Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to SoftwareONE's 2021 Capital Markets Day. We are live from Zurich, Switzerland. My name is Anna Engvall from Investor Relations at SoftwareONE, and I will be your moderator for today's event. We have an exciting agenda planned for you today, including five speakers from our executive board and a guest appearance by our incoming CFO, who will officially join us on the 1st of January. We will finish the event with a Q&A session. If you would like to actively participate in the Q&A, please see the dial-in details available on our website. You will also find the presentation materials on our IR websites. Please take just a moment to review the disclaimer with regards to forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures. With that, let's get started. It is my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Dieter Schlosser.
Thanks, Anna, for the nice introduction. I'm very excited to be here with you today for our first Capital Markets Day. Today, I want you to take three things away from our presentation. We continue to see an acceleration of technology adoption on the back of COVID. We also see that the tech adoption creates what I call cloud dynamics, and you will hear a lot of us talking about cloud dynamics. It's basically the consequences of moving into the cloud. The customer has to deal with additional complexity, and the rules of engagement for service providers are driven by born-in-the-cloud experts. IP generation, delivery automation, are not anymore by the size of the organization or the sheer amount of headcounts and people and resources they have.
Second, digital customer experience will completely change the reseller space, and we will demonstrate to you how our foundation and our platform enables us to really participate and capture on this market opportunity. Last but not least, we will share with you that we have built the right strategy. We focused clearly on execution of our strategy. We have the proof points that we accelerated. That's the journey. We also show you that the destination of being a next-generation service provider is paired with sustainable profitable growth, as well as a fresh approach to talent acquisition. Many of you have joined us since the IPO, but we do have a few ones who are new to SoftwareONE. Allow me to quickly go through a few key highlights of SoftwareONE. We have a very diversified expert base across 90 countries. We are serving 65,000 customers.
We do this in the local language, we do this in the local culture, but we do this backed with a global portfolio, with a global delivery model, and at the back of a global organization. Allow me to take out one specific service to demonstrate that. In the meanwhile, we are managing over 6 million users in the cloud, and we do this on a 24/7 basis in 13 languages. I will show you later how this service is growing on an ongoing basis. For the first half year, 2021, we have concluded with a growth of 12.3%, which is aligned with our full year's guidance for 2021. We have been able to acquire entrepreneurs with their teams. We have been able to attract them and make them part of SoftwareONE. You see the numbers. We have acquired eight beautiful companies in 2021 already.
This helps us dramatically to ramp up our growth streams and build up our capabilities. Let me freeze for a moment and go back in time from the time of the IPO till today and share with you our strategic achievements since the last two years. We committed to you that we attach services to our software and cloud customers. We committed to you that we build a global service business. We have scaled it out in the meanwhile for over CHF 300 million. It's growing above 30%. You have seen the recent number in the first half year. That's really just the beginning. We integrated Comparex in the same year as we went public, in the same year as we had the IPO. We committed to you that we reach our synergies and we harmonize our portfolio, which we have achieved.
At the same time, we used that experience to build an M&A platform, which allows us now to acquire 6- 10 acquisitions per year in a seamless way. We accelerated PyraCloud, and we are now having over 60% activated of our total customer base with a triple-digit growth on usage. That foundation becomes significantly important for us in the future with our marketplace strategy. We always said we want to be agnostic, and in the meanwhile, we have achieved the highest levels of certifications across all hyperscalers. Remember hyperscalers, we talk about Microsoft with Azure, we talk about AWS, and we talk about Google with GCP. At the time of the IPO, we have told you that we have managed 1.7 million users in the cloud on a 24 by 7 basis. In the meanwhile, we have reached 6.7 million.
We committed to you, we do a double up every 18-24 months. We have been a bit faster on that, and we will share with you what this means for us in the future. Let me quickly share with you our market in which we are operating. It's a massive market. There's no doubt about it. The addressable market is already over CHF 600 billion. If you look at the CAGR of 14%, we talk about a doubling up in the next five years. We participate in a massive market, but that has even been changed to the benefit of SoftwareONE. COVID has really taken out the why of digital transformation. Customers are asking when and how fast can I scale in the cloud. It has taken away seven years of lagging time of digital transformation. Customer have problems.
They have issues because the IT personnel is not equipped yet on the same level what you require as digital transformation. The cloud dynamics, on the other side, has created a tremendous complexity for our customers. The financial impact to move from on-premise to the cloud, to move from CapEx to OpEx, to move from CapEx to OpEx activated by permanent changing consumption, has not been well managed by the enterprises. Every customer has wastage. Every customer has a massive leakage wastage when they move to the cloud, and they seek support from a discipline which has been now only established, which is called FinOps. Not to confuse with the other o ps, which we have seen in the technology before. It was started off as DevOps, i t went to DevSecOps, and now we talk about FinOps.
FinOps stands for financial operations, and it's something which is a requirement, a requirement to manage the cloud spend in the future and provide the right governance for you as an enterprise. Customers need to deal with what you see over here with that 30% wastage, and they require the support of trusted advisors who are certified in FinOps and have the global best practice such as SoftwareONE. We also see that customers are not buying only one cloud. They are not only in the cloud. They are not only on-premise. They are on-premise, and they are multi-cloud. They are buying Azure, they are buying AWS, they're buying GCP, and they are buying maybe something else on top of it. Hybrid multi-cloud has become the standard in the technology sector. All of the above, all of this creates a tremendous headache for our customer.
It's an amazing opportunity for SoftwareONE to capture on. Let me talk to you a little bit about our opportunity in software and cloud. We see the reselling space changing completely. Customers expect digital experience. Digital experience like they know when they book a car on Uber or when they buy something on Amazon. In a sense, you can say that the technical giants like Amazon are defining the customer experience standard of the future. Now, customer, when they go into their professional life, they want to buy software in the same way they order something on Amazon. They want to self-serve. Alternatively, if it's not core for them, they seek for a complete managed service. Both motions we are able to capture. With our marketplace, the self-service, and with digital supply chain, the managed.
The traditional reselling, which is defined through high transactional, every deal is a own transaction, highly people-intensive, will still have a runway for the next 3-5 years, but the digital roadmap is absolutely clear for us. My colleague, Neil, will tell you later more about the opportunity in software and cloud and how we win the business of today while we build the business of tomorrow. Let me not forget that we always said software and cloud and solution and services is highly synergistic because we are taking care of the entire life cycle of our customers. We are very good, in the meanwhile, of attaching services to our software and cloud customers. We do this in an absolute scalable manner with our simple bundles, as you would expect from a next-generation service provider.
Talking about the next-gen service provider, let me dig a little bit deeper into that. Do we have the right to play? Do we have the right to win? Absolutely, yes. Certainly. For sure. We have the door open because we have 65,000 customers where we have an existing relationship. They trust us. We don't have legacy. We don't have history. We don't have a brownfield. We have experts born in the cloud. We have a highly diversified portfolio, which is aligned with the customer life cycle. We have a unique IP with our PyraCloud Platform, and we have data insights and intelligence, which is unprecedented in the industry. Do we have the right to play? Yes, we have the right to play, and we win.
Maybe there's one more thing which is more important to you, which is, are we able to grow as a next-generation service provider and really decouple the growth from OpEx investment? Are we able to increase the gross profit without adding headcounts and experts on an ongoing basis? Having built a portfolio which is enabled by IP and tech allows us not only to scale to the right level, but also allows us to provide a sustainable, profitable growth in that area. Talking about profitable growth, we have three enablers which are crucial in that aspect. This looks very simple. The most simple things are the most powerful things, and we are taking care of them for a number of reasons. The first one, innovation.
We make sure that we innovate not only on our platform, that we not only innovate in our SAP practice, and you will see later the examples on that we not only innovate on delivery automation. Bernd will also share some insights into that. We also make sure that we have a different approach to people and culture. We are in a service business. The people are our biggest assets, so we have to be different. There is a talent crunch out there, and we will share with you later in my next chapter on what we are doing differently in people and culture. Last but not least, Alex will share with you how we are able to build additional capabilities for our growth streams through a very rigid but also very agile M&A approach.
With all of that, we are very confident that we are able to deliver our guidance for 2021 and our midterm guidance. Let me quickly go through the guidance. I will start with the gross profit on the left side. For FY 2021, we have guided you with 10% growth on GP. That is not including Intergrupo. For the midterm guidance, we have guided you with mid-teens. For the Adjusted EBITDA margin, we guided you for 2021 with approximately 30%. For the midterms, we guided you that the EBITDA growth is in excess of the gross profit growth. For the dividends, we have a range of 30%-50% of the adjusted profit. As I said, all our strategic levers will lead us to that guidance. What are the key takeaways?
If you talk about SoftwareONE, you should have in mind, we plan the plan, and we work the plan. We are not building a strategy and replacing this strategy with another strategy. That's not how it works in SoftwareONE. We build a strategy, we execute, we learn, we build a new strategy. Reselling is going digital. Our starting point is incredible. Neil will share this with you. We will launch our digital marketplace at the end of this year in NorAm, followed by a few focus countries in the first half of next year. We believe this has a significant upside, which is not currently considered in the business plan. We do hope that we will give you the right indicators, the positive indicators in the second half of next year.
We continue to scale out our solution and service business. Because we classify us and we categorize us as a next-generation service provider, we will do this with a very attractive level of profitability. We have our three core enablers to facilitate our growth. We focus on innovation, we focus on people, and we focus on acquisition of capabilities. Last but not least, as I mentioned before, all our strategic levers are leading to our guidance, which we have given to you, and we reiterate it. With that, thanks for your attention. Now I hand over to my dear colleague, Alex, who will lead you through a market and a strategy update. Alex, the stage is yours.
Thank you. Thanks, Dieter, and welcome. Warm welcome from me as well to our 1st Capital Markets Day, a virtual one this year. Over the next few minutes, I hope to cover our mission, market and strategy. Really what I want to cover is why we're so excited about our fast-growing large markets, why we're so excited about the portfolio we've built focused on our customers. I'll touch on a little bit about our competitive differentiation, and I'll finish up with how we supplement our organic growth with M&A. First, on some of the key trends that Dieter mentioned. You've heard about many of these, and I really just want to highlight what does it mean for SoftwareONE. When we speak about acceleration and digital transformation, it's all about the increase in spend, the cloud-first strategy, the subscription and SaaS and public cloud adoption.
What it means for SoftwareONE is our markets are really healthy, growing strongly. The pull-through, you'll hear a lot about pull-through today, the pull-through of our services and solutions. When we speak about the rising complexity for our customers, what we're talking about here is the wide number of choices that they have, the complex cloud migration journey that they're on, as well as what Dieter mentioned, this concept of being hybrid as well as multi-cloud. What this does for us is it means we can engage with customers on an ongoing, on a recurring basis. This is really powerful, and we'll go through that today. Finally, what we're seeing in the market is Software as a Service, SaaS, and public cloud really dominating share of spend. You're seeing spend moving from traditional IT, whether it's data center or hardware, into SaaS and public cloud.
This has two impacts for us. One, our role with customers as a trusted provider is really important. They're in a new world, they're navigating it, and we're there to help them with that journey. Second, we're really close to the largest software players in the world, and we are helping them reach that customer base. We are helping them make sure the customer base understands their cloud products and is using them. That's really critical, as we know, for SaaS and public cloud because it is all about renewal and consumption. This is on our trends. Now let me go into our markets. I'll first cover our software and cloud markets, followed by services and solutions. In software and cloud, we operate in large, fast-growing markets. The market is more than CHF 600 billion.
It's made up of on-premise, SaaS, and public cloud, and the market is roughly doubling over a five-year period. This type of growth rate, these secular trends, is why we chose our business over a number of years to focus on software and cloud and not really focus on hardware, because of these growth rates, because of these trends. The global nature of our business allows us to take advantage to really benefit from the growth we see across the different regions in software and cloud. Finally, the final dynamic that we see is emerging markets are adopting public cloud at a faster pace as they catch up to the developed markets. Again, our global diversification gives us the benefit of growing with those customers as they catch up with the developed markets. That's the fast-growing, the large software and cloud market.
