8X8 Inc (EGHT) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

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8X8 Inc (EGHT 1.40%)
Q4 2021 Earnings Call
May 10, 2021, 4:30 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the 8x8, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year Fiscal 2021 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Victoria Hyde-Dunn, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Victoria Hyde-Dunn -- Investor Relations

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to 8x8's fourth quarter, and full year fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. Today's agenda will include a review of our fourth quarter results with the Dave Sipes, Chief Executive Officer; and Sam Wilson, Chief Financial Officer. Following our earnings discussion David and Sam will share greater details on 8x8's strategic priorities for fiscal '22 and the Company's long-term financial framework. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.

Before we get started, just a reminder that our discussion today includes forward-looking statements about 8x8's future financial performance, as well as its business, product and growth strategies, including the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as they involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from the forward-looking statements, as described in our risk factors in our reports filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made on this call and presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. Certain financial measures that will be discussed on this call, together with year-over-year comparisons in some cases were not prepared in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. A reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to the closest comparable GAAP measures is provided in our earnings press release and with earnings presentation slides, which are available on 8x8's Investor Relations website at investors.8x8.com. Additionally, we posted a set of presentation slides we'll refer to, when discussing our strategic priorities, titled the Business Review. During today's call, we will introduce fiscal '22 guidance and our long-term financial framework. These accompanying slides will be added to build presentation slides and reposted on the Investor Relations website following the conclusion of the call.

And with that I will now turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Victoria. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our fourth quarter results exceeded expectations with both service revenue and total revenue growing above the high-end of our guidance range at 19% year-over-year. Key drivers of growth were strong demand for our integrated UCaaS and CCaaS offering, continued upmarket focus on enterprise and channel execution. We're driving operational excellence throughout the organization and culture that is committed to a CPT mindset, customer first, product first, team first. We've strengthened our cash position and improved operating efficiency becoming non-GAAP Pre-Tax profitable in the fourth quarter and ahead of schedule. And we've crossed an important milestone and have surpassed $500 million in ARR.

Now let me turn to business highlights from the quarter. Let me begin with our channel-first strategy and upmarket focus, which delivered strong results. We had a record quarter upmarket with over 760 customers with greater than $100,000 in ARR a 25% increase year-over-year. Double clicking on this customers with over $1 million in ARR grew over 70% year-over-year and contributed to enterprise ARR growth of 49% year-over-year. We ended the total fiscal year with a record numbers 7-figure and 8-figured TCV deals versus the prior year, and these grew in average total contract value more than 60% year-over-year. These results reflect strong execution across global sales, marketing and channel themes and contributed to our largest quarter of a new deal registrations and pipeline.

Also, we formed a new strategic VAR partnership with Westcon, a global technology distributor. The partnership will enable Westcon to offer 8x8's UCaaS and CCaaS to their enterprise customers across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Our integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platform is a unique differentiator in the market and we're seeing continuing success in the upmarket. Bundled contact center and communications were very strong driving 9 out of our top 10 deals and 75% of upmarket bookings that were $12,000 or more in ARR. ARR from combo customers that is customers who have purchased UC and CC represents over 30% of total company ARR. Additionally, for the third quarter in a row, combo customer ARR grew at twice the rate of market growth. All of our 7-figure TCV deals in the quarter were integrated UCaaS and CCaaS offerings, and this illustrates the importance of having a single vendor for all integrated cloud communications needs.

Second. Turning to customer wins, new logos represented 52% of new bookings and we saw good execution in key verticals such as healthcare, mainly in food and beverage and public sector. Let me highlight a few recent examples. Integrated UCaaS and CCaaS offerings continue to lead the way with notable wins including the DH Pace, a U.S. provider of dock and door-related products selected 8x8's integrated CCaaS and UCaaS product to bring all services under a single vendor. DH Pace can now provide over 2,000 employees with communications, collaboration and engagement capabilities to enhance customer experience.

Another 8x8 integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product win this quarter is DataBank, a leading provider of enterprise class colocation, connectivity and managed services. They chose 8x8 to streamline and standardize their technology usage and provide more than 700 employees with an enhanced connectivity and customer engagement capabilities. In addition, we are seeing stand-alone contact center interest from upmarket customers. A great example is one of the world's leading reinsurers they selected 8x8 CCaaS for 500 contact center agents in the U.S. due to 8x8's enhanced functionality including advanced business insights, speech analytics, quality management among other innovative features.

The public sector continues to drive growth globally, building on strong momentum among municipal governments in the U.K. and a participation of new U.S. states in our NASPO ValuPoint Cloud Solutions contract. Western Downs Regional Council, one of the top 20 largest councils in Queensland, Australia chose 8x8's integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product to centralized previously disparate systems and information. By moving communications to the cloud for 400 employees, the public sector organization has the agility to work remotely without impacting customer or employee experience.

NHS Public Health Scotland, which provides support to the 14 Regional NHS Health Boards further expanded 8x8's integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product to now support over 3,500 employees. Their communication needs were critical to managing vaccination helplines and booking services for Scotland's COVID-19 response and 8x8 rapidly moved them to the cloud.

SLED government agencies in the U.S. are recognizing the need for an integrated cloud contact center and communications. The State of Washington recently joined Alaska, as a second state to offer statewide participation in and access to the 8x8 NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Solutions contract, making it easy for SLED agencies to purchase cloud UCaaS and CCaaS directly from 8x8 or 8x8 channel partners. Additionally, we continue to see existing customers adopt more 8x8 services creating a land and expand opportunity that will fuel future growth. A great land and expand example this quarter is VCA, an operator of more than 1,000 veterinary hospitals in the U.S. VCA's partnership with 8x8 continues to grow now adding 8x8 CCaaS to their 8x8 UCaaS deployment to meet their diverse business needs.

By adding contact center including call center overflow management capabilities VCA is providing it's 28,000 employees with enhanced engagement capabilities. Rock Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health, learning disability and community healthcare services for four metropolitan burrows this U.K. public sector organizations selected 8x8's integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product to enhance the patient support and communication capabilities for more than 3,000 employees.

Testing council is the local authority providing essential community services for more than 270,000 residents in the Liverpool City region following their original deployment of 8x8 CCaaS in 2020, the Council is now deploying services that include new UCaaS and Secure Pay PCI Pal. These will allow Council employees to work freely from any location.

Turning to Voice for Microsoft Teams, we expanded our partnership with Microsoft on two fronts. In March, we launched 8x8 contact center for Microsoft Teams. We are the first vendor in the Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant to have a Microsoft Teams certified cloud contact center solution. We recently launched new 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app, to further extend the Team's experience for users by adding new SMS, MMS and fax capability. Customers appreciate our superior call quality, Microsoft certified contact center integration and additional capabilities we provide to enhance the Team's experience.

