Progress Software (PRGS) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Progress Software (PRGS 0.39%)
Q4 2021 Earnings Call
Jan 18, 2022, 5:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Welcome to the Progress Software Corporation Q4 2021 earnings call. My name is Daryl, and I'll be your operator for today's call. [Operator instructions] Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] I will now turn the call over to Mike Micciche.

Mike, you may begin.

Mike Micciche -- Vice President, Investor Relations

OK. Thank you, Daryl. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Progress Software's fiscal fourth quarter 2021 financial results conference call. With us today is Yogesh Gupta, president and chief executive officer; and Anthony Folger, chief financial officer.

Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that during this call, we will discuss our outlook for future financial and operating performance, corporate strategies, capital allocation, product plans, cost initiatives, our integration of Kemp, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, and other information that might be considered forward-looking. This forward-looking information represents Progress Software's outlook and guidance only as of today and is subject to risks and uncertainties. For a description of the risk factors that may affect our results, please refer to our SEC filings, in particular, the section captioned Risk Factors in our most recent Form 10-Q. Progress Software assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements included in this call, whether a result of new developments or otherwise.

Additionally, on this call, all the financial figures we discuss are non-GAAP measures, unless otherwise indicated. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP numbers in our financial results press release, which was issued after the market closed today and is also available on our website. This document contains the full details of our financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2021 and the full fiscal year 2021, and I recommend you reference it for specific details. We also have prepared a presentation that contains supplemental data for our fourth quarter and full fiscal year results, providing highlights and additional financial metrics.

Both the earnings release and this presentation are available in the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progress.com. Today's conference call will be recorded in its entirety and webcast -- and a webcast replay will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I'll now turn it over to you, Yogesh.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Mike. Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm very excited to be here today to discuss our results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, the capstone to one of the best years ever for Progress. I will also share some highlights of the full year and then talk about the success of our total growth strategy thus far.

And I will wrap with our outlook going forward. So, let's get started. Following three straight quarters in which we beat our estimates and raised guidance, we delivered another standout quarter. Our fourth quarter results exceeded guidance for all metrics and did so without the benefit of timing of revenue recognition or large one-time deals.

The results reflect the continued success of our go-to-market strategy and a strong demand environment. Our Q4 and fiscal 2021 outperformance was evident across the board in virtually all of our product lines and across all geographies. We benefited from the generally strong economy, as well as from the renewed IT budgets of our customers. For example, a global financial organization significantly expanded its use of Chef, with a seven-figure expansion deal.

And Telerik DevTools close the largest deal in its history. Sitefinity Cloud continue to see increasing adoption, winning customers across industries such as manufacturing, retail, and finance. And WhatsUp Gold took advantage of opportunities presented by customers seeking alternative network monitoring solutions, enabling it to build on the positive momentum from prior quarters. This strong, unprecedented demand and excellent sales execution, along with the contribution of Kemp, built on our growth strength for annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, which grew by over 12% this quarter.

We exited the year with $486 million in ARR. And our net dollar retention rate was again above 100% as customers remain committed to our products and, in many cases, expanded their use. Another Q4 highlight was our acquisition of Kemp in November. Kemp provides us with the best application experience and load-balancing products on the market, along with a long list of great customers, and strengthens our already deep bench of talented engineers and salespeople.

The Kemp integration is off to a great start. And without disrupting Kemp's business, we achieved significant integration milestones in the first 30 days after closing. I'm confident that, as with Ipswitch and Chef before it, Kemp will exceed our expectations on value creation for our shareholders. As excited as we are about Kemp, we're already looking forward to repeating the success of our total growth strategy by executing on our next opportunity to create and return meaningful value to our shareholders.

Let me now share some details about what made FY '21 such a strong and, in many ways, unprecedented year of success for Progress. Throughout fiscal '21, we saw a sustained level of increased demand for our products. Our sales and product teams seized the opportunity presented by this increased demand, enabling us to meet and raise guidance each quarter. Some of this demand was indeed pent up from COVID.

