Morning and welcome to the Kinaxis fiscal 2025 first quarter results conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at the time for you to queue up for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, May 8, 2025. I will now turn the call over to Rick Wadsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kinaxis. Please go ahead, Mr. Wadsworth.
Thanks, Operator. Good morning and welcome to the Kinaxis earnings call. Today, we will be discussing our first quarter results, which we issued after close of markets yesterday. With me on the call are Bob Courteau, Interim CEO and Chair, and Blaine Fitzgerald, our Chief Financial Officer. Some of the information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, May 8th, 2025, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. For discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the forward-looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release, as well as in our CDR Plus filings. During this call, we will discuss IFRS results and non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA.
A reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release and MD&A, both of which can be found on the investor relations section of our website, kinaxis.com, and on CDR Plus. The webcast is live and being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the investor relations section of our website. Neither this call nor the webcast may be re-recorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without prior written permission from Kinaxis. To begin our call, Bob will discuss the highlights of our quarter and recent business developments, followed by Blaine, who will review our financial results and outlook and open the line for questions. We have a presentation to accompany today's call, which can be downloaded from the investor relations homepage of our website. We will let you know when to change slides.
Over to you, Bob.
Thanks, Rick. Good morning and thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased with the first quarter results, and I wanted to highlight three key items. First, it was a solid quarter for new business, including record expansion business volume for a first quarter. Our ARR grew 14% as reported, and in constant currency, SaaS growth was 16% or 17% in constant currency. Second, we continue to make progress with profitability as adjusted EBITDA was up 46% and the margin hit 25%. Lastly, it was our third consecutive quarter delivering Rule of 40+ performance. We view this consistency as key to evaluation that better reflects our elite positioning in the vertical software universe. This performance allowed us to maintain all guidance elements for the year, including SaaS revenue growth, total revenue, and adjusted EBITDA margin. We are also on track towards our midterm goals.
As always, we added important new customers in the quarter, and enterprise-class companies continue to be the biggest cohort. We're so fortunate to be able to name a sample of our new customers today. For example, we've helped orchestrate the supply chains for global leaders like Sun Pharma, which extends our success in Asia. Based in India, Sun Pharma is the world's leading specialty generics company with $5.8 billion in revenues and more than 40 manufacturing facilities. Sun Pharma provides high-quality, affordable medicines to more than 100 companies around the globe. Workwear Outfitters, based in the U.S., is a leading manufacturer of innovative work apparel and footwear for workers, with brands like Kodiak and has exclusive licensee for Dickies apparel in the B2B channel.
Delta Faucet Company, also headquartered in the US and who we know through Delta and Peerless brands, among others, offers purposeful, practical plumbing fixtures that solve our everyday needs. Demant A/S, headquartered in Denmark, with over 22,000 employees, is a global leader in hearing healthcare and manufacturing of hearing aids, dedicated to improving the life of people with hearing loss. Veolia, a U.S. subsidiary of a French-based company, provides water treatment and sustainable solutions for industrial and municipal clients. Finally, we've signed with one of the world's largest companies in the semiconductor ecosystem by both revenue and market cap. Our market share keeps growing from successes like this as we continue to win the most important and competitive opportunities across all markets and geographies. Ongoing growth of the customer base, balance across geographic and vertical markets, and revenue tiers remains a significant opportunity for Kinaxis.
As we briefly mentioned on our last call, we've struck a new partnership with Infor to help accelerate that growth, and I'm so pleased to be able to share more details today. The new relationship with Infor is focused on mid-market, discrete manufacturing companies, and the high-tech industrial, consumer durables, automotive, and aerospace and defense verticals. Together, we are integrating Infor Cloud Suite for discrete manufacturing with Kinaxis Planning One, the Maestro solution package that offers core fundamentals like supply and demand planning and inventory management. This partnership will create an entirely new channel by activating a mid-market team of sellers in North America and Europe within Infor. We're excited to see this initiative moving forward.
