Thanks for joining us.
Great. Thanks for having us, Brian.
This is gonna be-- I'm going to try to make this as interactive as we can here. So if anybody has questions in the audience at any point, just feel free to raise your hand, and I'll start off with some Q&A. But yeah, again, just feel free to raise your hand if you have any questions. With that, so Jim, maybe for those in the audience who are new to the AvePoint story, can you give us an overview of what the company does and what problems you all solve-
Sure
... for your customers?
Yeah, I mean, so maybe to start off, we're a software company, founder-led company since we've been around for really 20 years. So we've been at this a while. And again, we're focused on a SaaS solution. We're really delivering our solutions to customers of any size. We break them into three categories, the SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, but we satisfy literally any customer. We're global in scale, so we're addressing customers literally across the world. Again, so we're focused on that. And when we think about our SaaS solutions, we're really thinking about SaaS management and really data management for our customers. And so we're thinking about everything in that data management lifecycle from, you know, migrating your data into the cloud, to backing it up, to potentially optimizing the costs of that data.
We think about that as, like, storage optimization. And there are a variety of other things in terms of governing that data, who has access to it, who doesn't have access. So we play in that, in that space, which is, you know, when we think about where the future's headed, we feel like this is a good space to be in because data only becomes more and more important as we move forward. And so again, we're aligned heavily with Microsoft. We're a very strong partner with Microsoft. We think that, again, as Microsoft continues to evolve, we're right there as a supporting partner, and we're continuing to evolve with them.
But again, we're excited, you know, about the opportunities that are ahead of us, and, you know, we're helping customers solve those problems in terms of as they think about the next generation of digital transformation and ultimately what that means. We're helping them in that journey. We're satisfying the problems of what they're doing with their data, how they're managing it, and then ultimately how that data gets used, as we think about AI.
Got it. Going one level deeper, the AvePoint Confidence Platform is divided into three suites: Resilience, Control, and Modernization.
Yeah.
Could you just walk us through these suites and highlight some of your most widely used products within each of those?
Yeah, no, it's a great question, Brian. And I do think it's important to point out the platform, because we do have this platform of products, and it's a unified platform, an integrated platform, that seems to be doing well today as we think about customers looking to consolidate vendors, looking to take advantage of those things. The platform play is a positive for us. So that's been really helpful. And then when we think about the platform, we break it into three suites, as you mentioned. Resilience, and when you think about Resilience, think about products like backup. Think about Resilience being that, "Hey, I've got a problem, I need to recover something," that falls into that Resilience category. We also think of, like, storage optimization in the Resilience category as well.
So think about, "How do I optimize my storage, right? I've got all this data. How do I make it as cost-effective as possible?" We have products that help do that. So in this category, our top products would be a backup product, ensuring your data is secure and safe, and then a product, like a storage optimization product, to make sure that that data that you are keeping secure and safe is actually not costing you an arm and a leg. And so we're able to do that in that category. And then when we think about the control category, maybe think about that in terms of management and governance of your data. So this is becoming critically important, but even think about it, today, who has access to certain data? Who has permissions?
Who doesn't have access and doesn't have permissions? So this is a very important aspect of governing your data and managing your data, and we saw that come to life really through COVID, where people were turning on applications like Teams, and they were using it for chatting and video, but then they wanted to light up the workloads around sharing documents, collaborating, and doing all those things, and now you run into the issues of governance. It's, I'm sharing a document with you, but you may not be authorized to actually view the documents that I'm sharing, and that all falls into what we refer to as governance, and this falls into security.
and we've seen all types of issues like that in the news around governance and security of your data and the security of that data, and so we play a pretty pivotal role in helping customers manage that situation. And then the third suite is what we refer to as Modernization, and included in that suite are things like, how do you optimize your workspace in terms of efficiency and productivity? And things that fall into that category are a product that we refer to as MyHub which allows you to organize things and essentially organize your workday, thinking through all of the products that you're actually using during the day. And so that product's very useful.
