Hi, everybody. Tim Ripka from Jefferies Software Banking. Thanks for being here with us today and supporting the conference. We're very happy to have the CEO of AvePoint, CFO of AvePoint, TJ and Jim. I'll moderate. For those in the room, TJ, maybe you wanna just start with what is AvePoint? What do you do, product set? You know, what is your platform solving for customers? Start with that.
Yeah, thank you for having us here. Yeah, AvePoint, we're the largest data management and governance player in the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem, so you guys just heard about Microsoft. We've been in this ecosystem for 20+ years, and we're the first ecosystem player to invest in Microsoft Cloud back in 2010, early days. We started in the whole enterprise content management space, which is SharePoint, which then becomes the fabric for entirety of Microsoft Office Cloud. That allow us to expand our addressable TAM to the entirety of Microsoft, first the Office Cloud, and then, of course, Azure and Dynamics. And today, we're a multi-cloud. We also support Salesforce, AWS, Google, but majority of our revenue today, 90+%, come from the Microsoft stack. We're quite global as well.
We've been a private company for a long time, but went public in 2021. Today, 45% of our business is North America, and the rest of it is evenly split between Europe and Asia, and all targeting Tier One B2B software markets, so Asia, Japan, ANZ, Singapore, South Korea, in Europe, so Western Europe, Southern Europe, and Middle East, of course, North America.
Excellent. Just to build on that, because of the balance you have globally, what do you see in kinda from a macro perspective, at least from sales cycles, customer conversations, anything around that and any anecdotal around each of the markets would be helpful, probably?
I think macro overall; the climate really hasn't changed very much from an enterprise perspective. Customers continue to be very cautious, very ROI-driven. This is where we win. We do have an end-to-end platform that focuses on data management, data governance, and security. Obviously, there's a ton of conversation now around AI deployments and experimentation, and for data management, your clean data estate is the foundation for any AI deployment because you need that enterprise data to actually train your AI model to be relevant instead of just a summer intern type of knowledge base. So yeah, that's where we see a lot of traction, but we would say 2024 is a year of experimentation. I think 2025, potentially, is the year of a monetization on that wave.
But, we have grown pretty well. We are also quite unique in that we not only are successful in the enterprise space, which is 5,000 employees and up, we're also quite successful in mid to SMB market. That's 50% of our business now. Especially the SMB, three years ago, it was 0. Now, it's 23% of our recurring. Effectively, we're taking enterprise-grade SaaS solutions and make them accessible to small to medium businesses. Small businesses, our definition is 500 employees and below, and mid-market is 500 to 5,000. So roughly, it's 50%, 30%, 20% type of split right now from all the recurring side. Overall, revenue, 86% recurring, 14% services, and that's going down to 10%.
We started at 20% services when we went public, 2.5 years ago. So yeah, overall, we see continued strength in the SMB segment when a lot of companies don't see that, we think because of our unique value proposition and our platform play. Also, very tailored towards MSPs, managed service providers, who are basically IT for small businesses, and they use our software to scale and in data management and even operations and entitlement management for Microsoft Cloud for hundreds of businesses behind the scenes. So, we actually sell them pool licenses with monthly recurring contracts. So, that lowers their barrier to entry and allow us to continue to successfully grow. That's our highest growth segment, but we're still very, very sticky on the enterprise side.
A third of our business, also government, U.S. government, Japanese government, Singapore government, et cetera, so highly resilient, highly sticky business.
Yeah. I love the balance in your business, geography and market, customers, deployment. It's like you're never. You have plenty of diversity. I guess with that, Jim, recent quarter, good quarter, stock's up. You know, what are some takeaways from the quarter maybe for everybody to listen to?
Yeah, thanks, Tim. I think you're right. We had a very strong quarter. It was a great way to start the year, coming off of really 2023, which again, for us, was a very strong year despite some macro challenges. I think we performed really well in 2023, really exceeded guidance all four quarters. We started out Q1 of this year, again, exceeding guidance, both for revenue and operating income. So for me, I think the key takeaway is, you know, we again continued to execute. Our mantra has been profitable growth. I think we demonstrated that again in Q1. We had ARR growth of 23%. We had profitable growth, which was good. We continue to see leverage from our expenses in terms of driving more, again, more profitability.
We had nice SaaS revenue growth, up 44% year-over-year, so again, really strong performance. And, you know, the key takeaways, again, I think, is that strong performance, again, executing well. I think the teams are doing really well, which is, which is good, not only in, in terms of the results we delivered for Q1, but some of the other metrics we look at, which set up nicely for the rest of the year. So again, a nice way to start the year. We're excited about Q2 and the rest of the year.