While winning new customers will be a major part of the Kinaxis story for many years, I'm very pleased that in Q1 and for the second consecutive quarter, over half of gross additions to ARR came from existing customers. Thanks to rapid expansion of the customer base in recent years, exciting new product launches, and an increased focus under Mark Morgan, we continue to see more expansion business than ever in our pipeline. I'm also very pleased with the meaningful improvements we've made to our go-to-market team and approach. While started several years ago through a geographic expansion, adding VARs and solution extension partners, and moving to public cloud, among other initiatives, we took another major step last year by adding Mark and key regional leaders who know how to operate at scale and who are sharply focused on progressing our best opportunities.
We're winning the market, and together with the most referenceable customer base in the supply chain software industry, these improvements have seen us become best in class in how we approach the market and service our customers. As always, one critical reason we win remains our product leadership. We are thrilled that Kinaxis was recognized as a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning Solutions for the 11th consecutive time. Based on analysis of both our completeness of vision and our ability to execute, we take pride in consistently strong positioning in this important report. There is no time or place where our product and go-to-market leadership shines more than at Kinexions, our flagship industry conference. This year, a record 1,000 attendees, or almost 30% more than 2024, came to Austin to hear, see, and interact with the latest in our market-leading innovations.
At Kinaxis, we announced an important partnership with Databricks. Together, we will strengthen Maestro's data fabric to help customers quickly and easily unify their data, accelerate AI adoption, and bring together information from core systems like inventory and procurement, alongside external inputs such as weather patterns and market signals, all within one governed environment. The result will be faster insights, greater execution agility, and a more resilient, innovation-ready supply chain. In Austin, customers and prospects were hands-on with our next phase of AI innovation, including out-of-the-box AI agents to monitor, predict, and take action in real time for automation of key tasks like inventory management and disruption mitigation. Attendees were even creating their own AI agents on Maestro, showing how AI-driven supply chain orchestration can be accessible to businesses at any stage of their AI maturity.
Conference callers also saw firsthand how new generative AI functionality will make interacting with supply chain data even more intuitive. In addition to creating customizable dashboards, C-suite users to technical experts will be able to query digital twins by asking questions in dozens of natural languages and receive instant, insightful answers to complex questions. This allows interdisciplinary teams to analyze scenarios, assess risk, and make informed decisions without requiring AI expertise. Naturally, at Kinaxis, it was impossible to have conversations with supply chain leaders without discussing the global tariff issue. As long-time followers of the company, you understand that Maestro has been specifically built to handle disruptions of any kind, and few have been more significant for our customers than the current tariff crisis.
Consequently, we recently launched Kinaxis Tariff Response, a professional services offering for prospects that allows them, under a limited-time engagement, to provide Kinaxis experts with key supply chain data so we can show how Maestro can simulate tariff exposure, run strategic scenarios, and make data-informed decisions quickly. The service can be live in as few as 21 days, giving planners access to tariff modeling without the cost or complexity of building it internally. Interest in this campaign from prospective customers has been encouraging. Tariff Response provides a meaningful preview into the power of Maestro, so we expect some engagements from this program to convert to new subscription business in the coming months. Overall, I'm very pleased with the progress in the first quarter and for the remainder of the year.
We aim to deliver on a few key items: ongoing delivery of quarters that support our full-year 2025 outlook and midterm ambitions, more new market-leading customers coupled with a more balanced contribution to quarterly ARR growth from expansion business, and many new name accounts. We are setting up initial customers for our exciting new generative AI and agentic AI products and initiating a new pricing framework to better reflect and take advantage of the more universal integration of AI through Maestro and the higher value it brings. Lastly, a new full-time CEO. We're adding exceptional talent to our company now. We're working well as an experienced, collaborative senior team and delivering Rule of 40 quarters, all of which gives us the privilege of being patient and finding the absolute best person for the role.
As with any global software company, we do remain mindful of the significant challenges our customers face in the new era of global trade. We are confident in our elevated go-to-market team and approach, our product leadership, and the breadth of growth opportunities in front of us. Kinaxis today is better organized than ever to take full advantage of the incredibly dynamic supply chain orchestration opportunity that lies ahead. With that said, I'm going to turn over the call to Blaine.
Thank you, Bob. Good morning. As a reminder, unless noted otherwise, all figures reported on today's call are in US dollars under IFRS. If you move to slide nine in your investor presentation for Q1, I'm very pleased to report solid Q1 results that set us on a good path to achieve our fiscal 2025 goals, both on an as-reported and constant currency basis.
