Welcome to our webcast for the 2022 Q2 figures. We'll lead in with our disclaimer, and introduce today's speakers to you. That would be our CFO, Jan-Dirk Henrich, and of course myself, the CEO of Exasol Aaron Auld. We'll move to the next slide and kick things off with a summary of the key points. As of the 30th of June, our annual recurring revenues were running at EUR 32.5 million, which represents a 26% growth over the same period of last year. Our revenue grew by 23% to EUR 16.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA came in at EUR -6 million against EUR -15.5 million in the comparable period of 2021, and liquid funds stood at EUR 19.3 million compared to EUR 27.2 million at the end of December 2021. We are proud of the fact that we have now delivered double-digit growth in every single quarter since our IPO in May of 2020.
We were able to book 14 new customers in the first half of the year, of which alone nine came in in the Q2 . We were able to demonstrate significant improvement of profitability as a result of increased top-line revenue and a vastly improved cost structure, while liquid funds were completely in line with expectations. We can look to clearly improve pipeline development as an indication of accelerated ARR growth in the second half of the year. Our net revenue retention rate remains at a pleasingly high level, and we have seen little impact so far from the overall challenging macroeconomic environment. Overall, our long-term growth drivers remain fully intact.
This means that our 2022 guidance in terms of ARR, adjusted EBITDA, and liquid funds remains unchanged, as does our mid-term guidance, which will see us achieve operating cash break-even in the course of 2023 and growing to EUR 100 million of ARR and AAC in the course of 2025. In the first half of the year and in the second quarter in particular, we continue to add a number of impressive customer names to our roster. As is often the case, we are unfortunately not permitted to mention most of their names, a constraint we have to accept, of course. At least we are able to reference one of our most exciting customer wins, which is Credit Suisse, clearly a significant addition for us both in terms of underscoring our ability to win global brand names and, of course, in the upsell potential that this new relationship affords us.
Next to Credit Suisse, our new customers came in from several different industries but, as expected, with a preponderance from our key target verticals of financial services, healthcare, and increasingly transport and logistics. Unsurprisingly, EMEA Central remains the largest regional contributor to our ARR base. However, we can see a positive pipeline trend in the other regions, in particular in the U.S. market. Although the macroeconomic environment has not greatly impacted us to date, we do see decision-makers acting carefully and moving in a more calculated way than previously, which is only to be expected in the current economic climate. We continue to build out ourselves a marketing organization and have made some key hires in bringing on seasoned and internationally experienced people who, we are confident, will be instrumental in taking Exasol to the next level.
Here I'd like to highlight John Knieriemen, who has joined us from Teradata, where he was most recently vice president and general management manager for Teradata's retail, CPG, and travel and transportation business. John brings over 20 years of industry sales and management experience, and we are delighted that he has opted to join Exasol to run our U.S. business. At the same time, we still have a number of open positions, which we are working hard to fill in a very tight labor market. We continue to focus on our partner business and have defined a new joint major global partner recruitment program. In particular, we are pleased with how our partnership with AWS is progressing and will be presenting at the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, where we have also been invited to join the Amazon CEO personally for an exclusive meeting.
We have strengthened our engagement with Gartner and have competed for and won a slot to present at their upcoming symposium in Orlando, Florida, later this month on data science. Naturally, we continue to diversify our product offering, and our development work and go-to-market plans continue at pace. Our new Version 8 is weeks away from being rolled out to first customers, while our innovative autonomous insights technology is planned for introduction at the AWS re:Invent in November. With respect to Software as a Service, we are getting a high level of interest from our customer base and have brought additional customers onto the platform. At the same time, we know that we need to continue to refine the user experience and are currently bringing on additional SaaS know-how in order to augment our current team.
We have also completed our new top-line messaging, and now we're focusing on second-tier persona-based messaging. This will build the basis for targeted campaigns and will also be evident on our newly consolidated Exasol website, focusing on business outcomes rather than a purely technology message. We are also engaged in getting third-party benchmarking projects underway to underline our performance and TCO advantages over the competition. As part of our efficiency drive, we already kicked off several key initiatives, which are progressing well and allow us to have a clear end-to-end view of our interaction with the customer and enable us to run a leaner and more efficient business. Multiple stakeholders in the organization have been working extremely hard to deliver on the agreed internal targets.