As examples, Beam Suntory a premium spirits leader with a world-renowned Bourbon, whiskies, single malt, scotches, tequila and cognac with brands such as Jim Beam added more than 2,500 8x8 UCaaS seats integrated with 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to support their hybrid workforce across the globe.

Our quick implementation and continuous product innovation allowed Beam Suntory, continues to growth its international communication with 8x8. Silent-Aire, hyperscale data center solutions manufacturer turned to 8x8 UCaaS with 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to ensure dependable global communications for offices in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Silent-Aire chose 8x8's direct routing capabilities provide nearly 400 employees with superior global voice communications from any teams' endpoint. Our CPaaS portfolio of APIs and embeddable applications including SMS, chat apps, voice, video and performance monitoring empowers organizations to extend and customize communication that reimagine workflows and customer interactions for enhanced employee customer experiences. Our API offerings are also driving new customer acquisition.

An example of CPaaS augmentation for contact center omnichannel was DMV veterinary center, a 24/7 provider of emergency and specialty veterinary services throughout Canada. They selected 8x8 because our contact center solution, AI and intelligence features together with 8x8's CPaaS capabilities will enhance contact center call flow analytics and reporting. Our SMS API will be used to notify customers who do not want to stay on hold to initiate the chat interaction.

An additional purchase consideration was the fact that our contact center solution is Microsoft certified for Teams. Another CPaaS win with K-Vision, one of the largest TV networks in East Indonesia, who selected 8x8's CPaaS to provide two way customer service communication. With the 8x8 chat apps API, K-Vision is enabling customers to use WhatsApp, to interactive support and service teams for a quick and seamless customer support. Importantly, we placed a premium on innovation in Q4.

We introduced the industry's first integrated cloud phone and contact center solution that supports the communications and customer engagement requirements of multinational operating offices in China, in partnership with China Mobile International. We announced 8X8 Work for Web, which allows 8X8 users to securely communicate, collaborate and engage across almost any device and operating system be an everyday browser without software downloads or plug-ins. We customize video meeting backgrounds enabling participants select an image or blur their background during meetings for maximum privacy control, and we launched the industry's only financially backed, platformwide 99.99% SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.

Finally, we continue to receive industry recognition. We were recently recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketSpace Worldwide UCaaS Service Providers for Enterprise and SMB 2021 Vendor Assessment. We were also named a major player in the IDCs Worldwide CPaaS Service Providers report, and we were awarded a 5-star rating by CRN's and its 2021 Partner Program Guide.

Summarize, fiscal 2021 with a milestone year from which we will leverage the solid foundation we have laid with the integrated contact center and communications we are well positioned to further extend our leadership position with our CPT culture, integrated platform advantage and future growth drivers. I will speak more about this in a few minutes, but let me now turn the call over to Sam, to cover the financial results.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks Dave, and good afternoon. We appreciate you joining us, as we report fourth quarter and full year financial results. We are pleased to deliver results that exceeded guidance, improved operating leverage and achieved profitability one quarter earlier than expected. Overall results were driven by better than expected performance from UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS and the integrated offerings. Total revenue for the quarter was $144.7 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year and above our $138.5 million to $140.5 million guidance. Both service and other revenue performed better than expected.

Looking at service revenue, we generated $133.8 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year and above the $130.8 million to $131.8 million guidance. Total ARR was $518 million at quarter-end, an increase of 22% year-over-year. Our continued movement upmarket into larger enterprises and strategic investments in the channel and product innovation are delivering strong results. Fourth quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 61.2%, a 150 basis point sequential improvement and driven by improvement in both service margin and other margin.

Non-GAAP service margin increased 120 basis points over the prior quarter to 67.2%. Non-GAAP other margin came in at minus 12.5% for the quarter, a large improvement from the minus 50.8% a year ago and sequentially improved from minus 25.6%. Key drivers were continued growth in our professional services and the flex hardware rental program.

Turning to fourth quarter non-GAAP operating expenses, we continue to align the business to drive both improved execution and efficiency. Total non-GAAP operating expenses were 61% of revenue with sequential growth in both sales and marketing and R&D. Now that we are profitable, we will invest more next year in sales capacity, marketing demand generation and product development, total non-GAAP operating expenses were up about 5% year-over-year, while total revenue grew 19% year-over-year, a reflection of greater spending discipline.

We expect the delta between revenue growth and opex growth to narrow over time. As I mentioned earlier, we turned profitable one quarter earlier than expected with non-GAAP pre-tax profit of $70,000 and positive non-GAAP operating profit. This is better than our non-GAAP pre-tax guidance for an $800,000 loss.

Turning to the balance sheet, total cash and investments excluding restricted cash was $152.9 million. This was an increase of $0.4 million quarter-over-quarter partially driven by several one-time items the largest being $6.4 million operating cash inflow from the lease assignment related to our prior office location. We are pleased to be growing cash on our balance sheet quarter-over-quarter. I am proud to report that cash from operations was positive for the quarter. The team has put in a lot of hard work to make this happen.

Cash and investments balance was also above our expectation of $148 million, as collections remained robust and billing contracts in advance of service delivery both helped grow cash. For the fourth quarter, RPO was approximately $500 million, up from $270 million in the year ago period or nearly 85% year-over-year. Approximately $100 million of the year-over-year increase was driven by a policy change from including obligations with terms greater than one year to one year and greater, to more accurately reflect customers under contract and more closely align with industry convention. The remaining $130 million was due to growing the business. This concludes my prepared remarks for the fourth quarter.

Now let me turn the call over to Dave, to discuss strategic priorities for the companies. I'll then circle back with first quarter and full year 2022 guidance and commentary about our long-term financial framework. Dave?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Sam. We, 8x8 reported strong results today, and crossed a very significant milestone of $0.5 billion in ARR and impressive fee not many SaaS companies have ever achieved. Now is the time to look forward and set our sights higher as we've build a path to a billion dollar plus business, enjoying even more rarified air and a very select group of SaaS companies. What has gotten us to $0.5 billion won't survive alone to get us to our next milestone. We will need to build upon our success and add additional capabilities and additional muscle. We have already started down this path aggressively, and yet we have a lot more to do in the coming quarters and years.

We have already added new key team members change the way we organize, coordinate and attack initiatives as well as emphasizing the culture of putting the customer first. The excitement and energy internally is powerful as we begin these endeavors. Today, I'd like to share with you, our investors, what we're doing differently to build the next great profitable $1 billion SaaS business.

I came to 8x8, as an industry veteran because I could see the tremendous potential and the huge market demand for 8x8's unique offering, and the company's potential to capitalize on this through greater focus, execution and profit in operational rigor. Five months in the original thesis remains true in spades. Let's revisit this now. First, we operate in a massive market with 10s of billions of dollars and market opportunity. Digital transformation has only accelerated with work from home and work from anywhere becoming the norm. Second 8x8 has a differentiated cloud technology stack, which has been consistently recognized and is a key reason I came here.