New business remains strong, sustaining the upward trend in our ARR growth. Our profitability in Q1 was strong again, as was our trailing 12-month free cash flow margin, particularly if you adjust for the impact of one-time outlays related to our tax restructuring and litigation settlement, both of which we discussed on our last call. Our midterm profitability goal of consistent full-year normalized 25% adjusted EBITDA margin and consistent annual Rule of 40 performance aspirations are both clearly in view. Now, let me walk you through our Q1 2025 results compared to the same period last year. Total revenue was $132.8 million, up 11%. SaaS revenue was $84.9 million, up 16%. Our subscription term license revenue was $9 million, in line with our expectations given renewal cycles, and up 34%. Professional services revenue was $33.3 million, down 3%.
We see this largely as a reflection of ongoing success in our long-term strategy to move an increased share of professional services work to our partner network. Maintenance and support revenue was $5.5 million, up 15%. Our gross profit was strong, up 19% to $86.5 million for a 65% gross margin compared to 61% in the same quarter last year. The software margin was 80%, up from 76% due in part to higher subscription term license revenue and lower amortization, thanks to an intangible asset we retired last quarter. Professional services gross margin was down to 21% from 24%, consistent with partners taking on more of the services work. Adjusted EBITDA was extremely strong, up 46% to $33.1 million, or a 25% margin versus 19% in the comparable quarter.
This reflects numerous factors, including our revenue growth, higher gross margin, and lower operating expenses as a percentage of revenue, as we continue to focus on profitability and gain further operating leverage as we scale. Our growth and profitability performance resulted in Rule of 40 performance for the third consecutive quarter, calculated by adding SaaS revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin, our usual approach. Our profit in the quarter was up 157% to $15.9 million, or $0.55 per diluted share, versus a profit of $6.2 million, or $0.21 per diluted share a year ago. We are proud of this significant improvement. Profit benefited largely from the same factors that supported our strong adjusted EBITDA performance. Cash flow from operating activities: $31.6 million. That compares to $32 million in Q1 2024.
Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments were $314.6 million, up from $298.5 million at the end of 2024, despite the one-time payment made in Q1 relating to tax planning and litigation settlement. If you move to slide 10, our trailing 12-month free cash flow margin remains strong at 18.7%. Absent the tax planning and settlement amounts, trailing 12-month cash flow margin would have been 24.4%, a great reflection of our increased focus on profitability. On to slide 11. Our ARR, or annual recurring revenue, grew to $372 million, representing 14% growth both as reported and in constant currency. The split of gross additions to ARR between new name accounts and expansion business was 47% to 53% in Q1. This is the second consecutive quarter where expansion business was the bigger contributor.
Our pipeline for 2025 remains more tilted towards expansion opportunities than in prior years, which we believe is a reflection of recent growth in our customer base, more product to sell, and our heightened focus on this important sales motion. Moving to slide 12, our SaaS and total RPO balances remain very strong, growing to $767 million and $812 million, respectively, with three-year CAGRs of 20% and 19%. This metric continues to highlight growth in our subscription business and our elite gross customer retention. More details on our RPO can be found in the revenue note for our financials.
Looking at slide 13, while mindful of the impacts to our markets of the volatile macro environment, I'm pleased to reiterate our 2025 guidance: total revenue of $535-$550 million, or $545-$560 million in constant currency, SaaS growth of 11%-13%, or 12%-14% in constant currency. We continue to anticipate seasonal trends to apply, with Q4 historically being our strongest bookings quarter. Subscription term license revenue of $16-$18 million. Approximately one quarter of the total amount will be recognized in the second quarter, and the remainder split over the back half of the year, with Q3 being somewhat higher than Q4. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 23%-25%. Finally, on slide 14, we've continued to be active on our normal course issuer bid.
For the quarter, we purchased 157,428 shares and had an average US dollar price of $110.49 for an investment of roughly $17.4 million. Our NCIB goes through November 5, 2025. Overall, I'm pleased with how the business is executing. This is our third consecutive rule of 40 quarter. Despite the challenges to customers of a constantly changing tariff environment, new business in the quarter was solid and kept our ARR growth rate on a good trajectory. Adjusted EBITDA margin and free cash flow continue to move in the right direction, reflecting dramatically improved profitability, and our midterm financial aspirations are all intact. I'm excited for the coming AI transition and what it will mean for our differentiation and growth ahead. As always, thank you for your ongoing interest in Kinaxis and support to date. I will now turn the line over to the operator to start the Q&A session.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Sagar Karri with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi there. Good morning. This is Sagar on for Thanos. My first question is regarding your software margin. The margin was the highest in several quarters. How should we think about that trajectory as you continue your migration to public cloud?