Overall, we're pleased with progress on all fronts and continue to improve every part of the business and ensure that we work hard towards achieving our objectives while keeping our vision of being the performance analytics platform trusted by the world's most ambitious organizations in clear sight. With that, I'm pleased to hand over to Jan-Dirk, who will guide us through the H1 financial numbers. With that, JD, over to you.
Thank you, Aaron. Let me take you through Exasol's financial results of the first half 2022, by and large in the format well known to you by now. As always, let's start with our key growth metric, annual recurring revenue or ARR. ARR came in at EUR 32.5 million on a constant FX basis and at EUR 32.7 million on a current FX basis, exhibiting the tailwinds that we saw in our U.S. business from the gains of the U.S. dollar versus euro. Q2 growth exhibited the typical seasonal pattern of our business, which tends to be year-end driven. Absolute Q2 growth was slightly below absolute Q2 of 2021, primarily due to two deals that slipped into Q3 but are meanwhile closed. Overall, while Q2 consequently ended at the lower end of our targeted growth quarter, it still keeps us well on track to achieve our full-year targets.
Beyond absolute ARR growth, another key objective for us this year is and remains to accelerate our number of newly acquired customers and grow our overall customer base in order to generate a platform for upsell-driven growth for the coming years. We're therefore happy that in the first half of 2022, we were able to grow our customer base by net 12 customers based on a gross acquisition of 14 new customers. This is more than double compared to the five net new customers gained in the first half of 2021. Looking at the ARR development by type, we see continued healthy fundamentals for a subscription business. Upselling remains the dominant growth driver of the past 12 months, accounting for 75% of gross ARR gains. The underlying net revenue retention rate stood at 119% over the past 12 months.
Equally important, especially in these times, churn rates remain stable at 4% despite the poor overall macroeconomic environment reflecting the intrinsic stability of our existing customer base and the associated business variants. This is an important pillar of stability for our business plan towards break-even in 2023, as we also talked about in the context of our capital markets day. Looking at the ARR growth by region, we see a stable core region in EMEA Central providing a stable and significant growth contribution, as well as EMEA North and emerging markets making an overproportioned contribution to new customer growth, providing a good platform for future upselling. While upsell-driven growth in North America was strong, growth in new customers has not been within our expectations. This was partly due to the delayed go-to-market efforts related to the major reorganization conducted in Q4 2021.
As pointed out by Aaron, we have since, however, been strengthening the U.S. team over the past couple of months and are very happy to welcome John Knieriemen on board as new VP North America to drive our efforts in this continued strategic focus market with the significant experience he brings on board both in terms of the region and our specific addressable market with his background at Teradata. Moving on to profitability, we can see that we have made significant headway in our effort to lead the business towards profitability in 2023. On a like-for-like basis, meaning excluding effects from capitalized own work in 2021, adjusted EBITDA stood at EUR -6 million for the first half of 2022 compared to EUR -15.5 million in 2021.
These improvements represent the combined effects of our reorganization measures as well as our ongoing programs, as mentioned by Aaron, to make our core processes more scalable and efficient while managing reinvestments into the organization carefully in line with the observed traction we see in terms of growth. On the revenue side, the P&L shows the continued shift away from non-recurring revenue, which is down 10% versus 2021, to recurring revenue, which is up 26% versus 2021, leading to a combined revenue growth of 23%. The overall lower cost base is, of course, significantly driven by the right-sizing of our organization over the past months. Overall, headcount stood at 213 as of end June, down from 225 at the end of the Q1 .
This was primarily due to changes in our EMEA organization while U.K. and U.S. were largely stable versus Q1 and are now at a level from which we will continue to develop the organization. The significantly improved profitability is also reflected in a resulting improved cash consumption. Adjusted EBITDA of EUR -6 million translated into a cash consumption of EUR -5.2 million on a like-for-like basis, i.e., excluding the same non-recurring effects from IPO-related stock programs. Cash out for these non-recurring effects came in at EUR 2.7 million as included in our liquidity guidance for the year and previously communicated. Annual upfront payments of new subscription business continues to contribute to cash conversion via growing deferred revenues, while CapEx is at a low level due to the discontinued capitalization of own work and the continued shift of internal operations to cloud services.