Now let me touch on the services and solutions market. We focus our portfolio, and we focus on the cloud-only aspects of services. This is a subset of the overall IT services market, which is about $ 1 trillion. It's growing roughly faster than GDP. Where we focus our portfolio, where we focus with customers is cloud only, as I mentioned, and this naturally at first attaches to infrastructure as a service. This market you can see grows from $ 60 billion to over $ 250 billion, so 4 times as large in a matter of five years. This is our natural attachment point, so 30% growth rate. In addition, when we help customers with their cloud journey or supporting them in the cloud, we are naturally also addressing their application landscape and supporting them in the cloud.
We naturally broaden our market beyond just services attached to Infrastructure as a Service. In addition to this attractive, fast-growing services market, we make investments. We make investments in strategic growth areas where first we see a customer pain point. We also see a large, fast-growing addressable market. Most importantly, we see a SoftwareONE expertise, SoftwareONE strength that gives us that unfair competitive advantage to win. You started hearing from us at the beginning of this year on the strategic growth areas. They are SAP on cloud, application modernization, industry vertical, as well as hyperscaler and FinOps. As you heard from us, our aspirations for all of our practices, for all of our lines of business and services, is to be greater than CHF 100 million.
What's really exciting for us is these new strategic growth investment areas, we expect to actually reach CHF 100 million over the next two years. As you've heard from us, in terms of a clarification, three of them are brand new. That's what you see at the top of the slide. We expect them to generate incremental CHF 100 million. Hyperscaler and FinOps are already part of our core portfolio. Again, we expect them to reach that scale, but as part of our growing core services portfolio. We're excited but also confident in our ability to execute here because of our history. A few years ago, as we saw the pay-as-you-go phenomenon emerge, we started building out what we call our xSimple portfolio. You'll hear a lot about that today from Neil, from Bernd. Our xSimple portfolio helps support customers as they go to pay-as-you-go.
We identified the need, we built a portfolio, and within a few years, we've been able to reach CHF 100 million of gross profit towards the end of this year. That's what gives us the excitement as well as the confidence to achieve this. Let me spend a few minutes on how we go towards the customer. When we think about customers and what we deliver to them, we think about outcomes. The foundation of our outcomes, the foundation of what we deliver for customers, is commercial transformation. This isn't just about buying at the lowest cost or with the right terms and conditions and the right jurisdiction. Commercial transformation for customers goes as far as helping the customer clean up the house, figure out what they should be buying.
Once we do that, we also help them keep that house in order by putting in place frameworks and governance. That is what we call commercial transformation. An analogy to that is moving houses. If you were to move from one house to the next, you might pack up your house, 100 different boxes. You might pack up all your furniture and move it to the new house. When you get to the new house, you might figure out that some of the furniture doesn't fit, or you may want to buy some new things. You may have some boxes that always remain unpacked. That is the same phenomenon that customers face as they move from their existing environment, whether it's on-premise or hybrid, into the cloud. That's exactly what we try to address with them through commercial transformation. Get the house in order.
When we do that, we really get to know the customer. We get real insights into their current operating environment and where they want to go. We use those insights to transition to help them with technology transformation. Technology transformation is about helping customers get value out of their spend. Time to value, optimizing and managing their spend, as well as minimizing security risks. The two most common use cases that we see here are helping customers gain additional scalability by moving to the cloud, or helping customers move from the current application environment into a modern application environment. They need to look at what applications they have, which applications should stay on-premise, which need to be modernized for the cloud. These are the outcomes that we deliver with technology transformation.
When we can combine commercial transformation and technology transformation for our customers, and we can add vertical expertise, we can go all the way to digital transformation for them. What do we mean here? What we're after with customers is helping them improve their competitiveness or helping them create a new business model. This really does require for us to know what the customer is doing to help them go all the way to digital transformation. One concrete example of what we're already doing today is by partnering with one of the leading software players in the construction vertical.
We're able to build up this industry expertise, this vertical expertise, approach players in the engineering and construction space, and help them become more competitive, save cost, organize their labor as well as the raw materials better, be aware and manage their carbon footprint, and ultimately finish projects on time faster, more cost effectively. This, for us, is the combination of helping combine all of our strengths in commercial and technology transformation, adding vertical expertise to help customers with digital transformation. Let me give you a few concrete examples with customers on our integrated model. You heard this from Dieter. He called it they're synergistic, and this is what we mean. When a customer engages with us on an everyday purchase, Microsoft 365, we add reactive and proactive support. We add analytics through our platform. We put all of that together into a solution for the customer.
That's what we're calling our solutions, our bundles. You see them throughout the day. This is a way which a software and cloud transaction pulls through services and solutions. In another decision, a customer might be facing a large investment in a software platform. We help them not only transact that software, we first help them with an advisory engagement around it. What is their current need? What do they need for the business? What do they need for the future? These are all the things that we would help them with. A simple, "I just need help buying something," pulls along a service with it. When customers come from the other side, and we're engaged with them on application modernization or moving their SAP, their critical environment into the cloud, we do that based on our expertise. We do that as a project.
We then maintain it as a managed service. What it also does is it then also pulls along the cloud consumption because that application is now running in the cloud. These are some of the examples of how our business has become more and more integrated towards the customer and has created this nice recurring model for us. In fact, when customers think about their technology life cycle, they think about going from advise or design, what do I need to do, to buying, to implementing, to managing. As I mentioned, our commercial transformation gives us a seat at the table of almost any customer in the world. Every customer is focused on buying at the lowest cost, buying in a smart way.
What we do, as I mentioned, is we go a bit earlier than the buying decision and first help them decide on what should they be buying. That's the advise function. We then, what I call, help them keep the house in order. That's the optimize and manage. Make sure that that spend stays well-managed. When we do that, we have so much information, so much data, so much insight on the customer. We're then able to deploy our technology transformation really end to end. Again, from advising the customer on what should be done to actually helping them, let's say, modernizing their environment, to then supporting their cloud environment and optimizing it when it's running. We land it with commercial transformation. We expand with our technology transformation. This is what we think about, as Dieter mentioned, do we have a seat at the table?
Do we have the right to win? Finally, as the next-gen player, we're really focused on injecting IP, our own IP, into our solutions. First, we want to add more value to customers, whether it's recommendations or insights based on what we see in their environment, whether it's the digital experience, the self-service that Dieter mentioned, or it's the single pane of glass where they can manage their multi-cloud environment from one place. This is the IP that we inject into all of our solutions. We invest here because we want to add more value to customers, and it also creates a nice, sticky, recurring customer relationship for us. As we participate in the market, we see many strong players along this value chain. Many of the players focus, and they might focus on the next customer-facing application, or they might focus on overall share of spend.
I just want to supply you with whatever you're buying. They might focus on the next application, how do I take this next application for you and move it to the cloud? They might focus on the enterprise segment of the market. We see very many strong players, many strong peers in the market. Our competitive differentiation, our value proposition to customers is really the foundational pillars that I described for you. We start with commercial transformation. We help the customer get their house in order. We learn from that. We transition to technology transformation. We attach our technology transformation offerings to what the customer is buying. Finally, we're working on this, but we are building out more and more vertical industry expertise. Let me summarize these key ingredients of our success as I just went through. First, our customer base gives us the incumbency.
It gives us this captive audience that is already with us. They already are doing software and cloud with us. What our track record shows is when we engage with those customers and when we can attach services and solutions, 66% of our gross profit is doing both with us, software and cloud and services and solutions. When we attach the services to our customer base, the gross profit opportunity currently is eight times. That's been growing, and it's really interesting and exciting what you'll hear from Bernd, that the opportunity is much greater because our portfolio is still landing, our portfolio is still expanding with our customer base. This captive customer base is so powerful for us. Second, the history, the foundation of SoftwareONE is publisher and hyperscaler expertise.
As customers shift more and more of their spend to the biggest software companies in the world, as they shift more and more of their attention to the hyperscale functionality, we are there to provide them that expertise. We're there to provide them those solutions. The other side of that is we're the largest global player for the hyperscalers to reach out to have them reach this broad customer base. As we build our services and solutions, what you're hearing from us is we really focus on how do we make them differentiated, how do we make them scalable, and this is the IP point. Our IP is PyraCloud, which is the glue. We are constantly adding more and more intelligence.
We're constantly adding more and more functionality because we want the services to add more value to customers, and we want that to be a nice recurring business for us. The second important aspect of our operating model is our global diversification. This really matters, as Dieter mentioned, in the competition for talent. We are so diversified across many different countries and regions. We draw on talent from many parts of the world. This is so evident across SoftwareONE. We have so many amazing colleagues contributing to common cause from everywhere in the world. The second is, when we do deliver, we can introduce a blended delivery model. We don't have to deliver in a specific country or a specific region. We can offer customer options, and with those options, we can offer a blended cost delivery model.
Finally, we believe that all of this is only possible because of the SoftwareONE team. All of us are here because we want to be here, because we're excited to build this future. This is what we see through our entire team of colleagues, which is they're highly engaged, they're energized, they are helping us reinforce this high-performance culture. This is how we build this story. This is how we reinforce this story. Let me now touch on for a few minutes on how we use M&A to even further accelerate it. As you heard from Dieter, we really built up quite a robust M&A organization. M&A for us is first finding the right opportunities aligned to our strategic objectives. Partnering and identifying with the right entrepreneurs. He used a really interesting word.
We really want to attract the right teams, the right entrepreneurs to the SoftwareONE platform. We want them to see the value of being at SoftwareONE. We want them to see how we can accelerate their existing trajectory inside our ecosystem. We work quite a bit on that, and I know it sounds almost a bit strange to talk about this in terms of an M&A framework, but it's no secret that in today's world, in the areas where we're doing acquisitions, I'll cover that next, there's plenty of competitors who are standing up and willing to acquire these companies. We believe one of the attractions of how we're able to be successful in M&A is that the entrepreneurs, the teams, they want to join the SoftwareONE platform. They want to continue to be successful with the extra added fuel that we can offer them.
Finally, as you'd expect from us, we have a very rigorous financial discipline. We do joint business cases. Finally, we spend a lot of time on what is value creation, and value creation for us is the integration piece. Over the years, we've now developed playbooks on what does it take to be successful in integrating various types of companies. We take these playbooks as a starting point. We adjust them based on the situation, based on the team, based on the company, absolutely. We have really been working on how do we develop an approach, how we develop so that the entrepreneurs that we're bringing on, as well as our internal teams, know how to be successful together. Let me cover our track record. You heard from us, it's 13 deals since the IPO. Many more, even prior to the IPO.
Our acquisition engine has been focused on practice building. This is what you see on the left in blue. We have been focused on practice building in terms of SAP on cloud and hyperscalers. We are trying to add more and more IP automation. Finally, as all of you know us, we did do two acquisitions of scale. I think what you can expect from us going forward is a continuation of this picture. We will continue to build the practices. The practices are growing so nicely organically based on what I identified earlier. The market, our competitive edge, customer pain point, and we want to continue to add to that growth. What you should expect from us in terms of these acquisitions of capabilities is 6- 10 deals per year. What we also do is we are very focused on acquiring growth companies.
In addition to that, we actually accelerate their growth much more than what they can do standalone. In addition, we bring them to the level of profitability of SoftwareONE in just 2-3 years. This is really key for us because often we're acquiring smaller companies, so they need to both grow and scale in terms of profitability. Finally, we continue to evaluate acquisitions of scale. We believe we have a real competitive advantage here based on our track record, successfully completing Comparex, being able to integrate Intergrupo. These acquisitions need to go through a very strict financial and strategic filter before we would bring them on. Continue to expect roughly this picture from us. Let me just dive into one example of how SAP has been critical to our practice building. We identified the SAP-to-the-cloud trend a few years ago.
We started organically. We hired a team, we hired a leader. As we did that, we started bringing on additional talent through the acquisitions. We started with BNW, as you see since then, we've done five other deals. Six deals in total over the course of two years. What this has allowed us to do is organically and through M&A, build up more than 500 experts in this area. As you heard from Dieter, these cloud dynamics have really changed how we can play and compete in this space. It used to be that the SAP space was really dominated by the largest systems integrators that had thousands and thousands of SAP experts. However, as companies think about SAP today, they are really focused on, how can I run my SAP environment in the cloud? How can I pilot it? What does it mean for me?
