subscription revenue in the range of 1.673 billion to 1.688 billion, representing 16.9% year over year growth at the midpoint or 16.8% year over year constant currency growth at the midpoint. We expect non GAAP operating margin for fiscal 27 to be approximately 19%. We expect non GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of $3.21 to $3.29 using between 107.5 million and 108.5 million diluted weighted average ordinary shares outstanding. Regarding cash flow, we expect to increase our adjusted free cash flow margins to 21.5% in fiscal 27 excluding any acquisitions or any other one time charges. Our level of cash generation combined with our planned revenue Acceleration keeps us firmly on track to exceed rule of 40 by FY29. As Ash mentioned, just as we drive AI innovation for our customers, we are using AI to transform how we work across all functions. We are beginning to see productivity gains from AI which will evolve the structure of our organization and allow us to expand our operating margins. In FY27 we are expanding our operating margins approximately 2.5 percentage points. Furthermore, we're raising our medium term FY29 non GAAP operating margin target from more than 20% to approximately 25% with associated improvement in our rule of 40. These targets are now well ahead of our prior financial analyst day targets. We still expect to grow our headcount on a net basis this year, continuing to invest in our growth. We remain on track to achieve our medium term sales led subscription revenue growth target of 20% plus in FY29. In summary, we have seen markedly improved sales execution in FY26 and we're seeing more sales capacity come online, driving, improving commitments and accelerating crpo. The dynamic of commitments and Contracted Remaining Performance Obligations (CRemaining Performance Obligations (RPO)) improving gives us confidence in our ability to accelerate revenue growth and drive further margin expansion in the future. Thank you for your continued support for joining us today. With that, I'll open it up for Q and A.
OPERATOR
We will now begin the Question and Answer session. To ask a question, you may press STAR, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press STAR then two. Our first question today comes from Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Rob Owens (Equity Analyst at Piper Sandler)
Great. Good afternoon and thanks for taking my question. With the success you guys are seeing from a booking standpoint, when we look at CRPO and RPO specifically, what do you think is the unlock with customers? Is this just maturation relative to where people are in their AI journey? Do you think that there's something from a product standpoint that's really driven this unlock? And then as a second question you mentioned the CISA SIM as a service just to over acronym it a little bit. But where you're seeing success in the federal government, have you been able to affect that in the commercial markets as well?
Ash Kulkarni
Thanks Rob. Thank you very much for the question. Yes, so let me answer each in turn. So if you think about our platform, the way our customers are leveraging it is in a few different ways. So first is a data store just to build applications. The new applications that are being built, we are increasingly being used as a data store and really what matters there is just the fact that we have an incredibly efficient platform that's driving a lot of momentum for everything that we're doing around AI. We are seeing more and more customers choose us for that reason. The second reason is clearly because we are really strong at context. Whenever you're building AI applications, you need the right kind of context in real time. All the investments that we have made in our vector database, in our genome models, in agent builder, which is now generally available, that is also driving a lot of momentum for us as AI is becoming more and more widely adopted within organizations. And lastly, it's in the agents that we have built. The specialized agents for AI, for observability and soc for security. You know, the skills that we have built that can be invoked from cloud code or GitHub, copilot or wherever you work from. And that is really driving a lot of automation for our customers. And that's driving more and more of these observability and security events for us. That's allowing us to consolidate more workloads onto our platform and get bigger commitments, more longer term commitments because it's making us more entrenched in into the overall AI infrastructure stack within our customer base. The second part of your question about Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as a service to the point that you made, we are seeing tremendous success there. Matter of factly, if you remember a couple of quarters ago we had announced that that deal was basically a $26 million deal commitment over a 12 month period. They've already exceeded that as more and more civilian agencies are coming onto our platform. And that's all on Elastic Cloud, which is great as those ramp that's going to translate into revenue traction and that's what NAVAM was mentioning. And by the way, we are seeing that same kind of unlock in commercial organizations as well. Even in my prepared remarks I talked about the Fortune 50 global bank that has chosen us as their SecOps platform. They did that not only because we have the most efficient platform and cost and price efficiency becomes really, really important as you're bringing on more and more data, but also because of the AI capabilities that I mentioned. Their incident response team really liked the capabilities like attack discovery and all these AI soc skills that we have built. So we are seeing that unlock. We are displacing incumbents in more and more places. I feel that we're just getting started. So this to me is the momentum starting to build and you're seeing it in crpo. We expect to see that drive our revenue momentum in the next 12 months.