But by offering the best products to develop, deploy, and manage business applications in an ever-changing business climate, we were positioned to capitalize on that demand. And this demand remains strong into the new year. Fiscal 2021 was indeed an extraordinary year. While OpenEdge remains our workhorse and the customers who use it are extremely loyal and sticky, we saw strength across all of our products, with market wins for Chef, DataDirect, Sitefinity, WhatsUp Gold, Telerik DevTools, and others.

None of this would have been possible without our amazing team. The lingering pandemic has been extremely challenging for everyone. But at Progress, our people have worked hard, with dedication and commitment, to excel in the face of ongoing adversity. Our talented Progress team remains highly motivated and highly effective, and I could not be prouder of them for their performance in 2021.

This dedication translated to our being recognized as an employer of choice around the globe. For the first time in our history, Forbes magazine named Progress as one of America's best midsize employers and, again, named us the best company to work for in Bulgaria, where we have nearly 500 employees. The Boston Globe and the Boston Business Journal both put Progress on its -- on their exclusive best places to work list. And we, again, won two Stevies in the 2021 American Business Awards, including a gold award for our corporate social responsibility program.

Let me now reflect a bit on what we've accomplished since we launched our total growth strategy three years ago. We launched this ambitious strategy with the goal of increasing shareholder value through a highly disciplined M&A strategy. At the same time, we committed to strengthening our highly profitable core businesses while remaining intensely focused on operational excellence, with the objective of doubling our revenues in five years. To date, we are ahead of plan on executing our total growth strategy.

Three years into it, our revenue is up approximately 60% and EPS has increased nearly 70%. When we launched this strategy, our target was to sustain operating margins above 35%, with the goal of increasing margins as we scaled up our business through acquisitions. We have continued to exceed 35% margin since then, including achieving operating margins of 40% in fiscal 2020 and 41% in FY '21. Both of these years were aided by COVID's impact on spending, but we're still forecasting margins of 39% for fiscal 2022.

There aren't many software companies who are able to balance between goals of growing revenue and doing so profitably as effectively as we have shown. In addition to growing our revenues and margins, our acquisitions have also made our product portfolio even more robust. Today, we're proud to provide the best products to develop, deploy, and manage high-impact applications and experiences. WhatsUp Gold, from the Ipswitch acquisition; and Flowmon and LoadMaster, which came from the Kemp acquisition, are the best-in-class offerings to manage and ensure the delivery of application experiences.

They provide full-stack observability and automate optimum performance of modern applications. Chef is the leading product for DevOps and DevSecOps, being used by a growing number of enterprise customers to secure and automate the deployment of their cloud and on-prem infrastructures. And the secure and highly performing data movement capability of Ipswitch's MOVEit complements the high-performance, secure, and reliable data access capabilities of our DataDirect offering, enabling customers to access and move data from anywhere to anywhere. Our Telerik and Kendo UI products continue to innovate to lead the market in making it easy for developers to build amazing user experiences.

And OpenEdge continues to power business applications of more than 1,500 ISVs and thousands of other enterprises. Our product portfolio has never been stronger or more relevant than it is today. A key to our total growth strategy remains acquiring great businesses at the right price. We're extremely disciplined in our M&A strategy.

Returns on our two prior transactions exceeded even our most optimistic projections and offer proof points that we can deliver returns that significantly exceed our cost of capital. And we're well on our way with Kemp to achieving the same results. The M&A market remains very promising, and we're actively seeking opportunities to put capital to work, even in the current hyper-competitive market. Our corporate development team continues to vet dozens of candidates each quarter.

We believe the best way to create solid returns for shareholders is to keep making disciplined acquisitions while at the same time leveraging operational synergies among the products, technology, and customers we acquire. Now, moving on to fiscal year '22, we expect demand to continue to be robust. We're off to a good start as our customers continue to invest in their existing Progress infrastructure and have the willingness and the capacity to do so. As always, we are grateful to our loyal customers, to our shareholders, and to our employees for their hard work and dedication, especially in these difficult times.

As Anthony will explain, we remain very optimistic about our future prospects. With that, I will turn it over to Anthony for the financial overview and our forward outlook. Anthony.