Good question. Just to talk about, we've always had a discussion saying our software margin should be over 80%. Obviously, the migration to public cloud in the early days put us a little bit south of that.
We're really happy with where it's going. Obviously, it's still early days. I think the subscription term license revenue has helped us out a little bit in this quarter. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration as we move forward. We are consistently focused on trying to move that at a consistent rate above 80% as we move forward. The public cloud migration is going very well. We're seeing some economies of scale as we continue to move that forward with our APAC team already moved over. Europe is next in line, where we're well on our way to migrating that customer base.
Thanks. Just another question. I know you're hedged from an FX perspective. Given the appreciation of the Canadian dollar, how do we think about the potential impact on OpEx and margins as those hedges start to roll over?
Great question. Over the next six months, I feel pretty good. What we do is we hedge about six months in advance. As you're well aware, the Canadian dollar was in that $0.68-$0.69 place. That helps us out quite a bit on the bottom line. We do have a substantial amount of expenses that go through our P&L that come from Canadian dollars. We're going to benefit from that advantage over the next six months. Obviously, we're sitting closer to $0.72 right now. In the back half of the year, we'll continue to monitor that. I think we're in a great spot. Obviously, with everything going on in the macroeconomic environment, we're not exactly on terra firma. I think we have to recognize that there could be still some volatility in exchange rates.
I think we're in a great spot with the Canadian dollar, and our hedging program is doing exactly what we hope it would at this stage.
Perfect. Thank you. I'll pass the line.
Your next question comes from the line of Lachlan Brown with Redburn Atlantic. Your line is open.
Hi, Bob, Blaine, Rick. Good morning to you all. Strong delivery of bookings in what is usually a seasonally low quarter. Could you just talk to the success behind this? Did the trade uncertainty bring a pull forward of demand, or were a lot of these bookings going to the pipeline at the end of 2024?
Maybe I'll go first, Rick, and then you can jump in. We had an unbelievable connection. We already saw the level of increased interest with the number of people that attended the event.
We just finished the Gartner Group conference this week. The level of enthusiasm as measured by the attendance at our part of the events, just the sheer quantity of people in our booth on a relative basis, was terrific. We've won some of the most important customers in each of the industries we're serving over the last four to five quarters that create an incredible reference base. Our go-to-market execution is obviously in a really good place. The last part of it is we've got some really great products that we've already released in 2024 that are starting to pick up, and AI gives us another bookings capacity. Look, I feel like the demand is good. Our competitive win rate is strong. Our references are the best. We believe that our guidance is in good place.
The wild card is the economy and how that plays out. Generally, I would say that the company is in a really, really good period right now.
Maybe I'll add in some extra color on that, if that's all right. When we got through Q4, we had a great run-up in Q4, and we emptied the cupboards at that stage in terms of there were very few push deals that moved into Q1. The fact that they had an amazing Q1, our highest incremental ARR for Q1 that we've ever seen, is a testament that the team is executing at a different level than we've ever seen before. I think one of the big things that I've noticed over the last couple of quarters is some of our metrics are starting to change.
The conversion rates that we're seeing, especially in Q4 and Q1, are much higher than we've ever seen before. The pipeline is healthy. I'm pretty excited about some of the names I see in the Q2 pipeline and that large enterprise cohort that we always seek to win. We're seeing a lot more of that in our pipeline, which is great. You know what? We're winning the best deals that are out there right now. I think our Q1 deal that we didn't name the name of the company, but that was the deal that everyone wanted to win. We're very proud that it came to us. Things are rolling right now.
That's very clear. That's a strong outcome. Maybe on the guidance, there was good delivery on the SaaS constant currency in one tier of 17% year on year.
You've maintained the 25% guidance of 12%-14%. I understand perhaps taking a cautious view on the total revenue given it incorporates the discretionary professional services. But given SaaS revenue is recurring and more visible, just any commentary on the reiteration of the guidance would be helpful.