Also included in there are what we would refer to as vertical solutions, like in the education space, where we've got products that are fully integrated with the Microsoft stack, including Teams and others, and it's a vertical solution targeted at the education sector. So fully integrated with the Microsoft suite, and plays very nicely into this Modernization role.
The only other thing I would just maybe add is that all the suites are, they're interconnected, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of value that we are able to offer customers. You know, it's, it's not necessarily the case that a customer will come in and, and buy products from all three suites off the bat, but because we are helping them on this digital transformation journey, there's a lot of different entry points that we can come in and sort of solve an initial problem and then build from there. So, you know, it's very common for a customer to, you know, say, "I need to migrate from an on-prem, you know, sort of legacy system to the cloud or from cloud to another cloud," and we can obviously help them with that in a very efficient way.
But then once they're there, they need to, you know, back up and secure that data, and so they can, you know, tap into the Resilience Suite that way. So, you know, we've. There's a lot of different ways that we can help customers. There's a lot of use cases that we can address, and it all goes back to kind of the platform play, because if you think about sort of the collective power of those three suites, there's a lot of problems that we can help solve.
Got it. Last week, you guys reported your three key results.
Yes.
Maybe if you could just give us a quick recap of the results and kind of the key takeaways there, I think that would be helpful for the audience.
Yeah, no. So it was a great quarter for us in terms of Q3. We really tracked three fundamental metrics that we guide to and report on, and those would be revenue, ARR, and operating income.
Yeah.
Now, the ARR, we guide to annually, the other two we guide quarterly. But we're... You know, as it relates to the two quarterly metrics, revenue, we exceeded our guidance. Revenue grew, actually, 16%, which was, you know, right above our expectation for the quarter, so a solid performance against that, beat our guidance. Our ARR for the quarter came in at 25% year-over-year growth. Again, you know, right where we want it to be from an ARR point of view and tracking for the year. We had good growth kind of geographically as well, in terms of performance across all three of our regions. We kinda track regionally, North America, EMEA, and APAC. We had good growth across all three regions, which was very solid.
Then operating income, again, we delivered better than the guidance we provided, and we're showing significant growth over last year. You know, we hit this quarter about $9.2 million of operating income, compared to about $2 million last year. Really focusing this year on profitable growth, and we saw that come through with the performance in Q3. You know, it's a very uncertain environment out there, like we've all seen for the first nine months of the year, but I think our focus and commitment to not only driving the top line, which we've been able to do, but leveraging our cost structures to increase our operating income, was a key focus this year, and I think we've been able to do that. You'll see that across a couple different sectors.
Our sales and marketing expense is down as a percentage of revenue compared to last year. G&A is also down as a percentage of revenue last year. Again, that was our major focus, was to really drive leverage from those two pieces, and we've been able to do that. So we're really pleased with the quarter. Obviously, there's still a lot of uncertainty out there in the market, but we were really pleased with the quarter we delivered.
Absolutely.
The only other thing I might just add, just from a dollar standpoint, so ARR, we crossed the $250 million mark in Q3. We finished Q3 just over $250 million, so that was obviously a good milestone for us. And that resulted in net new ARR of about $14.5 million, which was the strongest quarter we've had on an organic basis since going public. And then, you know, our retention rates, we were happy that gross retention rates were stable, and we actually saw an improvement in our NRR by about a point versus Q2. So, you know, I think a lot of the metrics that we track pretty closely, we're happy with what we're seeing.
Got it. So AvePoint has a very close relationship with Microsoft. Can you just talk us through the advantages of that relationship and why customers benefit from working with both AvePoint and Microsoft together?
Yeah. I mean, we've had a relationship with Microsoft for over 20 years now, and so it's been a, it's been a win-win relationship for us, and I think for Microsoft, and ultimately for our customers. So one of the benefits for us, working directly with Microsoft, is this relationship we do have, and we've been, you know, Partner of the Year with Microsoft on multiple occasions. We are kind of in the—we get access to their new technologies early on, and we're involved in some of their dev cycles, so we're aware of what's coming out and what's coming down the road. That allows us to shape our products so that we're aligned with where they're headed. And that, that makes our products, you know, more beneficial to Microsoft in terms of they're complementary, which ultimately adds more value to the customer.