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Yogesh. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our call. As I'm sure you heard in Yogesh's remarks, we're very pleased with our performance in the fourth quarter, with results exceeding the high end of our guidance ranges on every financial metric. We're also delighted to have closed the acquisition of Kemp, and we're pleased with the progress of the integration to date.

Turning now to the numbers and starting on the top line, our revenue for the quarter of $143.7 million represents 11% growth over the prior year, reflecting stronger than anticipated demand of our OpenEdge, DataDirect, Chef, and DevTools products. In addition to strong operating results, we close the Kemp acquisition as planned, ensuring Kemp's contribution to Q4 was in line with our expectations. For the full year, revenue of 557.3 million represents 22% growth compared to 2020. This year-over-year growth is comprised of a full year revenue contribution from Chef, a one-month revenue contribution from Kemp, and growth across multiple other product lines, most notably, OpenEdge.

Consistent with our growth in revenue, we also saw growth in ARR throughout 2021, closing the year with 486 million of ARR, which represents 12% growth on a year-over-year basis and 3.4% growth on a pro forma year-over-year basis. And to be clear, the pro forma results include Kemp in both periods. In addition, our net retention rates showed continued strength in the fourth quarter, once again exceeding 100%. With customer retention rates remaining consistently strong throughout the year and with an improved demand environment fueling growth across our portfolio, we're thrilled with our top-line results for 2021.

What's more, as Yogesh mentioned in his remarks, we remain optimistic that some of this increased demand will continue into 2022. More on that in a bit. Turning to expenses, total costs and operating expenses were $92 million for the quarter, up 14% over the year-ago quarter; and $328 million for the full year, up 20% compared to 2020. For the quarter, the increase in costs and operating expenses was driven by an increase in variable expense associated with our top-line overperformance, combined with an increase in our cost base resulting from the acquisition of Kemp.

For the full year, the increase in costs and operating expenses was driven by a full year of activity for Chef and one month of activity for Kemp, as well as increased variable expense associated with our better-than-expected top-line performance. Operating income for the quarter was $52 million for an operating margin of 36%, compared to $48 million in the year-ago quarter. For the full year, operating income was $229 million for an operating margin of 41%. That's an increase of $46 million, or 100 basis points, compared to 2020.

Earnings per share were $0.92 for the quarter, an improvement of $0.01 compared to the year-ago quarter. And for the full year, earnings per share was $3.87, an increase of $0.78, or 25%, compared to 2020. Moving on now to a few balance sheet and cash flow items. We ended the year with $157 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments and approximately 100 million in untapped capacity under our revolving line of credit, for total liquidity of $257 million.

In addition, we had a debt balance of $627 million, which is comprised of our term loan in the amount of 267 million and 360 million in convertible notes. DSO for the quarter was 60 days, compared to 54 days in the fourth quarter of 2020. The increase in DSO was driven by the timing of billings, with much of our billings upside coming very late in the quarter. Deferred revenue was $252 million at the end of the fourth quarter, up 59 million from a year ago, reflecting the addition of Kemp's deferred revenue and an increase in non-Kemp-related deferred revenue.

Adjusted free cash flow was 42.4 million for the quarter, up 4% compared to the year-ago quarter. And for the full year, adjusted free cash flow was $179 million. That's an increase of 26% compared to 2020. We did not repurchase any stock during the fourth quarter.

As a result, at the end of Q4, we had $155 million remaining under our current share repurchase authorization. Now, I'd like to turn to our outlook for Q1 and the full year 2022. When considering our outlook, it's important to keep in mind the following. First, we expect exchange rates to have a negative impact on our 2022 outlook when compared to 2021.

We estimate that the negative impact on our revenue is approximately $7.5 million. And the negative impact on our earnings is approximately $0.03 per share. Next, as Yogesh highlighted, 2021 was a year of meaningful top-line growth across virtually all of our product lines. We recognize that some of the demand driving this growth was pent-up COVID-related 2020 demand, but not all of it was.