Rob Owens (Equity Analyst at Piper Sandler)
Great. Thank you for the color.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Matt Hedberg (Equity Analyst at RBC Capital Markets)
Great, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. You know, it was great to see CRPO growth accelerate. I think it was 500 basis points to 20%. Yeah, I was looking at your fiscal 27 guidance for subscription led sales growth. It looks like about 16.8 on a constant currency bas a slight deceleration versus I think the 18% you reported this past year. So I guess my question is how should we think about CRPO growing 20% really as a leading indicator? And could that accelerate your path to the 20% sales subscription growth target you had?
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, I think that what you're seeing is that our products are resonating with the customers and that's driving commitments and that's the underlying cause of the crpo and also RPO acceleration and all of that turned into revenue into the next year. And second, we're going into the year with more sales capacity than in 26. So what you're seeing on a sales led subscription comparison is basically a accelerating trajectory for both revenue and sales led revenue from the Q1 guide number progressively upward to the Q4 quarterly revenue growth number as you play that out to reach that annual target number that we gave you. And to your second question of does that put you in track to the 20% growth target? Absolutely. We feel good about the midterm targets and continuing to accelerate from the fourth quarter exit growth rate to the 20% number that we've laid out as the long term or the midterm target. Sorry, got it.
Matt Hedberg (Equity Analyst at RBC Capital Markets)
Maybe just a quick follow up. Are there any significant or meaningful or noteworthy go to market changes that you expect for this year? I know you had those in the past. Just want to kind of understand that dynamic as we go into the year. Thanks again, guys.
Ash Kulkarni
Yeah, no, let me be very clear on this. So you know, the changes that we made about eight quarters ago have settled in very nicely. Like you've seen through this entire past year, really strong sales execution. It's only getting better. You can see it in our CRPO and RPO numbers. We are very happy with the way our go to market engine is working and the way it's structured. So we plan to make no changes this year, just add more sales capacity. And that's something that we feel really good about and that's going to be part of what drives our future growth.
Matt Hedberg (Equity Analyst at RBC Capital Markets)
Thanks, Ash.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Miller Jump with Truist Securities. Please go Ahead.
Miller Jump (Equity Analyst at Truist Securities)
Hey, great. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to come back to the internal evolution that you called out and some of the reduced operational complexity. Like can you give more detail specifically on what segments are seeing the most productivity gains from AI right now and where are you going to be leaning in on hiring for that net headcount ad?
Ash Kulkarni
Yeah, so what I'd say is that when we look at different functions, you know, pretty much every function is taking advantage of AI LED automation. And you're seeing this, you know, you're hearing about this in the industry. We are building a platform that's helping our customers do these kinds of things and we're doing the same thing internally. Everything from, you know, our engineering teams using coding platforms for improving their pace of code development to our marketing teams using AI capabilities for marketing automation, our sales onboarding and enablement, our employee onboarding within finance for doing financial analysis. We are leveraging AI across the board. Now there are various functions such as in sales. You know, enterprise selling is still a task that requires pretty significant interpersonal interactions. And so in areas like sales and our sales capacity and our sellers, we expect to keep adding headcount meaningfully through this year. But then in other functions there might be, you know, the way we scaled in the past is going to be different from how we scale going forward. And so the number of people that we might need to continue scaling and growing the business might be slightly different than what we might have needed in the past. So those are the kinds of adjustments. But I want to be very, very clear, when it comes to our selling capacity, we do expect that that's an area that's going to continue to grow and net. Like I mentioned, like Navam mentioned, that we expect to be net employee headcount positive as we go through FY27.
