Thank you very much. Hello and herzlich willkommen. Thanks for joining our results call on the audited financial year 2022 and Q1 2023 figures. The topics for today, you see on the slide. I'm here. I am Jörg Tewes. I'm the CEO of Exasol. Here with me today is Jan-Dirk Henrich, our chief financial officer.
Morning.
Hello, JD. As you all have seen, we published our annual report for the year 2022 this morning, where we confirmed our preliminary results that were published earlier this year. We also confirmed our Q1 2023 figures. Since we already gave you more details on our 2022 results in our webcast in February, we would therefore like to concentrate on the business development in the first quarter and on our growth plan. As most of you know, I joined the company at the beginning of the year, so it's been my first quarter with the company, and I will start with an update on our Q1 performance and then some news on our product roadmap and our go-to-market approach.
Before JD will dive deeper into the financial details and our outlook for 2023. Afterwards, we will have time for a question and answer session where we're happy to take your questions. Before we dive into the content, let me briefly point your attention to our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. Let me now start with the summary of key points. Overall, we started into 2023 according to our plans and are hence on track to achieve our goals for this year. Our ARR is up 15% compared to the same figure 12 months ago. Our U.S. business is ramping up nicely as the go-to-market organization is now stable and effective.
We had some extraordinary churn in Q1 this year, with a European customer closing its Russian business, that had a negative impact on our overall revenue, ARR. We were able to further reduce our EBITDA loss, leading the way to profitability in the second half of this year on a quarterly basis. We had our first cash positive quarter since our IPO, supported by the traditionally strong Q1 billings. We were able to improve our liquidity headroom. We ended the quarter with liquid funds of EUR 13.7 million.
We're confirming the outlook for 2023, which you see here on the right side of the slide, ARR in the range of EUR 42.5 million-EUR 44 million, with an adjusted EBITDA EUR -3 million to EUR -1 million and liquid funds in the range of EUR 9 million-EUR 11 million. Here is a deeper dive on our ARR development by quarter. JD will give you some more details later on. The overall increase year-over-year is 15%. We increased to EUR 35.8 million. Our gross new ARR is slightly above last year's Q1, but net new ARR had a rather moderate incline due to some extraordinary churn that I already mentioned.
There's this one-time effect of a European customer who closed down its Russian business. We had some additional churn on the back of a weak macroeconomic situation, which we believe is only temporary and not fundamental to the business. To better understand how we will accelerate growth in the coming months, I will share some insights from our product pipeline and our refined GTM strategy in a minute. Let me give you some more insights on how we will manage to accelerate our growth in the coming months throughout the rest of the year. I shared with you in our last call that one of my initial focus areas as the new CEO of Exasol is the sharpening of our market positioning. Based on this refined positioning, growth acceleration will be based on three key levers.
First, the launch of our version 8 SaaS product and the accompanying marketing campaign. Second, a new programmatic approach to customer success and upselling into existing accounts. Three, growth acceleration in the specifically in the US with a new organizational setup and team for the North American market. Let me provide you with some details on the new positioning and each of the 3 key levers. Here you see the updated positioning and the way we positioned our past was strongly focused on the speed and technology aspects of our product. Specifically, the way we talk to our customers and position ourselves in the market is now very different.
Instead of just being the fastest database, which was our main message in the past, we now put the unique combination of benefits that only Exasol can deliver in terms of business outcomes front and center. That means Exasol is the no-compromise analytics database that provides increased productivity, cost savings, and flexibility, redefining how businesses use data. With a 20 times faster processing, Exasol provides insights in record time, empowering businesses to solve complex problems, become more data-driven, and bring innovation to life. This processing power translates into a return of invest of more than 300% with reduced licensing, implementation, maintenance, and training fees, eliminating cost shock and vendor lock-in for our customers. With Exasol, business have flexibility to manage data the way they want.