So, for 2022, although we believe the pent-up demand has dissipated, we do expect continued strength in the demand environment, resulting in slight growth from our non-Kemp products, even against our unusually strong 2021. Next, our expectations for Kemp and Kemp's contribution to 2022 have remained largely unchanged from our earlier estimates, in that we anticipate a full year revenue contribution of nearly $70 million. This equates to more than $60 million of incremental revenue compared to Kemp's 2021 contribution. Also, as previously mentioned, we expect the integration of Kemp to continue throughout 2022.

As a result, we expect to recognize cost synergies gradually during the year and to exit the year with an operating margin contribution from Kemp of at least 40%. Finally, when developing our outlook, we assumed that some of our expenses related to travel, events, and other in-person activities will increase in the second half of 2022 as COVID restrictions ease and conditions begin to improve. With that, for the first quarter of 2022, we expect revenue between 139 million and 142 million. This includes a full quarter contribution from Kemp, and earnings per share of between $0.83 and $0.85.

For the full year 2022, we expect revenue of between $605 million and $615 million, representing 9% to 11% growth over 2021. This range reflects the previously mentioned negative impact from foreign exchange of $7.5 million. We anticipate an operating margin for the year of approximately 39%, with a slight headwind from the Kemp integration, which will improve through the course of the year, as I've previously noted. We are projecting adjusted free cash flow of between $185 million and $190 million, and we expect earnings per share to be between $3.95 and $4.05.

Again, this range reflects the previously mentioned negative impact from foreign exchange of $0.03 per share. Our guidance for full year EPS assumes a tax rate of 20% to 21%, the repurchase of $50 million in Progress shares, and approximately 44.7 million shares outstanding. Our share buyback activity in 2022 is meant to address dilution from our equity plans. And while we believe that share buybacks and dividends can provide shareholders with a good return, our M&A track record over the past three years has delivered superior returns for our shareholders.

And for that reason, disciplined, accretive M&A is the top capital allocation priority of our total growth strategy. In closing, I'd like to reiterate that we're thrilled with our Q4 performance, the acquisition and integration of Kemp, and our outlook for 2022. As Yogesh outlined, we believe we are well-positioned operationally and financially to continue executing our total growth strategy to create meaningful value for our shareholders. With that, Daryl, let's open the call for Q&A.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

[Operator instructions] And our first question comes from Ittai Kidron. Go ahead, Ittai. 

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Thanks. A couple of questions for Yogesh and Anthony. I'll start with you, Yogesh. Maybe from a big picture standpoint, and you talked about the demand environment still being very strong.

Maybe you could talk about two things. Number one, how is omicron impacting demand, just kind of out of curiosity? It's been -- you know, so many people have been hit by this. I guess it's a question of whether are you seeing customers slow down in the way they move forward just because people are missing, are not around? And then second, maybe you could talk about the revenue synergies in Kemp. I would assume that a lot of the progress there is cost-driven first, but maybe you could talk about the cross-selling opportunities there? How far down the road are you in exploiting those?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Ittai, thanks so much, and great to have you on the call. Regarding the first, you know, question about omicron, right? We actually, right now, are not seeing any meaningful change in the business trajectory. You're right. You know, obviously, lots of people are getting hit.

And when people are out of pocket, that sometimes slows things down. But so far, we continue to see good momentum in our business. There is, you know, nothing in our business that makes us believe that omicron is going to basically have a negative impact or a meaningful negative impact at this point. So, again, you know, who knows which way this goes, Ittai, and how the world, you know, changes and whether it has a more serious impact over the next several weeks or not? But so far, so good.

And I think we're really pleased with what we've seen so far in the first six weeks or so. Switching over to the, you know, Kemp integration and the opportunity to cross-sell. I mean, as you know and as you yourself highlighted, right, our approach to this M&A and the total growth strategy is an extremely disciplined approach where we focus on expense synergies as the primary driver of shareholder value creation. And so, that is where we are heavily focused on.

It is correct. You are right in pointing out that, of course, Kemp products have some interesting synergies in terms of potentially selling together with things like WhatsUp Gold and Flowmon, for example, and so on. But that's much farther down the road. And from our perspective, we want to make sure that we execute on the integration, that we make sure that the people come on board, that the customers continue to move forward, that our retention rates don't suffer, that the business continues to function well while we put together the expense synergies that we need to put together in place as we integrate those businesses.

