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New Relic Inc (NEWR)
Q4Â 2020 Earnings Call
May 14, 2020, 5:00 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, and welcome to the New Relic Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Peter Goldmacher, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Peter Goldmacher -- Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to New Relic's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me today are New Relic's CEO and Founder, Lew Cirne; CFO, Mark Sachleben; and COO and President, Mike Christenson.
Today's conference call contains forward-looking statements. Any statement that refers to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events, including financial projections, financial guidance and future market conditions, is a forward-looking statement.
All information provided in this conference call is as of the date hereof, and New Relic assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. For information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to our earnings release issued today as well as the risks described in our most recent Form 10-Q and subsequent filings with the SEC. Copies of these documents may be obtained by visiting New Relic's Investor Relations website or the SEC's website.
Our commentary today will include non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating our operating results and trends. However, these measures should not be considered in isolation from, or as a substitute for, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported financial results can be found in our earnings release issued today.
At times, we may offer incremental metrics to provide greater insight into our business or results. This additional detail may be one-time in nature and we may, or may not, provide an update in the future on these metrics.
I encourage you to visit the Investor Relations section of New Relic's website to access our earnings release issued today, supplemental materials that accompany our earnings release, periodic SEC reports, a webcast replay of today's call, or to learn more about New Relic.
With that, let me turn the call over to Lew.
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Good afternoon, and thanks to all of you for joining today's call. We are living in unprecedented times. How many times have you heard that in the last two months? It actually is probably the number one salutation for emails I respond to. This is the great truth that we all know and face and struggle and contend with every day, we truly are living in unprecedented times. And as it relates to software, the world needs software more than ever, software is the lifeblood of the world.
And to make that more clear, I'd like you all to take a thought experiment with me. Imagine if this horrible virus, COVID-19, were actually COVID-89. That is, what if this virus hit the world a mere 30 years ago. At that point in time, internet was a virtual unknown to the world. There are a few people like me struggling to get their 28k modems to connect to a BBS or to AOL. But for all intents and purposes, the internet was a toy, a fad and not capable of doing much at all.
There was no online shopping, there was no e-commerce, there was no way to get the supplies you needed delivered to you. There was no way to deliver education online. There was no way for our kids to do the incredible and important work they need to do right now to further their educations at home with the help of a teacher or a resource instantly available online, there was no video conferencing. Telephone calls were very expensive, long distance. And so, a world of COVID-89 would have been a disconnected world that truly would have been paralyzed.
And yet here we are, finding our way through this incredibly difficult and, yes, unprecedented time, in no small part thanks to software. And New Relic's mission is to instrument the internet and help companies of all sizes, organizations around the world deliver more perfect software.
We've always believed our niche mission was noble and important, but now more than ever, it's indispensable. We do have customers in the e-commerce vertical, we have customers delivering online education, we have customers delivering video conferencing, we even have customers that provide games. And yes, in all of those segments, their traffic has spiked in unprecedented and unexpected ways. Without our platform, these facilities simply couldn't deliver the performance and availability that people depend on now more than ever.
We help our customers by delivering a single, scalable observability platform we call New Relic One. New Relic One brings together the performance and operational data our customers need, from their applications, from their infrastructure, from their end-user experience, and from their logs, all in one place. We deliver it in a beautiful UI called New Relic One.
When you think about these websites, and these web applications and these digital applications and what they need to do, it's important to know just how much data, how much telemetry, needs to be captured in order to accurately and completely measure these digital properties. It's not uncommon for a customer to send us a few hundred gigabytes of telemetry a month. That's a pretty small customer by our standards.
We have some customers that send us over three petabytes of telemetry data every month. That data could be coming from logs, it could be coming from the application, it could be coming from the infrastructure. What our customers continually tell us is that they love that they can use New Relic and only New Relic as the single place to put it all at this scale.
We've built NRDB from the ground up to be multi-tenant and work at petabyte scale. Unlike other people who approached this, who built on some very fine open source database technologies, but those databases were all designed to work for a single tenant and therefore need to be individually managed and scaled in a way that didn't anticipate the kind of scale that we need to deliver for our customers today.
It's no secret that fiscal '20 was a very challenging year for New Relic. Anytime a company goes through the difficult but important work of preparing for the next 10 years investing for the future at the expense of doing more expedient things that could help us in the short term, there are trade-offs involved and short-term pain is involved. And to be candid, it's a lot of work to align the company around those tough trade-off calls. So that was the natural course of what happened, going into fiscal '20. And we didn't make it any easier on ourselves.
As I've said in previous calls, I think we could have executed better throughout most parts of the business as we went through that transitional year. So, in that sense, I am thankful that 2020 is behind us and we have made the transition to New Relic One. And we are positioned now to establish ourselves for growth for the next 10 years. I'm very confident in where we are today.
But it all starts with our people and I'm very excited about the new talent we've brought into our Company. We got some remarkable new leaders that have joined New Relic in the recent couple of quarters. Most of you got an opportunity if you came to our Investor Day to see Mike Christenson. Mike is a world-class executive. He's brought a great sense of clarity to the business. He's helped us align and simplify how we think about our business, align the Company around clear goals that everyone can articulate. And he is driving a level of accountability and execution that is exactly what we need to drive the Company forward.
We've also brought a great international leader, Dmitri Chen has come into the APJ team and doing a great job, raising the game for that business. I'm very proud of the work he's been doing. We just brought in a fantastic new Chief Strategy Officer here. His name is Wayne Purboo. He actually was with a customer prior to joining New Relic and I remember that from the moment I went and met Wayne he was the kind of talent I wanted to work closely with and we're thankful to have him as Chief Strategy Officer at New Relic.
And Bill Staples joined us. His impact has been immense as our new Chief Product Officer. I am very confident that Bill is going to move the needle for our Company and help us redefine the industry and take the Company forward to even greater heights.
