Hey, good morning, everyone. My name is Andy Nowinski. I'm the software analyst at Wells Fargo, and it's my pleasure today to introduce you to TJ Jiang, the CEO of AvePoint, and then Jim Caci, CFO of AvePoint. We also have Mario Carvajal here, the Chief Marketing Officer, and Jamie Arestia from Investor Relations. We have about 35 minutes today. If there's any questions in the audience, please feel free to just raise your hand. We'll get a microphone to you as well for the webcast. For those listening in on the webcast, I'm happy to weave in any questions you have. TJ, why don't you start, you know, for those that are here that may be unfamiliar with AvePoint, why don't you start by just giving us a quick overview of AvePoint and, you know, the problems that the platform solves?
Sure. Good to be here, Andy. Thank you. Yeah, AvePoint's been around for 20+ years. I co-founded the company with Kai, who's now the Executive Chairman of the company. We started in the data management, enterprise content management space. We were the first to really invest into the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem. So we were the first SaaS software service, enterprise-grade, data management platform provider. Today, we're one of the. We think we're actually the largest Microsoft ecosystem player when it comes to SaaS data management, governance, and security. And this is a space that we've been doing for two decades-plus. We started by focusing on public sector, financial services, really regulated industry that care about, you know, who access the data, how to retire those data, how to classify label. So when you do searches, the proper things come out.
But of course, now with GenAI, everyone wants to deploy some sort of GenAI capabilities, especially Microsoft Copilot. It became a very hot topic that all industries now want to make sure they recognize that this whole data governance and management security is a fundamental prerequisite to actually deploy good AI capabilities. So, another unique aspect about the company is that this year, about just over $320 million revenue, as well as recurring revenue, we're very global. 45% of our recurring is in North America.
Then 30% in EMEA, rest in APAC. So that's, again, because of our traditional focus on regulated industry, we have to be local presence and have that capability. So today, we're in 18 countries. We actually touch and manage 500 petabyte of data on a daily basis with over, you know, 18 instances around the world with our SaaS software.
That's a great overview. Thanks. You know, Jim, this morning at breakfast, we were talking about, you know, really good Q3 results. The stock certainly reacted positively after your earnings call this, this quarter. Maybe if you could just give us a quick overview of what are the highlights from that results that investors clearly liked.
Yeah. You know, great, great question. Great point. I'm glad you gave me the opportunity to kind of elaborate. You're right. We had a very strong quarter. Very pleased with the quarter. Very pleased with our team's execution across the globe. As TJ alluded to, we're obviously a global company, and we saw all three of our regions performing, both North America, EMEA, and also APAC, really performed really well. So again, really pleased with that overall performance. You know, it's our seventh consecutive quarter of overperformance, you know, essentially exceeding the expectations that we set, and so we feel really good about that, and then, again, we're actually raising our guidance for the full year. So we've been doing that essentially every quarter, and pleased to say we're doing it again, or we did it again at the end of Q3.
So again, we're pleased with the ability to be able to do that. And then when we think about really where we're headed, there were some other key metrics that performed really well. GRR has been a focus for us this year, and we were pleased to see improvement in that GRR metric by one percentage point, up to 88%. Again, that's been a focus. We're again pleased to see that continued improvement. And then when we think about growth overall, we saw our ARR grow 23% year-over-year. So we're again pleased with that sort of growth. Revenue grew 22%. Again, very pleased with that performance. And then within revenue, our SaaS revenue grew 45% year-over-year. And then a focus we've had all year, really for the past two years, is improving our operational efficiency. And again, that was really strong performance in Q3.
We saw nice performance across the board in all categories from sales and marketing, G&A, and R&D. We saw nice efficiency, leading to the first time we've achieved GAAP profitability in Q3 and actually achieved GAAP profitability for the full nine months of the year, which is actually a year ahead of the scheduled target date for us to be GAAP profitable. So, you know, again, as you said, it was a really strong quarter. We're really pleased with the quarter. I think it's a lot of effort that, obviously the teams have been executing. And, again, we feel really good about it, and we're pleased to be raising guidance for the full year. So again, strong quarter.
Yeah. It sounds overall very strong. I mean, did you have any sort of, you know, customer consideration perhaps heading into the election? You know, a lot of uncertainty around the election. And I'm just kind of curious, like, did that hold anything back in Q3? And, you know, TJ, maybe for you as well, like, how have your customer conversations changed post the election? How are they thinking about spending if differently than they were prior to the election?