So, I would say, Ittai, right now, we are not planning any meaningful revenue synergies through cross-sell between those products and ours.

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Got it. Very good. And then a follow-up for you, Anthony. Maybe it's me, but it feels like you certainly are piloting M&A as a potentially a more immediate way for you to continue to drive growth, which makes sense.

I guess my question is market is contracted quite substantially, especially in growth names and in technology. Are you getting a sense that from your discussions with potential targets that there is now a greater flexibility and openness and eagerness, perhaps, is the right word to do something just given how strong the correction has been? Is that already worked its way into the mindsets of potential sellers?

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, you know, it's hard to say, Ittai. You know, we -- I would say that the pipeline continues to be very robust, and we are actively managing opportunities just on a continual basis. And so, there's a lot of activity out there. But yeah, I think, you know, for sure, the correction in the public markets, I think, ultimately, will trickle to some of the private company valuations.

You know, and frankly, we think that to the extent rates rise a little bit, that may tilt the competitive dynamic a little bit back toward us. You know, money has been so cheap for so long, and it's allowed, you know, multiples to really -- to push a lot higher than they had been previously, sometimes to a place where we're not willing to go. But I think, you know, we're feeling pretty, pretty optimistic about, you know, how this may present for us in '22 and beyond.

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Very good. Good luck, guys. Thank you.

Operator

And our next question comes from Ken Wong. Go ahead, Ken.

Ken Wong -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. Yogesh, I wanted to touch on your remarks about the strong demand environment sustaining. I guess, obviously, given what we've seen in the markets with expectations for software companies, do you feel it's broader software in general where demand is holding up or more infrastructure where you guys are focused? Any sense from your conversations with customers, whether or not it is a more of a Progress dynamic?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

You know -- thank you for that question. I actually think that, you know, you're right. I think not every software company is the same, Ken. So, you know, from our perspective and our conversations, they're primarily focused around infrastructure-related discussions, Ken.

And what we're seeing is that the product offering that we now have, which does cover the whole -- the broader DevOps cycle of develop, deploy, and manage, right, including really strong offerings for application experience, phenomenal offering for DevOps and DevSecOps, and amazing products for building and delivering wonderful experiences and applications digitally. I think those -- all those things are really resonating with our customers, and we are seeing demand for that. I think that, you know, when it comes to packaged applications, we really aren't a good, you know, sort of indicator of whether those things are seeing equally good demand or softer demand. So, I can't really speak to that.

But from our perspective, you know, we're seeing demand continue. We're not seeing really other than, as Anthony mentioned, you know, some of the COVID pent-up demand other than that changing. The rest of it, the demand environment seems to be and appears to be really strong. So, we're confident about the way '22 is shaping up.

And I feel really good about our business.

Ken Wong -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst

Got it. And I think you mentioned Chef seen in the largest deal in history, if I heard correctly. Would you associate that with it being part of Progress, and perhaps your sales force and your scale help kind of deliver those kind of higher deal sizes? Or is this more just a large customer came in and, you know, obviously, you know, delivered a large signing? Any color in terms of maybe some of the drivers that got you to that level.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Again, just to clarify, the Chef deal was a very large deal, and it was a seven-figure expansion. But it was not the largest deal in Chef's history. The largest deal in our -- one of our product's history was under DevTools products, which is the Telerik DevTools products for building great UI. But -- which was also another seven-figure deal.

But the Chef, let me talk, though, however, to the crux of your question about, you know, how this came about. You know, one of the things that is happening is we have continued to improve the capabilities of Chef, both in DevOps and DevSecOps. This was a large financial institution. The financial institution has been a user of Chef.

We were able to deliver new capabilities that allowed them to come up with new use cases that they could use across their global enterprise, and thereby, you know, have a really, really large seven-figure deal with us for Chef. Could Chef have done this on its own? I don't know. I think one of the things that we have done is actually put more resources on the product side in Chef than even Chef had by itself. And we've been able to do that because we have shifted a significant amount of those costs to India.

