All right, last session of the morning, I think. I'm losing track of time, but it's, I think lunch is up next. So, but we have the pleasure of having AvePoint with us, Jim Cacchi and Jamie Arestia from AvePoint. Thanks for joining us, guys. Thanks for making it over to Nashville.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Yeah, good to be here.
So we were just talking right off to the side here, lot of interest in this space. Little bit of news flow in terms of, you know, an outage back in July-
Yeah
-impacting the space around resilience, and even last week around, you know, an application consolidating, you know, essentially one of their own,
Yeah
-in a way. But, help us understand why it's just now that the space is seeing this inflection in resilience?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, and maybe just taking a step back to who AvePoint is real quick. So we're a leading provider in this whole data management, data governance space, which, as you said, is very topical. We're, you know, we've been at this for 20 years, so although it seems like it's very hot and very topical right now, for us, it's been the subject of our kind of mission for the past 20 years of making sure that customers are ensuring that their data is being managed properly, governed properly, secured. That's really been our focus, and we've been doing that really across the globe.
We've got, you know, a focus here in North America, which represents about 45% of our business, but EMEA represents about 30%, and APAC, 25%, so really good geographic dispersion. But coming back to your point, it's interesting. We've been having some one-on-ones this morning, and this is a topic that comes up all the time, and, you know, it's interesting. I think this conversation around data security, data management, data governance was relegated to, like, the IT groups, and that conversation would happen behind closed doors. No one that was actually a user in the business or running the business even knew what was going on. It was kind of the back in the closet.
And now, it seems like these are boardroom conversations, and even before the CrowdStrike issue in the past couple weeks, it was board-level conversations as we think about rolling out AI, and it was, "Well, you can't really do that unless you feel comfortable about the data on which you're gonna put these models and reason over." That became a really important topic at board-level conversations. And then, even the incident that happened. Obviously, you don't wanna see any customers or any businesses go through struggles and trouble with their own data, but I do think it's added a heightened awareness to and focus to the importance of making sure that your data is properly managed, governed, is secure. And that ultimately leads into other things around, you know, are we optimizing the data we have?
And all of those things play nicely into the work that we do for customers. So, you know, this spotlight, we feel, is very good for AvePoint, has been over the past couple years, but even with this renewed, heightened awareness, we think it's a good thing for us, and we'll be able to help lots of customers.
AvePoint's around the Microsoft ecosystem, really focused there. That's where T.J. kind of got it all started, right?
Yes.
So how do we think about where we are on the penetration today of that Microsoft ecosystem across sort of the apps themselves, within the apps?
Yeah
... what the opportunity is, and why AvePoint? Why-- instead of some of the other solutions we have out there?
Yeah, another great question. You know, the Microsoft ecosystem is massive, right? And, and Microsoft's success over the past, you know, umpteen years, has really been pretty phenomenal. And it's interesting, we get this question a lot around Microsoft and, you know, why be associated with Microsoft? Why not? And, and that's kind of ebbed and flowed over the past 20 years of whether you want to be associated, not associated. It, it's been, you know, a great relationship for us. I think when we think about penetration, we're still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of where we are. We ended this past quarter at $290 million of ARR, so we're still relatively small in terms of the overall opportunity, and we think that opportunity is massive.
Obviously, Microsoft is doing a great job executing on their strategy, obviously, AI being the next thing for them. We think that plays well into the things that we do. Again, we think we've only scratched the surface. Today, Microsoft represents about 90% of our business in terms of how we support our software products, support their products. We are multi-cloud, supporting other products as well as our customers. They're multi-cloud. You know, not everyone is just focused on Microsoft. They're using other technologies, whether it's Box or Dropbox for file share, or maybe they're using a CRM platform, or maybe they even have components of their group that are using Google Workspace, and they're sharing some of that information.
So the beauty of our platform is it allows our customers to take advantage of our solutions for all of those environments. And again, that makes us somewhat agnostic to Microsoft, that we're supporting others, but also, we recognize that they are the behemoth in the space, in the business landscape, and we do a lot for them and for our customers.
Makes sense. And question we always get is around, well, why aren't the hyperscalers' backup solutions good enough? So walk us through the features, functions that make it so, like, customers have to go with AvePoint as opposed to that native backup solution.