The customer ultimately wants—you know, the full value of the Microsoft product suite, but in order to get that, they really need our components as well. If you think about the example we use a lot is kind of like if you think of an electric company or some of your public utilities of providing the infrastructure throughout a city, that's Microsoft. They've got the platform, they've got this massive infrastructure, but then inside your home, you're having your contractors actually do all of your finishes, right? Inside the house. And that's kind of like us. So that Microsoft is doing all the plumbing and all the stuff outside, and then we're doing the finishes inside, and that's where we think about, like, our Resilience Suite, our Control Suite, and ultimately Modernization kinda sits on top.
The benefit for Microsoft of that is our products are allowing our customers to adopt the Microsoft products and actually light up all of the workloads that Microsoft wants the customers to use. Our products allow them to do that. Perfect example was that Teams example of, in terms of, you know, we're going through COVID. You know, Microsoft wants you to consume all of their products, right? Wants you to use all of that information. But people were just using the camera. They're just doing video chats. Microsoft wants you to collaborate and do all that stuff. Well, people were afraid to turn on the collaboration 'cause they didn't have the governance, they didn't have those things in place, so they weren't turning it on. They're using our product.
Now, all of a sudden, they can turn on all of those things, and by doing so, they're consuming more Azure, they're consuming more of the Microsoft stack, and therefore, that's a benefit to Microsoft. So, and ultimately, a benefit to the customer, but that partnership has been like that for the past 20 years, where we have insights, we take advantage of those insights, we can build accordingly, and then we help the customer adopt more of the Microsoft product, which ultimately helps Microsoft, and ultimately, the customer gets the full value out of the Microsoft product. So that's been really good.
And then on top of Microsoft, we're doing that now with Salesforce, and we're doing it more and more with Google products, and so we're expanding outside of the Microsoft environment, but make no mistake, Microsoft is still our, you know, key partner in all of this.
Right. Yeah, I like the utility company analogy. That's helpful. So I mean, we've heard a lot of companies continue to talk about headwinds from the macro environment. So I'm curious what you're seeing from a macro perspective, and how are you adapting to changing customer needs?
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So for us, you know, we're still seeing some of what we saw at the beginning of the year and really the first now three quarters, which... I'd be curious to see if any audience members have different if they're seeing things differently. What we're seeing is the continuation of the elongated sales cycles. It's still taking longer to close deals than it did a year ago, but it hasn't gotten worse. When we measure our deal cycles, they haven't gotten worse. They're longer than the prior year, but not worse over the first nine months of this year. When we think about scrutiny of deals, we're definitely seeing a lot more budgetary scrutiny on deal flows.
Now, we're doing it ourselves internally, so this is not unique, I don't think, to our customer base or our prospects, because we're doing it. You know, we're very, you know, focused on making sure we're getting the best possible deals. Now, I do think that actually helps us in certain ways. Certain of our products, as I've mentioned, are really centered around controlling costs, so I think that's been a plus. And then the platform play in terms of consolidating the vendors, I think we've benefited from that in several instances, where, you know, just like I've tried to consolidate vendors on our side, our customers are trying to do the same thing.
When you have a platform play, and you can provide multiple products to solve multiple problems, I think that puts you in a better position, and we've seen the benefit of that this year.
Maybe just one other point, sort of on the macro. You know, just thinking longer term about some of the tailwinds that we've called out, certainly, I mean, setting aside AI and anything around the potential there, for the past few years, we've talked about really three trends that we feel like are pretty good long-term tailwinds for us. The first would be sort of just the overall growth of data and the proliferation of software applications across organizations. You know, that continues to just move in one direction, and that's only, you know, increased with, you know, a hybrid work model and data being stored in and accessed from more and more places, and companies therefore having to adopt a lot of SaaS applications and sort of seeing their data growth skyrocket.
The second would be just the need for efficiency and cost improvements. That was the case before 2023. It's obviously been, you know, an elevated discussion point, but, you know, it's something that we've always sort of tried to partner with our customers on. And then the third would just be a compliance and a threat landscape that is continuing to move in, you know, again, one direction, where for compliance, there's increasingly, you know, there's regulations that need to be met. And in the threat landscape, obviously, you know, we don't need to tell you, but the number of breaches that you're reading about on a daily basis just continues to go up.