Third, having an integrated communications platform is resonating the key buyers, as witnessed by our top wins in this quarter. And fourth, we're capitalizing on this market opportunity by reaching through multiple routes to market and enabling partners with flexibility and how they choose to go to market. These combined with operational improvements we are enacting provide a path to building a $1 billion business through profitable growth.

Let's look at this one level down. The total addressable market is undeniably large, no matter how you look at it. Here on this slide, IDC is predicting the cloud communications market to be almost $75 billion by 2023. The largest circle on this chart is the combination of UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS, all segments 8x8 competes in today. Pealing that down one layer, the UCaaS and CCaaS sub segment make up $60 billion of this market, areas where 8x8 has strong product recognition and a decade of experience. Experience that is invaluable and impossible to replicate quickly for single product competitors looking to expand their portfolio.

And breaking that down even further, our check show approximately 25% of that market prefers a single vendor solution across UCaaS and CCaaS, an area where limited solutions exist today and 8x8 is consistently recognized as a leader. This is 8x8's sweet spot within the huge cloud communications market in which we compete, an obvious area to provide greater focus, execution and operational rigor.

Why is this market is so large? The market is so sizable because IT leaders have an immense challenge of delivering effective solutions for an evolving and increasingly more complicated workforce needs. Let's look at the issue. Getting a 360 degree view of your customer has been a long time mantra, as it makes organizations more effective by leveraging the power of information. Wouldn't that 360 view be great, not only for customer communications but also employee communication. However, mega trends are making this harder, they're working against this.

The rise of texting, social, other digital communication mediums and fragmented communications away from a Voice-only world additionally, multiple device and work from multiple locations and operate from anywhere world has further increased the challenge to get a 360 degree view of both employees and customers. This makes a challenging task for the IT leader to provide effective enterprise communication tools.

Cloud communication tools today are helping solve key parts of this puzzle by enabling digital communications and work from anywhere. On the left side of the chart, you see an employee experience of phone, messaging and video, all coming together in one application empowering employee communications. On the right side of the customer experience of cloud contact center with the inbound, digital and outbound, but they've broken the link between the two. A link that historical enterprisewide communications tools provided for our employees. Today, one cloud tool no longer provides that bridge for all employees, and this is not ideal. Not how it used to be in legacy solutions and it puts undue burden on the IT organization to support multiple, disparate solutions that fell to spread information quickly and effectively throughout an organization.

The ramifications are significant, as customer communications are siloed, large organizations only talk to its customers through it's lowest paid employees in the contact center making it difficult to be responsive to changing customers' needs. 8x8's core X Series offering brings these two experiences together and this is where our strategy really comes together. X Series by 8x8 brings employee experience and customer experience together. It frees information out of the call center, unleashes the ability to create great customer experiences and does this with the X integrated solution by building upon a common platform. If you look at the bottom of the slide we provide analytics and AI across the entire workforce.

Additionally, one integrated platform provides stations that are uniform across both save on implementation time and are cheaper to maintain across the enterprise. Furthermore, with the addition of CPaaS these experience can be further customized especially in the contact center with more robust omnichannel possibilities.

One platform powering personalized end user needs, is what's required to enable all employees throughout the organization. If you look at the right on this chart you'd see different end-user apps which access the single 8x8 platform yet provide specialized experience across different personas. We have the 8x8 work app, which brings the core employee experience across the organization, and that's delivered in three different ways provided as a desktop app, a mobile app or web browser app, which works across almost any device or operating system.

Additionally, we have 8x8 receptionist for high volume specialized functions within the enterprise organization and 8x8 contact center for agents. And what is also critical is that we are enabling third-party apps for other employee use cases, such as Microsoft Teams, Salesforce and Google Work. A great example of why this is important is Halfords, a British retailer of car parts camping and touring equipment that has 450 retail stores, 300 auto centers, 10,000 employees. They want to replace on-prem system they used 8x8's UCaaS and CCaaS and across 10,000 employees have 3,500 using Microsoft Teams a very -- in white color back office, and the front line workers they're using 8x8 app and in the contact center they're using Salesforce. Only with one real-time communication platform that enables different end apps continue empower the entire workforce of an organization today.

Additionally, 8x8 is the recognized leader in this area. 8x8 is consistently recognized as -- has been nine times unified communications and service leader and six times contact center as a service challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Only -- and we're the only Gartner Unified Communications as a Service Magic Quadrant leader in the contact center as a Service Magic Quadrant. We own the IP, provide an integrated experience direct X Series with the most seamless integration between UCaaS and CCaaS in the market today.

I often get asked, what can an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS system provides that cannot be achieved with a two-vendor solution? There's many thing, you can see it here on the chart, but first one, we can guarantee high availability and superior quality on a global basis. There is no finger pointing and no gaps. For example 8x8 provides an industry leading 99.99% platformwide SLA that just can't be promise credibly in any two-vendors scenario.

Second, the ability for companywide collaboration not just back office workers but integrating across an organization's front line workers, contact centers, reception and other personas. An example of this is we have at car insurance company that uses 8x8 for UCaaS and CCaaS. They improve in-office customer experience by adding video as a service enabled kiosks that allows clients waiting in a local office to instead interact with video with agents available at other offices to resolve issues faster. This is a way that information is flowing faster throughout the organization.

Our third area is unified admin capability that can't be done through a combination of best of breed solutions. It gives a single source for license management, mix and match user types and a single pane glass for monitoring. Fourth is extensible integrations that allow you to have just one integration with your core applications whether it's CRM, collaboration endpoints or productivity endpoints like Microsoft Teams. Lastly, the ability to bring analytics and AI across the entire organization with real-time reporting three channel analytics across the whole organization all of these capabilities make it possible to deliver a unified employee customer experience, that companies can rely on to exceed their own customer and employee expectations. And remember, this is the way it used to be before the cloud and now the cloud is just catching up.

And so how do we reach this integrated IT buyer? We let them buy, the way they want to the routes they want, and we reach them where they're at. On the horizontal axis at the bottom you see different business sizes, a small business on the left and enterprise is on the right, we reach the smallest of organizations through 8X8 e-commerce. Investments that have been made in the past and allows to redirect future investments and core -- to our core strategic market of mid-market enterprise buyers. And where do we reach those? Mid-market customers have reached through our inside sales and channel relationships and for largest customers our field sales organization works with our channel partners and strategic alliances. Half of our top-10 deals in Q4, were brought to us by channel partners. So obviously, this mix was important.