On the product side, we shipped some incredible new products. The first is New Relic AI. We're very excited to have this in the market after a very successful beta period. New Relic AI is we believe the most powerful, the most complete AIOps offering in our space. Because we have the most telemetry data in our platform from all those metrics, events, logs and traces and because so many customers today rely on New Relic alerts, New Relic AI is the perfect complement for our larger customers to help them reduce the alert noise and do more proactive detection of anomalies and problems to predict production issues before they become outages.
Some of our customers have seen 80-plus percent reduction in alert noise thanks to New Relic AI. That's direct hard dollar savings that our customers can realize at a point in time, where many companies are going to be looking at opportunities to save hard dollars.
The second thing we shipped very recently is New Relic Edge with Infinite Tracing. I'm very excited about this capability. As some of you have asked in the past, about how micro services and containers have impacted how people think about APM. One of the things that customers have been asking for is the ability to, what we call in the industry, do tail-based sampling. What it means is the ability to capture the slowest and the worst and the most -- and the erroneous transactions as they flow through a complex application environment.
New Relic Edge does that, but we do it in a special way that fully -- that very much differentiates us from the competition, because our competitors require the customer to install a piece of software in their environment to aggregate and inspect all those traces and send the slow and erroneous ones back up to their cloud service. That's a complex piece of single tenant software that the customer needs to manage and update, and deal with.
It's 2020, our customers don't want to be managing their management software. New Relic Edge delivers that capability in a multi-tenant service that we manage. We've deployed them in multiple cloud regions so that this logic sits close to where our customers run their software, but doesn't need to be managed by our customers. We believe this is unique in the industry. We believe it's exactly what our customers want. And it shows that nobody, nobody can beat New Relic in our core wheelhouse of APM.
We're hard at work at a very exciting roadmap that I wish I could go into more detail for you right now. But I can tell you this, I've never been more excited about New Relic's roadmap, our opportunity, and our position to do great things than I am today, I truly mean that.
Before I hand it off to Mike, I'd like to share a quote from the great Andy Grove. Andy said this, bad companies are destroyed by crises, good companies survive them, and great companies are improved by them. Now, there's no question that Andy Grove is one of the greatest CEOs in the history of technology, and Intel is truly one of the great companies in the history of technology. And so I think it would be premature for us to make that kind of declaration of New Relic.
I'm biased. I'm a Founder. I believe we're a great company. But here's how I want us to be judged by, is did we do great things during the crisis of 2020 to improve ourselves, I believe we will. Why do I believe that? It really starts with and ends with our people, and our core values. We are bold, we're passionate, we're accountable, we're authentic, and we're connected. And it's during times like this, that core values truly matter. They're not just things you say in an annual kick-off. If you live them every day, then companies do great things in crises.
During challenging times, we ask our people to do incredible things, to deliver incredible results while still trying to be amazing parents and helping their kids with their e-learning and dealing with a dog jumping into the room when they're in a meeting. This is happening to everybody who's working these days. And at times like this, great cultures do great things.
I'm proud to be a Relic. I'm thankful for the great work that you all have done. I'm very excited about where we're headed into the next year.
With that, I'm going to hand it over to Mike.
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Thanks, Lew. Today I'd like to provide an update on four topics. These are topics that you've heard us discuss at our Investor Day in December, and at some conferences and investor events since December, but I'll provide an update based on our results in 4Q.
Those four topics are sales execution, selling the platform, portfolio management and hiring. And I'll start with sales execution.
As most of you know in 3Q that ended in December, we redefined some of our most important corporate objectives for the sales and customer success organization. Those objectives were new ARR, $100,000 customers and renewal yield. In addition, we simplified our customer segmentation, simplified our selling motion, and we did a lot of training on the new product capabilities that we announced last fall. And then finally, we did a reengineering of our renewal management system, what we call portfolio management.
All of that was done in 3Q, and it was very important for us to carry that work through into 4Q. In addition, in 4Q, we ran a series of experiments in packaging our products, pricing and sales compensation. So it was a lot of change in two quarters, but the organization responded quite well to those changes. We felt very good in the beginning of our 4Q, as we went through January and February. But clearly, we encountered a headwind as we moved through March.
Stating the obvious, the quarter would clearly have been better had we not had the pandemic and the beginning of a recession. In some cases, the impact of the pandemic and the recession were clear. We have customers in the airline industry, the hospitality industry, and retail. These customers clearly had lower requirements for application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and analyzing log data than they did before these events hit. Fortunately, these verticals in the aggregate are a small percentage of our business. But in other cases, there was an impact that was less clear. Sales cycles were lengthening as people began working from home. Customers began imposing cost-cutting programs and some were requesting extended and more flexible payment terms.
Having said that, the financial impact on our results is difficult to quantify. What we can say, however, is that the drivers of our business -- the key drivers of our business, digital transformation, cloud migration, and operational resilience are as strong today as they were in 2019, and perhaps even stronger. And we do believe that our improved execution will continue in fiscal '21, as we go through this year and beyond as we pursue our goal of getting to $1 billion of revenue. So that's our sales execution.
So now let me talk about selling the platform. In fiscal 3Q and 4Q, we focused our sales team on selling our platform. The New Relic One observability platform. We measure our success in selling the platform in a variety of ways. Platform customers typically use all three of our important on-ramps, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and log analytics. They also use the other essential capabilities of the platform. They send in data from third-party sources, they build their own custom applications on the platform, it's a programmable platform. And finally, these customers have an agreement with New Relic that provides full and flexible access to all of the capabilities of the platform.
What I can tell you is that our platform adoption, the platform maturity of our customers, was quite strong in 4Q and we feel good about the direction and pace of platform adoption, and we feel good about our sales team's ability to communicate to our customers the value of the New Relic One observability platform.