And so there's an enormous sort of opportunity for us to capitalize on all three of those 'cause they're really not going away anytime soon. So, you know, obviously, as we look at, you know, what we've seen this year and sort of near-term expectations, there is the uncertainty that Jim discussed in detail, but we do feel like longer term, you know, the trends that we've been calling out for a number of years are still gonna be there, and provide, you know, sort of continued runway for growth.
Got it. Any questions from the audience? So the stock bounced nicely since the Microsoft announcement.
Mm-hmm.
You mentioned Salesforce and Google. So are there any other partnerships that might make sense that you're looking at and close at all to...? And I can't say it explicitly, but any partnerships that might be on the horizon?
Yeah. When we think about technology, obviously, Microsoft is still the gorilla, right, in the workplace, right? So, so having that relationship, we still feel very strong about. We do have relationships with Google and provide products that support that space. We obviously spend a lot of time in the Azure cloud. We're also working with AWS, AWS's cloud, so that's good. Like you mentioned, Salesforce, we also do work with Box and Dropbox in terms of as storage platforms. And then when we think about partners, so those are like the technology partners, and then when we think about our channel strategy in terms of our go-to-market strategy, so we have a dual strategy of direct to customers, where we have a sales force that goes after them directly.
And then we have a channel strategy where we are partnering with others to attack the market. If you think about it, we kinda go to market. We have three segments, right? We have our enterprise customer base that we go after, mid-market, and SMB. SMB is predominantly 100% channel, mid-market's somewhere in between, and then mostly enterprise is direct, with some partner involvement. We are trying to work with even more and more partners. Those would be SI partners, kind of the largest SI partners in the world. And so more and more of those relationships are forming. I do think that sets us up well, where they can take advantage of our software to execute and deliver the solutions they're trying to implement, mostly around digital transformation, security threats that Jamie referred to.
We have lots of products that can help them as they deliver these massive solutions that they're trying to do, so we're trying to partner more and more with those providers. So I think on the technology side, we've got an array of that, and then it's almost on the partner side, actually, the go-to-market partners is where we can even continue to further to enhance those relationships.
Awesome. Yeah, so just digging in on the channel, I mean, it's one of the biggest strategic areas of focus.
Yeah
... that you've talked about is the channel in relation to your go-to-market motion.
Yeah.
Maybe just walk us through your investments in the channel, and-
Sure
... your relationships with MSPs, and, you know, how those should evolve, but also-
Yeah
... like, the benefits you would expect to realize from this.
Yeah, no, it's a great, great question. I mean, I think we look at the channel twofold, right? It's some of the conversation I was just having about being able to reach more potential customers than we can on our own. You know, we're as Jamie said, we just crossed $250 million of ARR, but that's, you know, in the scheme of things, for us, that's been nice growth, and that's big, but in the scheme of things, that's tiny, right? So we can't possibly touch the amount of companies that we can if we use a channel strategy.
And so the idea of partnering with others to be able to go from a one-to-one relationship to a one-to-many is a strategy that we believe will provide great success in terms of top line, in terms of being able to reach more customers and provide the solutions that we have to offer and allow customers to take advantage of that, so that's great. But then also efficiencies in terms of our cost structure, that, again, it's not a one-to-one relationship, it's potentially one to many. And so we do believe that even in Q3 and this year, we've seen the positive impact of that on our cost structure.
Our sales and marketing spend is down as a percentage of revenue compared to last year, and a contributing factor to that is this strategy, where we're seeing more and more being delivered from the channel, and it's at less cost because it's not that one-to-one relationship. So, we're seeing the benefits. We're investing in those partners in terms of enablement, in terms of education, training, working with those partners to be able to deliver our software, and take advantage of that to their customer base. So we're investing in, you know, what we would call partner managers, and a lot of training and technology along those lines, and we're seeing the payoff in terms of the results we're seeing, but also then the efficiency that we're seeing on the cost side, so it has a two-pronged effect.