I mean, I can give you my view on that. Blaine and I didn't talk about it before the call, but in a ton of detail. But given the economic backdrop that we're seeing, we put in what I would call a responsible view of 2025. And if we were going to revisit it, it'd be better to do that in coming out of the second quarter. That'll really give us a good opportunity to understand what the macro effect's going to be. But against the backdrop that I just described, we're feeling very good abo ut our guidance.
Very helpful.
Thanks for the questions.
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Chu with Scotiabank. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. This is Richard in for Kevin today. So my first question, can you talk about the drivers of your expansion momentum and how it compares to previous quarters? I'm just wondering how much of the expansion is coming from an uptick in customers running scenarios versus, say, adding new modules, the expansion, or adding new geographies?
I think it's coming from a balanced, well-organized, highly performing software company. We basically are focused on getting to the outcome that customers are looking for. We're continuing to drive the highest level of reference with our customers. Our product and engineering team is delivering on new innovation at a higher speed than our competitors. We have a core capability with Maestro that is solving the problems of today.
We put a go-to-market discipline in that is about really making sure that we're creating attention for our company through marketing, working on the pipeline in a way that we're doing what I call company-to-company execution. We're meeting CEOs. We're meeting the CFOs. We're supporting the Chief Supply Chain Officer. We've extended our pipeline through partners. That's something we've been working on for years. We're starting to see the payback on that. The most striking thing about connections was how many world-class customers were on stage describing the value and impact of our solutions on their business. All of that comes together in a way that we can continue to really take this company forward. I don't know, Blaine, would you add to that?
No, that's exactly it.
I sometimes put in order, and I'll give you a little more clarity on some of the drivers. New Maestro environments, as customers expand with us, was the biggest contributor to some of that expansion. What I'm really happy about is the new applications. We got to see that firsthand. That was our number two. Scenarios is number three. The new applications, we saw firsthand at Connections where I'll give you an example. Enterprise scheduling, there was a number of deals that signed while we were at just before we got into the Connections, which helped out. Supply.ai, one of our newer modules. It will be probably renamed at some point to Supply Optimization. That new module is on fire right now in terms of how it's being brought on by customers. Environments, applications, and scenarios was the main drivers. We're really happy that obviously the new applications, especially that enterprise scheduling and supply optimization, are doing extremely well at this stage.
Just one thing on the volume of scenarios that are being run due to tariffs is directly related to the value our clients are getting from our solutions. Yeah, it brings in some revenue. It reinforces what we heard consistently from our customers is that they're so happy that they have Kinaxis in these times. That leads to an even greater referenceability of our customer base.
That's helpful. Can you also provide some commentary on net retention? I know you disclosed that it's higher than 100%, but how far has it been trending so far in 2025? Can you talk a bit about any relative differences between retention for your largest clients versus more the mid-market?
Yeah. There's obviously two components to that.
Our gross retention, we think we have best-in-class. It's between 95%-100%. We're extremely proud of that. It's a reflection of why we are in the position we are with the Gartner MQ. When you go to NRR, we've only disclosed we're over 100%. It's moving in the right direction, getting better and better. Obviously, that happens when you have two quarters in a row where the expansion part of the business is contributing more to ARR than the new logos. We're starting to see a little bit of a flywheel starting and seeing some improvement on that NRR. At this stage, we're still sticking to our disclosure, which is it's consistently over 100%, and we have a nice healthy margin right now.
Got it. Thank you for taking my questions. I'll pass the line.
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Chick with National Bank Financial. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. It's Mike Stevens on for Rich here. Congrats on the quarter. Very strong. Just wanted to dig into you mentioned the revenue tier opportunity. I don't know if you could provide some color on kind of how much of your customer base now is on revenue tiers or volume-based pricing and where you see that going with some of the AI products upcoming. As a follow-up, how many you think that could impact the revenue model going forward?
You want to go ahead, Blaine.
I'll start, and you can jump in, Bob.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
We do have some volume-based pricing that occurs.