The EUR 1 million of other cash outs is primarily due to bonus and commission payouts to employees for 2021. Overall, the outlined financial performance translates into strong quarter-on-quarter improvements in our bottom-line financials since Q2 and Q3 last year, becoming especially apparent in the improvement of adjusted EBITDA, which is not affected by the strong seasonality in cash inflows affecting cash performance. From our peak losses of EUR -9.9 million in Q2 last year, we have overall achieved a reduction of almost 80% to EUR -2.2 million in the past quarter. Likewise, adjusted cash burn in the first half of 2022 was combined EUR -5.2 million compared to the EUR -15.4 million in 2021, an improvement of 66%. With this trajectory, we are confident to achieve our goals set out for 2022 and maintain our guidance for growth, profitability, and liquidity.
As usual, let me close today's presentation by providing an outlook of our investor relation activities in the coming months and how you are able to touch base with us, to keep up to date on our progress. In June, we conducted our first capital markets day with over 30 investors attending live during the session and many more reviewing the related videos of Aaron's, Matthias's, Don's, and my own presentation on our website. We also conducted our annual general meeting in July, where we were happy and grateful to receive strong approvals for all decisions put forward by the board of management and supervisory board. We were particularly happy that all suggested candidates for the expanded supervisory board were approved and look forward to collaborating with them in pushing Exasol's journey forward.
Until the end of the year, we are planning an additional investor events like physical roadshows and conferences and our regular quarterly webcast in November. We hope we have the chance to meet some of you during these upcoming activities. In the meantime, we will, of course, be available for any questions you might have aside from our financial calendar. With that, I thank you for your attention, and we look forward to your questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you can do so now by pressing star one on your telephones. That's star one if you'd like to ask a question. We will now take our first question from Johannes Ries from Apus Capital. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for the presentation. Maybe an update on the pipeline and, maybe a feeling how the pipeline looks compared to your target for the rest of the year. How much, maybe percentage-wise, two or three times the coverage of the pipeline is there? Maybe how much, say, is a risk, given the fact that you talked also and you are not alone, nearly all enterprise software companies talk about it, this longer sales cycle you realize at the moment. Therefore, maybe you can give us a feeling that supports your optimism that you can achieve your guidance with a stronger second half like usual in this environment.
Maybe I'll start out with just some quantitative assessment, and then I will pass over to Aaron to give a little bit of a qualitative color on current business. If we review our status middle of the year in terms of overall pipeline and the gap to close to our guidance, if we look at the same situation in the middle of the last year and we look at our kind of traditional conversion rates, even with a little bit of a markdown for the current overall macroeconomic environment, that still gives us confidence and lands us in our growth guidance for this year. On top of that, what we haven't factored into this calculation is kind of the unknown upside that we might experience from the introduction of our SaaS product.
These combined observations, if we look at the pipeline and kind of the conversion rates that we expect, that kind of lands us within our guidance. We're quite confident about that we will see also the same seasonality with a strong year-end closure, as we have in the past. Yeah. Aaron, do you want to kind of give that some color in terms of experience from customer interactions?
There's actually not that much to add to that. I think you said that quite correctly. We obviously understand our business. The coverage is constantly growing. This has grown since last year and well into this year. We constantly see the level of coverage approaching that we are ideally looking for. The other thing, though, is that we do have very strong conversion rates. We are confident when we put something into Salesforce and forecast it that there's a very high chance of us closing it.
What we also know is, when we look at the Q4 and the way our interactions with customers typically go, we fully expect another very strong Q4, especially if we look at last year's numbers and where we are now and extrapolate that into Q4 as we look ahead, then that makes us very confident. At the same time, the sales cycles are growing longer, but that's something that I think is very manageable for us. In terms of what we will be closing this year, these processes are well underway and under control. I'm not expecting any surprises at this time.
Super. Thanks a lot. Maybe follow on and remind us maybe in your target for 2025, how important is your new SaaS offering and how much even Version 8 could help to accelerate your growth?
Well, all of the above. Clearly, if you look at where we are right now, SaaS is still not playing a major role in the revenue that we are building right now. Despite that fact, we are still growing at, you know, well over 25% or well, 25% every quarter, 26% this quarter and accelerating, as you can see from the customer wins in Q2 against Q1. V8 will be important for us in terms of being more strategic to some of our most important customers, giving them the elasticity that they're looking for in both the Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and, of course, AWS, which they'll be managing in their own cloud setups, if you like. This will be self-tenanted and will allow us to address more use cases within their organizations.