Yeah. I mean, I think T.J. did a great job of explaining this one time, that in kind of very layman's terms, if you think about the infrastructure of a city of bringing water to everyone's house or bringing power to everyone's house. And then inside the house, every house is somewhat unique and different, and an architect gets involved, and then you might have an electrician or a plumber bringing that to the last mile in terms of how it's actually gonna be utilized for that individual house and that individual resident. And I think if you think about our technologies, I think it's similar. Microsoft has to satisfy the masses in terms of they have to build something that is not so specific, it has to service everyone.
And you think of products like, you know, Teams or Office or any of those products, and the base functionality that they have from a security point of view, from a governance point of view, all of those things are very base level, and base level only because they need to support everything. And what we do is enhance those capabilities. So we're not necessarily competing against those capabilities, we're utilizing those capabilities, and then stepping forward and providing the additional steps, like governance, for example.
We're able to provide that automation layer to allow customers to really think about how in their organization they wanna have and distribute access to certain information or not, and our tools allow them to replicate that and automate that, so they can service a 10,000 organization, a 5,000-person organization, and making sure that that data that they're managing is properly provisioned and accessible only to the people that should have access to it. And that's not something that is inherent in any of the applications, whether it's Microsoft or others, and you wouldn't expect them to provide that level of detail, and that's the capabilities we provide. And I think it's resonated well, and that partnership has been a great partnership over 20 years.
We're enhancing what they've done, which then in turn accelerates the consumption of what they've provided out there, which is a win for them and obviously a win for us, and not just us, obviously, the whole Microsoft Ecosystem. They've done a good job of supporting that overall ecosystem. And again, that's why I think it's healthy. You don't see a lot of that cannibalization from Microsoft, and it's allowed companies like us to flourish, and we think that we've got a nice, a very impressive roadmap, hopefully ahead in the years to come to see that growth continue.
Got it. And when we start to think about the sort of recovery and resilience ecosystem, we kinda have app focus versus, I'll say, more broader infrastructure focus, like the, the Cohesity and Rubrik of the world, Commvault.
Yep.
How does that world play out, and why does that sort of app focus that you guys kind of lean in on win out?
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think, for us, you know, again, we've really tried to demonstrate to our customer base that, we provide them not only a point solution, but really a whole platform of opportunities. So where I think for us, customers lean in, and what we see as the most differentiation for us, is customers have a specific, unique problem that they're trying to address, or issue that they're trying to address. But when they come into the AvePoint environment, they actually see a multitude of solutions for not only the problem they have today, but the solutions that they're gonna need going forward.
So if somebody's coming to us with a particular challenge, whether it's a backup, a migration, governance, maybe storage optimization, they may be trying to solve that one particular problem, which is a great entry point for us, but then ultimately, they can see that we have a platform of solutions for them to address the many other challenges that they either are facing today or they know they will face, they just haven't been able to address it yet, and so that, for us, is a pretty big differentiator when we think about us versus someone else and what our customers are looking to ultimately achieve, and we've seen it over the past couple of years, right? Where we've seen a lot of consolidation of vendors, where customers are looking to, "Hey, I don't wanna have 10 vendors to address these issues.
If I could do with one or two vendors, it would make my procurement process much more efficient. It would make maybe my pricing leverage more efficient. And so if I can do that, I'd like to leverage a company that can provide me multiple solutions." And we've been the beneficiary of that and hope to continue to see that in the future.
So going back to something you actually said earlier-
Yeah
... around 90% coming from sort of that Microsoft ecosystem, 10% from everywhere else.
Yeah.
How does that ratio change over the next couple of years? Is it gonna be Microsoft is just gonna be your biggest growth driver, and so we stay roughly here, or, or how do we think about that?
You know, it's something we wrestle with literally on a quarterly basis when we think about our strategic planning every quarter of what's to come, and it's interesting. I think Microsoft still remains the dominant player, 'cause today they're still the dominant player in all of our lives in the business community. And I think that still stays pretty dominant. Now, I do think we're making penetration in other relationships, whether that's Google Workspace or others, and we are seeing improvement there. But there's such a huge opportunity still within the Microsoft ecosystem that I could see the growth rates maybe even being greater in some of the other areas. But, you know, I'd be shocked if it moved, you know, more than five points or so, maybe 10 points.