What you're referring to is a new pricing package and some planning that we're working around with some of the new AI modules that are coming out. We do get extra variable revenue from number of orders, number of scenarios. As we move forward, we are looking at a hybrid approach with consumption-based pricing that will be effective with the deployment of our AI solutions. Obviously, Connections, the team did a great job of showcasing why it's so important, why it's going to help a lot of organizations become more efficient, more effective, and more accurate as they plan for their supply chains. We do have a healthy amount of demand right now. We are capping the amount of initial customers that are going through this just to make sure that we obviously go through an appropriate beta deployment of this.
We have more than enough demand to cover that. At this point, over 50% of them will not have the tool in the initial month, but we expect to have a pretty nice onslaught of customers coming on board with that. We have been testing this out already. I think I've talked about this in the past. We have almost like a help bot or a chat bot that, what it does is it takes 14,000 pages of Kinaxis documentation on how to use Maestro effectively. That is being used more than we've ever seen before. It is the highest adoption we've ever seen of any module. For the customers that could potentially use it, we're sitting right now at 75% that are using it. That is just a testament to the demand that we have with our AI products.
Now, when we move on to chat with data and agentic AI, which are both coming out this year, that pricing and packaging tool, we are in an urgent mode right now in prioritizing that to get that out to make sure that people understand how this will work with the revenue tiers and the consumption pricing that'll be along the way with that as well. We think that will help with our revenue growth, but I think we have a little bit of planning and work to do to make sure that it rolls out effectively.
Yeah, I'll add to it. It's not going to have an impact on the short or medium-term revenue. You don't have to start changing your models. The industry is moving this way. The reason for it is that it ties value to consumption.
It is becoming a more normal way of making sure that as you consume capacity, you get the appropriate cost base with that capacity, particularly around AI solutions. More and more, we're exploring and we've been working on transactions that increase the contract increases with the consumption of the solution, both traditional SaaS and consumption pricing. Look at it. This is something that we're starting to develop as a modern company. It's not as dramatic as the kind of economics that you saw when you went from on-premise to cloud in terms of how the revenue tracks. It's got similar economic opportunities that I've seen in the companies I've helped make that transition. Customers are asking for it. They're seeing it from other vendors. We're working, we're in the early days of working through this.
You should think about it as a company that is committed to modernization, is listening to our customers and finding ways to make sure that as our customers get value, we get paid, but also give them paths to get value in a way where they can control consumption more. A simple example, there is a construct called product-led marketing where if you can let customers have broader access to your solution, then they are going to find ways to use it more within their organization. All of these things are things that are on our mind as we look towards the future and as we lead this market around artificial intelligence and GenAI solutions.
Okay. No, really appreciate that, Courteau. Thank you. Just one last one. You guys have obviously talked a lot about what you guys are doing differently and how you are innovating.
Just in terms of a big win, like the semiconductor company, maybe if you could just narrow down the top couple of differentiators that you think led them to go with you guys versus competitors.
I mean, I'd love to tell you about all the problems our competitors have, but I'll hold myself on this call. Okay. I'd probably say the number one thing is these are very educated clients. These are the most sophisticated consumers of software and some of the most important companies in the world that have consistently picked us over the last four or five quarters. The first thing that they look at is, "Am I going to be successful with the project? Is this a solution that I can get quick time to value?" We do that better than anybody in the industry. Secondly, references count.
If you go across our industry sectors, the ones that we've doubled down on or focused on, we have the leading companies in virtually every one of those industry categories already using our solution. They talk to each other. They're not just looking to understand the differences in our product versus others by listening to Kinaxis. They go out and do the research and see the value that the biggest companies in the world are getting. Number three, the differentiation really gets enhanced when you start looking at the challenges that are faced in things like this tariff complexity.
When I was at Kinaxis, one of the very, very senior executives for one of the biggest pharma in the world, Life Science Company, told me, "We are so happy that we picked Kinaxis, and the only mistake we made is waiting too long." When you have customers in a conference telling other customers that that is the way they should have gone or should go, that's helpful. These large companies already have experiences with some of our competitors like SAP and others. They can see the differences in the way we approach the business versus our competitors. Right now, we got it going. We're winning all the important deals, and it's because of the product. It's because of our culture. It's because of references, and we expect to keep that going.
Great. Awesome, Courtneau. Appreciate the insight, guys. Cheers.
Your next question comes from the line of Suthan Sukumar Stifel . Your line is open.