... That's great. Just in terms of numbers a little bit, you raised your ARR guidance, as you mentioned. Kind of the net implied numbers are $55 million. Anything kind of around the seasonality associated with getting kind of the go-gets analysis that people are probably doing in the room to get there to the, by the end of the year? That might be helpful.
Yeah, it's a great question. So you're right. So, our guidance now implies $55 million of incremental ARR. We just did $10 million in Q1. Historically, Q1 would be our weakest quarter in terms of ARR, net new ARR. Generally, Q2 is stronger than Q1, and then the second half of the year is stronger than the first half of the year. And so we would expect to see that same trend continue for this year. Again, everything sets up nicely. We're excited to see the ability to hit that number, and deliver against our expectations.
That's great. I guess kind of thinking now past 2024 and not anything that you've given guidance, you know, Rule of Forty was kind of a number that was, you know, discussed in your earnings, and you've been very, guys have been very disciplined about a nice, disciplined march to get there. Kinda anything in and around, you know, ARR growth, operating margin, the balance, the mix, you know, how you guys think about it as being something that people talk about when they think about AvePoint?
Yeah, it's a great question, and one we get a lot. We even got it back at our investor day last year when we put out the target that, "Hey, we're gonna be Rule of Forty in 2025." Question was, "Well, what's the mix?" And, so we think that, you know, last year in 2023, we had 23% ARR growth, and we had just under 8% operating income margin. And so, when we think about where we can be in 2025, I think we're gonna see growth in both of those numbers.
Mm
... is what we're expecting, to see ARR growth above the, the number, the 23 number we did in 2023, and then we would also expect to see expansion on the operating income margin. So both of those, we would expect to see progress. I think we're seeing that leverage already on the operating income in Q1, and I would expect to see that continue, and we expect to see the same thing on the ARR side. So, we haven't specifically stated what that mix is going to be, but just, as an indicator, I would expect both numbers to be improving.
That's great. Stock price to follow. TJ, maybe now we turn over to you for some comments around AI. Everybody's talking about it, kinda have to have a strategy around it, so any thoughts? You guys have built in some really cool new products. Kind of, you know, there's Copilot with Microsoft is out there. You know, anything around how AvePoint is playing the market and where you see in a meaningful way?
Yeah. So, my background is just machine learning and data mining. And we've been doing data management and governance for 20+ years. So finally, it's good to see that people recognize the importance of that beyond regulated industry. 60% of our business today is regulated industry that include government, banking, pharma, and manufacturing. But obviously now, with the disruption and the new Gen AI capabilities, data management is front of mind. I was actually at the CEO summit that Microsoft hosted a week and a half ago, where Bill Gates, Satya, and Jensen spent the whole, you know, two days with us. And the number one challenge of the 250 CEOs present is actually data quality, data management. That's immediate, you know, hurdle towards adoption.
So because of that, we were in a good space, but from AI perspective, we have announced AvePoint AI initiative as well, both internally, externally. Externally, obviously, it's productization, and we've already been long time deployment of cognitive services. So, even in the hybrid world, where we actually use, you know, AI is not just Gen AI, it's also traditional AI. We have done a ton of work around data classification, data analytics. For example, when Toyota in Australia moved to cloud, we were able to reduce the amount of data they moved by 90%. Just stripping out, you know, redundant, out-of-date, trivial content, because 10% of all corporate assets are actually the active content, the other ones are inactive.
But, of course, they're just as important to train your data model on historical data. But it is a continuous process because you have to capture concept drift. Your business environment evolves and changes, so you need to continue to train the model. So, data management, both at input and output, the data are equally important. So, we have been deploying AI capabilities. Most recently, in the last year, we've had Opus, which is, again, AI-driven, auto classification solution for records management, both on the tagging of records, sensitive records, as well as obviously, the workflow of how a record gets recycled or retained or made redundant.
Sure.
And then this year, we in just at the latest earnings, we announced the first in-category product for tyGraph for Copilot. So, that's also very important because the, the... One of the hurdles in companies' deployment of Microsoft Copilot is that your data these days is pretty large, right? We released a recent AI information assessment across 800 of our largest customers around the world. 60% of them have more than 500 petabytes of data. So, where do you start?
Yeah.
So, TyGraph for Copilot will actually allow you to zoom in on the density of collaboration in unstructured documents, as well as density of collaboration in the actual information workers. So, you can identify which area to prioritize in your essentially data management, data classification governance, so you can start as a championing workloads and championing users to drive adoption. Because a big part of this AI transformation is change management. So that's often talked about. So, TyGraph, it's a product that we actually acquired over two years ago. It was also a brand in the Microsoft ecosystem to capture signals of all the cloud interactions, who's talking to whom, especially in hybrid work environments, who's engaged, who's isolated, who's detached.