This is exactly the value that we deliver to them. We don't need what we would call an army of consultants. We need real expertise on SAP and the hyperscaler to show customers that value. That's what we've been able to do with a combination of organic and M&A. Finally, you see the recognition here with Microsoft doing the only strategic co-investment deal with us, given our ambition, given the momentum that they see in our business. Let me wrap up. First, we're extremely excited about our end markets. They're large, they're fast-growing. The importance of technology, software and cloud, is so critical to our customers because they use it to enable, they use it to transform their business. Our value proposition is an integrated one. We want to help customers with software and cloud. We naturally pull along services and solutions with it.
We are focused on customer outcomes because customers don't always want to buy one thing or the next. They want to know what will they get. Can you deliver this outcome for us? This is why we speak about commercial technology and digital transformation. Our right to win starts with our seat at the table, our foundation, our knowledge, our expertise, the insights we get about those customers, extending that to our right to win with technology and digital transformation. We have a captive customer base. We have so much more opportunity with those customers. We're also expanding our addressable universe, and you will hear more about that from Neil. Finally, we've really focused on how do we become recurring, how do we introduce IP and intelligence to our customers so that they value the digital relationship as well as the human relationship with our team.
Finally, M&A. We use M&A as an accelerator, as an accelerator for capabilities, as an accelerator for IP. Finally, M&A for us is a way to bring on additional talent. We believe that we have a unique edge in the market in terms of attracting talent and retaining talent. I want to turn it over on this topic back to Dieter.
Thanks, Alex, for this insightful presentation. It's actually an excellent segue to what I want to share with you now. We have been speaking, and you have been hearing a lot about digital transformation. You have been hearing a lot about technology transformation. None of them works if we are not considering the human capital. We call this unleashing the human magic. Without that, there is no success. You have seen me very passionate if you talk about our business model, and if you talk about our ambition, and if you talk about our execution. This is really dear to me. This is really dear to my heart. This is dear to all of our hearts in SoftwareONE.
If I show you now the next slide, and I tell you that this is the biggest differentiator of SoftwareONE, how we attract talent and how we retain talent, I would like to see you not only virtually, but in real, what you think. These are our core values. These are our seven core values. You will say now, "I've seen such things before. We might have something like this in our organization. We have vision statement. We have mission statements. Why would that be different?" It is fundamentally different. That is the key ingredient why SoftwareONE has been successful from the start till today, until tomorrow. We absolutely believe that you cannot dictate culture top-down. Culture is a result. It's inherently coming out on how you deal with your colleagues, with your customers, with your stakeholders.
You have to define the right core values which are relevant for you. You see some which might be jumping in your eyes, saying speed. I say later a little bit about that. If you have defined the core values, you have to find the right people who appreciate the core values and live the core values. If you have done this, you need to make sure that everybody of us remains an ambassador and calls each other out. I know this sounds nice, but I'm called out if I don't answer an email in a speedy manner. We all are calling out each other. We're making sure this is embraced and lived on a daily basis.
If you ask our 8,300 employees, "What do you think is the biggest differentiator of SoftwareONE?" I'm certain all of them will tell you it's the core values and the culture. Now, if I share with you a few numbers, you see that we have a highly diverse workforce. Over 80 nationalities, over 3,500 really core technology experts. One of the highest ratio when it comes to gender diversity. I want you to see the 4.7 years average tenure. That is something in the technology industry which is quite high. We are doing something right. We are doing something right because we are able not only to attract talent but retain talent. What is that? What is that ingredient, what we are doing right? I would say very simple, we are close to our people. How are you close to your people?
You hear their voices. We do this on a regular basis. When we do an engagement survey, we get one of the highest respondents rate, not only in our industry, but across industry. What makes me really happy is that we are far above the industry benchmark when it comes to engagement score of our teams. If we do those surveys, this is not only multiple choice. We give every employee the chance to add comments. Now, I tell you there will be over 20,000 comments each and every time when we do the survey. I tell you, all of us will read through those comments and we act upon. That's how we not only stay where we are, that's how we are improving.
I also shared with you that the gap on the skill sets in the digital transformation and technology transformation, the higher demand, the ever-growing demand on that side, is really driving a challenge for every technology organization. That's where we thought we have to find a different, a fresh approach. We have to have a constant inflow of talent, which are also not only attained but retained by us in a different way. Is there a way to combine this as a business model, but also with a purpose behind it? We inaugurated what we call the SoftwareONE Academy, and we are very proud of this. We are very proud of this because we have built a curriculum, a syllabus, which gives a platform to youngsters, which gives a platform to graduates, fresh grads, non-grads, all walks of life, employed, unemployed. Doesn't matter.
With the right attitude, we move them through the syllabus. We teach them from application services to cloud services to SAP services. We have started this in many locations already. We have around 100 students at the moment. Each of that student is doing this as apprenticeship. Once they are certified, they are a permanent employee. We instantly give them the platform for the future. This platform is scalable to a couple of thousand. We will see this, that we increase the locations in the future. Now, I want to swap to another very important topic. That has become really on the radar of every organization, by right so. It's ESG. It's environment, social, and governance. If it would be after me, I would be renaming this.
I would call it PESG, because we fundamentally believe that if you fix the people, if you have the right mindset with the people, you empower them to do the right things, you hire the people with the right attitude who want to do something in an organization with some purpose, Environment, Social, and Governance is an inherent outcome. With that, it's no wonder that we have always lived ESG, even at a time when it wasn't called. We have always been prioritizing ESG, even though it was not necessary to have a tick in the box. We don't want to do this for a tick in the box. We want to make a real impact as we always do when we apply our core values. We are not a manufacturing company, so we are not taking materials, we are not having, in that sense, carbon emissions.
For us, it is really important that our 8,300 people are behaving on a daily way, in such a way that we leave for our generations, the same world, maybe a better world in the future. What we can do as an organization is we can also combine our business with purpose. That's like magic. I want to give you two examples how we are doing this. Think about what we just shared with you and what Bernd will go very much into detail. If we migrate workloads, systems, applications, storage, compute, whatever it is, if we migrate this into a cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's AWS, whether it's GCP, you see on this chart, there is an energy reduction of 79% if we move workloads in the cloud. There is a CO2 reduction of 88%.
It even goes to 98% if that provider is using renewable energy. If you now consider that we do a couple of 1,000 projects, mainly in the enablement and in the move into the cloud, you see it's fantastic. It's fantastic to make sure that energy consumption and CO2 emission is reduced through our daily activities. I'll next mention to you our cooperation with RIB Software in an industry, it's called architecture, engineering, and construction. It's one of the largest industry, I think it's 13% of the global GDP. A lot of demand in terms of digital transformation. We, in the beginning, we thought that's an amazing opportunity for us, a huge addressable market, a burning platform because of the digital transformation, until we realized that this industry is accountable for 38% of CO2 emission.
The solution which RIB has developed, MTWO, which is the construction cloud, has a potential and a possibility with their sixth dimension, with their 6D BIM model, where the sixth dimension is sustainability, not only to impact the energy consumption on how you build buildings, but also impact the entire supply chain from the sourcing of the construction material to the supply chain of delivering it and reducing the 38% CO2 emission on an ongoing basis. We have built this cooperation 9, 10 months ago. We are absolutely confident to be successful with the business, but also be successful with the sixth dimension of sustainability and combine here business and purpose. To complete and to summarize, we have a clear roadmap. We have made sure that we have the governance in the board. We have made sure that we have the right attention in the executive board.
I'm the executive sponsor. We are aligning to roadmaps like the UN or GRI. We have appointed a third party, which makes sure that we are fixing the right metrics and reporting on the right progress. Before I conclude on that chapter of people and culture, personally, I have worked in many corporates, in many organizations. I really believe that SoftwareONE is unique when it comes to people and culture. We are genuine, we are authentic. We live it. I also like to believe that this was one of the reasons why we are able to attract talent, why we are able to attract global talent on a complete different level. I'm very happy and I'm very excited to invite Rodolfo to the stage now, who will be our CFO from 1st of January 2022. Rodolfo, welcome.
Thank you, Dieter.
Rodolfo, I think everybody would like to know first before you go a bit into your background of yourself, you had been on a fantastic journey through Lonza. You have seen it and transformed it through becoming a CHF 54 billion market cap company. What have made you to decide to join SoftwareONE?
Dieter, great question to tee off my introduction. First of all, good morning, good afternoon from my side. I may have met a few of you in my current role as CFO of Lonza, so I very much look forward to reconnecting or to meeting you once I start with SoftwareONE in January. Now, back to Dieter's question. The answer is straightforward. I'm proud to be closing a successful chapter as CFO of Lonza, and I'm very happy to start a new and very exciting chapter with SoftwareONE. Let me share a few highlights of the two chapters. I start with Lonza because I remain its CFO until the end of the year. Many of you may not know of Lonza. It has gained visibility because it manufactures a drug substance for Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.
When I joined, it was a combination of B2B specialty chemical manufacturing with pharmaceutical contract manufacturing. Together with the executive team, we transformed Lonza into the leading pure-play pharma services company. We did this by investing behind growth and financing the investment with accelerated productivity. The transformation, as Dieter said, resulted in a 6-fold increase in market capitalization from CHF 9 billion in 2016 to CHF 54 billion today. My motivation, and back to Dieter's question, my motivation to join SoftwareONE is straightforward. I want to be part of this exciting and promising growth journey. Dieter and the team today during the Capital Market Day will share the very attractive financial projections, and they are underpinned by very strong strategic pillars. I join a strong team of very dedicated professionals with a clear track record of successful entrepreneurship.
Last, but very importantly for me, in my interactions with the team, with the board, I have experienced an exceptionally positive culture and team dynamics. The question Dieter could have asked me is, what do you bring to the table? Let me just briefly answer the question with a few highlights about my education and my career. I completed my undergraduate degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico, where I was born and raised, and then I completed my MBA at the University of Chicago in the U.S. I've worked for three companies, P&G, Novartis, and Lonza. At P&G, I learned the basics. I moved up the ranks, and after 15 years, I decided it's time for a change. Then I joined Novartis in 2002, and I was able to help them accelerate financial and operational excellence by reapplying best practices.
The company was still reshaping itself. In my last role at Novartis was CFO for Animal Health, a very dynamic, entrepreneurial division where we led a turnaround in performance, improved results, and ultimately we ended up selling the business to Lilly for 5 times sales. Based on these experiences, and together with the SoftwareONE team, I am confident that I can help them accelerate financial discipline, operational excellence in a very dynamic, entrepreneurial company like SoftwareONE, and help the team in their strategic growth journey. Before we go into the coffee break, final word from my side. I'm lucky to join SoftwareONE with a strong foundation that Hans has put in place. I've met his global finance leadership team, and I have been impressed by the professionalism, the speak-up culture.
Hans and I are already coordinating the transition. I very much look forward to starting with SoftwareONE in January. Thank you.
Thanks, Rodolfo. Are you initiating the break, or I initiate the break?
[Inaudible] Dieter. We will now go for a quick break, but please don't go too far away from your screens as we'll be back in 10 minutes with our President of Services for a deep dive on software and cloud. Thank you.
Thank you.
[Break]
Welcome back from the coffee break. My name's Neil, and I'm excited to take you through our software and cloud strategy, how it will grow steady growth, and also deliver services-led acceleration. On top of that, how our investments in Marketplace and PyraCloud will provide additional growth opportunities. Let me take you back to the IPO when we presented our unique value proposition and position in the market, both for customers and for vendors. First of all, for our vendors, as Alex and Dieter said, we provide them unprecedented reach into our 90 markets and 65,000 customers. Not only that, but we take their solutions and we add our services to make more value in front of their customers. From a customer perspective, the world is getting more complex, and the software and cloud space continues to grow. The choices they have are exponential.
Providing those choices from an agnostic partner like SoftwareONE is a real value to them. Not only that, we can of course deliver it at the right price, in the right location, and the right terms. That is our unique value proposition to the market, and we think we're strongly positioned. With that, let's take a look at software and cloud dynamics. Reminding you of our H1 results, 65% of our gross profit was delivered by software and cloud. We continue to see the same behavior in our customers. They are buying ad hoc quotes and orders coming in a manual process to resellers like SoftwareONE and peers. Not only that, though, they're looking for that digital experience that Dieter spoke about, and we're seeing an acceleration of that demand of digital. Of course, software and cloud spend is continuing to grow.