Good morning, Jens. And congrats on the quarter. I want to touch on go-to-market. You guys talked about seeing higher conversion rates, and now you rolled out the Tariff Response offering, which I think should benefit your pipeline. Can you speak a little bit about some of the more recent changes in your go-to-market approach to support this elevated demand backup that you're seeing? What's working? What do you need to improve on?
I mean, look, we're always going to try and improve, but I mean, we did a lot over the last year. If you look at the differences in execution, it's just palpable, right? So where do I start? We have added talent throughout the organization. We already went in a lot of big customers. We were focused on net new. This is not a new phenomenon that I just described with the most important companies in the world deciding on Kinaxis. Now we're supporting the existing teams and adding to those existing teams with a huge amount of talent input. We've got better process. We're doing more company-to-company selling. Our pipeline's growing. The way we work with customers to make the decision has improved, accelerated in their ability to make decisions faster. We've got Mark Morgan that's leading it, who's world-class, arguably biased, but one of the most experienced and capable executives in this category. All those things are working for us. On top of it, we've really, really upgraded and set a different set of expectations for our install base, working with our customers.
Some of the most important companies in the world were using us in maybe two or three divisions when they've got 30. Our game plan coming into this year, starting Q2, Q3 last year, was to really mine these incredible customers that are global. I think, look at it, it's just every quarter we're just trying to get a little bit better, and we feel like we are.
Great. Thank you for the color. Blaine, maybe this question is for you. On cash flow, can you remind us on your CapEx commitments and the course ahead here? How do you expect free cash flow margins to track relative to EBITDA margins over the near to midterm and longer term?
Yeah, that's a good question.
We had a nice, healthy difference this quarter, and we're going to have probably a difference for the rest of 2025 just because of how the trailing of those two payments we made in Q1 will play out. The reason why we gave the adjusted free cash flow was just to show how close it is to adjusted EBITDA. If we adjust it up to where we think it'll be normalized going forward, we're actually fairly close. It's $25 million versus $24.4 million, which is kind of what our expectations were. As we potentially see our adjusted EBITDA continue to rise in the number of years ahead of us, free cash flow should be pretty close to it.
We are going to be a little bit higher on CapEx this year versus what we've had in 2024, just for the end of life of some of our data servers that we have to play out for, especially on the North American side, to make sure that we get over the line before the full migration is done. We do not anticipate that we will get much higher than where we are in 2025. That CapEx piece should be a little bit thinner. As I said at the beginning of this, we expect that EBITDA and free cash flow will be fairly close together compared to maybe some of our peers.
Thank you very much. I'll pass the line, Jens.
Your next question comes from the line of Stephanie Price with CIBC. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. I wanted to chat about professional services.
Revenue this quarter looks like it declined year over year. I assume part of this is the proportion of services completed by SI partners, but just curious if there's anything else to call out there. I guess the current guide assumes that PS growth will really re-accelerate. Hope you can chat a little bit about the drivers that you see for the rest of the year.
Yeah, look, we have dove in on this. If you look at what's going on in the general economy, you want to make sure that this is not a leading indicator on a challenge for our professional services organization. You got to understand, I've done this before. The first thing that you check is, how's our backlog? It's phenomenal.
The combination of what you would look at in net new wins, plus the extension of the opportunities that we're creating with our install base to extend the capability. Clearly, when you make a shift to partners, to give a little bit more color on that, it's a double impact. The first impact is you see fairly significant revenue to some of the most important partners in the world that can equally take on these major transactions like EY and Accenture. More and more, we're also seeding revenue where we're doing joint implementations. That's going to become more of the phenomenon, Stephanie, is that second category where we might have been prime. For purposes of skills transfer and customer outcomes, that part of the revenue will also go to the partners.
We will lead them there in some cases, but in some cases, they will be led. That ends up being pretty quickly from, say, two years ago, 60% of the backlog or the potential pipeline for services. There is not a demand issue. I think in this macro environment, and maybe it goes back to guidance, we have to be cautious. Service is one of those things that you will see the impact of a difficult period. It is more the economics of making a shift to give a lot more revenue to the professional services organizations that you are seeing. I have done this before, which I did at SAP, we did it at Altus Group, it can be a little bit choppy because you are trying to formulate your backlog into something that is going to make sense for the customer and make sure that they get a good outcome.