In the cloud, SaaS, on-premises or hybrid, without having to rip and replace their existing data platforms. Last but not least, competitors can deliver on selected elements of these three pillars with different strengths. What makes us, Exasol, unique is that it delivers on all three of these benefits without any required trade-offs, putting customers in the position to run their analytics use cases with maximum economic efficiency and maximum impact in terms of time to insight. This new positioning will be at the center of the growth acceleration levers we will pursue in the coming months. You'll see that across our customer-facing messaging in press releases and in our updated website that's gonna go live towards the end of the month.
The new version that we've been working on for the past years, it's actually coming to the market this month. We will launch our version 8 of our product, as well as an improved version of our SaaS offering on May 30, combined with a broader marketing campaign. Our new product suite brings a wide range of additional features and benefits to our customers in the following areas. A, we're introducing a scalable and elastic architecture with storage and compute separation, multi-cluster support, and new deployment options in a SaaS environment. In addition, we also have significant improvements in the areas of productivity, performance, and usability. Like I said, we are launching the product. It becomes available for existing and new customers at the end of the month.
We will have press outreach, press release, combined with an updated messaging on our website later this year. The second acceleration lever is a new programmatic approach to customer success and upselling into existing accounts. Exasol has always been strong in expanding business with existing customers. This was, however, dominantly driven by excellent service on existing use cases and concurrent growth with data volume. In order to better leverage what we call lateral growth within our customers, specifically those who are larger companies with different departments, we're looking at growing into new use cases and business within these large accounts, and we have set up a structured customer success program and team for that purpose.
We started into the year with a broad Customer 360 analysis to better understand how we can help our existing customers to grow with Exasol. The focus of this team is to define and pursue repeatable methods and set up an internal ecosystem of tools that can be employed to help our customers on their journey along the data maturity curve. The last acceleration lever is one where we have already seen first signs of success in the past 2 quarters, which is our U.S. business. As you can see on this slide, the ARR growth in the U.S. has been rather flat in the beginning of last year as the organization went through a lot of changes.
However, positive news since the end of Q3, our new organizational setup is largely in place now, and the new and experienced group of people came on board. With that new setup, the local organization can serve local customers with a full set of customer service and go-to-market functions. We're happy that since then, the U.S. business is continually building up momentum with a particular strong result in the past quarter.
We see overall good traction in the market and are very positive about this year and the midterm perspective in North America for Exasol. There's of course a lot more to say about our growth plans, but let me stop for now and hand over to JD for more details on our financial results and happy to take more questions at the end of this call. JD?
Yeah. Thank you, Jörg. Also again, a warm welcome from my side. I would now like to give you some more details first on our financial performance, both for the full year 2022, and then the first quarter 2023. Let me start by giving you again a brief overview of our full year 2022 results, which are now the final audited results.
Since we already published preliminary results end of February, I will not spend too much time on this, especially because as you can see from the first slide, our audited figures were largely in line with our preliminary results, with the exception of around EUR 400,000 of costs that were reclassified from cost of goods sold to OpEx, which compared to the unaudited figures, slightly elevated our gross profits without obviously impacting the EBITDA, which stood unchanged at minus EUR 13.4 million. While revenues overall, recapping 2022, again, revenues stood at EUR 33.2 million, that corresponds to a 20.7% increase. Our adjusted EBITDA loss was more than halved, this result was achieved by increasing gross profit by around 20% while reducing the cost base by more than 20% as well.
After a year of many changes in right-sizing, Exasol as a result is now a much more efficient company. Likewise, before diving into the Q1 results, let me also briefly recap how the top line evolved last year and which baseline we start with into the new year. Overall, our ARR last year grew by 17% to EUR 35.6 million on a constant currency basis, meaning based on end of 2021 FX rates. The strongest contributor of that growth was again upselling to our existing customers, while overall, as discussed previously, new customer growth came in below expectations, particularly in Q4. ARR churn, however, remained largely stable at around 4%. Starting into 2023, there are two important effects affecting our ARR baseline going into the new year.