So next, let me talk about portfolio management. At the end of 4Q, our aggregate ARR is $635 million. As we said, we're in the middle of a pandemic and an economic recession. So some of those customers, the ones who pay us that $635 million a year, are experiencing severe business stress. Some of them are likely to not need to renew their contracts at the same level in fiscal '21, as they did in fiscal '20. This fact shouldn't surprise anyone, and we're not alone in having to deal with these challenges.
What we can tell you is that we have built a portfolio management system that monitors customer usage of our products and customer health. It identifies any risk based on a set of variables and it helps us execute repeatable mitigation plans when we identify risk. So, we work hard to improve that system every day, monitor, identify and mitigate. And we will work with our customers to help them navigate any challenges that they're experiencing when we can work with them to help them with their New Relic relationship.
Our number one priority when we're dealing with these challenges is to keep our customers. Our number two priority is to preserve long-term ARR. The impact of the pressure on renewal yields and the headwinds in new ARR will undoubtedly put downward pressure on reported annualized dollar-based net expansion rate and Mark will discuss that in his section.
So lastly, I'd like to talk about hiring. Fortunately, our Company is in a strong position financially and our leadership team is very excited about our prospects at New Relic. So we're in a strong position to attract exceptional talent to New Relic. Even in a challenging environment, we're still able to hire great people.
In the last few weeks, Jay Snyder joined us as our Chief Customer Officer after a long and successful career at Dell and EMC, and prior to that, at PeopleSoft and Accenture.
In addition, Seema Kumar has joined our Company as Chief Marketing Officer. She comes from ServiceChannel, Salesforce and VMware with an extensive experience in a variety of roles, including CMO, Product Management, Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing.
And finally, we've hired a new leader for our organization in EMEA. This person will be announced at the end of 1Q. So, I hope this commentary in our perspective is helpful to you and now I'll pass it over to Mark, to provide more of the financial details. Mark?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Mike. Let's review the financials before I discuss our perspective on fiscal '21. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $160 million, up 21% year-over-year and above our guidance range of between $154 million to $156 million. ARR ending in the fourth quarter was $636 million, up 16.6%, and in line with the guidance of $635 million in ARR in fiscal '20 we made to you in December at our Investor Day. Total deferred revenue in the quarter was $316 million, up 33.5% and a bit ahead of our guidance for low-30% growth sequentially.
For the fourth quarter, our non-GAAP operating income was $3.5 million or 2% of revenue, compared to $3.8 million or 3% of revenues in the year-ago quarter. A couple of dynamics to note. First, we accrued $1.7 million in bad debt this quarter to allow for the potential that some customers would have a hard time paying their bills. While we aren't modelling those bills to eventually get paid, there is reason to expect that some of them will. Second, and more important structurally, as challenging as the current environment is, we are still investing in the business. We are still very optimistic about the observability space and our ability to grow, so our focus remains on growth over profitability.
Non-GAAP net income attributable to New Relic per diluted share was $0.14 compared to $0.13 in fourth quarter of fiscal '19.
Turning to cash flow. For Q4, cash provided by operating activities was $61.8 million. Free cash flow, defined as cash used in operating activities minus capex and capitalized software development costs, was $51.1 million. As of March 31, we had $805 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments on our balance sheet, up from $737 million last quarter.
For the full fiscal year, revenue was $600 million, up 25% from FY19. Non-GAAP gross margins were 84%, down from 85% last year. Non-GAAP operating income was $25 million, down from $30 million in fiscal '19. Non-GAAP net income attributable to New Relic per diluted share was $0.66, the same as $0.66 reported last year. Operating cash flow was $93.4 million compared to $116 million a year ago, and free cash flow was $28.6 million compared to $67.1 million last year.
In Q4, we added 67 paid business accounts with over $100,000 in ARR to end the year with 993 paid business accounts, up almost 16% compared to a year ago, and up from 926 last quarter. This number represents a mix of new customers coming in at more than $100,000 as well as existing customers crossing that threshold.
This quarter we generated 75% of our ARR from accounts spending more than $100,000 in ARR. That is up from 73% last quarter and 70% in the year-ago quarter. We previously shared a metric with you around percent of business coming from enterprise accounts, but we believe this new metric, based on ARR from accounts that spend more than $100,000, is more indicative of our larger business opportunity as it measures customers based on their spend rather than their size.
Our annualized dollar-based net expansion rate in the quarter was 116%, down from 131% from the year-ago period, but up from 109% last quarter and our best expansion rate for the year.
I want to spend a minute or two discussing gross margin. Gross margin in the fourth quarter was a relatively consistent 84%. However, our expectation is that gross margin will come in for fiscal '21 in the high-70s. This guidance represents the investment we are making in moving to the public cloud as we sunset our data centers. This is a significant undertaking that will take about three years to fully execute, but when the move to the public cloud is complete, we will get back to our near best-in-class gross margins in the low-80s range.
Mechanically, even though gross margins will come down for a period of time, we expect the migration project will have a positive impact on cash flow in fiscal '21 as the savings in capital expenditures will more than offset the reduction in operating income. While we feel it is a good long-term financial decision, the move is primarily driven by strategic considerations as operating in the public cloud is more perfectly aligned with almost every element of our business strategy.
Turning to guidance. While the current environment is challenging, it is also temporary. We believe the opportunity in front of us is large and long-lived, so we are going to take advantage of our large cash balance and continue to invest aggressively in the business. When the selling environment improves, we will be ready with a large and well-trained sales force equipped with some of the most compelling observability technology in the market.
In the near term, however, visibility is poor and what we can see isn't very encouraging. We are working through a challenging sales environment, compounded by the unfortunate reality that a portion of our installed base, primarily smaller businesses, cannot pay their bills. So, it is against this backdrop that we reluctantly rescind our ARR guidance for fiscal '21 and we will only give guidance for one quarter at a time until visibility improves.