We expect that because it's the foundations of our customers' digital transformation. Indeed, today, 70% of our software and cloud spend is delivered by Microsoft and 30% through multi-vendor. The 70% is the lowest it's ever been, which makes us less dependable on Microsoft, and it's a testament to the fact that our multi-cloud and multi-vendor approach is driving additional growth. However, we're really excited about our leading position with Microsoft and our really strong partnership. Let me first of all take you deeper into that Microsoft partnership. We've been going 30 years as a relationship with Microsoft. We have strong relationships at their top executive level. Satya's executive team has nominated an executive sponsor, which is Amy Hood, their Group CFO.
Dieter and I meet with her on a regular basis. We talk about our joint partnership and how we can continue to make that sustainable and profitable for both our organizations. We are well-known and experts in driving customers to the Microsoft cloud from the on-premise environment. Indeed, 70% of the Microsoft revenue that we represent is now in their cloud. That's the highest it's ever been. We also previously announced at our results about the strategic partnership we have with Microsoft on SAP and on App Services. Today, we have enabled 40 markets with our SAP services. Taking the Intergrupo acquisition and building on the Academy on top, we've used that as a platform to grow our App Services practice with Microsoft. Indeed, Bernd will talk more about that later.
Finally, we're in an elite group of partners that has a tremendous amount of gold competencies. Why is that important? It's important to Microsoft because it shows that we have their trust to be able to deliver not just software and cloud, but also add services to their customer base to get the most out of it. That's what's really important to both Microsoft and our customers. Microsoft look at their business across three segments. Let me talk to you a little bit more about those three segments. There's enterprise and there's public sector. Through the COVID pandemic, we have seen accelerated spending in those segments. Indeed, though, it's typically a lower margin business, we have cleared growth drivers across all three segments. For those particular two, we have a revenue growth. On top of that, we have market consolidation opportunities.
Microsoft and customers see the value we provide because we have our PyraCloud platform, which we'll talk about later, as well as the commercial transformation advisory services Alex talked about. Indeed, we are providing a digital experience, which I'll go into later as well. For SMEs, they were more adversely affected by COVID. We saw a slowdown there. We talked about that in previous calls, and now we've seen a continued recovery of the SME spend. That is a typically higher margin business for us. As SMEs have come back, they've demanded more from partners like SoftwareONE in terms of pay-as-you-go. We're delivering pay-as-you-go to our SME customers through our bundle called xSimple. Let me now talk to you about what xSimple means to SoftwareONE and our customers. Let's take a typical customer that takes a cloud product.
In this case, let's think about something like 365. When they buy the cloud product, then they have to make a decision on how they're going to support that in the future. Are they going to hire people or take on a maintenance contract for when things go wrong, and to optimize that? When things go wrong, who are they going to call? When they are deploying this cloud or 365 to their end users, how are they ensuring that those end users know what to do with that product? Take a product like Teams. How are they going to use it? How are they going to adopt that? They're looking at adoption services.
After they've bought the cloud product, they're also thinking about, well, this is now OpEx, so do I really want to buy upfront and then worry about deployment later? Or d o I want to pay as you go and actually manage that? Also, how am I going to make sure that I'm optimizing that environment so the right subscriptions go to the right users, and also the right number of users match the right number of subscriptions? This all comes after the buying cycle when a customer buys the cloud. We saw this gap in the market, we saw the demand in SMEs, so w e decided to package all that services, that platform IP, and put it into a single product called xSimple.
Now the customer has one purchase and they pay as they grow, and indeed, pay as they go. That's what we call xSimple. It's been tremendously well-received by the market. We launched it two years ago. We're about halfway through this transition. It's delivering a really high growth. We talked about the 70% growth that this is driving. It's highly scalable on our IP platform, PyraCloud, backed up by our global delivery centers. Not only that, we expect this growth to mean that this business exits FY 2021 with $ 100 million run rate. With those type of financials, it's worth me talking through a specific example of how we report that in our P&L.
I'm going to take you through now an indicative example. Let's take a customer that's buying $1,200 per year in cloud. The top pie charts you see in red there are a typical buy-only commitment offer from a customer through a traditional contract. If they take that from SoftwareONE, we invoice them immediately in month 1, and we make $60 in month 1. That's what the first pie chart shows. Because we've invoiced them in month 1, after year 1, it's still $60. Indeed, over the three years, which you see in the third red pie chart, we've made $90. Why $ 90? The customer's contract has continued to grow typically, Therefore, we make $ 90 over the three years.
Let me take you through the pay as you go example, which in our case is the xSimple bundle. In this case, we add those services, we add that IP, we invoice that to the customer, and w e make $15. That $15, of course, is made up of software and cloud, services and solutions. Of the $15, we represent that 20% of it goes to the software and cloud business line, and 80% goes to services and solutions. Therefore, $3 goes to software and cloud in month 1, and $ 12 goes to services and solutions.
The second pie chart on the bottom shows that we're delighted about the experience that gives our customers. They don't have to keep coming back and finding providers to help them with the cloud journey. For us, we can make $180 over the course of the first year. Let me remind you, from a software and cloud perspective, it takes us 20 months to break even because of the 80/20 split we apply. However, we're really excited about this journey, not just the experience it provides the customer, but of course, it allows us to make 6 times more gross profit for us from those customers as well.
Finally, I have to remind you, Alex talked about the fact when we add service and solutions to our customers, we can make more money and be more profitable, and this is a good example of how that happens in practice. Again, this is a scalable solution, and indeed, the contract we provide to the customers is evergreen. Let me zoom out now and look at how this impacts and affects our overall Microsoft business. We talked about we have growth drivers in all three segments. We continue to expect revenue growth and market consolidation in enterprise and public sector. Then for SMEs, indeed, they're driving the xSimple bundles, which is impacting our software and cloud growth and accelerating our services and solutions.
We're very happy and comfortable with the steady growth we'll provide in this business line, as well as the accelerated growth opportunities it provides in services as well. That concludes the end of my Microsoft deep dive. Let me take you back now to software and cloud and how we overall see the market and how we approach that. Dieter touched upon this earlier. We see the traditional model continuing for many years from a perspective of customers will come to providers, typically VARs or resellers, and ask for quotes on particular software and cloud products. Our customers in SME have 50 to 100 vendors, maybe. Enterprise customers, maybe 400 to 500 vendors. They're going to a lot of partners to go and get those quotes, and it's very manual and very intensive. We will continue to operate that model that we have today.
However, we're super excited about the digital approach that we're taking with our customers now and what we're planning for in the future. The second bar shows the digital supply chain. That is an existing service we have today. I'll talk you through that in a second. Then, of course, digital marketplaces. You may have already heard about that. It's quite a fragmented market today. We see ourselves as a key player, not only because of our platform, PyraCloud, but also because of our vendor breadth that we have. We will be a key player in providing a digital experience through marketplaces in the future. Let me talk first of all about digital supply chain. What is that? Again, let me give you a typical customer example.
If a customer today is buying software in cloud and it's not digital, they typically have 300- 400 vendors in an enterprise environment, and they may be using 10 or more suppliers to actually get access to those products. They're going to those providers looking for the best price, the best terms. They're also looking for the breadth, that each of them offer an individual breadth. We go to those customers and we say, "Why don't we integrate your systems that you have on your side?" They'll be operating something like SAP or Oracle, connecting it with our systems on our side. Every time you want a software and cloud product, we connect it and provide that dynamically to you without this manual process. That has a huge impact on the customer. They have more efficient operations.
They can see all their contracts and renewals because it's coming from one provider and not many. They have clear, trustworthy data, and of course, that entitlement visibility. That allows them not only just to manage and optimize their spend, but the data is also the platform that Bernd will talk about to add value on their technology spend. Finally, let me point you towards this bottom right chart. This gives you a real-life example of what happens when we connect our systems to a customer's via digital supply chain. You can see this customer, and if you look at the bottom, you can see the number of invoices they have. That shows you this ad hoc spend they have with a provider like SoftwareONE. In May 2021, we went to this enterprise customer. We said, You spend a lot on software. It's super fragmented.
Why don't you consolidate it through SoftwareONE? Connect your systems to ours, and we can have all these benefits. They executed that with us, and you can see the impact it had in the third quarter of 2021. We are now processing 557 invoices. To be clear, those 557 invoices would have happened for the customer anyway, just in a fragmented way. Now we've consolidated that through SoftwareONE to provide all these outcomes I've discussed. We're excited about digital supply chain, but we do know its limitations. Its limitations are based on our enterprise customers wanting to connect to SoftwareONE. We have to have that interface, and we do build that, and we build this customized catalog. It is limited by the fact of finding these customers and doing these integrations.
The digital experience is great. We want that digital experience to be expanded to all our clients and indeed every prospective customer out there. How are we going to give this digital experience to more customers? That leads me into talking to you about Marketplace. The first key point here is that we've done our homework. We are not starting from zero. We are already authorized with 7,500 vendors. That represents one of the broadest marketplaces in the industry. To give you an example, most VARs and resellers are dealing with a few dozen to a few hundred vendors in the software and cloud space. Indeed, the hyperscalers like Azure or AWS maybe have 1,000 or 2,000. We also connect to their marketplaces. Our marketplace is one of the broadest in the ecosystem.
However, customers today access that ad hoc in the manual fashion, as we talked about, which is traditional, as well as those customers that connect with us have that digital experience. To get this digital experience and these 7,500 vendors to all customers, this is what we need to do. We are executing our marketplace. This is in pilot phase, as Dieter discussed in Q4 this year. We will then soft launch next year in key markets. This is then providing customers access to this marketplace without integration, and also without the need to engage with SoftwareONE to set themselves up as a customer. Indeed, this is going back to Alex and Dieter's point around providing this digital experience they get in their personal lives into the corporate environment.
We're excited about this, not just because we can provide that experience, but of course, we can provide all this data to the customer. This data will allow them to execute FinOps. FinOps, Dieter spoke about earlier. Bernd will go into more details. Of course, this product itself, Marketplace, is built on our existing platform, PyraCloud. With that, I want to talk to you a little bit more about what PyraCloud is already delivering today for our customers. These are the three pillars of PyraCloud. The first one we spoke about. That's Marketplace. The second one is well established. That's our digital column. That one is the digital experience we drive and we create for our customers through digital supply chain. The third column is cloud management. Again, imagine our customers today are buying cloud solutions from a single provider like Azure.
It's okay for them to go to the Azure platform and manage that spend in the Azure platform. They add AWS, then they add Google Cloud Platform. All of a sudden they have multiple points to manage their entire cloud spend, as well as they already have their existing software and cloud spend, which makes it super complicated. PyraCloud gives them the single pane of glass connecting to these public cloud providers to manage their entire software and cloud spend. As our customers are moving to multi-cloud, we spoke about that. They're also now saying to us, "We're not just moving multi-cloud, we're going multi-public cloud." With this complexity, we'll drive even more relevance into our PyraCloud platform.
Finally, all these three pillars, we have a foundation under it called SoftwareONE Insights. That's the data we gather from that, and then we serve that back to the customer. That data we serve back to the customer allows them to self-serve and manage and optimize their spend in a more efficient manner, and we also serve that to our consultants so they can teach our customers how to be smarter and how to adopt technology faster and get more value out of the spend. As Dieter also spoke about, we have seen the continued activation of customers. We're now up to 60% of our customers on the platform, and triple digits growth in usage. I've talked a lot about PyraCloud, so it would be good to show you a demo.
Mike Fitzgerald, who's our chief technology officer, has put a short demo video together talking about some of these features I've just discussed with you. I'm now going to show you the video.
As you can see here, this is our new public marketplace launching later this year, which provides customers with access to the 7,500 publishers, as well as allows integration features for our digital supply chain services as well. Just a quick look around. You can see this customer here can search very quickly, find the products they're looking for, build a cart, add those things to the cart, build a whole bill of materials, call down direct from the SoftwareONE credit account or use different payment options, and significant other digital payment options will be added over time. Customer can also manage their orders, this location.