Our X Integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution solves unique needs and the numbers show it. It represented over 30% of total ARR in Q4, and is growing at twice the market growth rate. Additionally, if you look on the right, we find that buyers, buy our integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product they stay with us longer and have better upsell potential with 33% lower churn. And lastly, they contributed 80% of top deals throughout last year and contributed to 9 of the top 10 deals in Q4.

Greater focus and execution against the segment is the key for lifting the overall growth and effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts. I'll go into the key things we're doing to increase focus and execution to grow our X Integrated solution faster, but first, let me address refinements in our CPaaS strategy. CPaaS, is a small portion of business today, but operates in a quickly growing and attractive category. To drive success in CPaaS, we'll focus on three initiatives.

First, we'll build upon our regional advantage in Southeast Asia, where we experienced a competitive advantage in carrier coverage and quality of service through superior message rate deliverability. We will expand and densify our already significant sales President, as represented on this slide.

Second, we'll pursue selective contact center omnichannel attach opportunities globally, as demonstrated by the win we announced today with DMV veterinary center in Canada, which is utilizing 8x8 CPaaS SMS in addition to 8X8 contact center for digital customer interactions. Lastly, we will wind down our unprofitable wholesale CPaaS business. The business of selling messaging and connectivity to carriers a little to no margin and redirect those resources and focus on our enterprise CPaaS business and X Integrated solutions.

Sam, will cover the topline impact of winding down the $50 million business, but it is a smart thing to do, as it will create greater focus and success in our enterprise CPaaS business without sacrificing any profit or gross margin for the company. This greater focus we're applying to our CPaaS business will improve the long-term growth trajectory of this business allowing it to become a larger and more meaningful contributor to our overall business in out years.

Taking all this together, our focus in fiscal 2022, centers around four strategic pillars. First, we're working aggressively to expand our platform advantage, specifically, the intersection of UCaaS and CCaaS and ruthlessly focusing our R&D investment to enhance the enterprise grade elements of our contact center and maximizing interaction and unique use cases between UCaaS and CCaaS. Second, we will make 8x8, the easiest to do business with and win together across channel, partner relationships by leveraging our differentiated billing models and partner first mentality. Third, we'll drive operational excellence throughout the organization.

I personally know what it takes to develop a highly efficient and effective organization. I think many opportunities for improvement in this area, so we definitely aren't waiting and have already taken numerous meaningful steps with yet more to come. Lastly, expanding and defending our base of 1.8 million paid business users. We have a leading enterprise grade UCaaS product and a leading integrated UCaaS and CCaaS product we should never lose a customer to a competitive product, improving our customer focus, eliminating dissatisfaction triggers will allow us to better capitalize on our tremendous existing customer base.

Let me expand on each pillar. R&D has already been reprioritized and reorganize since I started to focus on the strategic integrated UCaaS and CCaaS buyers needs. Furthermore, over the next 18 months we will 4 times our contact center investment without sacrificing our commitment to profitable growth. Core swim lanes have been created and responsible to join to key areas that will generate enterprise leading CCaaS and UCaaS features and maximize the intersection of the platform.

Focusing on platform capabilities enables us to more efficiently leverage an already well sizable R&D team and patent note allowing us to compete more effectively against larger single product competitors. Results are already bearing fruit, as today we announced an industry first of enabling Mainland China offices a multinational organization. In connection with our partnership with China Mobile International we're able to add Mainland China to our Global Reach program. This brings our Global Reach program to over 43 countries. If you have a China office and you want them on your core corporate communications platform, 8x8 is your answer.

As part of our GTM sales motions, we will leverage partners to win together and create a world-class global partner experience. Channel routes to market represented 40% of total ARR and grew 38% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Between our VAR and agent network we now have over 6,000 channel partners across the globe and a dedicated 8x8 channel team working together. Over the coming quarters, we will reeducate these partners on our integrated UCaaS and CCaaS positioning and ongoing investments.

Additionally, we have geo segments in our inside sales team to better align with the regional nature of our partners. Furthermore, we will enable and feed partners with opportunities to upsell and cross sell our X Integrated solution to upmarket customers and integrate partners into our renewal sales process. Lastly, we are deepening our engagement with strategic partnerships, such as Bell Canada and Virgin Media business, strengthening executive alignment and assigning dedicated farming resources to these strategics.

Profitable growth is a mantra, as we are a scaled SaaS cloud business and we're dedicated to predictable and gradually improving profit performance. In order to drive superior performance, improving overall efficiency and go to market effectiveness is an imperative this is an area that I bring 20 years operational executional expertise to the organization and it starts with leadership and team.

Recently, we announced the addition of a new Chief Marketing Officer, Amrit Chaudhuri a new Chief Customer Officer Walt Weisner, who will will help drive improvements in our marketing efficiency and customer satisfaction and retention and help align the organization to our core mid-market and enterprise IT buyers.

We have also instituted a rigorous OKR process that the company has rallied around, which is aligning the organization around the most critical and leverageable activities exclusively. These improvements will compound over the next several quarters, as we generate momentum toward achieving our strategic goals.

Lastly, a laser focused approach on our core combo prospects will improve over time our sales and marketing efficiencies that can be reinvested in the profitable growth. Our fourth strategic priority this year is defending and expanding the base previously, there has not been enough focus on customer satisfaction. We have prioritized -- we now have prioritized high availability initiatives and are working on primarily resolving customer dissatisfaction pain point. These efforts will pay off greatly down the road. Also we have seen significant increase in stickiness with you see only customers when they adopt our contact center product. So we are ingraining that cross-sell motion across the organization and throughout the customer lifecycle.

Finally, with respect to retention, we're adopting a posture of extreme customer focus throughout the full customer lifecycle from initial contact through sales delivery and all future renewals. We should never lose a customer to competitive solution and should be willing to do what it takes to get every customer happy. Fiscal Year 2022 will be a year of instituting increased strategic focus, operational rigor and of establishing ourselves as the X Integrated market leader.

As we look beyond fiscal 2022, there are also additional drivers of growth that are worth mentioning. First, enterprise expansion will occur, as larger and larger enterprises adopt cloud communication solutions. Actions we are taking today and investments and enterprise grade capabilities will enable us to capitalize on this trend, as we move up market. Second, our investments in contact center will improve the robustness, scalability and completeness of our X Integrated product, which will improve win rates, allow us to tap incremental revenue streams within contact center and improve the attach rate of contact centers to UC-only deal.

Third, our CPaaS business will benefit from the broader adoption of Della Valle for APIs, increased usage from current customers as we grow when they succeed, a natural growth of the dynamic economies that we play within. Additionally, the new additions of our high-value CPaaS offerings such as call monitoring and video meetings provide differentiated high margin growth opportunities.