Miller Jump (Equity Analyst at Truist Securities)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If I could just squeeze in a follow up for Navam. The enterprise success sounds really encouraging, but it does look like there was a little bit of churn in the monthly cloud business.
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
So can you just talk about the dynamics you're seeing in enterprise versus SMB and what are your expectations kind of for the year ahead across those segments? Yeah, it's sales led subscription revenue and that tends to be the area that we're most focused on and that's where the sales team is focused on. So when you think about the growth and the success and the commitments we're seeing there, you're seeing the results of that in the, in the commitment volume we've built in CRPO and the RPO numbers monthly elastic cloud this past quarter grew 3% which is in line with what we've been thinking about and in line with what we've been modeling. We've always assumed that this is going to be a flattish business driven by smaller customer and SMB dynamics. And these are self serve motion SMB customers which tend to be more less of a focus area for us. So we exclude monthly from our core sales led subscription business. The annual cloud business grew very well at 26%. So that's sort of the dynamics you're seeing of roughly a flat monthly cloud business or slightly above last quarter and a nicely growing sales led subscription and annual cloud business.
Miller Jump (Equity Analyst at Truist Securities)
Got it. Thanks very much.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Kingsley Crane with Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Kingsley Crane
Hi, thanks for taking the question one for me. So was encouraged by this Omni V5 release. I think big picture. There's been a lot of talk about multimodal models kind of a few quarters ago and some of the frontier labs have hold back from focusing on multimodal. So I'm curious what kind of demand signals for Omni you're seeing in your customers right now. And then when an existing text customer swaps in Omni and starts vectorizing video audio, how could that affect usage on the platform?
Ash Kulkarni
Thanks. Yeah, thanks for the question. So we are very excited about the Omni models. So keep in mind that these are embedding models and our embedding and re ranking models, that's where we focus as opposed to language models for generation. But in these models, as you can imagine, there is so much information out there that is multimodal in nature. You have PDFs that have graphs and charts in them. You have audio and video where you might in video there might be specific images that you want to extract from it. There's a lot that effectively is multimodal just by nature. This effectively opens the aperture for us. It increases the total tam of the opportunities where we can go after taking that data, vectorizing it and then allowing people to do all kinds of search and analysis against it. So it's not necessarily that it drives, that it consumes more compute. These are very efficient models, but it just allows us to bring more workloads into the picture for customers to use the Elastic platform for. So that's part of what's driving that excitement for us.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Brian Essex with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Alex Isaac
Hi, this is Alex Isaac on for Brian. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about around the FY29 framework that you laid out and reaffirmed in terms of exiting FY27 around FY27, around 17%. How do we think about the bridge from there to the 20% plus growth in 29? And how do we think about where we should be exiting 27 and into 28?
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, so we've laid out the guidance number on a constant currency basis, which I'd encourage you to take a look at. So when you, when you think about where the Q1 guidance number is for FY27 and where the full year guidance is, mathematically it's a step up, it's an implied step up, which we also talked about during our prepared remarks from Q1 to Q4. So you see an accelerating growth trajectory both for sales led subscription revenue and total revenue with Q1 being the lowest growth number and Q4 being the highest growth number from a constant currency perspective. So that Q4 number is going to be higher than the average growth or the full year growth that we've guided to. And that's the exit value that you go into FY28 with. And the confidence we have going into 27 again is around the commitments that we have that turn into revenue. And that's the coverage of revenue that we already have through crpo. And we're entering the year with frankly an adequately large number of ramped reps who have been ramping across 2026. And they are going to continue to add commitments in the same way that they added commitments in FY26. So both those dynamics are going to continue towards 26 through 27, building the constant currency growth rate from Q1 to Q4. And, and that dynamic continues into next year as well. Right. We are continuing to add sellers and we will continue to add commitments. And that's the buildup to the 20% plus sales led subscription revenue mid term target that we've, we've laid out. And all the activity in 26 is just validating that progression through 26 into 27 and to the midterm. So we feel good about the setup in 27 and look forward to updating you as we, as we go along.