First of all, we took the deliberate decision to exit our engagement with the German Football Association. This reduces our ARR baseline like for like by EUR 900,000. However, the decision has an overall positive EBITDA impact of two and a half million EUR per annum, which you will clearly see when we get to our Q1 bottom line results later on. Secondly, readjusting ARR to end of 2022 FX rates, there is a positive impact of EUR 600,000 from the relatively stronger US dollar. Our starting point for 2023 is therefore EUR 35.3 million of ARR realized with 215 customers. With these 2022 results in mind, let's take a look at how Exasol started into 2023.
Looking at the development of ARR in Q1, ARR growth fell short of the previous year's net growth and came in at EUR 0.5 million compared to EUR 1 million in the same quarter last year. Breaking this down a little bit, on the positive side, our gross new ARR came in slightly higher than last year at EUR 1.4 million, and this was mainly driven, as we will later see, by a very good development of our U.S. business.
On the other hand, ARR churn increased from EUR 300,000 in Q1 last year to EUR 900,000 this year, of which the majority of impact, with around EUR 400,000 of this increase coming from the special or extraordinary churn in one major European account related to the closure of its Russian business and the related data cluster that was operated with Exasol. If we adjust for that effect, the ARR churn rate in Q1 was only slightly larger compared to the 2022 value, with the remaining elevation driven by the overall macroeconomic environment affecting smaller customers. After a quarter, without new customer wins in Q4, Exasol gained three new customers in Q1, 2023. As in Q4, we saw churn of seven customers in Q1.
These are mostly related to customers who had already canceled their contract in the course of 2022, but whose contract runtime now ended in Q1 2023. If you look at the elevated churn in Q4 and now Q1, these are, to a large extent, due to a delayed impact of economic decisions taken in 2022. Their impact was therefore mostly known to us when we set up our budgets and plans for 2023 and are factored into our full year guidance, which remains unchanged at EUR 42.5 million-EUR 44 million. On a 12-month perspective, if we look at the last 12 months breakdown and the known subscription business economics, on a 12-month perspective, we managed to grow ARR by 15%, which was mainly driven by an increase in business with our existing customers.
As a result, our gross retention rate remained at a high level of 118%, and the higher ARR churn rate of 6% compared to 4% in the year before was largely due to the impact of the downsell related to the Russian operations of the aforementioned European account. Adjusting for that impact, ARR churn would have stood at 4.5% compared to 4% in the year before, only very slightly higher compared to prior year. While gaining 16 new customers over the past 12 months, we however, also lost 18, which are comparatively smaller, and that was mostly due to the overall difficult economic environment, with churn having mostly happened in Q4 and Q1 this year, last year and Q1 this year, as contracts tend to end dominantly in these quarters.
At this stage, we have no indication that this elevated churn pattern will persist. As Jörg pointed out earlier, we see meaningful positive momentum from our product innovation and from our stronger focus on customer centricity, affecting both upselling, new customer acquisition and retention in the months to come. Let's take a look at how this 12-month perspective breaks down into the regions. Starting out with the EMEA region. ARR increased over the past 12 months by overall 12% to EUR 24.1 million. Net revenue retention was negatively affected by 2 percentage points through the Russia downsell, so this happened in this region. Again, adjusting for that effect, churn rates were actually quite low overall in the region on an ARR basis, even though there was a bigger number of lost customers.
As I said before, this is because the lost customers were, on average, rather small customers. Overall though, nevertheless, EMEA Central was the region that was most affected by the overall economic climate of the past 12 months, which becomes visible in the gross ARR retention rate, which ranged 3 percentage points lower than the year before. If we turn our attention to EMEA North and the emerging markets, the growth was overall 11% over the past 12 months. Here, gross ARR retention rates was basically stable over the past 12 months. Also downselling was not a factor, but the region was affected by the loss of 4 customers. Overall, the customer base in this sub-region remained largely stable with new customer acquisition balancing out the churn.