Our guidance for the first quarter of fiscal '21 is as follows. We are forecasting revenue of $158 million to $160 million and a non-GAAP operating loss of between $3 million to breakeven. This would lead to non-GAAP net loss attributable to New Relic per diluted share in the range of negative $0.01 to positive $0.04. In addition, we are forecasting the first quarter end of period ARR to grow 13% to 14% year-over-year.
And with that, I'd like to turn it back to the operator for Q&A.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. And we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question today is from Sanjit Singh of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Sanjit Singh -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Thank you for taking the questions, and hope everyone on team New Relic is doing well and the employees are doing well as well. So much to dive into, but I guess the first place to start is what you're sort of seeing in the environment. Mark, if you could sort of walk us through at the end of quarter March, do you see any sort of benefits from customers, seeing a surge and usage of the digital properties? And then as we got through April and May, what are the trends that you have seen since then, if you could maybe just start there?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. So, as we entered the last couple of weeks of March, the end of our fiscal year, obviously, the two most critical weeks a year for us, that's when things really -- slowdown really hit and we did see an impact, I would say an adverse impact on customers who might have been looking at a large deal and decide to hold back. And so we did see an impact there. We also saw an impact on customers very quickly looking to adapt their payment terms to go quarterly billing sort of annual, just in cash preservation mode. So we did see that. And I think it was all pretty new going into -- just into the end of March.
As we entered April, I think those trends continued to a certain extent. Some of our customers are seeing a spike, which is great. And we're there to service -- to serve them. And then as we entered April, I think particularly on the small side, we saw initially in April -- from a cash collection standpoint, April was very slow, I think a lot of that was as companies we're getting used to working at home. just going to monthly bill run instead of weekly things like that. But we did see that come back pretty nicely in early May in terms of people paying their bills and things, so more comfortable in that regard.
Overall, though, I would say we continue to see customers that are cautious about their outlook going forward. And that's our cautious tone as we look out to our first quarter and first half.
Sanjit Singh -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Understood. As my follow-up, I guess would be for Michael or for Lew. We're all going to hopefully get out of this and the overall observability market seems to be doing continue to grow pretty fantastically well. And so with the big improvements in the platform and all of the new product releases, I think what a lot of those are trying to understand is, who is going to be consolidating spend within $100,000 type plus accounts and who isn't? And with the backdrop, I think there was a report around those 30 different monitoring tools at some large enterprise corporations, it seems to us that's probably unsustainable over the long haul. So, I was wondering if you could sort of walk us through the points on why New Relic to be a consolidator of functionality and capability in this space as we maybe go into a more conservative spend environment?
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Sure. I'm happy to speak to that Sanjay. It's Lew. I think we are in a naturally strong position to be the consolidator and it really starts with our platform. The data collection technology that we have, which I think I shared a fair bit about at our Investor Day, but it is -- unlike any of our competitors, we've custom built a multi-tenant database to collect and ingest literally petabytes of telemetry data from some of our customers. So there is no scale that we really can't handle in our customer base of what we foresee for the digital businesses up today in the future.
And the fact that all going into one database regardless of whether it's infrastructure data or logs or APM data, if you want to consolidate, you don't want to consolidate to a vendor that has their different data going into different places, and usually going into databases that were open -- designed to be running in a single-tenant architecture. And so they run at at a performance and at a cost disadvantage. So -- we're going to have more to share on this throughout the course of the year, but we believe that we have an opportunity because of the nature of our data collection capabilities to be the most ubiquitous telemetry data platform for our customers, because it can operate the scale and because we can so cost-effectively deliver that telemetry data capability.
Sanjit Singh -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Great. It sounds exciting and congrats on the strong Q4.
Operator
Our next question is from Sterling Auty of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Sterling Auty -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst
Yeah, thanks. Hi guys. So, looking at your comments that you made in the guidance here for the June quarter, I want to make sure that I understand how you think it's going to manifest itself in terms of the negative impact, in terms of the customers that are paying more than $100,000 versus those spending less than the $100,000. In other words, is the impact disproportionately represented in those smaller customers?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Hey, Sterling. It's Mark. Well, I think it's -- we're seeing it -- we expect it in both. At the low end with smaller customers, I think their business has been disrupted dramatically and they've got to reduce their spend. And so what we're seeing is either they can't pay much or their business gone down and so they'll reduce their spend with New Relic. And then on the high end, you have some situations where customers are reducing spend, other where -- others where deals and projects are just going to take a little bit longer time to manifest themselves. But I think we're seeing it in both segments.
And the good news is that we don't see particularly in over the $100,000 and we don't see people going to zero. We don't see people leaving the New Relic franchise, but we are working with them. We understand they're going through challenges. We want to be a good long-term partners. And so we'll work with them to adjust as their business needs. And as Mike said in the prepared remarks, we're focused on long-term ARR and long-term relationship with these customers, and we want to make sure we protect those. And so that's that the kind of the North Star for us.
Sterling Auty -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst
Okay. And then one follow-up. So that's kind of the net dollar retention what's happening in the current customer base. What are you seeing in terms of the activity levels in terms of being able to fill the top of the funnel on new sales leads? And in particular, what's that experience like on some of the newer solutions that you brought to market over the last six months to nine months?
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
I'll give that a shot, Mark. I would say that again, one of the advantages we do have is we have 16,000 paying customers. So the vast majority of our ARR -- new ARR comes from those existing customers. So top of funnel is great and we did have a lot of new logos under $100,000 and above the $100,000, and we're happy with that. But we're really going to kind of power through this period of time and through FY '21 selling more to our existing customers.
In this quarter, we saw terrific, what I described in my earlier remarks, platform adoption, where people are using all of the three core on-ramps as we call them, APM obviously, but good momentum in infrastructure and terrific momentum with logs. So they're using all of the capabilities of the platform, including the newer capabilities and looking at it as a true platform.