Alex Isaac
That sounds great. Really appreciate the color there. And then just a quick follow up on the, you know, on the AI attached side, especially around the 100k plus customers. How does the spend profile look on the AI attached customers relative to non AI customers? And which of the AI products are you seeing the most traction or adoption, especially over the past, let's say year to date as AI models have really accelerated in their ability to act objectively.
Ash Kulkarni
Yeah, so this is. Asher, maybe. Let me answer that one. So as I mentioned in our prepared remarks, we now have in our 100k ACV customer cohort, 600 customers that are using us for AI use cases. And you know, that is, that is a really nice acceleration that we've seen there. That also includes about 40 customers from serverless that we are counting now. You know, our serverless continues to grow in traction and we are seeing, you know, customers come onto that and use us for AI use cases as well. And we are seeing AI being used across the board as we get used as a vector database. We are seeing AI getting used as elastic, being used as a context platform for building agents, using Agent Builder and so on, as well as our AI Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and AI Security Operations Center (SOC) capabilities in our observability and security platform. So we are seeing benefit across all three solutions when it comes to AI. And that cohort, the AI users within our 100k cohort, like that cohort, continues to grow at a faster clip, expand at a faster clip than other cohorts. Like we had mentioned in our financial analyst day, you know, that cohort is growing at roughly 5%, little over 5% faster than the rest of the cohorts and that trend is continuing. So as more of the 100k cohort adopts us for AI, we expect that that's going to be a continuing and increasing tailwind for our business overall.
Alex Isaac
Thanks, Pateli.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America securities. Please go ahead.
George McGregoon (Equity Analyst at UNKNOWN)
Hi, this is George McGregoon on for Koji Ikeda. Appreciate you taking our question. I wanted to ask, really great to see the acceleration in constant currency CRPO growth and RPO growth as well. Could you kind of, maybe qualitatively kind of give some color on between search, observability and security, what is seeing the most uptick? And then as it relates to RPO growth in conversations with customers, how are they kind of sounding now about viewing elastic more strategically and in a longer term roadmap for their own use cases? Thank you.
Ash Kulkarni
Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, and just in terms of the solution mix, we saw growth across all three solutions. Our search and AI continues to be a very strong grower in Q4 security was outstanding in terms of growth. So both of those are sort of leading the charge. But we are seeing growth across all three segments when it comes to the pattern that we see with customers. You know, look, we have evolved our Security and observability solution over the last several years to a point where we are considered to be a strong leader in the categories that we play in. In observability, we lead with log analytics and then we expand from there. You know, we just recently announced our metrics, our new metrics offering which I'm very, very excited about. It's one of the most efficient metrics platforms out there. So in the coming year I expect that that will also contribute. But you know, we are in observability, seeing strength in security. We are displacing incumbents in so many places. I talked about the CIS sym as a service which is seeing a lot of success in government. I gave the example of the Fortune 50 bank as we are maturing and getting stronger and being seen as one of the best leaders out there because of the efficiency of our offering, because of our AI functionality that is very differentiated. We are seeing our customers making bigger bets, we are seeing them make longer term bets. And that is something that basically is a signal to us that they see us as somebody, as a partner that they're going to depend on for many years to come. And that's the foundation of our continued growth. So very excited about that. And it's across the board, it's across all regions, which is also what is very satisfying.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Howard Ma with Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.
Joe DeBartolomeo
Hey, thanks for taking the question. This is Joe DeBartolomeo on for Howard. So just in terms of the sales led fiscal 27 guide, is it fair to assume that within that constant currency number about 500 basis points is from AI contribution which would be in line with your long term guidance. And just how can that number drive upside throughout the year?