We're now kind of at the point where about 50% of our total ARR is through the channel, as we called out at Q3 last week. And then of our new ARR that we added in Q3, about 72% of that came through the channel. So the quarterly contribution will probably fluctuate depending on how deals come in, but, you know, that 50% of the total ARR was about 40% in 2019. So, you know, it's grown a few percentage points every single year, and we would just expect that to continue growing.
You know, I don't think it's ever gonna reach 100%, because while we will wanna go through the channel as much as possible to reach certainly SMBs and mid-markets, it's obviously important for us at the large enterprise level to continue to have sort of that high touch level of engagement with more direct sales reps, but there will be some channel involvement there, too.
Makes sense. So one of the more powerful slides in your investor deck is a breakdown of your ARR in a number of different ways, that you've got it broken down by, customer size, by region, by channel versus direct.... Can you just talk about the diversity of the business?
Sure.
and how you expect kind of that breakdown to evolve, or the, like, which segments are growing faster?
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great, it's a great point. You're right, there is a slide in our investor deck that essentially breaks out our ARR that Brian's referring to, that shows it from a bunch of different lenses. I do think it highlights the strength of AvePoint in that we are diversified and very well-balanced. Maybe starting just geographically, when we think about our three regions, about 45% of our ARR is coming from North America, about 30% to 35% is coming from EMEA, and then the balance is coming from APAC, 20% to 25%. Fairly balanced in terms of for a company that's $250 million of ARR.
Very unusual to have a company that started in the U.S. and has that kind of balance at this stage in our life cycle. So we feel good about that. It's actually helped in terms of some of the ... over the years, and we've kinda always had that balance, it's helped over the years in terms of as the ups and downs of the economy have happened, whether it was something in Europe, we didn't get too affected, if it was something in APAC, we didn't get too affected. So it's kind of acted as a little bit of a natural hedge in terms of having the three different markets, so that's been very positive. If we think about, you know, the ARR in terms of direct versus indirect or channel, as Jamie just referred, about 50/50 now.
So very well-balanced when we think about that. And when we think even about, you know, where we sit from a enterprise, mid-market, and SMB, we've got pretty good diversification there as well. 50% of our ARR is coming from enterprise, about 30% coming from mid-market, and about 20% that's coming from SMB. And SMB is only about three or four years old for us in terms of tackling that market. So it's our fastest growing segment, that SMB market. A lot of greenfield for us, but all three of them, you know, all three segments are growing well and are really, you know, are doing well. And then maybe lastly, when we think about industry concentration, we really don't have any concentration. We're spread out, in terms of industry specific.
About 60% of the revenue is in highly regulated industries, as you would kind of expect. They were early adopters to things like governance and all of those things around security. And that would cover things like banking, our government sector, you know, pharmaceutical. So heavily regulated industries represents about 60%. And then our public sector, which is all the government, both federal, state, and local, both in the U.S. and really worldwide, represents about 30% of our overall business, which has been great. Again, in certain economic downturns, that piece of the business has always remained pretty steady and stable, so that's been a really positive thing. And then, no customer represents more than 2% of our total ARR, so we've got great diversification in terms of our customer base.
You know, the number of large customers continues to grow every quarter, so that's good. So we feel really good about that slide being a really good representation of the diversity in our ARR, and also the stability and balance. So we feel like we're well positioned to continue to move forward and not, you know, subject to one thing that we're overly concentrated in.
Just the only other ones I'd call out from the slide, 'cause there are a lot of well-balanced pie charts on it, but you know, when we look at the ARR coming from both new and existing customers in any given quarter, that's also been pretty balanced historically, which is great. You know, we have a ton of greenfield opportunity, obviously, with new customers, but we're also very under-penetrated with our existing customers. And these last couple of quarters, in particular, we've called out really, you know, meaningful success that we've had with expansion and with selling back into the base, yeah, to the point where, you know, we're, it's about 60/40 in terms of existing versus new contributions to ARR. And then the only other one was the ARR contribution by suite, where we...