Sterling Auty -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst
Got it. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question today is from George Iwanyc of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
George Iwanyc -- Oppenheimer -- Analyst
Thank you for taking my question. So kind of digging in on the customer side, the year-over-year customer losses, can you give us a sense of how much you feel that is competitive losses? And then how much is just some distressed within the customer base?
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
What I would say is, again, we have 16,000 paying customers, nearly a 1,000 over $100,000. And we want to grow our customer count across that entire range of customers. Obviously, as you heard, we have a real focus on $100,000 customers, but our smaller customers are still New Relic customers and we want them to get value and have a great experience. And we're making investments to improve the customer experience, make it easy to try, easy to buy. And we do want to resume growth at the lower end of that customer size in terms of their spend.
What I will say is, although we've had a, what I would describe as a slight decline in total customers, the aggregate ARR for that decline at the low end is less than $5 million. So although you've had a bit of a drift down, I would expect that to turn around, and it's not a big dollar number in terms of ARR.
George Iwanyc -- Oppenheimer -- Analyst
All right. Just one follow-up question. On the investing front, Mark, can you give us a sense of like the hiring plans, either near term for the next quarter and then for the full year? And how much would be, let's say, R&D oriented versus sales?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. So we as -- eventually, we are investing for growth. We feel like we -- that we have -- continue to have a very good long-term opportunity ahead of us and we want to capitalize on that opportunity. So, we'll be investing. We're continuing to hire. We've hired -- obviously, everything has gone to virtual, but we've been able to do that and fairly seamlessly transition to that. The hiring environment has definitely gone and worn in favor of companies like ours who are hiring. So, we are continuing to do that. We'll be -- we feel like we'll be hiring fairly steadily throughout the year. It's across the board.
Certainly, R&D as a percentage of total spend last year ticked up a bit. We'd like to continue to see that go up. We have a lot of great plans and we want to be able to execute on those on the sales side as well. We want to continue to add capacity. These times will pass and so we want to be well situated as things continue to improve over the latter half of the year, hopefully. And then on the G&A side, we've got to continue to improve our systems and things. And so we're investing best in there as well.
George Iwanyc -- Oppenheimer -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question today is from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Raimo Lenschow -- Barclays -- Analyst
Hey, thanks for taking my question and the extra disclosure. That was really helpful. One for Lew, one for Mark. Lew, can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of customer understanding around observability and that we're now talking APM and infrastructure and logs and how that all needs to fit together versus like the old word of doing everything separately?
And then, Mark, on the ARR growth number that you gave us like, thank you, that was really helpful. And what's the assumption or how do I have to think about the kind of lower upsell versus extra higher gross churn? Like, how do I kind of conceptually, at least, if you can't quantify it, kind of think about that number? Thank you.
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Sure. So, how we think about and our customers think about observability, one simplified way to think about it is, monitoring is the capability that tell you when you have a problem because it watches the same thing continually and then tells you when that thing changes or goes into a bad state. The difference is observability is telling you why you have a problem by giving you the capability to ask questions you didn't know you're going to need to ask. It's like because you're -- in real time, you're trying to solve a mystery, where precious second counts. So you need to have all the data at your disposal, anything that can help you understand why there is a problem in order to prevent an outage or if you haven't figured that you have an outage to get things back up and running as fast as possible, you need an immense amount of data and the ability to ask any question of it in real time and that data could be in logs or infrastructure metrics.
And so that's why we -- customers are kind of saying, I don't want to go between tools. And so we and other companies are kind of advancing the idea that all of these types of data should be provided by one vendor, where we take it a step further is we believe it's not only one vendor, it should be literally in the same database with the same query language so that it's a seamless transition to ask the next question, whether it'd be in logs or infrastructure data or application data. And we believe that's unique and important to our customers.
Raimo Lenschow -- Barclays -- Analyst
Thank you.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
In terms of the question you had on upsell versus churn for Q1, we expect it to be a larger impact on the churn than on the upsell. And as I look at April and now we're midway through May, looking through April and May, are there new ARR that we're seeing is roughly in line with what we saw a year ago. We came into the quarter with good pipelines. But as I said, we are expecting close rates to be impacted. But -- so new, it's been fairly consistent with last year. But on the churn, we are seeing a tick up in churn. And so we think that will be the larger impact as we go through Q1.
Raimo Lenschow -- Barclays -- Analyst
Okay. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question today will come from Rob Oliver of Baird. Please go ahead.
Rob Oliver -- Baird -- Analyst
Great. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks very much for taking my question. Appreciate it. And Peter, welcome to you. My first question is for Mike. And then, Mark, I had a quick follow-up for you. Mike, at the Analyst Day last year, you laid out really detailed plan on we got to focus on $100,000 ARR customers. And the 67 added this quarter was solid and sounds like would have been telling you better had it not been for those last few weeks of the quarter. I know you said you're goal was to get to a 100 at some point kind of as a quarterly run rate. Can you talk a little bit more about -- you mentioned logs were strong. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the platform usage and where you saw particular strength this quarter? And you did mention in your prepared remarks that you had conducted some experiments in terms of packaging and pricing product. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Sure. Obviously, getting customers to spend more than $100,000 or getting new -- net new customers to come in above $100,000, we felt pretty good about that. The gross numbers were good. Logs was a big help. People are really beginning to look at it as a complete platform. They are exploring the full range of capabilities of that platform. They liked the logs capabilities. So that was a help. In this environment, we did have a few customers who are still customers who dipped below $100,000. So that number that we report is a net, and I would say that had we not had a number of customers dipping below the $100,000 that we might have actually gotten a lot closer to our 100 target. So, I'm hoping that sometime over the course of FY '21 as business regains momentum, that we'll be able to get that 100 per quarter in terms of new $100,000 customers. I'm optimistic about that.