So, from a corporate, you know, essentially a hybrid work culture management perspective, it's very important, and we repivot that towards Copilot adoption. So that's important. So, we'll continue to have more and more of those coming out AI-enabled product and services. Also very importantly, to allow our product portfolio on the same platform to work better, so we can improve the upsell. So, we have been incrementally improving by one percentage points on the NRR side for the last five quarters, and so that allow us to do more of that as well. So platform play, better ROI for customers to get their cloud investment. Internally, we are actually deploying AI across different organizations, whether that's finance, legal, marketing, HR, sales to continue to uplift the operating margins so that our internal employees are more efficient.
Yeah, obviously, it's a comprehensive thing. We've been a Microsoft partner for 20+ years. This is something that we're staying ahead of it, and we have very close working relationship with them.
That's great. I guess, Jim, maybe a couple questions back to you. Great SaaS quarter for your SaaS part of your business, accelerated 40%+, in the quarter, highest ever. What's kind of driving it? How sustainable is it? Clearly, you know, it's helping your gross margin with the SaaS contribution. Anything around that part of the business would be helpful.
Yeah, another good question. I think you actually touched on it earlier, that the beauty of that growth that you're referring to is it's happening across the globe. So you mentioned that, you know, you like some of the diversity of our-
Yep
... you know, of our business in terms of that we're not just centered, you know, on North America or just on one product. So, you're right. We have three regions we operate in, and all of them had 40%+ SaaS growth. So again, good diversification, not centered in one region, so that's been very positive. I think if you look at it between new business and upsell, I think that's another way to think about that SaaS growth. So as TJ just alluded to, we had a really strong NRR quarter again. We've had five quarters in a row where we've essentially improved our NRR by one percentage point. We're now at 110%. So that's been very strong.
So, we're seeing that SaaS growth come from new business, new customers, but also from our existing customer base, so that's been really positive. So, those are encouraging, you know, signs for us that, you know, it's not just one specific area, and can this continue? I think we're seeing it across the whole business, which gives us more confidence that it is sustainable. And we're seeing nice growth in the pipeline of the business, too. So when we look at all of those things combined, we see nice momentum. It's enabled us to raise our guidance for the rest of the year. And again, we would expect that kind of SaaS growth to continue. And so, yeah, we're encouraged by it and look forward to the rest of the year.
Yeah, by your size, that growth is impressive. Let me open it up. Any questions or before,
I'll just make one additional comment based on what Jim said. So, our largest country by revenue is USA and then Japan and Germany, and Germany is actually pretty close to Japan now. However, just to make a commentary on AI, Japan, as a market, we've been there since 2007. Usually, they're late adopters of technology, whether it's mobile phones or social media and then cloud. But this time around, with GenAI, they're equally as aggressively adopting. So that's a very big difference, and Japan now is our fastest-growing region as a country. And again, from a B2B software perspective, it is the second-largest market, and then Germany. That's how Microsoft ecosystem sees it as well. So, we're pretty excited to have this regional growth of...
I think for our size company, typically, you don't see that. So, that goes back to our history of being 20+ years of being private and have no debt, and we just really methodically, because we're so enterprise-focused before, regulated industry-focused before, methodically built out this physical presence in 18 countries to build out this highly scalable business. Now that we're very well-funded as a public company, have a healthy balance sheet, cash generating, no debt, and we think that we have a very good foundation to continue to scale growth.
That's good. Maybe just one, Jim, capital allocation, anything? Clearly, like TJ said, healthy balance sheet, great, you know, cash flow positive, no, no issues there. M&A, you know, stock buybacks, anything you wanna share?
Yeah. I think, we look at it really from three different points of view. We really look at three pillars when we think about cash allocation. One is investing in the business, which we're obviously committed to do, predominantly in R&D, where we invest. Our target is to be between 10% and 15% of our revenue, continuously investing back in the business. So, right now, we're at about 12%. We were 12% in 2023, 12% in Q1. We would expect that to stay roughly about the same. And then when we think about M&A, you're absolutely right. That's a definite pillar. We did four acquisitions back in 2022. We didn't do any acquisitions in 2023. We looked at a lot of opportunities, just didn't pull the trigger.