It's obviously a little more balanced, or it's a little, I guess, less balanced and more skewed towards the Resilience, which is about, you know, kinda high 50% of our ARR. Control is sort of high 20%, and then, you know, Modernization is sort of in the teens and makes up the balance. So, Brian, as you were asking, kind of where things evolve to, I think for most of the examples that that Jim gave, you know, there's not a lot of evolution that has to take place for kind of greater balance to be achieved, which is great.
I think with the suites, it's the one area where we would expect to see sort of more growth, coming from Control and from Modernization, and that should sort of—those should make up a, over time, you know, a greater share of the overall pie. But overall, I think as Jim said, the diversification of the ARR is really, I think, what makes us pretty unique.
Absolutely. Any questions from the audience? All right, I'll keep going. Maybe shifting to competition, who do you all compete with, and how does it vary across the different products and suites?
Yeah, no, it's a good question. You know, there's kinda two answers to that. When we think about our Confidence Platform or the platform play across all suites, we don't really have any one single competitor that competes across the board. So we don't really see a unique player that can compete on each of those platforms. But where we do see competition is more on a point solution basis. So if we're looking at a backup solution, let's say in the SMB space, it might be companies like Veeam or the old Datto before being bought by Kaseya. Like we would see them co-compete there. And then, you know, we might see like a Commvault on the high end, right? In terms of like enterprise grade.
And then we would see other point solutions, you know, competing in, like, control or in our Modernization. We might see, again, one-off point solutions there, but again, no one who's actually competing on a platform level, which again, I think has given us a tremendous advantage, particularly, as I said before, when we're talking about, customers looking to consolidate vendors. Like, there's just not a lot of people that if they're looking across this sector, that they can actually go to to try and consolidate, which, you know, I think has bode well for us over the past couple of months and quarters.
Got it. So shifting to AI, definitely a hot topic. So it's obviously one of the hottest topics in software right now. I mean, how are you thinking about the opportunity there for AvePoint? And, you know, is there any timeframe you would put around it in terms of when we start to see, you know, you all benefiting from AI, whether it be in your pipeline or your AR growth?
Yeah. So maybe I would kinda categorize it into maybe three categories, right? So, there's the AI that I think we benefit from of just like Microsoft Copilot or other AI that's happening in the world that people are taking advantage of. And if you think of our core fundamentals of managing the data, if you think of AI sitting on top and using all of that company data, then companies need to make sure that that data is governed properly in terms of who has access to it, who doesn't have access, that it's current, you know, what are the retention policies? You know, it's the old story of garbage in, garbage out.
So if your data is garbage, and then you're saying, "Well, but I'm gonna put these AI, large language models on top, and I'm gonna learn all this stuff, and I'm gonna then do something with this." If the data itself is garbage, then your results are gonna be garbage. So we do think that the one benefit for AvePoint is, I think we're in this business of this data management that benefits from the AI push. So that's, that's one piece, right? Is that it helps our core fundamental business. The second piece is obviously we're now, and have been for a while, we weren't just calling it AI, we would call it automation and a few other things embedded into our product.
So we're continuously enhancing our existing products to incorporate more AI, more automation, to make it easier for our customers, and provide more insights to our customers of what's actually happening in their data structures, so they know what's going on. So that's the second. And then the third piece to that would also be coming out with products that now are AI first, as opposed to just enhancing our existing products with AI, actually coming out with AI derivative products, and so we're working on a bunch of that stuff. And then the last thing that we're trying to take advantage of would be AI for ourselves internally.
So, for example, obviously, we have back office functions that could benefit from adoption of AI tools and technology, and so we're exploring a variety of those to, again, take our cost structure and make our cost structure more effective and efficient. So we're experimenting with a few things there, and I would expect that those would start to pay dividends maybe as early as next year or the following.
And then again, I would just caution us all to, you know, I see there's a couple people in the room that might be as old as I am and have been through this cycle once or twice already before, that it will take longer to see the benefits than we would like to imagine right now, and that when we see AI today, there's a lot of testing going on, there's a lot of excitement, but the actual benefits of that are gonna be further down the road than today. Like, the experimenting is happening now, and then I think that will result in, "Okay, these are the things that we can actually take advantage of and see." And so I think it's that.