Lastly, we will steadily expand our global footprint. International revenue represents 27% of total revenue and grew 48% year-over-year. We operate a very strong base of business in the U.K. and have numerous opportunities to leverage success there, including our relationships with pan-European partners to grow into additional European countries.

In order to execute successfully, we will stay focused on three core tenants of customer, product and team. We are aligned to IT buyers and mid-market and enterprise customers that we know value integrated solutions for all the reasons we have discussed. We align our GTM and delivery approach to serve the needs of these customers better than anyone else in the industry. Our R&D prioritization and investments will extend the leadership of our combined offering and will maximize the intersection of customer and employee experience.

Finally, I'm confident in the team we have onboard and I have the experience to drive continuous improvement across the organization. I fully expect these efforts to move us closer to world class benchmarks and every part of the organization. That is my expectation of the team.

It's an exciting time for 8x8. We sit at the intersection a massive market migrating quickly to the cloud with a differentiated offering in which to capitalize on the secular tailwinds. Improvements we are making today will compound over the coming quarters and allow us to more efficiently grow while maintaining a profitable growth mindset. Scaling a SaaS business to a $1 billion plus business while demonstrating profitable growth can be tremendously a rewarding activity. I know, I've done it before and I fully intend to do it again.

With that, I'll turn it over to Sam, to detail the financial path ahead.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

As Dave shared earlier, 8x8 is an amazing company, and we see tremendous opportunities ahead for us. We had many accomplishments in fiscal 2021, and are in the rarified SaaS here with over $500 million in annual recurring revenue. Our upmarket focused enterprise is working, and the number of paid business users continues to grow. I am particularly pleased with our return to profitability and operating cash flow positive, while continuing to grow ARR at healthy rates. Let me share how our financial picture will evolve over the intermediate term and the milestone shareholders should be on the look out for.

The rule of 40 is an important SaaS benchmark for investors measuring revenue growth and profitability. As I mentioned earlier, in fiscal 2021, we focused on returning to profitability putting one leg of the Rule of 40 in place and getting us to mid-teens on this metric. Using revenue growth plus operating margin we expect to exit fiscal 2022 in the mid-teens, fiscal '23 in the mid-20s and fiscal '24 we would like to achieve mid-to-high 30s, with a stretch goal of hitting 40 before we close out fiscal 2024.

This will be driven mainly by improving service revenue growth coupled with mildly expanding profitability. In other words, profitable growth. We are biased toward the growth given the market size, but do not want to run, non-GAAP operating losses. As part of our focus on improving execution we've taken a decisive cleanup measures to focus our operating spend, eliminate distractions and maximize returns. We are phasing out our services we sold to other carriers, known as wholesale CPaaS and repurposing any spending from that customer segment into the core segments described by Dave.

This change will have a direct impact on what we report, specifically the face numbers on the income statement. In 2021 CPaaS wholesale services contributed $15 million in service revenue and essentially zero operating margin. Rationalizing these services will be a near-term 300 plus basis point headwind to service revenue growth rates in fiscal 2022 and is already incorporated into the fiscal '22 guidance, I will provide shortly. We believe this is the right decision to concentrate our resources on our core market opportunities.

Going into fiscal 2022, we are focused on adding demand generation sales and engineering capacity smartly and efficiently to maximize growth and we want to self-fund this. We are making these investments from a position of strength for long-term value creation. We are significantly increasing our investment in contact center and ex-integrated UC and CC solutions, which our estimates suggests are the fastest growing portion of the overall market.

We are adding up market sales capacity for mid-market and enterprise customers and channel investment will continue to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate than we have in the past. Since the typical mid-market deals generally take three to four quarters from lead to closing, we'd expect the first results of this new efficient investments to show up in our upcoming fourth quarter. These two things combined further sharpen our target market as mid-market and enterprise where the LTV to CAC metrics are better. We are very focused on setting the stage for service revenue growth acceleration as we enter fiscal 2023.

We want to grow quickly. We want to be cash flow positive, so we can fund our own growth. We believe this is the best thing we can do for shareholders over the long-term, and we are very focused on these three swim lanes. The first is growing the top line as quickly as we can by building the best integrated UC and CC solution in the market and enabling sales teams to drive new customer growth in this large market opportunity. Second, we established a more disciplined investment framework and a path forward for increased efficiency across the business functions. We expect to see gross margin improvement over time, through our refined GTM focus and product rationalization, and we should show unit economic improvements. Lastly, we are committed to strengthening our balance sheet via self-generated cash flow.

As we enter 2022, we have good sales funnel metrics and continued strong demand for our ex-integrated UCaaS, CCaaS solutions, Voice for Microsoft Teams and CPaaS. Offsetting this is the continued work we need to do around operations. Taking all this into account, we are establishing the following guidance for Q1 fiscal 2022 ending June 30, 2021, we anticipate total revenue to be in a range of $142 million to $143.5 million, representing approximately 17% to 18% year-over-year growth.

We anticipate service revenue to be in a range of $132.5 million to $133.5 million, representing approximately 16% to 17% growth. We are no longer providing guidance for non-GAAP pre-tax loss since we are now profitable. Instead, we believe that non-GAAP operating margin is a better measure of our ongoing financial performance. We anticipate to be operating margin positive in Q1 and for each quarter of fiscal 2022. We are establishing guidance for full year fiscal 2022 ending March 31, 2022 as follows.

We anticipate total revenue to be a range of $595 million to $605 million, representing approximately 12% to 14% year-over-year growth. We anticipate service revenue to be a range of $555 million to $565 million, again representing 12% to 14% year-over-year growth, and we anticipate fourth quarter non-GAAP operating margin to be approximately 2%.

As I mentioned earlier, our fiscal 2022 guidance incorporates exiting non-core services, which were approximately $15 million in service revenue in fiscal 2021. Excluding this amount from fiscal 2021, the service Revenue guidance would have been a range of 15% to 17% or approximately 300 basis points higher. Looking specifically at gross profit growth and ARR growth, we believe a year-over-year growth in these segments should be at least 2 to 4 percentage points higher than service revenue growth. For fiscal 2022 we believe gross profit and ARR growth metrics are good milestones to track our progress throughout the year.

Next, I'd like to provide some context on our long-term financial framework. With the investments we're making in product innovation and once we lap exiting non-core CPaaS services our revenue growth rates should bounce higher. We grew total revenue 19% in fiscal 2021 and believe we can return to 20% or greater revenue growth in late fiscal 2023. That's a goal, not guidance as there is a lot of time between then and now. As revenue growth trends back up, we plan on bringing a marginal portion of that growth to the operating margin line. We are focused on further accelerating ARR in an efficient manner. We also have plans to increase sales and marketing efficiency over time a key theme with investors and the R&D investments will increase as a percentage of revenue to fund innovation and further expand our product differentiation.