The entire organization understands that there is -- as we have observed in working with our customers, there is a fundamental difference. When they get to that level of spend, they are looking to you as a more important technology partner, they are looking to you to provide a broader range of capabilities, and we want to be able to answer that call.
Rob Oliver -- Baird -- Analyst
Great. Thanks, Mike. And then, Mark, for you. Just on the gross margin side, I know you guys aren't guiding to the year, but you mentioned that the trend down to the high-70s. And how should we think about that, is that something that happens kind of right away or how do we think about the trajectory of that impact on the model? Thanks, gentlemen.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
I think it's -- it will trend down over time. The gross margin will trend down over time. This quarter we're looking at probably about a $2 million hit to gross margin and then drop to bottom line. But we expect to save more than that in capex reductions for the data center. So that will be a positive cash impact. And I think that will kind of go down over as the year goes on through Q4. And then we expect high-70s margin in the next couple of years as well as we build out the data center. But there to throughout the course of the project, we do see an actual cash flow improvement over the life of the project as we will be saving more in capex that we'll be spending in gross costs.
Rob Oliver -- Baird -- Analyst
Thanks again.
Operator
Our next question is from Yun Kim of Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.
Yun Kim -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst
Thank you so much. Congrats on a solid Q4. Just following up on the previous question, as you look at your pipeline, do you see continued trends toward larger deals, which should lead to continued increase in average ARR for your $100,000-plus customers? Or do you see that metric kind of stabilize at current levels and then maybe more of the growth will likely come from just simply higher number of $100,000-plus customers? And just real quick on that. What are you kind of seeing around the platform pricing model you introduced last year? Thanks.
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
I would say that we're not expecting huge increases in average ARR per $100,000 customers. Where we are getting the most traction is, getting the distribution across the $100,000's to be more uniform. So we have a lot to fill in around that average, moving people up. I think that, that is from a math point of view, more likely getting more $100,000 customers, moving the ones that we do have up a bit. And our models are basically forecasting that we have more $100,000 customers, but at roughly the same ARR -- average ARR per $100,000.
In terms of -- sorry, the second half of your question?
Yun Kim -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst
Yeah. Just a question around platform pricing and what the trends there?
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Yeah. We have been working on a number of tests, I'll call them, to encourage our customers to explore the full range of capabilities of the platform. And so we tried a few different models for that in terms of how we do business with our customers, what they pay us and how we give them flexibility to experiment and change their consumption of the different capabilities of that platform. I am really happy, as I said in my earlier remarks, with how well that has been received by our customers. And I think that over the rest of FY '21 and beyond, I expect to see many more of our customers and perhaps virtually all of our $100,000 customers having full platform access as they become more comfortable with the platform and its capabilities.
Yun Kim -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst
Thank you so much. Quick question for Mark on the expansion rate. Is there a noticeable difference between $100,000-plus customers versus those below? And what kind of trend that you expect going forward? Do you see higher churn rate or like a downsells to be more material for $100,000-plus customers or churn rate to be more noticeable for those customers in below $100,000-plus? Thanks.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. Yeah. So, we definitely see a distinction between the two. Under $100,000 net expansion rates tend to be quite a bit lower than over $100,000. And so that's -- we expect that to continue. That's one of the reasons we really want to get the customers to over $100,000 that threshold because their behavior really changes. They're more committed. And so lower downgrade numbers as well as better expansion opportunities. And we expect that distinction to be -- to continue, but we're trying to improve both numbers. But obviously, the one that's really driving the ARR and driving our business is the number of the over $100,000.
Yun Kim -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst
Great. Thank you so much.
Operator
Our next question today is from Jennifer Lowe of UBS. Please go ahead.
Jennifer Lowe -- UBS -- Analyst
Great. Thank you. Maybe just to start, we talked quite a bit about the current demand environment and some of the challenges that into with that. But maybe even taking it back a step, I'm just curious what you're hearing from your customers in terms of their willingness to try out new technologies, like some of the things introduced with New Relic One, the types of projects that they're working on, are they rolling out new apps, are they still going through digital transformations that potentially create opportunities for you to instrument those applications shifting to the cloud. What sort of the bigger picture that you're seeing out there and how that sort of trickles down to the demand for your product specifically?
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
This is Lew. There is like a short-term to long-term way to think about this. Long term, this is no -- unquestionably driving new habits for everyone in the world to do more digitally than they have done in the past. And that could be in distance learning, that could be in video conferencing, it could be in shopping. And so -- and we have many of our customers seeing sudden spikes in usage and they're thankful that New Relic is there to help them handle that change in application behavior. But because of the macroeconomic environment is not necessarily turning into instant new business depending on their nature, that company might have more traffic, but may not have corresponding more revenue in some of those cases.
So, we believe that this just further makes our mission and category more important and more exciting, but it doesn't necessarily translate to short-term business benefits. But we think that it does set us up well for long-term success and as companies move to cloud and move to digital.
Jennifer Lowe -- UBS -- Analyst
And maybe just one for Mark. As we talk about customers who are looking to potentially downsize usage as they deal with the issues in their own businesses, how does that actually manifest? Is it a scenario where you get -- they get kind of a three months or six months grace period where they can reduce usage, but the expectation is that should scale back up as hopefully the world returns to normal? Or is it just a reset and it's indefinite in time horizon? What are the mechanics there as customers come to you and others [Indecipherable]?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. It can be any of those. From the spectrum of some customers just want to go from annual to quarterly billing, right, that's an easy one. Some people just want to go from net 30 to net 60, those are pretty straightforward and relatively easy to do. At the other end of the spectrum, we have customers who literally can't pay for six months. And so we'll say, OK, then you make up that payment once you go live and can pay, or at the -- in the worst case, we say, all right, you get to use the product for free for six months and then pay us when you can. When you start up again and we'll put some thresholds around that milestones and things are bound that. Obviously, that's a huge impact to us and it's not something we want to do lightly. But it can be all across that spectrum. And it's really just understanding the customer, understanding their needs, while at the same time being mindful we've got a business to run as well.