Yeah. I mean, AvePoint's been around for 20+ years, so we've seen multiple elections and multiple recession cycles. We have consistently focused on profitable growth. This is no different. The problem sets that we address are relevant to all enterprise, regulated industry, namely to make sure that your data is well-governed and secured and protected. So it doesn't matter which side of the House administration, which side of the aisle is in the White House. The same concerns are still there. So in fact, Q3 was our biggest quarter for public sector. So almost over a quarter of our global business is in public sector. In North America, it's about the same. And public sector's fiscal year-end is actually Q3. So Q3 and Q4 are our big quarters. Q3's really public sector year-end, and Q4 is commercial enterprise.
We continue to do well. It's regardless of the administration change. I think technology and, you know, the focus on productivity remain the core for all businesses, including government.
Got it. Okay. So maybe shifting to your platform, some of the product-level questions around data protection, data governance. I guess what are the highest areas of customer interest you're seeing related from a product perspective? Is it more around, you know, like governance and data security? Have you seen any sort of change of that, you know, given all the, I guess, rollouts of Copilot that we're seeing in GenAI? I would imagine there's more of a focus on data protection now as you roll these models out or organizations try to roll them out.
Yeah. So what we see first, we think we're very unique in the market in that we do have a truly singular platform for information management. That's fully SaaS. So that starts with data migration integration, what we call Modernization Suite . And then that goes into business continuity, Resilience Suite . So that's data backup, data archiving, storage optimization. And then we go into control, which is governance. So access control, and lifecycle, and rights management. So the way we tailor the product suites is to actually, pre-COVID days, follow customer's journey into cloud, right? You first start data analytics and migration. And then, of course, you do the backup, and archiving. And then you do the proper information control.
But since COVID, and then, of course, now GenAI, the focus for customers is really around governance and security because all of a sudden everybody jumped on the cloud very quickly. That was COVID effect. And then, of course, with GenAI, it's that everyone moved to cloud, much faster. So I'll give you an example. Japan is our second-largest revenue country, right after U.S. And historically, Japan is always a few years behind in technology adoption, at least two years, when it's whether it's mobile, social media, etc., than cloud. But now, we've seen for the first time they're moving as fast as anyone else when it comes to GenAI experimentation. And that led to a massive also migration into cloud because folks now realize one, this technology is strategically important, and two, all the latest happening is in cloud first. So those are some of the game changers.
So we see the focus around governance and security be paramount.
I definitely want to get into GenAI, and dig deeper on how you guys play there but maybe just to wrap this up on the product side. Resilience and backup, I think, are also pretty interesting areas. There's a number of companies here that talk about both data backup and data resilience, and resilience, not just recovering from, like, a cyber-attack . But we've seen you know a massive increase in ransomware attacks and trying to recover from that. So I'm wondering, as it relates to your resilience play, like, how do you, when you go to a customer, I guess, differentiate between, you know, between the traditional backup vendors and maybe the more of the cyber resilience vendors like yourself that do more than just backup?
Yeah. So it's always been a competitive market. Because we're the first to invest into cloud. So we were the first to provide SaaS backup and service for Microsoft 365, and then the first to actually be FedRAMP certified in the government data centers, first to offer granular, high-speed user-enabled restores, and of course, also first to do ransomware detection and recovery. Because our relationship and our profile in the ecosystem, we have folks sitting on, for example, partner advisory councils, product advisory councils, and Microsoft. We actually see the product roadmap ahead of the game, so six months, at least, if not a year and a half ahead of time. So often we are the first launch partner.
So for instance, recently, we were the first launch partners for Microsoft Office 365 Backup Storage, which is basically a very fast snapshot that allow us to offer 20 times faster backup at the enterprise grade than the traditional backup. So these are things that, you know, we're first in class to offer. But the power, just like you mentioned, is really in the power of our holistic platform. So there's vendor consolidation. Customers want to have less throat to choke, more enterprise-grade accountability. So that's where we win, right? We don't just do backup protection and resiliency. We also do governance and security. We also do data analytics and integration and migration. So we become now that single, more strategic advisory partner for our customers. And that's how we see we differentiate.
We show that with our customers' kind of journey and also our customers' use cases continue to expand. This whole land and expand, and customers use more and more of these use cases that allow us to be truly differentiated in that space.
Do customers land with AvePoint on a backup or resilience play first and then go into governance and Modernization Suite s, or do they?
Right.
They start the inverse?