We'd like to see operating margins in a 5% to 10% range over the intermediate term and believe longer term say five years out, we can be in a 10% to 20% operating margin company with a relatively high growth rates. We plan to balance our focus on profitable revenue growth while making sure our efficiency of spend is high. We believe 10% to 20% operating margins is the right range while total penetration of cloud communications relative to legacy on-prem systems remains low. Once cloud communications becomes a majority of the business, we will focus more on increasing operating margins.

Lastly, while we are cash from operations positive in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, it was based on several non-recurring items. By the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, we expect cash from operations to be positive on a regular basis and have the objective of becoming free cash flow positive.

The final topic I'd like to discuss is an administrative one, our IR metric sheet. Based on the feedback from discussions we've had with the investor community we will no longer publish and report bookings metrics beginning next quarter and we'll focus only on an annual recurring ARR-based metrics. We believe ARR metrics are a better indicator to measure our business performance.

In closing, we are super excited about the future of 8x8. We have an opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the market within our integrated platform upmarkets focus and multiple growth opportunities all inside of a large total available market. At the company level, we believe our unit economics can improve, our recurring business model is an asset and profitable growth will remain. Thank you to our employees, our customers, our partners and also importantly, you, our shareholders for your continued support.

Operator, we are ready to take questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Tim Horan with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Timothy Horan -- Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. -- Analyst

Thanks guys. On Teams, can you give us a sense maybe just qualitatively of how Voice adoption is going for Teams users? Where do you think they are at this point? How easy is it to adopt many of the different Voice options on Teams? And where are we with contact center with Teams at a high level? And then I guess lastly, does it matter to these enterprises who the legacy PBX provider was as they move through well using UCaaS or CCaaS for Teams? Thank you.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Hey, thanks, Tim. This is Dave Sipes. The -- on Microsoft Teams we've seen good traction in that, this is an area that we were very early in getting a direct connection into Microsoft Teams app. As you saw on our platform we have an agnostic approach of enabling different personas and different applications, Teams is a key one of those, and we have recently been certified as 8x8 Contact Center for Microsoft Teams and the first spender in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service to be certified by Microsoft.

We also continue to differentiate product by putting additional capabilities into the Teams app. We talked about last quarter adding call forwarding rules and count settings, log in and out of call queues and access group voice mail and we're following that up with this quarter, we expanded the app functionality to include to be able to send and receive SMS, MMS and fax. So we continue to create greater capability to those end users that are on that.

We also, you remember the last quarter we talked about Hanover research and a study that we commissioned with them showed that 70% of deployments Microsoft Teams plan on bringing in third-party Voice into that, so we can do that with UCaaS and CCaaS and enable those organizations that are moving to Teams, and even in hybrid environments, which we talked about.

I got Halfords where a number of users are on Teams, but the bulk of the organization is still is not for different reasons. They're just not using that license universally across the organization, whether it's contact center agents or frontline workers or whatnot. So we bring all those additional personas and ability to power real-time communications across the whole organization. So -- and we're seeing them, and we've had record pipeline of Microsoft Teams in the quarter. So we still see tremendous momentum.

Timothy Horan -- Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Great. Thanks. Maybe just start with for Dave. You talked about some changes to the Salesforce or channel training, whether that be kind of geo-segmentation or just better training of the channel on kind of the joint CCaaS, UCaaS product or full portfolio of products. Just -- how long do you see that training or those changes needing to take place? And when do you think you could start to see traction in some of that?

And then maybe a follow-up question for Sam. It grew services revenue almost 20% in the last fiscal year. And I understand the 300 basis point headwind from getting out of some of the Wavecell business, but that would still leave a couple of hundred basis points of deceleration in the fiscal '22 guide. And so just trying to get a sense of is that conservatism? What leads to kind of that deceleration on the services line? Thanks.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Great. Thanks, Meta. I'll answer your first part, and I'll let Sam answer your second part. On education, there's focused strategy on CCaaS and UCaaS customers. It is an area that we're already seeing benefits of that when we look at our pipeline generation. But as you mentioned, it is -- there is a training element that we're embarking upon both for our direct sellers as well as our channel sellers.

I would say that's going to go on and we're going to put full shoulder into that over the next two quarters. And really honing in those areas of that intersection of CCaaS and UCaaS those benefits to customers as well as things like our platform advantage, our 99.99% SLA that we announced today, our ability to bring the things like China, Mainland China. And so there's a lot of different elements there that we're going to the education of the whole organization as well as all our partners.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Alright, and I'll take the second part of that. So let me first, let me give you a bit of a technical answer. So if you look at Q1, Q2 of fiscal '21, they were both influenced by the Wavecell acquisition because we hadn't lapped it yet. So if you look at just the back half of fiscal '21, you'll see 15% to 19% growth about an average of 17% roughly and we guided toward effectively a pro forma 17%.

So core business we expect to be flat to up. Going into next year, if you take out the business because that 17% had some of that growth in it from the non-core services CPaaS and we're expecting 17% growth in the core business. So I hope that math makes sense. If not, I'll certainly walk you through it again.

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

No, that makes more sense. Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Ryan McWilliams with Stephens Inc. Please go ahead.

Ryan MacWilliams -- Stephens Inc. -- Analyst

Thanks for the question. I have a question for Dave, and one for Sam. So, great to hear about the path forward for 8x8 and the opportunities you see ahead in the combo UC-CC deals. As you think about approaching the Rule of 40 in fiscal 2024 and beyond, what do you think the main thing 8x8 needs to get right in order to get there? And then maybe what improvements we can look forward next few quarters? And then for Sam, in your presentation, it said channel ARR grew 38% year-over-year, but it looks like new bookings growth improved just 7%. Can you help us reconcile the difference between those metrics? Thanks, guys.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Thanks, Ryan. On the improvements that we have been selling UC and CC, I think you look across GTM and how we go about educating back to the previous question how we educate our direct sellers, how we educate our indirect sellers. The onboarding of -- the additions of management we've done now. Amrit and Walt, in addition to the currently strong team on the GTM side of improving those motions that we'll be doing over the next several quarters and execution on the GTM side. And then there is the R&D side and the increased -- the refocusing of R&D into UC, CC and the intersection of those two, as well as the increased investment what we're doing on contact center that will improve over time. Win rates attached to UC-only deals and our land and expand model for the installed base, as well as generating incremental revenue streams within contact center.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I'm sorry. And then reconcile the channel bookings versus channel ARR. So channel ARR obviously a cumulative four quarter metric versus the channel bookings, which is a one quarter metric. And if you look at channel bookings at the quarter before we were up 64%, this quarter we're up 7%. So that's an average of 35% really close to that 38% number. Some timing associated with there. So it's really just a bit of mathematics there, there is nothing special.