We're allowing customers to manage their software spend here. They can also look at any agreements that they have and manage their renewals of this process, whether that be on-prem licensing or cloud-based renewals. They can also find access to their assets here, or their license keys for different licenses and different pieces of software that are being purchased. We can see here as part of our marketplace platform, our digital insights technology is providing customers with insights to manage their software estate. This particular customer is buying Office 365 or has an Office 365 agreement, and the platform is making a recommendation to change the agreement type from E1 to E3 and making a recommendation on saving to do so.
Because this is built on top of the marketplace experience, it is looking at the customer's buying patterns and use cases, and the algorithm is giving the option for automation at the bottom here to say you can automate that change of subscription from E1 to E3. This is Insights, our own IP that is powering decision-making for the customer based on buying patterns through marketplace. Built into our managed services and our professional services, we include the PyraCloud platform to help customers make digital decisions about their software portfolio and get digital outcomes from our services. Here's a good example in an Azure managed service where the customer can use our cloud cost optimization technology to break down spend management.
You can see here we're seeing total predicted cost and then total predicted savings, and at the bottom giving some automation through the platform that supports the service delivery to the customer. Here in this case, we've got the capability of switching plans, of right-sizing resources, or actually shutting down some virtual machines using the automation that's built into the platform.
Great. I hope you enjoyed that video. Thank you, Mike, for putting it together for this event. Let me now leave you with my key takeaways. First of all, we offer one of the broadest platforms for 7,500 vendors to our customers in the ecosystem. Today, we provide that ad hoc and in digital supply chain, and in the future, marketplace. We are highly valued by these vendors because not only do we offer them access to these markets and to our customers, but we add services on top to add even more value to their solutions.
Microsoft and SoftwareONE is a joint success story. We continue to invest in that partnership, and it continues to drive IP-related reoccurring services revenues, as well as software and cloud. The adoption of multi-cloud is one of the most exciting things that's happening in the industry. Again, that will make PyraCloud, our platform, more valuable to our customers and help them manage and optimize their spend. Then finally, we see steady growth in software and cloud driven by multi-vendor, PyraCloud, digital supply chain, marketplace, and of course, the continued recovery of SME is driving our xSimple business, which contributes to our growth in software and cloud, and accelerates our services business. With that, I'm going to hand over to my friend, President of Services, Bernd.
Thank you, Neil. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm the second new kid on the block. My name is Bernd Schlotter. I'm now 100 days in as President of Services, so still brand new. I spent 25 plus years of my career in client services and in software at companies such as Bain & Company for 17 years, HP, Atos, and the last few years at Boston Consulting Group. I'm very excited to be here, and just as Rodolfo elaborated before, it is quite a long process to get to know SoftwareONE. Dieter and John and Alex, and Neil, we started talking in January. I was actually getting through COVID in Hawaii. I was sitting there in my shorts and my nice dress shirt, and I was talking to Dieter, and I felt like this is a culture that I want to be a part of.
The seven values resonated with me. Over time, I got more and more excited about the opportunity to build a billion-dollar or Swiss franc services business. Let me tell you where we are coming from. We reached just under CHF 200 million in revenues or CHF 146, CHF 147 in gross profit in the first half of 2021. It's about a bit more than a third of group profits, gross profits. It's about 3 to 1 in terms of technology transformation versus commercial transformation. Commercial transformation is the core of where we're coming from. It's the source of our competitive advantage. I will elaborate on that a bit. Technology transformation is where a lot of the revenue opportunity is, as you also see in our growth investments. Today, I want to talk about four things. First, very briefly about the opportunity and customer pain points.
Second, a bit longer about our right to play and our right to win, why we think we can be successful as a still relatively small player in a very big market. About our strategic portfolio, how it ties together, how it's integrated with software and cloud. Lastly, I want to reassure you, we are very cognizant about profits and about profitable growth, and I show you the levers that we will pull in order to be profitable. Let's start with the opportunity first. As most of you will know, IT services grows very predictably, usually 200 basis points, 300 basis points above GDP. The game is all about identifying the hyper growth segments. In this case, for us, it's services on top of Infrastructure as a Service and some subsegments of the application segments.
Focusing on them and driving growth for ourselves aligned with the market growth, which is what we're doing. Market growth alone is not enough. It has to be paired with customer pain points, with problems that we can solve or help the customer solve themselves. Here on the left, you see some of the key cloud challenges. The top four roughly relate to technology. Security is a big issue in the age of the cloud. It has to be embedded everywhere. Multi-cloud management, cloud migration, of course, and then the war for talent is on across both technology and commercial. There's just not enough talent out there, and companies are looking for help, and SoftwareONE can provide it. The bottom four or five are the commercial pain points, very real.
How do we manage our cloud spend, governance around cloud spend, compliance, and bring your own license and other issues around the journey to the cloud. As was mentioned before, you see on the right-hand side some key stats. It's estimated that on average, almost a third of cloud spend is wasted because people buy capacity they don't need. They commit to contracts they don't need. They don't take advantage of falling prices. The world is multi-cloud and hybrid at the same time, and spend in the cloud is increasing tremendously. We are uniquely positioned to support customers in their own journey to digital transformation. Let me tell you why we think that is and what we think our sources of competitive advantage are. We think there are four major ones.
The first one is the big, as I call it, is design and make and buy and migrate and operate. End-to-end coverage together with software and cloud, helping the customer across all of their needs, across their whole digital journey. We have 65,000 customers. We have a seat at the table. We get that proof of concept, we can convert that proof of concept to a relationship, first projects, and then recurring. It's about share of wallet. It's not about hunting new customers. That's a very important advantage. Second is insights. Together with our platform, with our ability to benchmark like companies, to see historical patterns, usage, we can drive proprietary insights that make us relevant in the conversations with our customers and drive a differentiated ability to serve them better than others. Third, mentioned a lot, our PyraCloud platform, three modules.
The module that is most relevant for services is cloud. It's a single pane of glass allowing for managing multi-cloud environments and also delivering insights for value-based customer journeys, allowing us to drive value and outcomes with the customers in the most relevant fashion. Last but not least, we don't have technical debt. We don't have a legacy. We're born in the cloud, and we can drive a different economic model than our customers can. Let me go into those four in a bit more details. The first three in this section, and then the next, the 4th one, in our portfolio section. As I said, it's the big end. Together with software and cloud, tightly integrated, we can advise them on the front end. We can allow them to design the right solutions for their business need.
That will lead to a make versus buy decision, and if they want to buy, we can support them and then can implement in the next stage. If they want to make, we can make the solutions. If they have a solution and the best decision is to migrate, we can migrate the solutions. At the end, we can pull everything together, manage it, and optimize it for the client. I don't think there are many players out there. In fact, probably none, that can do all of this as well as we do it end to end. Our linkage to software and cloud is also showing results. On the left-hand side, you see in the red color, the gross profit, the share of gross profit that is generated by software and cloud-only customers. It went down from 40% to now 34%.
The blue is the revenue or the gross profit generated by both software and service and software and cloud customers. Cloud customers that buy both. It has gone up to 66%. We're steadily increasing, we're steadily penetrating our customer base. The right-hand side is actually much more important and much more powerful. As you see, a year ago, from the first half of this year, trailing 12 months, the leverage we got from a customer when they converted from software and cloud only to both was 7.7x in gross profit. Quite a significant uplift. Now this year, it has grown to 8.6. To be honest, we think this can go dependent on the customer segment, for the smaller customers to 20x, for the larger customers up to 200x.
There's tremendous growth opportunity in it for us, and it's in it for us as a game or share of wallet, and not necessarily hunting down large customers. However, we have to have credibility with the customer. We have to have relevance in order to drive this leverage further up. That's where our insights-driven approach comes in. We have our own platforms, and there's a few more than the three components of PyraCloud. We acquired a few companies that gave us proprietary data and platforms. We also work, of course, with many suppliers. All of that combined delivers relevant conversations with customers about things like planning and tracking optimization of cloud usage, optimizing their software value chain about modern applications, SAP and cloud, and new ways of working. This is all fueled by a single source of truth for customer health. We know how they're doing.
We know how likely they are to have emerging needs, how likely they are to upsell, cross-sell, or the risk of them leaving us. We have an engine that will recommend the next logical action with that customer. All of this together is a very powerful instrument in our share of wallet strategy. The customer conversations then are framed in terms of customer journey. This is not transactional. This is a long-run interaction with the customer. As we are now, when you start on the top right with discover and evaluate and the engage segment, that customers nowadays do research, and by the time they call a vendor, they have done 70% of the decision-making already. You need to be early in the game. It helps that we have an existing customer base. We can create that awareness.
We have the right to have a seat at the table, a tremendous advantage. Of course, we have a good engine from our transactional business for the transaction piece. The second half of this chart is, I always say, services is the new sales. It's very clearly, we start at every touch point with the customer to influence how they feel about it and how likely they are to purchase more from us. We are focusing on onboarding, we are focusing on customer adoption and engagement through customer success motions. Obviously, we have to be excellent in support and troubleshoot. Then we go into expansion story and even into co-innovation with customers.
All of this, as I said before, fueled by our PyraCloud platform that also will deliver real-time insights on potential for spend, for cost reduction, on workload and operational status that allows us to predict before the trouble happens, as you see in other areas like security threats or stuff like that. That's an integrated machine that we're building that we think is adding to our competitive advantage. The fourth one of our competitive advantages I want to cover in a lot more detail in our strategic portfolio section. As we say, we are driving a portfolio, a share of wallet strategy, so it has to hang together and it has to be integrated. The way we're doing this is on the top, you see those blue boxes. These represent what we call service lines.
This is the way we make decisions when we think about capabilities, when we think about M&A. This is the way we drive business cases, and this is also the way we manage margin. Because these are separate business definitions that have separate economic models, and we cannot average out across them, otherwise we will never be able to manage our margin up. On the left-hand side, you see commercial FinOps, digital ITAM, we call it digital because we don't do hardware, and digital supply chain. On the right-hand side, you see future workplace, new ways of working, application services, and SAP on cloud, our big investment areas. Cloud services, where we have one service line for now for each of the hyperscalers. The reason for that is we're acquiring capabilities. We'll later talk about an AWS acquisition.
We're also building relationships with the hyperscalers on these tower levels. At the bottom across, very important, security for us is not a standalone go-to-market, it's embedded in everything we do. We will invest into security, but we will embed it into our offerings. We will have cross-portfolio integration. Our architects will be together. We will make sure that we architect our offering in a way that makes it hang together. Last, but certainly not least, at the bottom, we have consulting, we have governance, adoption, and change management capabilities. Because as leaders said before, the journey to the cloud is still people and culture-driven. For many of those service lines, for example, FinOps, changing behavior and changing the culture is just as important as delivering the technical or software capability of doing so. We feel all of this fits nicely together.
Let me give you an example. Actually, two examples. The first one is around commercial transformation. I won't take you through every icon here, but the beginning of the journey is a software and cloud customer. We'll design a very easy, simple landing offer that is quick to value, quick to consume, low barrier to entry. Out of that, and together with our insights, we might branch out into three things. The first one on top, FinOps, making sure that the cloud investments are managed properly. The second one about the long tail. Neil was talking about the hundreds of suppliers that they may have, and we have an automated way of dealing with that spend. At the bottom, probably the most sophisticated at the moment, is for your very large vendors, an Oracle, a Microsoft, an SAP as examples.
We have a very sophisticated advisory and our managed services to make sure that you get the most value out of those relationships as well. Let me start with the top, and let's define what we mean by FinOps. FinOps is one of those buzzwords where if I say FinOps and you have 50 people in the room, you might get 20+ different definitions. At the very essence, it's cloud financial management. It's planning, monitoring, and optimizing cloud spend. It is combining systems, best practices, and culture, very important, to increase an organization's ability to understand and better manage their cloud cost. Then last, financial accountability to cloud spend, making it clear that governance and financial responsibility matter when subscribing to cloud services. All of this enables IT to be an internal service provider. We're in the business of making IT look good to the organization.
As with everything we do, it's underpinned by our platform. We have the solutions designed already, many of them building on the IP we gained with the examples. Then, obviously, we're certified as a platform, as a provider for FinOps. We are also certified with the three hyperscalers. A very good story, and an area where we are investing tremendously, and an area that we are embedding in all of our activities. That's why we're saying this is growing together with the business. It's not growing separately on a standalone basis. Let me go to the middle branch that we saw before, the management of the long tail. It has to be consumed, like Neil said before, in a B2C-like manner. It has to be an easy process with quick approvals for the users. The primacy of self-service.