SaaS, obviously, is clearly the upside as we move ahead because this will allow us to work in a more simple fashion with our partners and approach or address other regions where we don't have a physical presence. As we look ahead and look at the growth rates that we're already achieving and then factor in V8 and SaaS on top of that, then that's where we clearly see our upside.
Version 8, how important it is maybe even to make you more attractive or maybe more usable for your customers?
It's very important and obviously ready to be rolled out or very shortly. What this does is add another way of using the product to the way it's already being used. Right now, it's if you like, a volume-based license where a customer precommits to a certain size or a certain volume of data, which they have in the system, and they pay for that on a subscription basis. That's perfect for the use cases that are well understood and known or are operative, 24/7 operational BI. However, when you are building out new use cases where usage is perhaps not at the same operational level or is being accessed by different parts of the business at different times, then the volume-based model makes it more difficult in terms of introducing it to a new use case.
Therefore, with the V8 elasticity, this will allow our customer to enter at a much lower level and build up the business, the new use case, if you like, from scratch without having to make major commitments on day one. That is what our customers are asking for, especially within their own tenanted cloud deployments in order to be able to reach across their own organizations with self-service analytics, for example. V8 is, of course, super important for us.
Cool. Finally, on U.S., do you expect in the second half some accelerations there? You talked also about a good pipeline, maybe also a little bit more additional light on this part, this region. What is maybe the reason for your optimism there after you have changed the organization heavily in the last 18 months? Maybe only an update that gives us a feeling that this region which is lacking a little bit maybe could also give you a growth driver going forward?
Well, obviously, we pulled back to quite a large degree when we realized that some of the decisions we'd made and the people that we'd brought on board weren't really pushing forward the business. It was focused to a high degree on product marketing and product management and, in fact, issues that we already have well in hand. We pulled back, but we're now reinvesting. John Knieriemen is a very important player for us to run the U.S. business. We've hired our new head of marketing there. He's based out of Austin, Texas. He'll be working very closely with the U.S. team. We've hired field marketing. That's where we've also placed our new head of channel in America and OEM.
There's a clear emphasis on the U.S. market still, just doing it in a more measured and focused way. A couple of people left us have actually come back again, which is very good news. You can see the pipeline growing. We also see the same high level of retention, whether that's with customers like Allianz North America or whether that's with a couple of other names I'm not allowed to mention right now. That's all looking very solid. It's a clear focus point for us moving ahead.
Super. Really last question. Partnerships, are further partnerships in the pipeline, maybe even on partnerships who sell your product combined with their product? I think especially as real-time analytics guys?
We have a number of partnerships that are emerging right now. What we are doing is really focusing on partnerships that will add value. We have had a number of partnerships in the past which we feel weren't delivering the kind of results that we expected. With the new head of channel and OEM in America, they are working every day to build these partnerships and make sure that they actually deliver for us.
Great. Thanks a lot.
You're very welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Nicole Wimpfler from Hauck Aufhäuser Lampe. Please go ahead.
Hey. Thank you for taking my question. I have one follow-up on the U.S. business. Now, setting up the business there, when can we expect first impacts here? Is it with a continuous second half, or is it more regarding in the next year? On the open jobs which are still like available, do you face any headwinds from labor shortage or any other reasons? How crucial are the open jobs for ramping up the U.S. business here? Then in terms of personnel expenses, what increase do you expect here, even though considering that personnel expenses should increase due to the wage inflation? Yeah, right now, this is the first one on the U.S. business.
Yeah. Good point. What's happening in the U.S. is ongoing. It's a constant improvement and acceleration. But to your point, we're also bringing on new people who are getting their feet on the ground and understanding the business and beginning to build out their own style of pushing all of that forward. That being said, they're obviously building on an existing business. It's not as if we are starting at zero. We have a number of really significant customers who are continuing to grow their business with us. That gives us a very strong footing. In terms of how important new hiring or new hires are, of course, they are. We have gaps in the way we go to market.
Right now, a lot of people are really working very hard and around the clock to get things done. Obviously, the new roles that we're looking for will make that a lot easier. At the same time, we are very conscious that we haven't always made the best decisions in the past. We're being very careful to make sure that we do hire the right people in terms of their expertise and obviously that they are a cultural fit. I think in terms of what that will cost us, we are clear that the American market remains expensive and that we have to be competitive. We will refuse to do anything which is out of the norm, just to get someone on board quickly. I think that's a mistake that we made in the past, and we have to avoid repeating that mistake. That means waiting till we find the right person at the right price point, then that's what we'll do. Maybe I can pass to Jan-Dirk to maybe add anything from your side, from the CFO's view.