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, so the 500 basis points of acceleration from customers using our AI features and AI products continues to be the case both in 26 and 27. So what's happening is more of our customers are using our AI features. That's driving that tailwind to be across a broader set of customers. So I wouldn't say that it's just the guidance number minus 500. It's just a growing proportion of our customers are now consuming at a faster rate because of the features that we're, we're, they're using on our, on our, on our platform. So that's the way I would think about it. You know, we're seeing a very nice steady uptick of 100k customers that are using our gen AI features. We've been disclosing that every quarter and that's been progressively moving up. So that's going according to how we would expect and driving more acceleration across the entirety of our customer base over time.
Joe DeBartolomeo
Got it. Thanks for that color. And just a quick follow up if I may. Are you guys factoring in any meaningful contribution from new products and features in fiscal 27? And just in particular, how big of an expansion opportunity is your revamped metrics engineering among existing customers?
Ash Kulkarni
Thanks. Yeah, so I'll talk about the metrics piece and then I'll ask Nawam to weigh in on how the guide's been constructed. But you know, on the metrics piece, look, the way I think about it is if I just look at the technology that we have built, the metrics backend store that we've built, it's highly, highly optimized for time series data for metrics and you know, as we've benchmarked it against the leaders out there, we find that our solution can not only stand up to but outperform just about anybody in terms of efficiency, in terms of ingest performance and inquiry performance. I'm really excited about the opportunity there. As you know, our go to market motion has always been a land and expand motion. So it's highly likely that we are going to start by expanding metrics uses in our existing log analytics customers. That will probably be the fastest route to market for us. But over time, as you can imagine, you know, we would, we would anticipate that we will start to lead with metrics as well. So it's a big opportunity. Infrastructure monitoring and metrics is a, is a meaningful and large part of the overall observability market that we haven't had much of a presence in. So it is damn expensive for us and something that excites me.
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, on the guidance side it's the organic growth given the product set that we have to sell to our customers. It's not assuming any new products, it's not assuming any acquisitions. So that's the way I would think about the guide and it's just looking at what we already have to sell to our customers.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Ramo Lynchau with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Amy Coggin
Hey guys, this is Amy Coggin on Rainbow. Thanks for getting the question. Navam, can you help us understand how much of the back half acceleration is
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
driven by execution of increased ramp sales capacity and how much of it is driven by CRPO or expected near term closed deals? Just trying to understand the conservatives and embedding in the guide and then maybe how much might require solid execution from ramp sales reps? Yeah, I'll start with the guidance side first and then go to the next question. Philosophically, what I'm giving you, I'm focused on giving you is a credible projection based on what I'm seeing today with the appropriate risk adjustment added to it. And there's the risk adjustment related to consumption, related to fx, related to timing of large deals and mix, and all of those are embedded in there as we provide the guide. As I said before, I feel good about the setup for 27 given the commitment improvements we've seen in 26. So how you should think about it is we have a CRPO number which is going to be recognized over the next 12 months and that's the coverage of the revenue that you have from existing commitments that are just going to be recognized. The cloud commitments in Q4 for example, will be more tail end weighted and self managed will be more ratable upfront. So the back half acceleration, as I said, is a combination of two things. It's your existing commitments ramping and consuming against the commitment volume that they've already committed to. And second is increasing number of reps that are becoming ramped and are contributing. So that's. And the coverage amount on the sales led subscription side is approximately 70%. So the sales capacity increase going into the year is one of the highest we've had compared to historical periods from a growth perspective. But sales execution is tail end weighted because the largest quarters are in Q4. So it's a combination of both coming from both the existing commitments that we've had and the commitments we're going to get in the next few quarters.
Amy Coggin
Great. If I could just squeeze in one more. Just thinking about last year's pricing adjustment, are there any anticipated pricing or packaging changes that might be embedded in this year's guide?