So pre-COVID, it's modernization first, and then resilience, and then control. Now it's often control first, right? So because when you turn on Copilot, it uses Office Graph, and all of a sudden you're getting recommendations for things that you're not supposed to have access to because no enterprise has their security permission management done correctly. So that's actually increasingly the tip of the spear for us is the governance bit and security bit, and then goes into resiliency. So we effectively have multiple ways as first entry into different type of accounts. Another very unique aspect of our business is that, we almost never see this at a company our size where we're successful at both enterprise as well as SMB. So 50% of our recurring revenue is enterprise, and 50% is SMB. So we define enterprise as 7,000 seat and above.
And we license by seat, just like Microsoft with Office, total number of employee count. And then between 500 - 7,000 is mid-market, and 500 below is SMB. So small business and medium-sized business is now 50% are recurring. Specifically, small business is now close to 20% are recurring. And this is actually very unusual to have company, you know, we're still not that large yet. Obviously, we have great aspirations to get to 1 billion annual recurring as fast as we can. But at our sizing, to be able to address and see growth both in enterprise as well as medium and small business, that's also a unique aspect of it. And again, that's highlighted by the concern around data governance and data security.
I want to touch on that. On Microsoft and GenAI, you know, Microsoft talked about on their last earnings call. I think they talked about how, like, 70% of the Fortune 500 have now rolled out Microsoft Copilot.
In some form or fashion.
In some form or fashion. Exactly. So, like.
Even if they have 100 seats.
Yeah.
Pilot.
Right.
Yes.
So I guess that's what I was wondering. Like, what are you seeing with customers right now that are rolling this out? Are we still really in the experimentation phase of Copilot, or are you seeing broader deployments of it?
So I would say we are still in early stages. I think adoption rate in total seat count is about 3%-4%, a year and a half out, on Copilot rollout, if you include preview. So there's a lot more. So everyone is experimenting. I would say 80% of enterprise are experimenting. Very, very few are going enterprise wide. We cited in our earnings call in the last couple quarters where we had this massive financial institution rolled out, enterprise-wide, Copilot. But they had to essentially roll out our governance solution first before they turn on Copilot.
This happened, you know, several times. Another one is one of the Big Four as well that did that. But these guys are still few and far in between to see this enterprise-wide deployment, but we think the true directional is pointing in that way. May perhaps, you know, Microsoft is also working with a whole different type of licensing model, and continued improvement on Copilot capabilities. We think that the bigger kind of conversion will happen probably second half of next year.
And so on, on the customer that rolled out governance first. I guess two questions on that. I guess number one, which vendors did you compete against for that governance play? And second, has that customer experienced any sort of data exposure that they, you know, didn't want Copilot or the model exposing?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think oftentimes, it's the CISOs that react very quickly from pilot. T hey notice that there's potential massive issues at hand. So then they use vendors like us to come in to resolve that for them in an automated fashion. Honestly, when it comes to M365 , we are the best in class because we've been doing cloud and SaaS in that space for the last 12 years. We see some vendor you. I would say you mentioned legacy, right? I would say, for example, Varonis. They came from a file share monitoring space.
They're going to cloud. They're the, I would say they're the new entrants in the SaaS offering. But we have been doing this for, you know, over 10 years, and we have incredible large set of enterprise as well as medium-sized businesses globally that's adopting this. So we don't see that much competition yet in that space. But of course, others are coming in. At breakfast, you just mentioned Zscaler is also coming in.
It is a hot area for sure. The ecosystem, the market is massive. We don't see. There's plenty of headroom for many vendors. In fact, the president of Microsoft Collab and OneDrive, Jeff Teper, he's been a good friend and sits on our board since 2014. He commented that he's surprised to see this many backup vendors still in cloud, right? Even as the on-prem space has significantly consolidated. You take a vendor like Symantec, right, that's still a laggard again, they still don't have a SaaS solution today. I think it's going to be some time before consolidation happens because the run rate for SaaS-based solutions is still massive.
Okay. Well, I have a number of financial questions for Jim eventually here, but I want to just continue to wrap up this discussion on GenAI. What is Microsoft doing? They have Purview, I know, as a.
Yep.
DLP solution, but do they have any? I mean, if they want more customers to roll out Copilot enterprise-wide beyond that 3%-4% of users like you talked about, how do they, do they have anything of their own? Are they relying on partners like AvePoint for that?
So think of Microsoft as infrastructure, right? So they're almost like utility companies that do the, you know, pipe, pipeline for the entire city. But when it comes to actually individual enterprise, actually roll things out to handle the nuances of different license types, to handle multi-cloud scenarios, Microsoft consistently rely on partners like us, right? We don't compete against Microsoft. We compete within this multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem that's Microsoft Cloud. So we do leverage Purview when customers have them, and we then have capable. But Purview also, even with the latest enhancements that they announced at Ignite just a couple weeks ago, we were out there in Chicago.