This is one of the reasons we're getting rid of the bookings numbers in general, because you do see some volatility in them quarter-to-quarter, they have tendency to throw off investors when the reality is over the last two quarters we were up 35% in bookings and 38% ARR really close together.

Ryan MacWilliams -- Stephens Inc. -- Analyst

Appreciate the color. Looking forward to see what's next. Good luck, guys.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Please go ahead.

Matt VanVliet -- BTIG -- Analyst

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. A lot to digest here, but maybe first on sort of the new announcement around the entry into China. What's capitalizing that? Why now? And sort of what's been the impediment in the past? Obviously, a lot of companies, especially in software tend to shy away from some of the issues around the Chinese market. But just kind of curious, what kind of growth rates you might see there?

And then sort of dovetailing off of that, a lot of investment in some of these R&D initiatives that you're talking about, Sam, but just -- I guess from a headcount perspective, how much you're expecting that to be versus some new projects? And just thinking about that longer term. I know it kind of fits in the framework there. Thanks.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Great. I'll take the first part of that, on the expansion of our international presence. Our global reach program which now goes to 43 countries is a very important element for servicing multinational organizations that want to bring all their employees onto one platform, and servicing all under offices globally to do that. It is an area where there is a lot of demand for many of the largest countries.

China is an obvious one, where every multinational has a China office, now becomes a potential customer for 8x8 line now, it's our partnership with the hard work that we've been doing to make that happen, as well as partnership with China Mobile International that's enabling us to provide both UCaaS and CCaaS and the first provider that into Mainland China. And this is an area we have -- we've always had high demand, we have close to 10,000 seats in deployment today from numerous customers and double-digit number of additional customers in the pipeline that's all really from install base or very new customers, because this is all prior to today's announcement or any end marketing efforts that would go around that.

So we just see it as a very important element in the overall global story, and servicing multinational corporations across all their cloud communication.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Matt. I'm going to change your question just slightly. I apologize, but I really wouldn't call these new projects. I mean one of the things that Dave has done really clearly is focuses down, and so we actually probably have less new projects on the board and we have a lot more direct focus on the projects that we do have. So contact center that he mentioned and core platform technologies that he mentioned.

We're repurposing existing dollars from businesses we're getting out off to fund additional headcount in those areas. So you won't see raw headcount going up a huge amount. It is increasing, no doubt about that as it is in sales capacity demand and demand gen capacity, but a lot of that is being paid for by repurposing of dollars, and that's why you continue to see operating margin improvement in fiscal '22.

Matt VanVliet -- BTIG -- Analyst

Alright, great, thank you. All very helpful.

Operator

The next question comes from Catharine Trebnick with Colliers. Please go ahead.

Catharine Trebnick -- Colliers Securitie -- Analyst

All right, thanks for taking my question. Nice quarter, gentlemen. Two things I want to hit on. One, is a year ago, video was the hot topic on our earnings call, where does that fit in the four pillars? Thanks.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks. Thanks, Catherine. Video is an important element of the employee experience offering and is one core element that we had when we were still you're seeing innovation as we launched blur and virtual backgrounds this quarter. Additionally, we offer video as a CPaaS service and this is a full meetings capability higher-level APIs that go into other products, and that's an additional way that we're playing the video enhancements that go across the Jitsi or as well as a whole 8x8 user base. And additionally finding areas in contact center omnichannel attach is a third area that video is important to our overall platform.

Catharine Trebnick -- Colliers Securitie -- Analyst

Alright. Thank you, I'll save the other one for later.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Catharine.

Operator

Our next question comes from Will Power with Baird. Please go ahead.

Charlie Erlikh -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst

Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. This is Charlie Erlikh on for Will. Dave, you mentioned the pipeline a few times. And I was just hoping to ask, could you maybe compare the pipeline versus where it was a quarter ago and versus where it was a year ago? And in terms of sales KPIs, I'd love to hear also how your win rate has been stacking up in the enterprise, specifically?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. So as we go, and there is one great thing about bringing Amrit onboard, on marketing is a real focus on enterprise pipeline generation. It's an area we've had strong momentum especially when you look at channel, what -- I mean record channel pipeline generation and record number of active channel partners. And back that, if you look even further back over the last three years active channel partners have gone up 10 times in this area, so those are all areas where we've seen increasing momentum and ability to scale our organization.

And Sam mentioned some GTM sales capacity that we're making investments and to capitalize on the pipeline momentum. So that's, that's a key area. As far as focusing our pipeline into our core strategy UCaaS, CCaaS is where we'll see improvement and win rates, as well as investment and contact center that rounds out the robustness and completeness of that product to allow us to close even more CC and UC deals.

Charlie Erlikh -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst

Alright. And then I'd also love to hear what you're seeing on the pricing front. Maybe both in SMB and enterprise? Is there any change in pricing at all or have they been pretty stable overall?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Pricing is something that -- I've been in the business for quite a while and what you normally see is, you have as you move upmarket into larger customers and addition of additional products, you gain some revenue per account advantages. Additionally, as you scale in there you have and over time you have some lower per user on the UCaaS side, but that gets made up pretty much completely by the expansion in the customer size and in the selling and cross-selling of additional products and capabilities.

Charlie Erlikh -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Jonathan Kees with Summit Insights Group. Please go ahead.

Jonathan Kees -- Summit Insights Group -- Analyst

Great, thanks for taking my questions. And I wanted to, I guess commend you guys for laying out the financial framework. I know these are just aspirational goals, but it certainly helps in terms of inspiring more confidence in your fundamentals in the your financial outlook and progress going forward. So my questions are actually on the carriers. That's great, that you got China Mobile. One is see, if we get an update on how Virgin Mobile at least Virgin Media has been progressing in the U.K.? And I guess, do you assume this is going to become a more recurring thing where we're going to get more carriers signing up, and this has become a material part of your channel?

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, It looks. So the China Mobile is helping us with our global reach expansion. Virgin Mobile is a reseller of our product in the U.K. region and Bell Canada, a reseller of our product in Canadian region, and those are areas we're investing in our team that works those accounts for the expansion in those accounts penetration of the 8x8 service, as they go to their seller network. Our routes to market include carriers as those two, in addition to our direct team and our VAR agent and our reseller network. And those are probably the bigger share of go-to-market, and we see expansion across those as China key or shorter term line of sight, as well as faster ROI.

Jonathan Kees -- Summit Insights Group -- Analyst

So, if I may, just a follow-up. So do you -- because I don't know if -- I don't think you could answered my question here. Do you see it's like a more resellers in it, more curious, become more common now with your channel program and your outreach?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

We see expansion of all our indirect channel. Probably what you'll see sooner is what I'm saying is expansion within our agent network in our VAR network. An example of that is the Westcon deal that we announced, which is one of the largest distributors in the U.K. and Ireland that's selling our product in those markets. I would expect to see more of those in the short term, so stay tuned.