Jennifer Lowe -- UBS -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question will come from Rishi Jaluria of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Rishi N. Jaluria -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Hey, guys. Thank you so much for taking my questions, and glad to hear you're all staying safe out there. Wanted to ask a little bit about -- so going back to the churn question. You disposed at the Analyst Day some of the metrics around your $100,000 customers and single and multi-product [Indecipherable] adoption. Just to get a sense for what directionally do churn rates or even expansion rates for that matter, look like between single product customers and multi-product customers etc.?
And maybe alongside that, as Mark you were talking about customers looking for maybe concessions if their business is struggling, at what point does it make sense to start adding kind of new products at discounts for those types of customers to help increase the stickiness? And then I've got a follow-up.
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Sure. So the -- when we look at it, our best customers are customers that use the entire platform. That's our goal. We've been making progress there. We now have -- at the end of March, we had about 30% of our ARR that had access to our full platform by one NRDB or some vehicle or another. That was -- on the other hand, about half our new ARR in Q4 came from customers who did have full platform access. When we look at those customers, they adopt us more broadly, they get a lot more value, they have more users, their churn characteristics are better, their expansion characteristics are better. So, we feel like that's best for the customer and that's best for New Relic. So, we want to drive as many customers to full platform. If we could do it, every one of our customers would have the full platform. And so that's our goal. We've got to reduce the friction, everything from product to the go-to-market engine to make sure that it's easy for our customers to go from a standstill to have you never heard of New Relic to adopting a full platform. And so that's what we're working hard at doing now.
In terms of giving customer -- offering customers that, that's certainly part of the discussion when customers come to us and want to either downgrade or have issues, it's sort of try and get something else done. I'm trying to give them some help, but if you think about it, a customer who is using the full platform is much less likely to come to you and say, you know, I want to reduce the number of hosts I have, if it's just APM. Obviously, they can use that spend on -- they can use spend across all our products, they are much more likely to be comfortable spending that as opposed to just taking a one-off reduction in their spend because of -- they have a point solution. And so that's why we're driving these numbers, and that's why pushing this and one of the key focuses of us as we go through this year.
Rishi N. Jaluria -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
All right. Got it. That's helpful. And then in the guidance, you talk about ARR growth of 13% to 14% for Q1. I apologize if I missed this in the confinement back there or press release anywhere. But what was the ARR for Q1 of fiscal year '21? And then is that based on the old definition of ARR that would place you at $636 million this year or is it based on the new one that will put you at $642 million, the partners and some more [Phonetic] subscriptions. Thanks.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Okay. Sure. So, I will give you the ARR at the end of last quarters for last year for fiscal '20, based on the old definition the $636 million comparable. And that was -- at the end of Q1, so end of June last year, we were $563 million. At the end of September, end of Q2, we were at $585 million. At the end of Q3, we were at $601 million. And at the end of Q4, as we just mentioned, we were at $636 million. So just from an apples-to-apples standpoint, those are the numbers that -- ARR numbers for last year.
We will be coming out with the full reconciliation of these numbers to the new definition of ARR in general, that includes just some partner and support true ARR, and it's in 6-ish-million a year -- actually a quarter, but we'll be coming out of that, but I wanted to give you those historical numbers for perspective.
Rishi N. Jaluria -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
That's really helpful. Thank you so much.
Operator
Our next question is from Robert Majek of Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Robert Majek -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. Thanks. Just following up on the prior question, would be curious if you could just walk us through some of the conversations you've had with customers in this environment as far as R&D goes. What are they asking for in terms of the products and functionality? And how that may have changed now going forward?
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Sure. So our customers -- and most recently, it's been in particular like how can I realize cost savings by standardizing on producing from the number of tools I use, standardizing on one platform that can replicate what I get from many vendors in many tools. So, there's certainly -- there is excitement that we've had logs in the market and our logs offering is very fast and scalable and that the logs are more valuable when they're in the application context and when they're in a separate context is not application aware. So, that's an example of -- hey, I really at the end of the day, as I think about how this markets evolving, I think that as -- we think about lessons like these separate products from mobile monitoring and browser monitoring and application monitoring and infrastructure monitoring, is that we think about observability as just like full stack monitoring all of those things, and we want to serve every engineer make sure they've got the tools they need to ensure that whatever they're working on is bullet proof and delivers a great experience. So that's how we think about. Where we want to take it is, we want every professional engineer to use the whole New Relic platform so that anybody who contributes code that can impact production has the tools they need to make sure that production works flawlessly.
Robert Majek -- Raymond James -- Analyst
That's helpful. Thank you. And just perhaps one more quick one from me. You saw an uptick in RPO this quarter. Can you just give us some more color at some of the ways that are driving your pipeline here?
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Sure. So, RPO generally for us in Q4 does tick up. Our business is such that we do a lot of deals during the course of the year that are co-term type deals. And so we'll get a bump in ARR. Maybe suppose someone doesn't upgrade in December, they'll just commit for three months till their billing cycle in March. And then in March, when they're annual renewal comes, that's when they'll do the full 12 months. So from an RPO standpoint, it's that March deals not in impact really on our revenue, on our ARR, but it does have an impact on RPO because of the 12-month -- gone from a three month prepay basically to 12 month. And so that's one of the dynamics that drives the Q4 number up a bit, relative to other quarters.
Robert Majek -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Thanks a lot.
Operator
Our next question will come from Derrick Wood of Cowen and Company. Please go ahead.