So if we're sitting here five years from now, going through this, same exercise, I would still think Microsoft is the dominant player for us, and maybe we're talking about 80% versus 90%, or maybe we're still talking about 90%. I still think they're the gorilla in the room. I think there's still massive opportunity for us in their ecosystem. We may have talked about it before, but we've got about 50% of our customers only consuming two products of ours. So when you think about that install base, we think there's massive upside potential, and that's all within the Microsoft ecosystem.
So we think not only is there a huge amount of new customer opportunity that is consuming Microsoft products that need our support, but also the existing customer base, there's massive upside potential for them to benefit from the other products that don't currently consume. So all of that leads me to believe that we're sitting here in five years, that Microsoft is still a major component of our overall revenue.
So you actually just said something I wanted to touch on, and I'm gonna skip right to it.
Sure.
Two or more products, that disclosure. First of all, you guys give fantastic disclosures, love, love all of them. And how are you incentivizing more of that platform, kind of, multi-product adoption, multi-suites? You guys give that kind of breakout.
Yep.
How's that gonna play out? How are you kind of changing your go-to-market to drive stickiness?
Yeah, great question, and maybe just touching on the disclosure comment. So we had our first Investor Day back in March of 2023, and we made a conscious decision at that point to kind of overshare or provide more information than we'd ever provided. And the feedback, almost the same feedback you've given us just now, is that it was welcomed in terms of a lot of people. In March of 2023, it was a tough time at that point, right? 2022 was a rough year for a lot of companies. People were actually pulling back disclosures, and so we felt it important that we be as transparent as possible and share as much as possible. And I think the set of guidance and metrics that we provided, I think, illustrated that.
But I think there's probably even more, when we have our next Investor Day, that we would even like to share additional information. So thank you for supporting that, and I think that just encourages us to probably share even more. And hopefully, that's a good thing. I know it makes us answer more questions, for sure, but I think that's a good thing in the long run. Now, in terms of incenting and what we're trying to do, you know, growing that two or more products within our 50% of our customers. So incentives, what we're trying to really do is educate our customer base, first and foremost, as to what's available.
And we run lots of workshops. We spend lots of time with individual customers because now we've seen within a customer the life journey that they're gonna be experiencing through whether it's the digital transformation or now as we start this AI readiness process that many companies are underway. We've seen it with many other customers, so we kinda know how this story plays out. And so when we think of the products that we have to offer to address those challenges and issues that they're going to face, we try and highlight really the benefit of those. And so the incentives come really in the form of really trying to educate and inform and be a trusted advisor to a certain degree, and not just trying to sell them more product.
We really want them to be a lifetime customer, and we do think that the products we have to offer can do that. So it's really about demonstrating the value more so than running a special promo or some sort of incentive to get them to adopt. It's more of really demonstrating the value, and that's been resonating. I think there's still a lot more work we can do, as demonstrated by only 50% of the customer base having two or more products. There's a lot more we can do. We think there's huge upside potential there, and we're, you know, aggressively trying to educate and communicate that value.
The only other thing I might add is just that, that's at the product level, the 50%.
Yep.
That was about 40% a few years ago, so it's grown a nice amount since then, but also at the suite level, we have three suites of products, and we provide a similar stat on the percentage of customers who take two or more, and that's at about 25%, and that was about 18% a few years ago, so growth there as well, but I think... You know, in terms of, like, the multi-suite adoption or products from multiple suites, there's even more of an opportunity there. I think this also works nicely with kind of where we started, about sort of the overall market demand and seeing the market come to us a bit more because of the discussions we're having now are more strategic in nature.
It's not just about solving a kind of one-off tactical problem of backing up data or migrating data, but it's this more holistic approach to data management and governance that requires kind of all three suites of our platform.
Yeah.
And at our last earnings, we flagged a few customer examples, which I think demonstrate that, especially at the enterprise level, where, you know, we have one of the world's largest investment banks buying products from all three of our products in Q2 as a new customer. We had a Fortune 10 healthcare company who had been a previous customer, mainly focused around backup by our entire Control Suite, so there's expansion happening as well. And again, I think that's, you know. We would hope to see those percentages continue to increase as we sell more of the platform, both upfront to new customers, and we expand more with our base.