Jonathan Kees -- Summit Insights Group -- Analyst

Great. Will do. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Siti Panigrah with Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Siti Panigrah -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Dave, you talked about this massive market opportunity. I guess, I agree with you. And also, your competitors are also aggressively investing both on product and and go-to-market. I'm wondering, what's your view on the competitive landscape? And as you are looking at investment as you talked about, where do you see 8x8 has a sweet spot?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, the cloud communications market is massive, we talked about $75 billion, both UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS we've been operating in UCaaS and CCaaS for 10 plus years with lots of experience curves, team knowledge, feature function capability. The intersection UC-CC has traditionally been a very strong buyer motivation, when you look at legacy solutions that got broken when we went to cloud. We provide that today and there is a very few competitive set when you look at that intersection. And I think where we stand out is having been in that with more experience, more recognized, when you look at partner and the 9 times recognition on UC and 6 times recognition on CC, as well as defining that as our core strategy creates more focus than you'll see anywhere in the market.

And I think those are the elements that we'll leverage to win at that core sweet spot of the market, which is massive in and off itself, estimated $15 million. And as we move more to product suite in the cloud, we'll gain share within the cloud.

Siti Panigrah -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst

Okay. And if I hear correctly, you mentioned differentiated billing models for channel. Could you a little bit elaborate on that?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so we enable both an agency reseller model where we provide billing to the customer, and utilize percentages to the partner channel. Additionally, we offer a wholesale billing model for our VAR channel, which is a way traditional resellers have operated, especially in Europe and that's where we see a lot of traction of that model, but those are two alternative models aren't typically provided in the cloud communication space that we provide both opportunities in an effort to be easy to do business with and support our partners in the way they want to grow the business.

Siti Panigrah -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst

Thank you. Thanks, Dave.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Peter Levine with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Peter Levine -- Evercore -- Analyst

Great, thanks guys for taking my questions, and for the detail on the call. Perhaps, can you unpack the $1 billion target? Can you give us a timeframe on that target? I mean how do we get there, meaning, how much of an emphasis is being baked in from expanding leveraging the channel? And are you factoring in any inorganic contributions? Thanks.

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Alright. Let me, I'll get part of that, Dave, and maybe. So in terms of building our target it's a number that we put out. If you look at our growth rates in the back we're expecting to be about 20-plus percent growth rates here within a couple of years. You should expect that it's within five years is easily achievable and no, we are not expecting inorganic pieces. We reserve the right at all times to be able to use shareholder money wisely to acquire inorganic pieces that we want to tuck into our technology portfolio, but it's not built into the plan. We think we have line of sights. And I just want to highlight though this is not guidance, I'm giving you a rough objective. But we absolutely think it's achievable, and I think we have line of sight for it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Daniel Bartus with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Daniel Bartus -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to also ask about Microsoft. Just at a high level. When you look forward, how much life is there to coexist on top of Teams? Do you think the market will shift more to UCaaS and CCaaS bundling on top of Teams or do you see a long runway for just better telephony and just a UCaaS piece on top of it? Thanks.

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, this is David. Capitalizing on the Microsoft Teams opportunity, it's being used as a core team messaging endpoint. And I think over 115 million active users or something at this point. For enabling real-time communications and Voice specifically, I believe that is an opportunity, definitely for the employee base, the core employee base. We are certified now for contact center, so it is an additional opportunity for agents to utilize. I think you may see -- agents usually operate in a more specialized endpoint environment around things like Salesforce or even the 8x8 Contact Center app, but we will see likely some agents utilizing as a secondary application for Team messaging. So it's important that we enable all users in the organization to operate across one real-time communication platform that 8x8 enables.

Operator

Got it. Thanks for that. Our next question comes from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Adam Kelsey -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC -- Analyst

Thank you. This is Adam on for George. Sam and Dave, you called out within -- with respect to the increased R&D spend the intersection of UC and CC. I was hoping you could provide additional detail on what exactly you're focused on, specifically on the near-term objectives? And if there is any long-term projects you feel like are going to generate great ROI, but just will take some time to get there?

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think we -- I highlighted a number of areas, so this is a great question, we get asked it all the time, but it goes from the most fundamental of having a high availability platform, and we were able to announce 99.99% financial backed SLA across our entire platform. So as you go with the UC-CC sell, that is so much more powerful when you can do that, than if you're partnered or you're going with two separate vendors in that situation.

So that's one key area, there is the cross-employee collaboration especially between things like contact center agents and back office employees and front-office employees that having all on one platform enables. And then things like a integration platform that allows an IT organization to implement more cost effectively and maintain and into the core workflows across the organization. And we're seeing that across a number of our customers as they go and deploy our X Integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution.

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Michael Turrin -- Wells Fargo Securities, -- Analyst

Hey, there. Thanks, good afternoon. Good afternoon, teams. Sam, you just reached breakeven targets. I think we can all understand the calling out -- the areas you're calling out for investment, whether it's CCaaS or some of the go-to-market improvements you're focusing on going forward. But I guess, why show any degree of gross margin expansion at all given -- you kind of hit that initial target in FY'22 versus just the opportunity to drive just a little bit more incremental investment into those areas?

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Well it's a -- I mean, it's a great question. To be fair, we are transitioning from really focused on profitability now to potentially slowing down that profitability increase and really reinvest in dollars. To me, it's just a function of efficiency. As long as we can be incredibly efficient with our investments we'll always make those first, and as long as we remain profitable.

Gross margins are really just an effect of that, we are focused on that. We're focused on improving our margins across the board. One piece of that is our cost to serve. It's a fairly large number, and so its an easy number to attack. So I can pull money out of gross margin then roll that money back into R&D and sales and marketing that becomes much more toward new revenue generation. Both those things are either product differentiation, which drives new revenue or increased sales capacity demand gen capacity to drive new logo additions and cross sell. So really it's for me it's a source of additional dollar funding to drive profitable growth.

Michael Turrin -- Wells Fargo Securities, -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

Duration: 84 minutes

Call participants:

Victoria Hyde-Dunn -- Investor Relations

Dave Sipes -- Chief Executive Officer

Samuel Wilson -- Chief Financial Officer

Timothy Horan -- Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. -- Analyst

Meta Marshall -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Ryan MacWilliams -- Stephens Inc. -- Analyst

Matt VanVliet -- BTIG -- Analyst

Catharine Trebnick -- Colliers Securitie -- Analyst

Charlie Erlikh -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst

Jonathan Kees -- Summit Insights Group -- Analyst

Siti Panigrah -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst

Peter Levine -- Evercore -- Analyst

Daniel Bartus -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Adam Kelsey -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC -- Analyst

Michael Turrin -- Wells Fargo Securities, -- Analyst

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