Derrick Wood -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you give us a sense for how much of your revenue comes from SMB and how much from, so to speak, distressed verticals? And then I guess just on the flip side, any verticals you'd call out that you've seen incremental strength from in terms of revenue and bookings, since work from home? And then I've one follow up.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
I guess, what I would say is if you look across our 16,000 paying customers, there are small businesses that spend huge amounts on observability in the $100,000 and at the high end of the $100,000 customer segment. And there are very large companies that pay $25,000 to $50,000 per year. So, you cannot look at our customer base and say the bottom end of the spend is SMB and the high end is big enterprise. Yeah, it's a little bit higher -- a little bit more high big enterprise at the top, but there's big companies through the entire customer base and small companies that spend a lot -- that's spend a $100,000 or more with us. So it's hard to make that distinction. The -- that's the way that I would describe it.
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Yes, on the distressed, so we look at the heavily impacted industries, it's in the 10% to 15% range of our installed base. And then when you look at verticals that are doing well, I would say entertainment and gaming are certainly two that stand out as you can imagine. And I don't think we're alone at seeing that, as people are sheltering in place.
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Subscription, entertainment and gaming, ad supported businesses have had some negative impact.
Derrick Wood -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Right. Right. And then -- so my second question, I guess, more for you Mark, but it could be anyone. But I mean, you guys had really high safe side on calculated billings, you had a big acceleration to do $100,000 customers. Well, your commentary certainly seems kind of more cautious than what the reported results which I see. Did you just touch on kind of the delta between the tone and the results? And may be specifically on billings were there some one-time factors on the deferred side that helped you in the quarter?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
I was wondering who's going to speak. In terms of the billings, we were helped. It was a strong and we appreciate that. So that good. I think after what we've through last year, we went into the quarter with -- just trying to set modest and achievable expectations, so that was certainly one factor. Nothing -- I don't think there was anything unusual. But as we've said in the past, billings -- our billings quarter to quarter fluctuate quite a bit depending on durations and terms and things like that. So it was a good quarter and we're pleased with that.
On the other hand, as we look out this year, we want to be make sure we're realistic about the headwinds that are out there. I think people are starting to -- the economy is starting to open up on the other hand, is it going to be a V, a U, and L, you pick your logo. There's certainly uncertainty about that. And we know we're making progress, we feel like we had good momentum as we kind of came out of Q4. But there's still work to do and we acknowledge that and we want to keep our heads down and go after. We still feel great about the long-term opportunity, but in the near term, we still expect there are going to be some bumps along the way.
Derrick Wood -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Got it. Yeah. Makes sense. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question will from Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead.
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
Hi. Thank you. And I'll ask my questions concurrently. First, Mark, just wanted to get your feedback on how we should be thinking about the reported net retention this year? It was up nicely in Q4, still down year-over-year, but as you balance the economy versus an improving product set, just wondering about how we should be thinking about that. Is it kind of -- should we be thinking flat year-over-year, should it be improving year-over-year, should it be down year-over-year?
And Lew, I'll just go ahead and ask my second question to you, is -- you talked about your AI -- improving AI capabilities at the outset of the call. I was just wondering if you could compare and contrast versus what's out there today, particularly against Dynatrace Davis engine or any other capability. And should we think about that as opening up new accounts or is that additive being able to go ahead and sell to your existing accounts to be additive to your existing portfolio? And that's it from me. Thanks very much.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
So, I'll take the the expansion rate question first. We think there is going to be an impact in the first half on both upsells as well as churn. And so we would point to the first half decline in net expansion rate, and then the second half, we'll see how things are going and give an update later in the year about that.
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
Okay. When you say decline, Mark, you mean from the 116% though, right?
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
I would say from year-over-year.
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
Okay.
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Our Q4 tends to be strong and -- but we'll -- it is somewhat seasonal.
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
Okay.
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
And then on the AI product, yeah, we're excited to have it in the market. Some of you may remember this came out of the acquisition of a great company called SignifAI that we bought about 18 months ago. So, what we think is particularly differentiated about it is in alert noise reduction and the fact that we have many customers that when something goes wrong, they don't get one alert, they might get thousands. And -- but it's -- you can't just assume they're all the same thing. And so you need to kind of use AI to sift through it all and reduce the noise and help you understand what really is going wrong.
We think we've got the strongest capability in that particular area. We also have for many years, it means starting back with radar, which I think they launched in 2015, had technology to automate problem detection and resolution. I think we've under-marketed it. We haven't quite told that story is as well as some other companies, but we do have great AI capabilities to surface what's wrong and interesting and abnormal to our customers to help accelerate their ability to troubleshoot.
And if you -- in a way to kind of look at it is like, at the end of the day, Gartner did issue their Magic Quadrant and also their peer review and we ranked again, I think, for the fourth -- third or fourth year in a row as a number one peer reviewed product in our space as in the APM Magic Quadrant. And that's really important. That's like the user is saying what is your favorite product, and we get the highest marks year after year on that. And a big part of that is, our AI capabilities, such as they are, in combination with our ease of use, make it easier to stop these thorny problems as rapidly as possible. And so we're proud of that accomplishment, but we have much more to do with AI. I'm very excited about the roadmap.
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
Okay. Thank you. Congratulations.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will conclude the question-and-answer session and also conclude the New Relic earnings conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation, and you may now disconnect your lines.
Duration: 67 minutes
Call participants:
Peter Goldmacher -- Vice President, Investor Relations
Lew Cirne -- Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Michael Christenson -- President and Chief Operating Officer
Mark Sachleben -- Chief Financial Officer
Sanjit Singh -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Sterling Auty -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst
George Iwanyc -- Oppenheimer -- Analyst
Raimo Lenschow -- Barclays -- Analyst
Rob Oliver -- Baird -- Analyst
Yun Kim -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst
Jennifer Lowe -- UBS -- Analyst
Rishi N. Jaluria -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Robert Majek -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Derrick Wood -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst
Keith Bachman -- BMO Capital Markets -- Analyst