Yeah. I think what I would add in addition is that, I mean, we've been through the reorganization that we've made over the past couple of quarters. We are now in a position where we can kind of steer the pace and also the intensity on how we invest versus the kind of traction we see, which is very important for us in order to steer our way towards profitability, while at the same time doing the right things for the most crucial positions to fill. Yeah? If you ask me what is the definite number X that the personnel cost will go up over the next quarter, I can't give you a definite answer on that because we will observe closely how the traction will go, and how we add back people. Yeah?
I think what I've said and mentioned in the past, if everything goes according to plan, if we go towards the kind of mid to top end of our guidance, we would grow back the business into 2023 to the vicinity of 230-240 people. As said, we're looking at that closely. We're looking at where we gain traction. We're looking at the most crucial roles. As Aaron said, it's also a fit with our approach to really focus on getting the right people on board.
All right. Perfect. Maybe a short one on the current trading of the SaaS solution. You already mentioned that it's not in the figures for this year. Can you give us some more color regarding any success in terms of revenue contribution, acceptance, or onboarding a little bit more?
Which, again, is a great question. This is progressing. I don't know if this is maybe too German or approach. It's a bit of a discussion we're having with the sales side as well, is that we can improve the usability, the customer experience. What we realized was on the engineering side, we're obviously in a good position. However, there are certain things that we can refine. That requires more SaaS know-how than we have had up to date in the organization. There's one person that we have already hired. We'll be joining us in September, who is an absolute SaaS expert and actually comes from one of our existing customers, which is a good sign as well. Then we're looking for a second person to add to that mix.
We want to really get the user experience right before we push harder. We're kind of keeping this within our customer base right now. We are adding customers, and we're learning from that experience because our customers will probably be more forgiving than the customers never worked with Exasol before. We want to just be a little bit more patient before we push harder and make sure that we've got the experience in the right place. It will always be a continuing refinement as it always is with a product. For us, it's a bit of a new experience but also a valuable one to be able to see it in real life, to see how things play out, to be able to observe the user experience, to get immediate feedback. Obviously, that goes straight into the team.
Any issues that arise are addressed. We have a list of issues, which you always have in software development. We're working through those. That's what the team is focused on. There's a bit of pride, obviously, involved on our side, in terms of the kind of product that we typically deliver to customers to make sure that that's a really good experience.
Great. Thank you. My last one would be on the marketing expenses, which came down significantly. Like, I guess it's around 40%, compared to last year. Keeping in mind that last year has been, like, unweighted. Now, looking beyond this first half and maybe next year when there are still marketing contracts with football clubs, and I still have in mind that they are probably running out end of the year or next year, what shall we expect on the marketing expense side here? Should it, yeah, like, go up significantly again, or is it on a stable level now, or what are your plans now?
No. I think what you will see, Nicole, is that on a net basis, in the end, the marketing expense next year is not going to be radically different from what you're going to be observing, in the first half of this year. What's going to happen is we're going to start ramping up our marketing efforts a little bit in the second half of this year. As you rightfully said, most marketing activities that we're doing are running out at the end of the year. We'll be basically drop out of the cost base next year, which will refinance this ramp-up, right? Overall, kind of the expectation would be that marketing on a full-year basis will be at around EUR 6 million next year, depending on the traction we see again, and how much we can afford.
This is kind of the logic behind that. I think when we initially laid out our four-year plan beginning of this year, one of the key rationales that we shared with you is kind of that the cost base that we're building up this year will be largely stable next year because we're able to refinance some of the things by basically resource reallocation internally from things that are not working for us anymore to things that we believe have bigger traction and productivity.
All right. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take a follow-up question from Johannes Ries from Apus Capital. Please go ahead.
Yes. Only one follow-on question. Your upselling is still the main driver of your growth. Just to understand it, what is the main reason behind that, existing customers maybe increasing their contracts? Is it that the workload on the existing applications, e.g. maybe is increasing, and therefore usage-based metrics are working? Or is it primarily new use cases of the customers who start new projects and also use, because of their good experience, your solution? Just to understand what are the main drivers that the existing customer base is definitely a big driver, though.