And so, while the costs are significantly less, the actual number of people on the product is significantly greater. And we have been able to serve the enterprise customers' needs, as well as the needs of the open-source community really well by doing so. And I think I mentioned in the last quarter's call that, you know, when we had our Chef con, there was an amazingly positive reaction from across the board, from our customers and the open-source community. So, I think it is that focused investment and that focused effort around solving enterprise customers' problems, as well as, you know, staying focused on the open-source community as well.

That combination has served us really well on Chef, and I continue to be extremely excited about its future prospects as well.

Ken Wong -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst

Got it. And then last, and if I could sneak this one for Anthony. Revenue growth next year, 8% to 10%. And I don't know, ARR is not really an area that you guys guide on, but any way to think about whether or not there are headwinds, tailwinds that would move that number kind of higher or lower than that revenue range that you guys already put out?

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, hey, Ken. It's -- you are correct. We're not guiding on ARR yet at this point. But, you know, we've -- we put out the pro forma ARR numbers each quarter for the past year.

So, you know, in the slide deck that we've -- that we put out with the earnings release, there's sort of an eight-quarter trend in there now. And I guess what I would say is that the trend we've seen generally in ARR has been, you know, some growth up into the right, and it's been generally pretty tightly aligned to what we've seen on revenue. I would say, if anything, revenue can be a little more erratic because we may land some multiyear deals with, you know, some of our subscription products like Chef or DataConnect. But absent that, I would expect the two to move in, you know, relatively consistent trend lines.

Ken Wong -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst

Perfect. Really appreciate the help. Thanks a lot, guys.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Ken.

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks.

Operator

And our next question comes from Pinjalim Bora. Go ahead.

Pinjalim Bora -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Oh, great. Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter. I have a question on future acquisitions, I guess.

It seems like a -- the valuation reset might help you. But as you look forward, I mean, is there any particular area of focus for this year? I mean, observability is one area I guess you have been getting a lot of assets. Is that something that you might double down on or is that kind of the DevTools side? What are, you know, couple of areas that you're looking at?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

So, Pinjalim, you know, the reality is that, you know, across our entire portfolio, we continue to look for opportunities to either consolidate or buy or, you know, find other assets that are complementary to what we have. So, you're right. You know, the -- you know, two out of the three of our acquisitions, whether it was Ipswitch about two and a half years ago or Kemp just a couple of months ago, were both in the observability space. The, you know, Chef was obviously in the DevOps and DevSecOps space.

And so, I don't want to just say that we're looking at only one or two spots. We really are looking at that entire lifecycle from a develop, deploy, and manage, right? So, whether it is additional DevOps, DevSecOps, and related assets and companies that would help there, whether it is application development, front-end development tools, you know, back-end infrastructure, data movement. Data is one of the areas where -- by the way, we don't talk about it too much, but MOVEit that came to Progress through the Ipswitch acquisition has bolstered our offering there. You know, we used to have and still do the world's best, you know, real-time data access solution with DataDirect.

You know, it is literally the gold standard in the market. And then we acquired MOVEit through Ipswitch, and that basically gave us the ability to securely move information in bulk. And therefore, now, we have both real-time access to data through DataDirect and the, you know, bulk moving of data on a periodic basis through MOVEit. So, data is another area which is the foundation of analytics, which is the foundation of really any work that business is trying to do today.

So, we see us continuing to work across all of these areas within the infrastructure software space, whether it is the observability side and then application experience, the delivery side, whether it is the DevOps, DevSecOps piece, whether it is the data access and data integration piece, or whether it is the actual application development and deployment of the platform itself. And there are lots of assets, as you said. And so, there's opportunistic aspect to it as well, Pinjalim, right? Whatever shows up, you know, as long as it makes sense. The key for us, even more than the specific domain, is really about the characteristics related to how strong the product is, what's the customer base like, what's its recurring revenue, how -- what's the retention rate? I mean, as you know, right, we've -- you know, in FY '21, we had a net retention rate of over 100%, right? We want to sustain extremely high net retention rates.