Where everybody was carrying an AvePoint Microsoft backpack. So, I mean, it's still very coarse. So it's not; there's no granularity to it. There's no real-time reporting to it. For example, even the latest enhancements, the risk level reporting, it's every 28 days where we provide real-time reporting. We provide real granularity. We provide end-user level, sustainable kind of self-governance. So that kind of nuance and the range that we cover, plus multi-cloud, is something that Microsoft's not never going to do. So they will provide a baseline for some folks that may be good enough, if you go for the, you know, E5 license that has the Purview included. And by the way, E5's been out for five years.
The adoption rate of E5 is still only 19%. So there's a long way to go, and there's a lot more, you know, nuance in the market. So that creates opportunity for vendors and partners like us.
Okay. Is there any questions at this point? One here in the audience. We'll just wait for the microphone, and then we'll get it to the,
You don't have any more questions for Jim?
I do. I have. We'll move to those after these.
Yeah. Thanks for doing this, taking questions. I'm curious, like, you talked a lot about backup, you know, and the, the role that that plays. And, you know, we see some others out there talking about cyber resiliency. So I'm curious, like, when you're competing in the market, who, who do you predominantly beat competitively? Like.
Yeah.
If AvePoint wins, who's losing kind of question?
Yeah. That's a great question. So backup's just, again, one part of what we do, right? Today we back up about 500 petabyte of data on a daily basis. But in backup, so it's really interesting. We don't have a singular competitor across the board. And even within backup space, we have different competitors in different segments. So in enterprise, we're running to Commvault, right? Commvault is more enterprise grade, and they have a SaaS solution since last year. So we ran to them. We don't really run into the legacy guys like Symantec, Veritas, because they don't have SaaS, right? So now increasingly, third-party software as a service backup vendor is what customers go to for the hyperscalers. And by the way, we also extend into not just M365, but also Google, Salesforce. And we also run our instances in AWS.
The world is multi-cloud, so that's also very important to keep in mind. In the SMB segment, we will run into folks like Veeam, who's here today as well. They're predominantly SMB. I think 80% of Veeam's revenue comes from a company with less than 100 employees. That's a new space that we got into over the last two years. Went from 0 to now close to 20% recurring. We're growing very, very quickly in SMB, leveraging the MSP in the vertical segment. I can go into more of that if you want, what that MSP is. Yeah. Those are the different type of players we run into. SMB will also have people like Acronis. You know, we run into different players across different segments.
So again, our advantage is because we are cross-segment, but we're also multi-cloud, and the conversation is no longer just backup, right? So in the old days, pre-cloud, enterprises would even have a backup group that only think about backup. But today, it's really the cloud group that think about cloud security, cloud operations, and the entire digital transformation picture. So it's actually much more centralized than before. So that actually bodes very well for us, because we don't just have a backup conversation. We also have a storage optimization, archiving conversation, and then, of course, access control, and lifecycle management conversation. So we can expand that. And because enterprises continue to look for consolidation, to less vendor to rely on, that also bodes well for us.
Last thing I would say is, because we've done this earlier than anyone else, I think today we're pretty much the only fully FedRAMP-certified vendor, in the government data centers. So Commvault started that process. It's a three-year process, by the way. They started that process a year ago, right? They have not completed, and many other vendors are still in the queue. So that allows us to really go after the public sector, in a very advantageous way. And of course, now we're going in after even the next level higher three-letter agency, level data centers. So this type of high governance requirement, becomes a barrier into entry. So for example, in Japan, we're completing this ISMAP certification, which is a 2,000 security control certification.
So a lot of these things, because we started and focused on public sector, regulated industry, we have a first-mover advantage as well.
Maybe just as a quick follow-up to that, you didn't mention, like, a Rubrik or Cohesity, which are more focused on cyber resilience.
Oh, that's right. They're enterprise. Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
We ran into Rubrik from time to time in the enterprise space.
Cohesity is doing, you know, this merger with Veritas.
They bought Veritas. Yeah.
Or, yeah, that backup install base, I guess. Would you start to bump up against them in the backup space?
Yeah. We start to see Cohesity again, it seems the space is still very large. That's why you see so many players. I think there's still plenty of run rate to get to that. Again, we rarely see Veritas offering because they just don't have a SaaS solution.