I wouldn't expect to see the impact for AvePoint in terms of really AI contributing significant revenue in the short term, but we all agree that longer term, absolutely. I would think we just all have to be a little patient as it relates to the full effects of that.
Got it. So maybe shifting to retention rate-
I have a question.
Oh, sorry, missed it.
A security question, with regards to your platform, application security, and obviously, data security, you know, these are probably, like, in the forefront of your mind, with regards to customer data. How rigorous is your program, in you know checking and testing your platform, and then obviously protecting your data? And then, you know, how is the alerting function inside AvePoint, in the event of a situation that you know you need to alert on? Can you talk a little bit about those?
Yeah, I can touch on them, and then, Jamie, if you wanna add to that. But, so obviously, we're a public company now, so there's a certain amount of controls and processes we have in place just from a SOX point of view around our internal security and controls. We go through rigorous walkthroughs in terms of disasters or, you know, breaches, and then, I think that's both an insurance function as well as a SOX compliance function, as well as our own CISO, making sure that we're doing those things. And then in terms of the products itself, we have ISO certifications, we have various certifications in Europe, in Japan. So we take it very seriously. Obviously, our customers are dependent and reliant on our taking it seriously.
So, again, it's not something we take very lightly. We are very strenuous on it. It is continuously being tested from a product point of view. And then, like I said, we have certain breach conditions that we're actually, what are the steps we're doing? How are we notifying customers? So there's a whole protocol that's been established, and that stuff is routinely tested. So I feel good that we're doing everything we can to make sure our customers feel comfortable. And then, obviously, when we engage with customers, they go through a whole process of screening us, and we respond to all of those RFPs with a, you know, litany at this point. I'm sure you guys have seen them. It must be, like, 30 pages of data security questionnaires.
We go through, respond to those in detail, provide all the details that are required. We go through interview process with our CISO, with customers. So we spend a lot of time on that, and feel like, you know, we're, we're doing everything we can to ensure the best possible results.
Excellent. Okay. Yeah.
Can you help us understand how you price it?
Sure. So for most of our products, it is seat license-based, and we would be aligned with Microsoft's kind of pricing counts. So, for example, if you have 3,000 people in your organization, we would be licensing you the products based on the 3,000 seat count. So essentially, your Microsoft seat count would match our seat count. So that's most of the products are license-based. We do have a few that we're starting to use more consumption-based. And I would expect over the, you know, next few years, you'll see multiple models as the whole, you know, industry evolves, that you'll see a variety of models coming to the forefront. But right now, it's mostly seat-based.
Can you get compensation customization?
Well, I mean, it is a SaaS platform, right? So there's, there's not a ton of customization. We do, we do have a services group, and services represents about 15% of our business. And so there are projects that we will do for customers, where we have done customization work for them, but that is more of a project-based and not really part of the core. We see that more in Asia, to be honest, where, you know, whether it's Japan or Singapore, we still see that model being much more almost like the old SI model here in the States, where you'd see more of that customization happening, but not so much in North America and EMEA. So most of that is happening in Europe. But we would, we would treat those as more like projects.
Sure.
One question, specifically, when you are getting a new customer from on-premises, what's the normal ROI time period-wise you provide to the customer?
Well, the beauty of our platform, too, is we will provide a hybrid model. So we will allow customers... You know, if you remember, when we started 20 years ago, it was all perpetual license and maintenance. And then, obviously, SaaS came along, and we adapted, and we have a SaaS platform now. And so now all of our products are subscription-based in terms of a, you know, a fee for... an annual fee. But we still allow customers to, if they have on-prem data, we will provide a hybrid license, which covers them for their on-prem data, as well as the data they have in the cloud. So we allow them to kind of migrate at their own pace.