And so, we look for really strong businesses, to be honest, even more so than specific domains.

Pinjalim Bora -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Understood. Thank you for that. One for Anthony on that retention rate point, and I'm a little bit nitpicking, but it's -- your retention rate stood, you know, at an elevated level, pretty good to see above 100%. But sequentially, when I look at it, it would downtick a little bit.

Now, you're layering in Kemp, I guess. So, is that is a function of Kemp? If we remove Kemp, how has been the kind of the retention from, you know, Q3 to Q4 for the core business? If you can talk about that, as well as how has gross churn kind of held up?

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Pinjalim. You know, I think Kemp came over, and as Yogesh mentioned, it, you know, roughly added 40 million of ARR into the mix. And when I look at, you know, where the sort of the movement was, you're right, it was, you know, not much of a movement quarter to quarter.

Kemp might have slightly lower net dollar retention rates than the rest of our business. And, you know, we knew this coming in. We understood that, you know, from a gross perspective, they were probably in the low 80s; and net perspective, were probably in the high 80s. You know, and I think that was very similar to what we saw with Ipswitch when we acquired Ipswitch back in 2019.

And we view that as an opportunity. So, you know, yeah, there might be, you know, an ever so slight tick down when you add Kemp into the mix. But we don't expect that it's going to be dilutive over the long run. We think we're going to be able to drive the net retention rates for Kemp up, you know, to the same levels where Ipswitch and a lot of our other products are.

And, you know, we're -- like Yogesh said, 100% is great. And, you know, we're going to continue to try to make the right investments to maintain that.

Pinjalim Bora -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you very much.

Operator

And our next question comes from Anja Soderstrom. Go ahead, Anja.

Anja Soderstrom -- Sidoti and Company -- Analyst

Hi, everyone, thank you for taking my question, and congratulations on another great quarter. A lot of good questions asked already, but I'm just curious about price increases. Have you done any price increases? Is there room for you to do that or is it all demand-driven for you?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

So, Anja, thank you. And we -- you know -- so, as you are aware, many of our customers -- with many of our customers and their contracts, we have a little bit of a cost of living type of increase -- type of structure built in. But, you know, the CPI type of an increase. But in general, we have not had price increases, and we have not done price increases across our portfolio.

Is there an opportunity to do so? I think, you know, to us, right now, the way we see our ability to continue to drive growth is to offer better products and continue to do better there, serve our customers better and serve a broader need that they have and expand that way. We don't see pricing as a very important tool because, among other things, you know, that's an infrequent tool. You know, you use it some time, it look -- it makes you look good for a short time. But the question is, can we provide sustained growth? But we always look for opportunities.

If we can do that in a sustained way, we're willing to do that. But in general, we have not done price increases, and right now, we're not contemplating those.

Anja Soderstrom -- Sidoti and Company -- Analyst

OK, thank you. And given you serve a lot of different end markets, was anything that stood out to you in terms of any surprises among your customers in a specific end market?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Not really. I mean, I think we've felt really good at the end markets across the board. All our geographies globally did well. Business was strong across all of our products.

I mean, you know, we are seeing strength that is not limited to just one or two things. And so, that's what makes us confident about 2022 as well. So, Anja, nothing specific to highlight. You know, it's a -- I think it is just strong execution on our part, solid demand across the board, a really, really great execution by the Progress team on multiple fronts.

So, you know, steady as she goes.

Anja Soderstrom -- Sidoti and Company -- Analyst

OK. Well, thank you. That was all for me. Thank you.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Anja.

Operator

And our next question comes from Tyler Radke. Go ahead, Tyler.

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

Hi, this is BoYoung Kim on Tyler Radke. Thank you for taking our question. To -- organic growth has been continued to come out on the higher end of where you've been, you know, managing the business. So, I was wondering if you could comment on any presence or expectation of impact from a pull-forward dynamic that seems like you think the strength that you've seen over the past 12 months is really durable.