We are delivering a pre-approved service catalog. Making it very simple to buy off that catalog that is approved by IT, that has been vetted by procurement. We're providing alignment of all the stakeholders, we're making it easy, and we are improving that process seamlessly over time. We think that will be a tremendous opportunity for us, and we are ahead of the curve in comparison to our competition in this digitization. Now look at the bottom of the branch where we are dealing with our most biggest vendors, if you're a customer. We are bringing the right solution here to business requirements at the right cost, and especially the right cost is quite in the neighborhood of a PhD thesis sometimes in order to understand all the complications of doing business with large software providers. We are an 800-pound gorilla in this space.
We have 1,000+ customers in long-term digital ITAM managed services. We do 2,500+ projects every year. We have probably the largest digital ITAM consultancy worldwide. They're automating a lot so that number of consultants might not go up as much, but our capabilities and our volume will go up, and w e have 3,000+ certifications. Even though this is a sizable business for us, it is growing nicely north of 20%. As you may have heard, we are now recognized in the leader quadrant by Gartner for software asset management managed services. A very nice story, and we will continue to invest in this. You hear us talk a lot about application services, SAP cloud services.
These are our growth vectors, but a lot of it will be fueled from the commercial side, and will be fueled by the insights and the learnings that we get from both FinOps and ITAM. Let's take a second to explore how this then spills over in our ability to grow and drive share of wallet through technology services. We might have again, or we have again, a software and cloud customer. We might use FinOps or an existing ITAM managed service as the entry vehicle. This leads naturally to a cloud subscription, because if you allow the customer to better manage their cloud financials, it is natural for us to manage their subscriptions, which then opens up so many insights for us that allow us, for example, here, to talk to them about workplace migration. This could be Office 365, this could also be Google Workspace.
At the bottom, talk about their complete application estate and assess along the famous 6 Rs, if an application and the workload should be retained, should be retired, should be rehosted, replatformed, or refactored, or replaced by a commercial application. Let's start at future workplace, at the top, workplace migration. I'm using this to demonstrate to you the modularity of our approach. At the beginning, on the left-hand side, we're offering something that every customer needs. There doesn't have to be an opt-out. This is the bare minimum they need. On top of that, they can custom configure to their actual needs. It could be, of course, security, it can be backup, it can be unified communications and collaboration, it can be a FinOps element to it. The customer will feel this as customization, but it's really configuration from our point of view.
Then, of course, it will be integrated with our marketplace. If they want applications on top of that integrated, they can procure them easily in our marketplace. That's a very fundamental approach. We have to decompose our offerings. We have to sell the customer exactly what they want in a standardized and automated way, and the only way to do this is modular and with automated configuration. Let's go to the bottom and look at assessing the application estate and thinking about modernizing applications, and then also about migrating workloads. In that business, we entered in a big way with acquiring Intergrupo, as you know. We have advisory capabilities, delivery capabilities on a project basis, and also managed service capabilities. As you see on the left-hand side, 80-plus new logos this year alone, year to date.
22 countries with active revenues, 150-ish new opportunity every month, 150 new resources, greater 100 students in our Academy that we are feeding into the business. Something that we all are very excited about it. It was one of the key selling factors for me, that a company is so creative and creating opportunities for so many people and making it a win-win with the business. A great opportunity. We're gaining traction here. 2022, 2023 will be breakout years for application services. Let's talk about one workload migration that you heard a lot about today, SAP in the cloud. Again, similar, we have great discovery and advisory services on the front end. There's three paths that customers can take. An implementation or re-implementation of SAP, a conversion of SAP to S/4HANA, or migrating their current SAP, just lift and shift to the cloud.
For each of those, we have an offer. We have a lot of momentum in the business. As you see on the next page, almost 200% revenue growth over the last 12 months, five XD experts in the business, 50 new logos, 40 active countries. Most importantly, again, coming back to what Dieter said about people and culture, people who come to us like it and stay with us. We will build differentiated talent by our ability to attract and retain talent. We have 300-plus active discussions and other projects, and at the bottom right, you see we've been honored as the most promising partner by SAP last year. It's a great story. However, the biggest obstacle is not necessarily our ability to deliver, it's the hesitancy of the customers in the market to make the jump.
As you all know, I'm sure, companies invest a lot to get SAP up and running. Once it's running, it's awesome. But people are afraid of the risks that they take if they migrate their system. What we have done is we have designed an offer that allows them to better assess the risks, see some quick value, and bring along, in a change management motion, the internal stakeholders that may be pushing back to moving now, why not moving later. There is a deadline out there, 2027. There's a lot of pressure, but companies are hesitant. It's important to give them a tool where they can start exploring and learning how to do this. This is a case study. We are allowed to use the name.
It's Zuellig Pharma, one of the largest healthcare services groups in Asia, with their purpose is to make healthcare more accessible. We did an initial situation assessment, feasibility of converting, a very fast-track full scale S/4HANA pilot, a new Fiori user interface, and readiness assessment. The value that this delivered was the proven feasibility it can be done, higher transparency on the cost, the benefits, and the risks, and almost most important, is increasing stakeholder buy-in. The internal stakeholders are learning that this journey is feasible and that it can be done. We believe this is the way to go in the SAP market, and obviously, this is ongoing, converting to the full scale migration. Once we have that, the next logical step is then cloud services, managed cloud services, helping our clients on an ongoing basis.
This comes back that we already have scale, 50% year-over-year growth in managed services, 6.7 million active users, the full portfolio of offering, also an area of investment. Let me show you one example. It's from our recent acquisition, HeleCloud. I call it the perfect trifecta of what M&A needs to deliver. It delivered talent, certified talent, great people in the right place. It delivered a platform, the next-generation managed service blueprint that we are looking for with automation, orchestration, compliance, the way we want it, something we can take and scale across the globe. We can add value, and we are a better owner of that asset than it was standalone. Lastly, it is in the right place to deliver services to our most important markets in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, and U.K.
This is the kind of investment that Alex and the team are driving and something that we really will do more of because it will enhance our capabilities. That's the perfect time to talk about profitable growth. We need to be cognizant that we will not scale this business with people. We are next generation service provider. We scale this platform with industrialization, with automation. On the left-hand side, you see the four levers that we are going to pull to drive profitability. The first two ones are by far the biggest ones. It's about modularity in the service catalog, machine learning driven configuration, automation, and the benefits of scale once our service lines are scaling. It's about an optimized delivery network, clear accountability for remote, and about IP on top of pure cloud.
It's about de-averaging the business and protecting the higher margins that we have in parts of our business that are very accretive to the average margin and making sure that we drive more of those. Lastly, closely related to software and cloud, the share of wallet game, motions, blueprinting that allows our account teams to lower their cost of sales and drive more share of revenue for us. We're excited about this. I'm 100 days in. It's the beginning of the journey. You'll hear a lot more about this next year, but we started, and we're going down that path, and we are convinced it's feasible and valuable. Which leads me to my key takeaways. It's a massive opportunity. That's number one. It is high growth with big customer pain points. We're going to build something big.
Our right to win is rooted in our existing customer relationships, our customer insights, and because we're born in the cloud. We have a tremendous leverage already if we add software and services and solutions to software and cloud, and we will drive that multiplier more and more. We're all about complete customer journeys and to support customers in their own digital transformations, and we're building for profitable growth. With that, I conclude my remarks, and I want to invite my dear friend, Hans, our CFO, who will talk about financial performance.
Thank you very much, Bernd, and welcome to this Capital Market Day from my side. My name is Hans Grüter. I'm the CFO of SoftwareONE since 2014. As announced earlier, I will retire at the end of this year. I'm very glad that with Rodolfo Savitzky, a highly experienced CFO and leader, will take over at the beginning of 2022. I will spend all the time necessary that the transition will be a smooth and successful one. Before going further, I would like to clarify we will not provide today an update on our Q3 performance in adherence to our current half year reporting cycle. I will focus on key financial drivers of the business and the midterm gross profit and EBITDA perspective. The first financial driver is the growth of our business. We returned to solid level of growth in H1 2021.
In the last years, we have group gross profit delivered in a context of the acquisition and integration of Comparex, as well as the pandemic, of a solid 4% year-on-year at current currency growth. You see that in the gray bubbles. Based on strategic investments made, we have been able to increase the growth to 12.3% at the half year 2021. Even more accelerated the gross profit from solution and services to 53.4%. This 53.4% does include the gross profit from Intergrupo, which we have acquired recently, and without increase of still significant of 36% would have been resulted. This acceleration was accompanied by an increase of the managed service as part of the total service pie. In line with our strategy, we have been able to increase that from 55% to a number of 59% in the half year 2021.
Going to the second financial driver, which is our globally diversified business. We are diversified across geographies. You see that here in the slides of the gross profit, which we have achieved on the half year. We are also diversifying across our industry sectors and customers with very low customer concentration. This diversification does reduce the risk, increase the stability of our revenues, and give us stability going forward. Furthermore, about 70% of our accounts receivable are insured or are with top credit customers, which adds security as well to our balance sheet and cash in. Our global delivery footprint, which delivery centers in New Delhi, in Leipzig, and in Mexico, and in additional regional delivery centers, for example, in Malaysia, the Philippines, Romania, or Colombia, helping us to enable the cost optimization, cost reduction, as well as additionally benefiting from standardization and automation.
These are very important drivers of our margin improvement, as just Bernd told you in his presentation. Going down the profit and loss statement from EBITDA, this translates into an attractive bottom-line profit. You see the figures here on the left side for the half year result. The key drivers for the different line of businesses are for depreciation and amortization. About 45% of that relates to tangible assets and to internally generated assets, which mainly is our PyraCloud. This bucket we expect to increase marginally because of investment in our PyraCloud engine. 30% of that total depreciation and amortization relates to our offices which we do lease, but under IFRS also need to report it under amortization. We see, in one way, a slightly increase because of the business volume, but on the other side, as well, a decrease based on new working concept post-COVID.
The remaining 25% is related to our M&A activities, for example, by amortization of customer base. This is linked to the merger activities and will also then develop depending on the activities in M&A. When it comes to the net financial result, we are a global company and therefore exposed to foreign exchange risk. We are hedging that risk and, as a consequence, about 70% of that bucket is based on hedging cost and foreign exchange remaining adjustments. We believe that this will grow with the business volume going forward. 30% of the financial results is financial income and cost, and this will remain on the same level going forward. On the tax side, we have reported in the last periods a tax rate to the Adjusted EBITDA of 26% or less. We benefited from extraordinary items, which are not repeatedly going forward.
We think that going forward, the tax rate will be a reduction from originally guided 30% at the IPO to 28%. We control and manage all these key drivers to make sure that these are helping to increase or to maintain the attractive bottom-line profit. Moving on to the cash flow statement. We are in a position to have a strong cash flow generating. When you see on the left side, the cash flow from operating activities, we have been able to increase year by year to this CHF 276 million in 2020. For the half year, the cash flow from operating activity is negative. It's negative because of seasonality of the business, and in particular, about the net working capital, which I will show you later on some more details.
Please be aware of that last year on the half year, the cash flow from operating activities have been inflated by a vendor-deferred payment program we enjoyed in the magnitude of about CHF 250 million, which was related to the very beginning of the COVID pandemic phase. We are in an asset-light business model. Therefore, capital expenditure is on a low base. You see that we have spent, in the last year, less than CHF 25 million. Most of that is linked to PyraCloud. We expect, going forward, that this will increase a bit based on the investments in our engine, PyraCloud. The change in net working capital has provided a support for the cash flow of operating activities in the past years.
Similar to what I said from half year on the cash flow generation, you see that on the change in net working capital, which is based on seasonality, negative. Let me go in more details about the net working capital situation. The net working capital does fluctuate during the year with a constant pattern, which is linked to the business seasonality, with the peaks in June, in December, in April, and in September. This then correlates one or two months later in peaks in the net working capital. We have been able to decrease the net working capital year by year. You see here, measured about the monthly net working capital as average to the annual gross profit, and it went down from 22% to 13% and 10% at the half year this year.