Finishing off our regional perspective with our strategically important U.S. region. As you recall, and as Jörg said before, the region has gone through some significant changes in the last 12 to 18 months. With the new organization now stable and in place, we are very happy to see that the business starts to gain traction again and positive momentum. Overall, over the past 12 months, ARR grew by 30%, with Q1-2023 making a significant growth contribution in and by itself with 14 percentage points alone. Gross ARR retention rate was well above group average and stood at 132%.
With 2022 having seen no new customer wins in the U.S., we are also particularly happy that we won a new customer in Q1 this year, and a large one at that, as you can see here, which came in at EUR 400,000. While the region also faced some customer churn in the past 12 months, like the other regions, for similar reasons, we are very confident with the momentum of the team in place and the opportunities that we see for 2023. Finishing the perspective on the top-line results, let's turn our attention to the bottom-line results that flowed from it. In Q1, we were able to continue our path towards profitability. Compared to Q1-2022, adjusted EBITDA improved by more than 40% to minus EUR 2.2 million.
The main driver of this improvement was a reduction in marketing spend related to sports sponsoring. If you look at the marketing cost line and the change from Q4 to Q1, there you basically see as a majority of the impact of the stop in sports sponsoring activities. All other cost categories are largely on the same level as in the same quarter in 2022, despite continued pressure on salaries and prices for products and services. Implicitly, there's also quite an efficiency gain contained into these numbers if you reflect on the overall market price developments of the past 12 months. Other costs, the third line from the bottom, are noticeably lower again after the temporary surge in Q4.
As stated in our last webcast, the surge was related to one-time consulting, legal and advisory fees, largely associated with A, a finalization of some key internal improvement projects, and B, the changes in management that's happened in this time. In addition, Q4 was impacted by the one-off impairment of remaining capitalized own work, which we stopped doing last year, to the extent of almost half a million EUR. Overall, Q1 bottom line performance puts us on a good track to achieve break even on a quarterly level in the second half of the year as per our plans.
This improved bottom line then also translated into a strong cash performance, which as mentioned many times before, was supported by the traditionally strong seasonality from Q1 billings. For the full year, as you can see, we were able to end the quarter with a positive net cash flow of EUR 1 million, representing the first quarter since IPO without cash burn. Reading the slide from right to left, you see that we had an extraordinary cash effect of EUR 1.9 million for legacy IPO-related stock programs, implying that the underlying operational change in liquid funds was actually at +EUR 2.9 million. As you will see on the next slide, this is a marked improvement compared to the -EUR 0.6 million in Q1 last year.
The mentioned EUR 1.9 million for IPO-related stock programs were the last major payments for this program. There will only be a very small remaining amount of EUR 300,000, which will be due in Q1 next year. Basically, this payment in this past quarter represents de facto the finalization and closure of these programs for all intents and purposes. In the future, you will not see no meaningful differences anymore between the EBIT reported and adjusted EBITDA figures. Q1 is traditionally our strongest quarter with respect to cash flow, due to the over proportional annual payment through customer contracts becoming due in the beginning of the year. This is represented in this graph by the strong increase in deferred revenues.
In Q2 through Q4, we will see cash consumption turning negative again on a low level before turning sustainably positive in 2024. Due to the nature of revenue recognition and the billing seasonalities, sustained P&L breakeven will hence precede in the second half of the year, will hence precede sustained cash breakeven. The following charts, if we summarize all this as a result of the cash performance, our liquid assets stood at EUR 13.7 million at the end of Q1, compared to EUR 12.7 million at the end of 2022. As you can see from the historical developments on the right-hand side of the charts, Q1, in summary, represented another important step in the significant improvement trajectory since the beginning of our turnaround efforts in Q3 2021.
Based on these results, if I conclude my part with the outlook, we maintain our guidance for the full year 2023. We aim to grow ARR to a level of EUR 42.5 million-EUR 44 million on a constant currency basis and improve adjusted EBITDA to a range of EUR -1 million-EUR -3 million by achieving EBITDA breakeven on a quarterly level in the second half of the year. We also maintain our guidance of an expected liquidity position at the end of the year in the range from EUR 9 million-EUR 11 million, which will simultaneously be the low point in the liquidity curve in our business plan. While this is not an excessive risk buffer, it provides sufficient headroom to fund our plans.