We're still aggressively looking at opportunities here in 2024 and would expect that we would probably do some acquisition in 2024. We also made an announcement. We invested in A3 Ventures, which is another way for us to execute on our M&A strategy, as opposed to just acquiring companies. Being able to invest in a fund that's actually then going out and investing in other technology companies in the same ecosystem is another way for us to expand our reach. So that's also. We made a $50 million commitment to that fund, so that's another way for us to really take advantage of our M&A strategy. And then the last avenue is share repurchase, which last year we did a little over $40 million in 2023. In Q1, we did about $13-$14 million.
And again, it's an option for us to continue throughout the rest of the year. But, you know, as TJ said, we have a very strong balance sheet, over $200 million of cash. We generated $35 million of cash from operations last year. We would expect that number to be growing in 2024. Again, really solid foundation from a cash point of view, and we're looking to deploy that as efficiently and as effectively as possible.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
I just wanted to ask about, you said 90% of your revenue comes from the Microsoft ecosystem. Can you talk about the other 10% and how you expect that to evolve over the next few years, and who might be your partners there?
That's a great question. So, the problem we solve around data management governance are common problem sets across other cloud ecosystems such as Salesforce, Google. Specifically those, and also, other file share platform like Box and Dropbox. AWS is more of a compute platform. It's an infrastructure service, IaaS, that's more akin to Azure. So, we support AWS from a data backup and application provisioning perspective. But the primary problem we solve is unstructured data management and governance and record management. So, that problem set exists in Salesforce and in Google. So, we see the monetization opportunity, the biggest right now in Salesforce ecosystem, and we're investing more in there. And then Google is there as well.
It's just the—I think the propensity to monetize is higher in the Salesforce segment than Google at the moment. But obviously, the number of users in the Google Cloud ecosystem is bigger compared to Salesforce. But unit economic-wise, Salesforce ecosystem works better. So, that's the space we're looking at. So, yeah, I think in the medium term, we will see the revenue expansion in the multi-cloud space. We do multi-cloud because our customers are multi-cloud. That's the reality. In fact, their specific government and regulated customers, it's part of their mandate to have to be multi-cloud, so they're not relying on only one hyperscalers purely from a business de-risking, resiliency perspective. So, we just follow where the world is, and we continue to expand our footprint in existing accounts.
Supporting multi-cloud is part of that strategy so that we can capture more of the upsides.
Can you talk more about the SMB strategy and what are some of the opportunities you see there or that you see there in SMB?
Yeah, SMB is very interesting to us. As I mentioned earlier, more than 3 years ago, we don't even do any SMB business, and then we see SMB customer coming to us, buying 5 seats, 10 seats. That was not something we're used to when we're used to dealing with the Nestlé, Walmart, like 300,000 seats, 200,000 seats in one go. And we license, just like Microsoft license, Office 365 by subscription, by number of employees a company have. Quickly, we realized that just because you're a small business doesn't mean your data doesn't matter to you in cloud. And then we also recognize that SMB predominantly don't have IT, so they go through an intermediary layer called MSPs. You guys are probably familiar with Datto and Kaseya. That's their space.
But for us, we very much focus on obviously our strength in the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem and our platform play. So interestingly enough, when we start to invest there, where we actually have a single pane of glass for the managed service providers to use our software to scale and accelerate their ability to manage hundreds, if not thousands of tenants in one go, we see that segment take off, growing three digits year-over-year. So now it's Q1 is 23% of our recurring and our total revenue, 86% is recurring and going to 90%. Interestingly, that segment for Microsoft is more than 40% of their business, revenue-wise. So it's a huge segment. You guys probably know Veeam, right?
Which is a private company, do $1 billion a year, and 80% of Veeam's revenue come from companies less than 100 employees. So SMB is actually a huge market. It's just having the right approach to it. We think we unlocked it with MSP focus, and we're picking up a lot of steam. Interestingly, the MSPs, as they become more sophisticated... For example, we have one MSP, less than 100 employees, will give us $1 million a year in ACV. So they're behaving more like mid-market customers, like sophisticated IT. In the back end, they could have hundreds, if not thousands, of end customers. We even give them pool licensing, so as the customer may individually churn, but the overall size of the pool increases.
Another change we made was also to make monthly contracts available to SMB for MSPs, so that it lowers the threshold. It's as easy as signing up a mobile phone contract, right? Whereas for enterprise and mid-market, it's annual, if not multiyear, contracts. For now, a blended average is 2.2 years. So, when you do that, and when you look at the MSP level, the churn is actually quite low, and the growth is very high. So, we're, we continue to be very bullish on SMB.
Thanks, very much, TJ, Jim, for joining and supporting the conference. Any other questions? We'll conclude. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tim. Thanks, everyone.