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah. So from a price increase perspective, we've always been adding new features and improving performance of our platform. Given the changes we've made in FY26, we felt confident to to relook at our prices again. So we did a 3% increase for cloud and a 5% increase for self managed. And we make these decisions based on the new features and capabilities we add. And the product is also becoming more efficient that allow customers to reduce cost as well to make elastic a more efficient place to put in their data. So that's sort of the puts and takes of pricing for usage based models like ours. What matters most, and we've said this before, is the net consumption trend over a period of time. In any given quarter, we expect to see the benefit of more consumption pricing and that's offset by optimization and efficiencies that our customers do on a quarterly basis and because of the new product features that we've added to our platform in the past year. So the price increases that we do don't necessarily change revenue in a perfectly correlated way in the same way that a seat based pricing model works, for example. So the underlying usage model, the underlying usage trend remains strong and we've guided Q1 appropriately. Given that usage trend, since this price raise is smaller than what it was last year, we don't expect it to be meaningful on a year over year basis when you think about comparisons.
Amy Coggin
Great. Thanks guys.
OPERATOR
The next question is from Mike Sikos with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.
Matt Kletrion
Hey guys, this is Matt Kletrion from Mike Seacos over at Needham. Thanks for taking our questions. What assumptions are you baking into the fiscal 27 guide around US federal contribution? And is there any way to think about the expected impact from the CISA contract or the FedRAMP authorization?
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I'll start with the US public sector and the federal business. It remains a strong business and we continue to expect that business to strong in 27 as well in the way it was performing in 26. So nothing specifically different about the relative performance of the public sector in 27 was assumed in the business. But we're very pleased with the way the system as a service platform has been adopted through civilian agencies and as Ash mentioned, against that total commitment number, we're continuing to see more and more agencies added and consuming against those commitments. So we're very pleased about that performance.
Matt Kletrion
Very helpful, thank you. And then curious as to what you're seeing regarding cohort expansion rates. Like are newer customers growing as quickly as customers that you landed say six to eight years ago did over their first two years and our older cohorts of customers continuing to expand.
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
Anything you can give on the dynamics of just different eras of customers, so to speak.
Matt Kletrion
Yeah, so the base cohorts continue to be expanding very nicely because of, as Ash mentioned, the normal. The normal trajectory is it's a LAN Upsell Cross Sell motion so that Upsell Cross Sell continues to run as a machine internally with our sales team and you're seeing those cohorts expand year over year as commitments increase and then more features and products are added and more commitments happen. And then you also add your second or third solutions against the initial solution that you adopted. So that machine is driving nicely on the Core land, expand motion. What's increasing is obviously the tailwind related to AI. So insofar as a customer is a AI is using more of our AI features, you see that additional benefit of faster growth with those customers. And we detailed some of that during our financial analyst day.
OPERATOR
Awesome. Thank you.
Jamie
The next question is from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Ash Kulkarni
Hey, this is Jamie on for Sanjit. Thank you for taking the question. Could you just comment on how you view the splunk displacement opportunity today and to what extent that could be an upside catalyst for this year relative to the guidance?
Jamie
Yeah, let me answer that. So the opportunity to displace incumbents. There are several of them that we are seeing our sales teams displacement. There are. These are big markets, you know, when you look at the overall SecOps SIM area, these are large markets and there are lots of interesting things happening because of the pace of attacks increasing significantly and the sophistication increasing, sophisticated increasing significantly. Customers are looking for modern platforms that leverage AI effectively sitting on a data store that is efficient. So all the data that needs to be brought in and analyzed can be done at a reasonable cost. And we are exactly that answer. So we are seeing a lot of success in displacing these incumbents. And you're seeing those in our CRPO numbers. And like Navam and I have said, I'll expect to see those show up in our revenue acceleration over the next 12 months and even beyond that because the market share that these incumbents have is still meaningful. And I believe that this is going to be an opportunity that allows us to continue to accelerate over several years.