With EBITDA turning positive in the second half of the year, our intent is to manage our cash position back up to a level of around EUR 20 million, which we consider an appropriate cash position given the size and scope of our business. Subsequently, we will continue to invest into growth acceleration, keeping profitability at an appropriate level relative to our growth trajectory. Let me close today's webcast in the common manner by pointing out where and when you have the opportunity to follow us on this journey and catch up with us.
May and June, as usual, will be the busy months, as always, with the upcoming spring conference in Frankfurt next week, the Stock Picker Summit organized by our partners at Hauck & Aufhäuser, where we will be present, and the annual general meeting in June, which will be held virtually, in the new format and within the legal requirements that are now set out in Germany. This closes today's presentation. Thank you again for your current and future trust and interest in Exasol. Now Jörg and I are happy to answer any questions you might have.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. We have our first question from Nicole Winkler from Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thank you. Hi, Jörg. Hi, JD.
Hey, Nicole.
-of questions. Hey. I have a couple of questions and maybe beginning with the first, looking at your flat ARR development and the three pillars you now expect to grow in this year, can you give us some more color on current trading, especially how the pipeline looks like in terms of upselling and/or new customers, maybe even by vertical, if there are any changes here and by region? Maybe starting with this one.
JD, should I start and then you fill in?
Yeah.
Nicole, if I understood the question, you're basically, you're looking at the ARR development. We had 15% and, obviously, we've been looking at, we're looking to, for that guidance that we have, we're in the 20%-25% range. We gotta increase the percentage increase year-over-year to get to that 20 to 20. First of all, we believe that our launch of our products combined with the updated positioning will give us more visibility across all our three major regions, North America, UK, Nordics, and Central Europe.
Which will then also improve the our pipeline. We've been going through an intensive account planning on our top-tier accounts right now and in all regions. That's part of basically what I've been doing in the past four months. Yes, we have confidence by looking into our major accounts starting there, combined with some new accounts that we're developing right now that will increase the percentage increase, so that we actually land at that range at the end of the year. JD, anything you want to add?
Yeah. I think you said the major points. I think looking at these two levers, new logo acquisition and upselling, I think what Jörg pointed out that in terms of our upselling performance, we are very confident with based on the account planning that has been done over the past three to four months, together with the teams, which gives us good uplift with respect to net revenue retention. With the new logo acquisition, in addition to the things that we already see in the pipeline, there is, and that was the intent in our plans for this year, to generate additional headwind... Sorry, tailwind. Scrap that. Tailwind, of course, from the broader launch of the new SaaS and V8 version. Yeah.
The combined effect of these three elements or the existing account planning, the new logo opportunities that we've been working on going into the year, plus the additional momentum from the product launch, is what makes us confident to land in the zone that has been guided.
Great. Thank you. Maybe, following on this, with the broader SaaS launch, end of this month, what are your expectations for your marketing expenses for the full year?
Well, we're keeping the marketing expense in the budget that we've set at the beginning of the year. We are not gonna spend more on marketing, if that's your question, due to the nature of the launch. That launch and the respective marketing costs are basically in our budget that we have. We will remain to do tight budget control for the company because we value that goal of becoming profitable in the second half of the year. That's a very important goal for us. Leadership is looking after that. We're not overspending on marketing.
coming-
I think-
Oh, sorry.
Yeah. I think building on that, I would probably add that some of the, I think Jörg mentioned earlier, for example, that we will also update our website with the new launch. That is something that has been in preparation for a while, and kind of expenses for which had already been in the budget last year. Basically, many of the things that we will use and employ have been built up over the past couple of months and have partly also already been covered by the marketing budget last year.
Great. Maybe coming further to the budget control, any updates on how you expect your headcount is going to develop in this year? Are you keeping your personal or your headcount stable and your personal expenses as well?
Yeah.
Yes.
Should I take this, Jörg?