You're seeing some of that. Like every quarter with professional services, sometimes there's some timing things coming out that go on around that. It's really the economics of that shift.
That makes sense. Maybe touching on the broader space, with the strategic acquisition announced recently, just curious about your thoughts on consolidation here and your interest in M&A at this point.
Consolidation has not worked. It's part of the reason that we're beating companies like Blue Yonder, E2open, which is a mess. If you look at our strategy and where we're going, we want to serve from the center of supply chain planning and through the advent of orchestration. We're in a place where we can give the information.
We can drive the orchestration through all parts of the supply chain without having to buy software in each of those categories. The trends are such that we can be the control tower, the orchestration point, the autonomous supply chain planning across the whole ecosystem. That is why we signed partnerships with Databricks. That is why we are doing work with Infor. More to come on that front. We think we can really, really solve a complete view of the supply chain with our strategy. Where people have tried to do M&A to do it, it has been a disaster. If we look at M&A, it is all with a view to the future and this orchestration strategy that we are looking at. Secondly, we will continue to do share buyback as we go forward. We are going to be generating a lot of cash.
We do have opportunity to go after what I would call innovative companies in this orchestration mindset.
Great. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. And nice job on the quarter. Bob, earlier, you noted that the firm was leaving guidance unchanged despite the solid start to the year, mainly due to macro uncertainties. I was wondering if you could provide additional commentary on what's changed with respect to buying behavior over the past 90 days or so.
I mean, we've seen enthusiasm clearly for our product. Virtually, I talked about Gartner Group. I talked about Connections. I talked about our pipeline. If anything, maybe I would say that you got to be on your game.
I mentioned this briefly to sustain not just our company, for all software companies, the growth that we want and, frankly, to set ourselves up for the future quarters and even into 2026. You better be talking to the CFO. You're competing for capital against other priorities in these companies. There's definitely pressure on capital. You see it. There are so many companies in other industries that can't even give guidance, abandon the idea of giving guidance, right? Those things we observe, but we worked pretty nicely through the quarter. It's consistent with how Mark and I think about being an enterprise software company. You should be talking to the CFO anyways and other parts of the company. The need to absolutely improve your execution and alignment with companies is enhanced in this environment. So far, so good. We feel, as you know, we did confirm guidance.
We're also being cautious against that. For us, so far, great quarter. Things are going well. People see our solutions, both existing customers and new, as being really strategic, not only for the environment we're in now, but it has reminded them that they need these kinds of products to deal with other kinds of complexities in the future. Yeah, you got to be on your game in this environment. There's no doubt that as an enterprise software company, you're competing for capital right now in a very cautious world.
That's helpful. Thank you. As a follow-up, I was wondering if you could just expand a little bit on your partnership with Databricks. For instance, is the arrangement strictly a technology partnership at this stage, or is there a co-selling component to it as well?
It's technology, joint development.
We're already in market together, exploiting relationships and developing that opportunity. It's a part of our buy-build partner strategy, meaning that there's some parts of the Databricks capability that in the past we might have tried to build ourselves. By working with Databricks closely, we'll find ourselves in a place where we can absolutely go faster. We can tap into the development talent. They have their technical conference coming up. I think it's in June. We've got seven or eight people going to that. They've been on site with us. They're very, very excited about the partnership as we have. Actually, there's three very senior executives at Databricks that either directly work for me or worked in my organization. Similarly, Mark has very good relationships with some of the Databricks team.
It comes back to what I described with customers now, where if you're going to be selling these kinds of complex, high-value, high-price solutions, you better have a relationship across the organization. What we set up with Databricks is a situation where we're not only connected to the technical group, we're connected to the senior executives at their company. Andrew Bell is going to be speaking at their conference coming up as well. Yeah, it's got the makings of a great—I'm not declaring victory, but it's got the makings of a great partnership in the form that we want to develop these kinds of partnerships in the future.
Thank you.
Thank you. I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn it back over to Rick Wadsworth for closing remarks.
Thanks, operator.
Thank you, everyone, for participating on today's call. We appreciate your questions and your ongoing interest and support of Kinaxis. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report second quarter results. Bye for now.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.