OPERATOR
Great. Thank you so much.
Matthew Martino (Equity Analyst at Goldman Sachs)
The next question is from Matthew Martino with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Ash Kulkarni
Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. Ash, maybe just on mcp, you know, you've leaned into making elastic easy for agents to reach through standards like mcp. You launched MCP apps recently. Recently. As more agents pull data that way, how big of a distribution and growth factor do you think that can become? And does being that agent accessible retrieval layer turn into a durable advantage over time or do you see this as sort of table stakes moving forward? I think it's going to be a durable advantage, especially because we are able to not just provide access to data, but we are able to provide smart access to data. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you bring data into elastic, we build very smart indices that allow you to understand exactly what you need and get that information from within our systems very, very quickly. We are adding capabilities that allow you to do that in a distributed and federated manner so you don't have to move your data into a central location. So there's a lot of smarts and sophistication that we are adding. You know, we recently published a blog that showed how you can reduce the token usage cost by 70% by pre computing some of the context that you need for retrieval as opposed to using sort of naive retrieval, augmented generation or RAG techniques. And that's exactly why the advantage that we have I believe is so durable and is only going to continue to grow because data volumes are growing as more agents are being built. The need for not just speed but cost management is going to be incredibly important. And to do this in a way that's predictable, that is cheap, that gives you sort of answers that are accurate is going to be the need. And that's exactly what we do very well.
Navam Wilihinda (Chief Financial Officer)
I really appreciate it all the color there. Navam, I know in the past you've disclosed you know, the AI customers are growing several points faster and I presume a lot of that initial momentum likely came from the search side, but curious whether you're starting to see that AI growth really broaden out with some of the newer AI features you've brought to market on the security and observability side. Thanks.
Matthew Martino (Equity Analyst at Goldman Sachs)
Yeah, I'd say that a lot of the initials initial growth is specifically that 5% growth momentum that we we referred to during financial Analyst day, including what's continuing on right now comes from mostly search. But as you mentioned there's newer AI products that have been penetrating that have been going across security and also observability. So you're seeing the benefits of that across the board. But I'd say the predominant numerically what we've disclosed was predominantly the search side, but we're beginning to see momentum in security. Particularly the selections are because of the AI feature set that we have in the product.
OPERATOR
Thank you both.
Robert Galvin
The next question will be from Robert Galvin with Stifel. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking the question. I had a follow up on the go to market strategy for FY27. A key theme we've been hearing from some other infrastructure peers is that AI selling motion skew much more technical as AI use cases and pipelines build out elastic. Are you seeing a similar need for more technical sales teams and if so, do you have the right team in place or do you need to Change your sales. Org hiring profile in FY27? Thanks.
Ash Kulkarni
Yeah, that's a great question. So you know buyers are reasonably technical. But here's the thing. Elastic. Our platform has always been a technical sale. We sell to development teams that are trying to build all kinds of search applications. We sell to infrastructure engineering teams that are building observability solutions. We sell to security operations and security specialists in the CISO office that are building SecOps solutions. So we have had a DNA ever since the foundation of the company, not just to build a platform that is really optimized for these kinds of use cases for use by technical developers, but also a go to market motion and a selling motion that knows how to target these buyers and sell effectively to them. So the AI motion is very natural for our teams to. We do have a small specialist team that has been focusing on, you know, how to, how to really help our customers get these AI applications off the ground. But it's a, it's a relatively small team and it sort of acts as a set of advisors across our broader field and we are seeing a lot of success with it, as you can see from the commitments.
OPERATOR
Thank you.
Ash Kulkarni
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ash Kulkarni for any closing remarks.
OPERATOR
Thank you all for joining us today. We are entering FY27 energized and ready to drive our momentum forward. The continuous innovation across our platform and the increasing adoption of AI gives us great confidence in our future. Thank you.
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