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. Basically, as of end of March, we were at around 190 people, which is actually slightly below the water level mark that we are planning with on average for the year. Basically, within our cost planning, we are planning with between 190-200 positions.
Great. Maybe one last question before I'm going to hand it over. Can you give us some more color on the repositioning and partnerships, how you're progressing here?
Well, partnerships are very important for our business. I think we have, there are different types of partnerships. There's the hyperscalers, so companies, AWS, Google and Microsoft, where we have a renowned focus on. As you know, Nicole, I used to work at Amazon before I joined Exasol, so understanding how these partnerships work, and I think that that's something we're actively working on right now, strengthening these relationships with what we call alliance partners, those hyperscalers. Then we have also our implementation partners and partners that resell our product. That's another important pillar of our marketing and sales strategy that we're putting more emphasis on right now.
Great. Thank you.
I think, Jörg, I think, what's worthwhile mentioning, if you take, for example, if you take a look at the upcoming launch of V8 and SaaS, in particular the SaaS product, as you've, as you know from previous webcasts, is built on AWS as a backbone, and we're basically working with our colleagues at AWS to help potentially support the campaign that starts end of the month with messaging and supporting quotes, for instance. These are just a couple of examples that we are working on in addition to more concrete, you know, joint commercial efforts with the hyperscalers.
Great. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is from the line of Robert-Jan van der Horst from Warburg Research. Please go ahead.
Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Yeah, two of them actually. The one is more of a broader one, because I was thinking about your marketing approach, and of course, it makes sense that changing go-to-market strategy will take its time to materialize in ARR growth. I was just curious how you as the new CEO monitor it. What are the KPIs you're looking at? What makes you confident and what those maybe look like, you know, challenges or work? A short follow-up on the partnership question that was just asked. I understand the importance of the partnership with hyperscalers, but more like as a requirement of your customers to be able to move across platforms.
What's your view on partnerships with like consulting companies like CGI and Accenture, which was always kind of a potential essential path to growth. How are things looking here? What can be improved? Do you expect like them to be a significant driver this year or just, you know, midterm? Thanks.
Yeah, Robert, thanks for your question. Maybe taking one step back, there are three key areas that we're looking at to ultimately drive business goals. First of all, it's looking at the existing accounts that we have and understanding on our existing business. How can we work with our customers to make them even more successful and to expand that business in the area that they're working on? Then, as I mentioned specifically, something we're looking in North America, but also in other regions, how can we also branch out into other departments in the same customer? Because it's much easier to just go to another department versus signing up a brand new customer. That's element number one of our sales strategy.
The second piece is, we got to increase, our pipeline of new logos. I think that's something, as I came on board and as you see in the numbers here, the ratio between churn and new logos needs to change. We need to, in order to grow the business on a going forward basis, we need substantially more new logos than logos that we're losing. We have some programs in place to work on that. That launch that I referred to is one element.
The SaaS product in general will give us the opportunity to also come in and lower the barrier of entrance for new customers to work with us because it's much faster to get going with a SaaS product versus a traditional managed either on-premise or a hyperscaler solution. That's the second element where we think we're gonna be able to sign more new logos. The third aspect of that is we're working on, and that will be part of our launch, and I want to preface that too quickly.
hat we call an Accelerator Program right now to onboard new customers for an let's say certain amount of time, 3 months, so that we give them a very attractive offer to work with us and solve their business needs. These are things that we've decided to do that we're in the process of implementing and rolling out right now from a marketing and sales perspective. Last but not least, the third area is as your, as basically your second question on the partner business in general. You are right, there are implementation consulting partners like CGI, Accenture, and smaller players in the market. We're obviously not a huge player.
We're working with partners, dedicated partners in certain verticals, be it financial services or regional teams, together on implementing a solution for our customers. Just to give you an example, I'm in Zurich today, here in Switzerland, and we've had a meeting actually with multiple partners this morning, and we're actively working on strengthening our relationship with these regional partners here in Switzerland.