So, if you could give us any examples that has helped you internally discern what's pull forward versus what's sustainable, that would be really helpful. Thank you.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

So, let me start with a little bit, and then Anthony can potentially add further as well. So, we did not have any pull forward this year. We actually feel really good about the quality of our business this year. What we did have, though, is some pent-up demand from 2020.

So, it was really pushed later from 2020 into 2021 that helped with the organic growth to some degree. But then, in addition to that, we also saw general strong demand. The general strong demand we continue to see and we expect to continue to see, obviously, the 2020 push forward of COVID-related pent-up demand, I think that is largely behind us. So, we've been really pleased with the way our organization has been very disciplined.

We do not do pull forwards, and we did not do pull forwards this year. And as I said, we did not have anything -- I think I even had that in my prepared remarks that we did not have any pull forward or any large deals being, you know, pulled from Q1 to Q4 or anything like that. It has been a really strong, steady, disciplined execution.

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

Got it.

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

I would agree with that.

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

Go ahead, sorry.

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

No, I was just going to say the only thing I would add, though, is that, you know, your guess is dead-on in terms of the 2020 COVID demand that sort of came into '21 earlier in the year. You know, when we talk about sort of sustaining a strong demand environment and seeing some growth ahead in 2022, you know, it's slight growth. And for Progress, even I think slight growth is a pretty big statement. You know, I mean, since I've been here, I don't think the outlook from an organic perspective has been this strong.

In fact, I know it has not been this strong. You know, so for a business that may have been tilting more, you know, on the negative side from a growth perspective for the past couple of years, to be outlooking something even slightly positive is an important move, we think. So, we're optimistic about it.

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

OK, thank you. And then I also wanted to double click on an earlier comment you made about improving net retention rate within the Kemp business. But since you are focused more on the cost synergy side, could you tell us more about where the expected improvement in net retention would be coming from?

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

So, Anja, again, let me start, and then, again, Anthony can jump in. You know, from my perspective -- I mean, if you look at Ipswitch. So, we acquired Ipswitch in May of 2019. So, about two and a half years ago.

Its net retention rate was in the upper 80s. Today, it's well into the 90s and, in fact, mid-90s. And the reason is very simply that we do cost synergies, but we do them around the aspects of the business that are more around, you know, new customer acquisition and, of course, operational efficiencies from the perspective of, you know, leveraging our platform and being able to run it more smoothly. So, Bo, that's the reason why we were able to actually make more investments in WhatsUp Gold and MOVEit.

On the R&D side -- so our R&D investments are usually greater. It may not look like that from a dollar perspective, but it is that way from a people perspective and the number of headcount on it. And so, we do that. And we also have a very strong customer relationship management organization that works closely with enterprises to have them stay with us, to understand their needs, and address those needs so that they will stick with us longer.

So, it's a whole host of effort around both the way we do our go-to-market, which is different, and the way we do our product engineering. And that allows us to increase retention while at the same time reducing costs. And it's a fascinating thing, but it is about paying attention to the details related to what drives customer retention, which is often not the same thing that drives revenue growth. So, Bo, that's what we are focused on.

We continue to focus on retaining customers more than anything else. And we feel confident, right? I mean, we have done this with Ipswitch. We have sustained it with Chef. Chef came with already high net retention rates, so we didn't have to try to push it any higher.

They were phenomenal. But we believe that we will be able to do the same with Kemp. It comes from having that experience with a very similar profile of products, with a similar go-to-market that we have with Ipswitch, as we did with Kemp as well.

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

OK. Thank you very much.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks.

Operator

And we have no more questions at this time, and I'll turn it back to Yogesh for closing comments.

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Daryl. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We couldn't be happier with our performance in FY '21, and we're excited to carry the momentum forward in FY '22. I look forward to talking to you all soon.

Thank you again, and goodbye.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Duration: 51 minutes

Call participants:

Mike Micciche -- Vice President, Investor Relations

Yogesh Gupta -- President and Chief Executive Officer

Anthony Folger -- Chief Financial Officer

Ittai Kidron -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst

Ken Wong -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst

Pinjalim Bora -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Anja Soderstrom -- Sidoti and Company -- Analyst

BoYoung Kim -- Citi -- Analyst

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