We're not forcing them that, you know. And we have a lot of government customers, and so they're a little slower in that migration path. So we'll work with them on the journey, and so we're not forcing them to say, "You have to move everything to the cloud." And you know, we are seeing more and more shift to the cloud. Obviously, you know, that's been growing very nicely for us. You know, it's 40% year-over-year, so we see nice growth in the cloud, our SaaS platform there. But we still allow customers to have the on-prem as well. And so when they think about, you know, return, you know, it's much different than the old perpetual license. And you know, I think they're getting value immediately in this new world.
But again, they can transition at their pace, and we're not forcing them to do that. So again, I think that's another advantage we have, where some of our competitors are either one or the other. We've got some competitors that are only on-prem, and they're not migrating to the cloud, and then we've got other competitors that are cloud only, and it's difficult for customers to make that transition immediately. And they wanna have more of a bridge and be able to transition, and I think that's been helpful for us to be able to provide that.
Awesome. So at your Investor Day in March, you introduced some targets.
Yeah
... one of which was Rule of 40, as well as, GAAP profitability by 2025.
Yeah.
What do you think are going to be the top contributing factors and catalysts as you progress on those targets? And then, you know, as you look at the cost structure today, where do you see the biggest opportunities for leverage?
Great question. So there's a bunch in there to think about. But, but you're right. From a profitability point of view, we think about it in two steps, right? One is we set a target for this year to be GAAP, to be non-GAAP profitable, operating income profitable. And right now, we're guiding. Q4 guiding has us being somewhere a little over $20 million for the year. So that's a big step up from break even last year. So we went from break even of non-GAAP operating income to now we'll be $20 million plus. So that was the first step in the hurdle. And so that was, I think, a very good accomplishment for us. We saw great leverage coming out of sales and marketing and G&A, as I spoke of before.
That was a big contributor to that profitability, as well as obviously our revenue growth of 16%. So very strong, good performance. I think when we think about 2025, we're now talking about being GAAP profitable in 2025. And so for us, the biggest difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is our sales, our stock-based compensation. So for us, in this year, we'll probably have stock-based compensation about $36 to 37 million. So that's a big nut, right? So we've gotta get over that. And then going forward, it'll probably be similar in terms of size of SBC. So, we set that target for 2025. I think it's achievable. I think we get there, through a couple things, right? One is continued growth in terms of our ARR and revenue base. I think we see continued growth there.
And then we see continued leverage coming out of sales and marketing and G&A. We've got some longer term targets that we're, you know, aiming at and targeting, and we're gonna see continued improvement along those lines. We saw a nice improvement in sales and marketing efficiency this year. We expect to see continued improvement next year. Same thing with G&A. So again, I think it's twofold. When we think about that GAAP profitability in 2025, we also are expecting to be Rule of 40 in 2025 as well, which for us, Rule of 40 is our ARR growth percentage, as well as... Bless you. As well as the operating income percentage of revenue. And so we think both of those are major contributors to that Rule of 40.
We don't exactly know the component, you know, like, which one will be exactly what amount, but we do think that they're both gonna be important factors. We'd expect to see nice growth on the ARR, and we would expect our operating income to continue to increase. We're targeting the end of this year, that operating income, non-GAAP operating income, would be about 8%, and we expect that to continue and, you know, continue to increase year-over-year. So we're gonna see nice growth in ARR and also nice growth in the operating income.
Yeah, just that was the one other thing I was gonna just add was, at the beginning of the year, you know, the sort of Rule of 40, as we looked at our initial guidance for the year, got us to about 25, I believe. It was about 20% ARR growth and about a 5% non-GAAP operating margin. And just with our performance so far this year, if you look at our updated guidance, that 25 has been increased by about another five points to 30 with, you know, 22% ARR growth, and as Jim mentioned, about an 8% non-GAAP operating margin. So, you know, even over the course of just this year, you know, we've made good progress sort of towards that Rule of 40 by 2025.
And, you know, we would expect to see, you know, certainly continued improvement and margin expansion on the bottom line. And for all the reasons we talked about, sort of the top-line growth, should continue as well. So we feel good about that target.
Fantastic. Well, with that, we are out of time, so we'll leave it there. But, thank you both again for your time.
Great.
Thanks.
Thanks, Brian.
Thanks, Brian.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks, everybody.