This is driven by constantly improvement on the cash collection on one hand, and on the other side as well, to be prudent about the payment terms we are granting to our customers. It's a balance we need to make every day to benefiting the business or benefiting the pure financial view of the net working capital. We have achieved low net working capital, I said record low net working capital at December 2022, but also in June 2021. It's probably ambitious to say we can beat this year by year. It can be that it will not be able to, at the exact balance sheet date, to be better off in going forward. Please be assured we are continuously working on the net working capital and focusing and make sure that it helps to improve our cash flow generation. Going to our balance sheet.
We have a very solid balance sheet, which is positioned for accelerated growth and progressive dividend payment. The balance sheet is unlevered at the end of June in the magnitude of CHF 400 million. In addition to this starting point, we are generating net cash year by year, this enable us not only to invest in growing the business and to acquire bolt-on and sizable acquisition targets, but also paying progressive dividend as we have guided in the magnitude of 30%-50%. Going in the midterm gross profit and EBITDA perspective. With this slide here, I would like to summarize the presentations made by my colleagues and translate that into the financials.
Starting with the gross profit, the mid-teens gross profit growth is based on excellent market development, and we are very well positioned to benefit of this market development. When it comes to the line of businesses, we see for software cloud a steady growth driven by Microsoft multi-vendor, including the digital supply chain as well as the PyraCloud. When it comes to solution and services, we see continuing high growth momentum. We see the pull-through of services with our large software and cloud customer base. We see a focus and an expansion of our recurring managed services as well as PyraCloud. We have, as discussed today and presented today, we feel that also with strategic growth areas, which are contributing significantly.
Three of them, they are contributing SAP on the cloud as well application services and the verticals as standalone, while two of them, the FinOps and cloud services, are integrated in Solutions and Services and are growing together with this core business. When it comes to the EBITDA development, which you see on the right side, the EBITDA growth in excess of the gross profit growth is driven by the growth of the business, by the shifting of the business line mix, and benefiting of scale and IP-enabled operation model, which Bernd has greatly presented in his presentation. When it comes to Software and Cloud, here we see stable, strong margins with even improvement potential through automation and digitization. When it comes to Solutions and Services, we see the continuing margin increase as service line will mature and scale.
We build on growth in our highly recurring, for example, IP-enabled solution. We are continuing optimizing our delivery model, including the growth of our global workforce. Summarizing my part and the takeaways, what I wanted to show you, SoftwareONE has a business model for growth, a business model for increasing the level of recurring growth and recurring revenue. It's a business model for generating attractive profitability as well as attractive cash flows. We have a solid balance sheet, and we're very well positioned for our strategic journey. Last but not least, for the midterm growth, we can base our midterm growth on very attractive market opportunities. Last but not least, we are focusing all what we are doing for steady margin improvements. With this, I hand over to Dieter. Thank you.
Thanks, Hans. Very insightful. Just stay a moment here with me, please. I think this will be maybe your last public appearance with us. You will be with us for another few months, but we have the opportunity over here to thank you personally. You have been absolutely fundamental to the growth of our organization, where we are today. You are a key contributor towards it. We will always remember you as not only a very competent leader, but an amazing colleague and a good friend. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and same to you, Dieter, and to my team. Yeah.
Thanks to my colleagues for this amazing presentation. We have, I think, seen an incredible content. If I would like to summarize now in three points what we have shared with you today, it would be, we have an amazing opportunity, a tremendous opportunity, whether it's in software and cloud or in solution and services. In software and cloud, whether it's pay-as-you-go, whether it's digital supply chain, or whether it's marketplace. On solution and services, the cloud dynamics has completely changed the entry criteria. We have become a leader in our growth streams, and we have an amazing opportunity to grow further. Being a next generation service provider will give you that attractiveness from a profitability as well. Secondly, the opportunity is nothing worth if you are not able to execute. You have seen SoftwareONE follows always the same rule. We plan the plan, we work the plan.
Last but not least, it's not good enough to be customer centric. In today's world, you have to be customer centric and people centric. With that, I thank you for your attention for the day. We will now wrap up and have the Q&A session. I think there will be a delay of 20 seconds. Whenever you have registered to the Q&A sessions, it will be active in 20 seconds. Thank you very much. Just wait.
Just leave it. No.
Control, can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you.
Oh, okay. Sorry.
Yeah.
Little confusion on the phone.
Yeah. We were reserving the first spot for you anyhow.
Oh, well, thank you. I did dial in quite a while ago. Look, thanks very much for your presentation, and nice to meet a few of the new execs on the team. Just maybe three questions from my side. First of all, growth outlook organic, and what percentage of revenue contribution do you expect to come from M&A on a regular basis? Say that the assumption of 6-10 M&A deals per year. Second question, how much of total gross profit is recurring? I see the 59% on solutions and services. What's the sort of split in software and cloud? Maybe can you just remind us of the average customer spend per year with you as well in gross profit terms? The third question, what is your expectation for gross profit growth in solutions and services?
How much of this would be driven by commercial transformation service lines versus technology transformation? Where is that solutions and services margin today? I guess I'm trying to get at, if the mix shift is towards services, isn't that lower? Do you have a negative mix shift, and are you saying that that's being offset by the automation and scale effect?
Yeah, thanks, Stacy. Let me start with your last question. You have seen that we have doubled up the service business over the last two years with hardly any deterioration on our margin profile. That's what we also will continue to see, regardless of the mix shift. We have a healthy mix of services in our portfolio. We have services which are highly scalable, highly profitable, then we have services which are in startup mode, those services will mature and scale out in the future. From that angle, we see no impact on the mix shift. In terms of whether we report contribution margin or other metrics which you just referred to. We will see this in the next 12- 18 months, what kind of metrics we will provide as an additional reporting.
In terms of GP or the midterms growth from an organic or non-organic point of view. The midterms growth for us is inclusive to the bolt-on acquisitions. We would always separate it out if it would be a bigger one like we have done with Intergrupo, but it would be usually in that space. If we have bolt-on acquisitions and we talk about 6- 8 or 6- 10, you can always assume we talk about a range of CHF 50 million-CHF 100 million GP in that range through acquisitions. The third one you want to take, Alex?
Yes, sure. Hi, Stacy. Yeah, in services and solutions, we break out the managed and recurring, that's the 59%. On software and cloud, the nature of these customer purchases is very much recurring. As we know, customers are buying software, buying cloud, and they renew or they consume more. That's kind of the natural recurrence that we have in our business. I would say that business is highly naturally recurrent. It is not locked into what you would consider a traditional three-year agreement. I don't know, Neil, anything else you'd add to that?
Yeah. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, as you said, it's naturally reoccurring. We have contracts with our customers, long-established relationships with those. This continues to be reoccurring. We do have additional growth opportunities, of course, as we grab more of their software spend when we make ourselves more relevant with the digital approach or digital supply chain. When we do take customers to that approach, it makes it even more reoccurring because, of course, then we do enter contracts when we go into digital supply chain.
Lastly, in services, as you know, you measure net retention, so it's not necessarily contract by contract, but you measure revenue that is recurring from the same customers versus revenue that is incremental. There, we have a lot of opportunity ahead of us to drive more the type of 55% up to 60% or 70% in the coming two years.
Thanks, Stacy.
Mate, wait, just one quick follow-up. The average customer spend per year? That may not be too easy. I appreciate.
Yeah.
The average.
I can take that.
Wow.
When a customer is purely software and cloud, they're going to be around CHF 8,000 per customer and when a customer is both software and cloud and services and solutions, it's CHF 35,000-40,000 per customer, and that's kind of the 8 times multiplier that we already have today. Bernd referenced that he sees a much greater opportunity there in terms of share of wallet.
Yeah. As you may imagine, there's a long tail of customers with lower spend, and then there is the top fewer customers have a significantly higher spend. If you want to build a larger services business, we obviously need to drive higher spend per account.
That's great. Thanks.
Thanks, Stacy.
Thanks, Stacy.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star one on your telephone and it's the pound or the hash key to cancel. Please kindly mute the sound on your webcast before asking the questions on the phone lines. Thank you. We have the next questions coming from the line of Alastair Nolan from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I've got two or three, if that's okay. The first would just be, apologies to labor the point on the mix shift as we move more towards services. Just kind of zoning in on the margin, can you give us a little bit of a better feel as you mentioned, obviously, you expect certain service line items to mature, scale, and benefit from automation. As it stands, what is the margin differential between the services side and the sale of software or even within that, the recurring piece of services, how much more of a margin uplift do you get versus the kind of more project-based services that we might typically expect to be more people heavy or people intensive and therefore lower margin? Then, just two others.
One was just on the M&A contribution going forward, just to confirm I heard that right. It's CHF 50 million-CHF 100 million is the ballpark gross profit contribution we'd expect going forward from M&A. Just finally, in terms of kind of trying to assess the growth opportunity, do you have a good feel or anything you can provide us with in terms of your current share of customer wallets and maybe where that's trended from and where you expect that might be able to get to over the midterm? That'd be really helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Alastair. As we mentioned earlier, in terms of the mix shift, we haven't seen any considerable impact by doubling up our business. You can assume that the margins on the service business are already on a good level. We believe that we will grow the services very much decoupled from the OpEx investment. We will invest rather into automation and into IP, and with that, have a different scalability. At the moment, we are not disclosing contribution margins or service margins. Alex, you want to say something on the last point?
Yes. On acquisitions, thanks for clarifying that, Alastair Nolan. We do think about M&A as kind of an additional growth opportunity on top of organic. The reason Dieter Schlosser mentioned that we break out the larger deals, but not every deal, is because there is a real trade-off in our business. Even when we're doing these 6- 8 to 10 deals per year, the smaller bolt-on deals, it takes time and attention from Bernd's practice that they can be dedicating to organic growth. We really feel that we want to do these deals. The practice building, it's not always one for one, where we say, well, it's either organic or M&A, because oftentimes when we have M&A, it's to supplement organic, and we're dedicating some of our valuable resources on that M&A. That's just to clarify that differentiation.
On the numbers, I think what we're comfortable saying at this point, again, we're ramping in terms of our M&A capabilities. What we're comfortable saying is 10%-20% of our growth seems to be coming from these bolt-on acquisitions. I would rather think about it in those terms. You can certainly say how much is that in terms of gross profit. I would really think about 10%-20% coming from M&A each year.
Yeah, I think it's also important to reckon that if we really buy technology businesses, and particularly on the cloud services, and particularly in certain growth streams, there's a reason why they usually sell as a revenue multiplier. With that, for us, of course, we bring them in because of the capability. We don't bring them in because of the customer or the market. We bring them in because of the capability, and then we uplift the margin to the level where we want to be.
Great, thanks. I think just one other then, just on kind of wallet share, maybe any of the numbers you might be able to provide around where you think you're currently at and kind of what the opportunity is there.
The share of wallet in terms of customer, Alastair?
Yeah.
You want to say something, Alastair?
Yeah, sorry. Yeah, exactly. In terms of their kind of IT spend.
Yeah, I think Neil and I should answer separately because it's very different for software and cloud, I would assume, than it is for solutions and services. For solutions and services, especially in the enterprise and in upper corporate, it is small. There's a lot of opportunity for us to grow. While we might have significant share of wallet on the software and cloud side, we're just beginning the journey of attaching our services to it. There is a lot of headroom. I don't think that there is any barriers that are coming up in the next few years on our ability to drive that share of wallet.
Yeah, I guess from my side, Bernd, I'd say that going back to Stacy's point, the contracts we have in software and cloud are highly recurring, and we continue to be a stable business. Where we see opportunities to get more of the customer contracts and more of the spend, that's why we're focused on the digital aspects. Of course, on top of that, we see, of course, good growth drivers with the other hyperscalers of AWS and GCP. That's why we've invested organically and in M&A in those particular hyperscalers recently, because that will pull through additional software and cloud share of wallet for our customers. That's what we're also focused on.
Great. Thanks very much.
We have the next questions coming from the line of Ross Jobber from Citi. Please ask your question.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for a fantastic and fascinating presentation. I've got three questions, all at a relatively high level, I believe. I don't know if that's good or bad. My first question is, you've painted a very compelling story of how you can take your expertise in technology transformation and you can move it into business transformation. There's two sides to every coin, and so I'm just wondering, to what extent is there opportunity for people to do the opposite? For people who've got business transformation skills, maybe the larger system integrators, to be interested in moving more into technology transformation. I guess that's question number one.