It is. It's one thing we're very proud of. Because if you think about the breadth of choice that there is in the market and the amount of pressure that is out there and obviously any one of our customers are targets or legitimate targets for our competition. Yet it's number one very difficult to budge. Number two, our customers continue to invest in the product. I think it goes a long way to show the strength of what we deliver. I mean, the decisions are unsentimental. Even if you consider a further aspect, you have constant change at our customers. It's not as if the customers that we've had now for multiple years have stayed with the same team over this time.
You have new teams coming in or new decision-makers who, after an analysis of the situation, still stick with Exasol. That's an extremely important aspect of our business. The reason to your question is manifold. It is that the existing use case is growing. More data is being put onto it. They are finding different ways of using the product. It's very easy to migrate business processes onto Exasol and run them from there, especially when other parts of the business see that when running Exasol, you have a very stable environment, which is important for business. We know from multiple other projects that are being run at our customer sites that there is very often a high level of dissatisfaction between what was promised and what is actually delivered.
One thing that we are very good at is delivering what we promise. Perhaps we could be slightly more aggressive in the way we market. We've heard that before. That's the way we operate. That is what we want to expand. Every time we win customers, it's a new upsell potential. What we also have to get better at and we are improving as we speak is identifying new and additional use cases within an enterprise. Our sales team is being sent out with the clear objective of better understanding the organization and getting us to a strategic level. That's going well as well. What we know we need to do then is just improve our demand gen, which is also what we're working on now, you know, with everything we've got.
Because we know when we want to win a customer, you know, seeing is believing, then we're in a very good position. It is about winning new customers. That means smart and targeted demand gen., and we've in the past been reasonably good at that but not good enough to you know really accelerate growth. That's one of our main focus areas right now is the second-tier persona-based really outcome-based marketing campaigns, and getting in front of the right decision-makers with our value proposition. When we know that, when we're at that point, then we have a very good chance of winning, which is going back to what I said before, that we have very strong conversion rates. Once a customer is engaged and sees what the product can actually do in any proof of concept, then we know we're on a very good track to actually win that business. That's what we need to expand and accelerate. We're already doing a good job on the upsell side.
Great. On this, maybe hunting and farming, do you do very well as a hunter? Who are the maybe the we would say really is a close competitor, so always maybe in the end still in the race. You have to win against mostly a winner. I think maybe you can also if you are in with the right decision-makers. How high can you maybe can also retell us again what is your win rate? I think it was quite high, though.
It's very high. It's a number we don't divulge. I can tell you, it's very high for the market. I think what's important there is to understand where we're coming in. We are still solving legacy problems first and foremost. That's where we are very strong but also in creating a path to the cloud. Being able to solve a problem that the customer has today, which is impacting their business, and taking away the immediate pressure points but then also being able to provide a path to the three different cloud platforms is a very strong selling point. As we move ahead with consumption-based pricing, and the elasticity across all deployments, then this makes us a very strategic project as well or product as well. That's where we come in. That's our entry point. Then our value proposition is to be able to grow with us and expand across multiple platforms.
The competitors at the shortlist are normally?
Well, that's the great thing because, obviously, if a customer is already in the cloud or has decided to go to the cloud, then you have a certain group of competitors, which are very well known. It's Amazon Redshift or it's Snowflake or it's Google BigQuery. That's pretty much it. On-prem, we have the known vendors. Obviously, the cloud-only vendors can't go there. We have a pretty unique value proposition in that we're able to bridge those two worlds. That it shouldn't be underestimated how much data is still on-premise and how many processes still run on-premise. It's a journey to the cloud, which takes time. We can provide the immediate fix but also that path to the cloud as well because there are very few other competitors who can run on all three cloud platforms.
Okay.
That's another thing we're seeing, that customers now have to think about: a second cloud deployment. The notion that you would completely rely on one cloud vendor for everything that you have is a dangerous prospect. What we see increasingly, especially in financial services, is the strategic decision to look for and deploy a second cloud platform, which immediately, again, reduces the number of technologies that you can actually then deploy for that. Exasol is clearly one of them.
Great. Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Thank you. There are no further questions in the queue at this time. I will turn the call back to your host.
Okay, Aaron, J.D., would you like to wrap up?
Yeah. Okay. Well, I think, all that remains for us is to thank you for your continued loyalty to us and your attention and your interest. Thanks for joining the call today. Thanks for the great questions. We look forward to seeing you at least in the next webcast or in one of our other shareholder interactions. Thanks a lot.
Same here. Thank you very much, everyone.