Okay, perfect. That helps. Just to clarify a little bit. When you start talking about the strategy, it was a focus on existing customers. Also when it comes to, you know, the overall number of customers, there are of course two ways to gain new customers or reduce churn. Just to give me an idea of how you plan to allocate resources just compared to what we've seen beforehand. Do you think that more resources that need to be allocated to like marketing with existing customers and servicing of existing customers compared to new logos, or is new logos still like a main growth driver, this and the next year?
Yeah. I would say for this year's ARR targets, we mainly rely on existing customers, let's put it that way.
Okay.
That's basically our sales teams that we have in those regions. That's their job to work with our existing customer base on our this year's ARR target. Filling the pipeline, finding new customers is something that matters more for ultimately 2024, 2025, right? Because it takes a while to develop a customer and turn a new logo, a customer that started, into a significant revenue contributor. What we need to do is basically both. Since we're focusing on this year's financial targets, but we also need to in parallel work on the future of the company, which is bringing more new customers in so that we'll have future growth in the outer year. I mean, there is no priority one over two or two over one.
I think we need to do both as a company to be successful in the future. The investment that we're doing right now on marketing, on go-to-market is more towards that, finding new customers. Like I said, the top line revenue, the ARR, this is basically what our sales team does on a day-by-day basis.
Perfect. That was very helpful. Thanks.
The next question is from the line of Miro Zuzak from JMS Invest. Please go ahead. Mr. Zuzak, you're now live. Maybe unmute-
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay. Sorry, I was on mute. My fault. One, two questions from my side. The first one is an easy one on Utila. Could you please give an update there? What's going on?
Yes, I can. We're excited about Utila. We actually have deployed it with a couple of initial customers right now. We have one customer using it who is actually very satisfied with the product. We just made it available on the AWS Marketplace. However, we have not pushed it aggressively to the market yet. Right now we're focusing our main marketing efforts on the, let's say, core launch of our Exasol 8 SaaS product that I talked about earlier. We are working on an updated marketing plan for Utila as well. You'll hear more about Utila in upcoming results. It's there.
It's a product that customers like. We will still need to do proper marketing for that product. That is something where we're actually not investing dollars right now because we're focusing on the Exasol dollar. Once on the core Exasol offering. We'll look at it and we'll take a, let's say, work on a plan for Q3, Q4 this year.
Okay. Thank you. The second question is a bit, let's say more, more general one. I like using Google Trends, maybe you know it, to check like search engine queries. If I type in Exasol there and I'm looking at the graph, I see that it's going really back since one and a half years. Now the general... I mean, you've rolled out SaaS, you run a much larger business now than you used in the past. Now, am I making a mistake by looking at Google Trends, if I, if I wanna find out like how the SaaS product develops and, you know, how customers are caring about your software?
I assume some of them, they will always Google the company and stuff like that. Maybe you can explain what happened like, before, like in the last five years, it was more or less flat. Thank you.
Yeah, fair question. I think there, as you know, and we have had several announcements of our SaaS product in the past. We were not able to deliver the product at the quality that the market expected. That has changed. We're now bullish about both our Exasol 8 and the SaaS product. We are working on that marketing launch, and one of the key objectives of that launch is to increase the share of voice for Exasol and our product to specifically address that awareness issue that you're alluding to here by running a Google Trends. That is the objective with our marketing campaign that we're about to launch.
I mean, it's one of the KPIs that we at least internally will be looking at how are we improving share of voice awareness for the company, for the product in the market. Launching, having a new product launch combined with a refreshed messaging is an opportunity for us to increase that.
If I understood you correctly, we could basically expect this line to go up again in the second.
Yes
half of the year.
That is the goal. Yes.
Cool. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time, and I go back to Jan-Dirk Henrich for closing comments.
Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate the time and support for Exasol. I'm excited about the future. I think we've made really good progress in the last four months that I've been on board. I'm looking forward to providing updates on our next webcast. If we have the chance to see each other in person in between, I'm looking forward to share more updates then. Thank you very much.