Question number two, you've also painted a very compelling picture of how you're able to provide the customer with a very, very comprehensive support solution as they migrate to the cloud, with one notable exception, which is hardware, which I know has been a deliberate decision. To what extent could you see yourself potentially doing hardware in the future? Could you give us any color on how you actually help your customers with the hardware implications? Cloud migration obviously often has data center implications. My third question is perhaps a slightly simpler question, which is just about as this service business grows, how much of this service revenue is or is going to be fixed price in nature in the future? Thank you.
Sorry, I didn't get the last question.
Fixed price versus fixed time and material.
All right. Okay. Yeah, let me go one by one through and thanks for those questions. The first one in terms of digital transformation as a result of technology or technology transformation as a result of digital transformation. From our point of view, there's either way possible, and that's what we mentioned with cloud dynamics. You have the opportunity to move to the next level and offer a service. We believe digital transformation only works if you speak the language of that certain industry. Digital transformation only works if you come from the core processes, the core business processes, from the customer in which the customer's industries. That's what you have seen on the architecture, engineering, and construction vertical. We believe that's a natural pathway from us. On the other side, going the other way downwards and saying technology transformation is, of course, always possible.
You have to assume that every global SI has a legacy business, has long-term contracts, 7, 10, 15 years contracts, complete end-to-end outsourcing agreements with high-end margins at the tail end of the contracts. That's the natural friction which they have compared to moving to the cloud and advising the customer to go into that direction. That was the first question. You have to remind me again on the second one.
About the role of hardware.
Yeah. From a hardware point of view, and you're absolutely spot on. We made a conscious decision not to do hardware because we believe that requires everything around homologation, supply chain, inventory, et cetera. What we obviously do, if you migrate customers to the cloud, you go top-down from the technology stack. If you end up with the metal, there is an impact on the metal. That's where we advise the customer where really they can cut down top-down, end-to-end, and do not stop on the database level, but go beyond this as well. That the real impact, the real financial impact and benefit, but also what we earlier discussed on ESG is felt from a customer point of view.
Maybe one addition to that, we of course, have some larger relationships where data center plays a role and there's impact on hardware. We're doing this with third-party providers, with partners, without having to get into hardware ourselves. I think that's going to be the strategy going forward. It's just a whole different ballgame, and we don't believe that the growth and the profits are there for us to go there.
Yeah. On your last question, in terms of T&M and fixed price, time and material and fixed price, we have 59% managed service. That's recurring revenue, fixed price. On the professional services, we actually do not prefer T&M. That's not our preferred go-to-market. Our preferred go-to-market is a fixed price and a gain share on top of that. That's the usual go-to-market. If there's no other choice, we still take the business on T&M. That's the exception.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Thanks once again.
Sure.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please press star followed by one if you have any question, and it's the hash or the pound key to cancel. Please kindly mute the sound on your webcast before asking the questions on the phone lines. Once again, it's star one for any questions or comment that you may have. Thank you. We have the next questions coming from the line of Knut Woller from Baader Bank. Please ask your question.
Yeah, thank you. Three questions also from my side. I understood, Hans, that you said there won't be any trading update to Q3. Is it fair to assume, given your confirmed targets, that the SME recovery you envisaged at the end of the second quarter is continuing in the second half of the year? The second question, you reiterated your capital allocation plans regarding dividend policy also M&A. Would it be also an option for you, especially in light of the current valuation of the shares, to use the excess money for a buyback? Thirdly, I learned a lot about the delivery on the service side. Hence, I think a couple of concerns I heard from investors regarding the scalability of this business should have been alleviated.
Still on SAP, for example, on the delivery here, I would like to get some more clarity why you don't need more headcount to do the transformation to S/4HANA or the migration to S/4HANA on the standardized way. I would like to get some more color here as well as for FinOps to get some better understanding here. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the question. Let me start and then I hand over to Hans for the buyback, and then we have a discussion point about the S/4HANA migration, I would assume. From an SME recovery, yeah, you're absolutely right. The SME is continuing to recovering in the second half of the year. Are we back to pre-COVID level? Not yet, but we assume that's to be happening next year. Hans, you want to say something on the buyback?
Yes, of course. I think what you see now with our balance sheet, what we have today, it's a very solid balance sheet, and you could think of going in this direction. I would say yes. If you are not where we are today, I think SoftwareONE is a growing company, and I would like to be in a position that I can finance the bolt-on acquisitions out of the cash flow we are generating. I would also like to be in a position that I can finance sizable acquisition going forward. That's basically the reasons why we have come up with this kind of, let's say, spend for M&A and growth, but on the other hand, only going for dividends.
There are, of course, other options, as you say, as one of them, which we could think of, but that's only, I would say, in absence of not having enough growth opportunity going forward.
Continuing on your last question on the scalability, how do we really decouple that from adding additional headcounts? You mentioned the S/4HANA migration. The principle how we built this business is we do the project to get to the managed service. We don't want to be the largest project expert in the world. We want to make sure that whatever we migrate, we can manage afterwards and have recurring revenue with those customers. For that reason, we also build already and front-load already the automation right in the beginning, so that this journey is an inherent journey for the customer. They should have no other choice than going through us on migration, and then automatically it will become a managed service. I give you an example over here.
While the normal behavior would be, you have 9- 12 months projects. If you go functional, it's 24 months- 48 months projects. We try to be time-boxed everything between 3- 12 months, as an outcome. We have our own IP where we reduce heavily the workload and automate as much as we can. For instance, we have an IP where we provision a landscape, and we can do this in 1- 2 hours, compared to others who would need, for the same purpose, a couple of months. That's where the differentiator comes in. Bernd, maybe you want to say something.
It's absolutely right. There is, of course, a customer-specific, people-driven engagement. It's around the solution architecture up front. That will be done locally. Even the rest of the project, as Dieter said, is highly automated, with remote delivery from places that are cost-effective as opposed to doing it over and over again in each individual country.
Excellent. Thanks very much. That's very helpful.
No sweat.
We have the next questions coming from the line of Ben Castillo-Bernaus from BNP Paribas. Please ask your question.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for the presentations and questions. Two from me. Firstly, you've got this strong uplift in GP when you attach services. My question is, if you look at your customer base, can you give us a sense of how many of those customers are taking services today, i.e., what your attach rate might look like? What sort of run rate are you on in terms of adding services to customers that don't currently take it? What might be a reasonable target attach rate to think about over the midterm? My second question is on the xSimple and pay-as-you-go bundles. That slide, I think 47, was a helpful illustration. You have that 20-month break-even timeline for Software Cloud. You have some GP shifting into the solutions and services bucket.
How long do you think it will be until you lap those initial headwinds and the net impact of Software Cloud is a net positive? Secondly, if we think about the pay-as-you-go has a 6 times GP multiplier, can you give us a sense of what the corresponding EBITDA multiplier might be? Obviously some of that increase in GP is going into solutions and services at presumably a lower margin. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thanks for the question. On the first one, on the service attach. I think at the moment we stand around 12,000 customers where we have attached services. If you ask what's our total addressable market, you would naturally say the 65,000 customers. Not all of them are really addressable from our side. Some of them are really small, where you wouldn't get the right share of wallet. We assume that half, 50%, of our existing book of business is an addressable market to attach services. Now, on pay-as-you-go, maybe Neil, you want to answer here and help here?
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Ben, for the question. We're about halfway through that journey, as we said. I think we're now coming, especially with the SME recovery, we're coming towards the end of the headwinds. Alex has talked about, in previous calls, about the six-month break-even point, and maybe that's a useful point for you. We talked about that $15 in the first month, and we're delighted about the 3x that we make in the first year. We think about it from a margin perspective that it's a six-month break-even on the total GP that we make, if you think about it from an EBITDA perspective. That's what we focus on internally.
Great. Thanks very much.
We have the next questions coming from the line of Michael Briest from UBS. Please ask your question.
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon. A couple from me as well. Just going back to slide 47, I think the last question was along that line, Neil. The chart seems to imply that the services contribution from Microsoft will more than double over the next four years. Could you maybe give us a feel for how many xSimple customers you have now? I think it was 1.7 million at IPO. Implicitly, is that then going to be a sort of CHF 200 million run rate business exiting 2025? I've got a question for Hans around the cost base.
Yeah. Thanks, Michael, and good to have you back. The 1.7 million users. 1.7 are the users, not the customer. I let Neil answer on that, and then you can raise the question to Hans.
Yeah. We haven't disclosed the number of customers. What I would say is that, we look at those three segments, enterprise public sector and SME, and SME is a proportion of that business. When we think about the 1.7 million users, I think we discussed prior in the presentation, we're over 6 million users now, predominantly driven by xSimple, but also other cloud services where they're attaching user managed service into that as well. But you can think about that 6.7 million being driven predominantly from xSimple. Then the last point?
200 million.
Magnitude. Yes. We expect to exit FY 2021 at CHF 100 million run rate. As we explained as well, the growth rates are strong on that business.
Okay. Would you assume there's any pricing power in this, or if you're going to double profits from the services side, you're going to double the users of the managed cloud services?
Its cost proportion?
Yeah. GP is proportional, and then as we discussed prior, we still want to apply even more automation to the platform. It's driven by two aspects. One is our PyraCloud platform, which is delivering, let's say, the experience to our customers, where they can leverage and manage the users basis. Then, of course, the automation based on the global service delivery centers that's adding all the services on top. We continue to want to invest there and make sure that we have a positive outcome. Of course, we'll also invest in upsell and cross-sell on that customer base as we acquire more.
Yeah.
Thank you.
You want to say something?
And then-
Michael, just one second. Bernd wants to add something.
Just because we're always talking about the service margin. As we are trying to get across, there is no service margin. It's a mix of very different businesses. The xSimples are highly favorable in that mix. Driving xSimple growth will be very favorable to the service margin in aggregate.
Understood. Hans, just going back to the cost side of things, I think at the interims, you guided that costs will be flat in the second half sequentially. Can you give a bit more detail on that? The Comparex savings sort of fully come through now, and obviously you've made a number of acquisitions through the course of the last nine months, and we've seen headcount increasing. The natural assumption is that costs go up sequentially. Why is that not going to be the case this year?
We have, first of all, I think we have front-loaded the investment. This is, let's say that the first half and the second half will be rather equal than what it was in the past. That's one driver of this, that we can say it will be more or less the same total OpEx at the end of the year or the second half as first half. Another point is that we have made a project or a decision that we go for improvement of all what we are doing and providing internally and get rid of people which are not delivering. This is helping and contributing to that equation. We are very carefully about replacing of people which leave SoftwareONE. This is a great lever to manage the cost base going forward.
I'm not sure if I have covered all, Dieter, or you would like to add something on this?
Yeah. Michael, these are mainly the two topics. We said we front-loaded our investment. Now they have to perform, so we get the leverage out of it. On the other side, we also have clear expectation on how performance looks like in SoftwareONE. From an acquisition point of view, you want to say something in terms of acquisition?
When it comes to acquisition, you have also in both sides on the equation. You have on one side the cost side, but on the other side, you have also the gross profit that these acquisitions will deliver and will contribute. Of course, I think when you look back and say, it is very hard to predict about what acquisition you will be able to land. I think the two acquisitions we just made on HeleCloud and Centiq, it was very difficult to predict. That you cannot plan with all this. Basically on the M&A part, it is these two levers which I just mentioned, which is on both sides, on the OpEx as well on the GP.
Will there be any exceptionals related to removing underperformers in the second half? Do you think broadly headcount will be flat at the end of the year versus the end of June?
From a growth point of view on headcount, we are pretty clear that we have invested into the headcount in the first half of the year and would only replace in the second half of the year if that is directly related to a commitment to a customer.
Okay. No exceptional items then?
There will be exceptional items, exactly, which will be also then disclosed in detail based on our rules which we have already in place.
You can't give any guidance today on roughly?
No.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael.
There are no further questions at this time. Please continue. Thank you.
No, is it?
Are there any further questions?
There are no further questions at this time.
Okay.
All right. Thank you very much. You want to close officially, Anna?
Thank you very much for your time today and the questions from the analysts, much appreciated.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Thanks.