... So maybe clicking into that governance suite, actually, you guys talked about a really large win on Copilot governance. So I guess you're very open around disclosures, but, like, how do we think about AI penetration today versus kind of that pipeline build, especially around governance?
Yeah.
Data governance with AI, as that seems to be a huge deal?
Yeah, I mean, I think I don't think there's a conversation. You probably haven't had a conversation this morning that didn't somehow tap into AI and,
Shockingly.
Shockingly, right?
Yeah.
And literally every board conversation, right, that we hear about, it's part of that conversation. So, I do think it's. You know, when we look at our customer base in terms of AI, we think of even Copilot being the poster child of that, of how people are trying to roll that out. I think we're in the early stages still, where we've got customers. None of our customers have done, like, a massive rollout of either Copilot or any other kind of LLMs sitting on top of all their data. We're still in the early stages. People are doing Copilot pilots, right? They're doing 50, 100, 150, maybe 1,000, and these would be organizations that might be 20,000 people, 50,000 people.
So I think we're in the very early stages in terms of that really kicking in. I think that's good news for us in terms of as people think about these experiments and what they've uncovered, is that their data is generally a mess in terms of that they're trying to look at and analyze. And I think that overall is very good for us to come in and help them in terms of making sure the data's secure, making sure it's optimized. We talk about, you know, reasoning over this data, but if the data is 20 years' worth of gobbledygook, right? It's just... Then you're not gonna get good results when you try and reason over that data, 'cause it's just outdated, it's incoherent, essentially.
So the cleanup of that data is very important, and then that leads to other things like, well, how do we think about storage optimization? We're paying for all this, this data. Is it the right amount of storage that we have? Should we think about how we're optimizing that? And then, ultimately, the governance around it, is we're running these queries against this data, but who has access to those queries? And what data did it pull? And something that you wouldn't have otherwise should have had access to, but now you ran this query, somehow you have access. So, so all of that is, I think, really focusing the spotlight on the importance of this data governance and management. And again, that, that fits right into our wheelhouse. But again, I would say early stages. We're seeing a nice tailwind in 2024.
I think that continues and increases in 2025 and 2026, when people start to get through their pilots, and then they're making a much larger commitment to AI and the benefits of it, whether that's Copilot or others. I think we're gonna continue to see that increase. So I would expect 2025, 2026, we continue to see stronger and stronger investments from our customer base, which I then think in turn requires them to make those heavier investments in data management and governance.
Got it. We've got a couple minutes left here. Are there any questions from the audience?
Maybe as you think about, instead of the drops, what's the one metric or way that your customers are evaluating you versus, you know, time to value, ROI, your ability to back up? Like[audio distortion]-
You know, that's a great question. The one that I hear over and over isn't so much on any one individual product. For me, the message that keeps coming back is our ability to address multiple issues. And so you mentioned, like, in a backup scenario, maybe you're right, the granularity of the backup might be an important factor, that I wanna be able to recover... I wanna be able to back up data, but I also then wanna be able to recover at a granular level, so I don't have to take three days to restore all the data. I just want that one file that was corrupted or deleted, and we have the ability to do that.
So, like, some we will win technically on a point solution, but the bigger concern or positive that I hear is more on our ability to address multiple issues, and so that plays into the platform, and our ability to address multiple issues with one vendor seems to be the biggest, you know, benefit or that our customers get from us.
Is there a way to rank order in terms of impact to either the growth profile or even just within your existing base, your net retention rate here, between data growth itself versus new users, new apps?
Yeah
... however you kind of want to rank it?
Yeah. So I know we're running out of time, but so quickly, so when we think about growth within our existing customer base, which would lead to our NRR numbers, for us, we license. Most of our products are on a per-user basis. So even the data growth isn't a major driver to our growth rate today. Where our growth comes from today is really on the cross-sell or the additional products that customers are consuming from us. 'Cause we license, similar to Microsoft too, that we would be licensing your whole environment. So, you know, if you have backup from us, it's across all your users. So then, for us to improve that or get an upsell on that, it's really not gonna come from more of the same product, it's coming from additional products being added to the collection.
So that's our biggest upsell motion, is a cross-sell of additional products across the platform for that end user.
Got it. I think we're coming up on time, so I think we're gonna leave it there. I really appreciate you guys coming over to Nashville, and hope to see you again next year.
Great. Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.