Of course, Cohesity bought them. So, but yeah. So there's segmentation happening. And there's also a geo strength, right? These guys, some of them are very, you know, very strong in North America and Europe, but very weak in APAC, for example. So we actually see that kind of gradation.
Got it. Unless there's any other questions on this topic, we'll move on to some of the financial questions. Right there. Okay, so Jim, yeah, maybe coming back to the Q3 results, you know, certainly profitability, you guys highlighted your GAAP profitable. That was.
Yep.
You know, meaningfully ahead of your guidance. And sales efficiency certainly improved, like, what's the drivers? Like, where are you seeing that efficiency that you're getting?
Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, at our Investor Day back in March of 2023, we kind of made a couple comments, right? One was we wanted to focus on profitable growth. And so for us, what that meant was really continuing to grow, and growth is important, but doing it responsibly and focusing on profitability. And so one of the ways that we've tried to do that is say, how can we be more efficient? So you put a point out sales and marketing, but we've, we've actually looked at efficiency across the board, right? So if we start with R&D, we have a global development team, which really helps us optimize the cost when we think about R&D. When we think about our G&A expenses, we went public a couple years ago.
We're now starting to see the benefit of scale and leverage and those. I would call them one-time expenses for being public, but they're, they're not one and done, but they don't increase at the same rate that we had when we went public. So we're starting to see some of the efficiency there. And then the last point you mentioned on sales and marketing, we've really continued to focus the company on a channel direction, which is providing a lot more efficiency in terms of the growth of the business that we're seeing more and more of our business coming through the channel, which is much more efficient for us. So we're seeing that really produce results as well. And our long-term goal in terms of specifically on sales and marketing is to get to about 30% of revenue. And in Q3, we were at 31% of revenue.
So we've made significant strides. Now, that's just the quarter. Quarters do fluctuate, so we wouldn't. I'm not suggesting that we're right at 30 yet, just yet. But, we've made significant strides in terms of that operating efficiency. And obviously, sales and marketing leads the way in terms of some of the improvements we've seen.
What are you doing on the channel side? And, like, what are some channel partners that maybe you weren't previously working with that you're working with now, and why have they gravitated toward AvePoint?
Channel is, we started investing in channel very aggressively, a couple years, a few years back, four years back. We see the opportunity to really scale through channel. First, obviously, it's the major global distributors, whether it's Ingram, Tech Data, Crayon, SoftBank. That would be the big distribution houses. Microsoft uses them the same way. Secondly, we actually use them across the board, whether it's medium-sized companies or large-sized companies. But what we also find through channel is this core industry that's called MSPs. We call it Datto. Ticker used to be MSP before they got acquired by Kaseya. MSP is a relatively new phenomenon that's happened. System integrators, these consulting shops, pre-cloud, they make their money by doing all these, you know, machine upgrades, software upgrades, right? That's always recurring whenever major vendors do upcycle refreshes.
But with cloud, a lot of that's happening automatically, right? The hyperscalers are automatically updating the software and handling the hardware behind the scenes. So then there's a pivot for these system integrators to become a fully recurring business that's called managed services. So they will then take over your, if you're a small business, especially, you don't have IT. The consulting shop down the street will just say, "Hey, I will take over all your email, your cloud license, and management and support for you," right? And let's call that a managed service offering. So increasingly, these guys become our end users. So they will use our software to, as part of their mission-critical business applications, to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of tenants behind the scenes.
So all of a sudden, we're able to access five-man companies or two-man companies that we were never able to touch before because we were very enterprise-focused. And because we're SaaS, where we take care of all the cloud operations, cloud security, and all the upgrades, which we do on a monthly basis, so it's much easier for these managed services to use our software to then scale their business. So it becomes mission-critical for them. So this is a highly high-growth space for us. It's growing three digits. And it's our ability to then unlock the SMB market. So that's worked really well, where we provide enterprise-grade software for SMBs via MSPs. So MSP is now behaving like a pretty sophisticated midsize company IT shop, right? Because traditionally, we deal with large company IT organizations, you know, the JPMC IT, Goldman Sachs IT, IRS IT.
Now MSPs are behaving like that. We even have small MSPs, 60-person MSPs in New York City that would do $1 million a year recurring with us, and that's to us. They package this and sell to their customers. They even change, we don't even, we don't control how they license it. We license it by end users. So obviously, we have to change the go-to-market motion. For enterprise and for midsize companies, we do yearly multi-year contracts, blend average of two years. For MSPs, for SMBs especially, we do monthly contracts and 100% digital marketplace registration and pool licensing. Even two-tier pool licensing, we have global MSPs like Crayon. We made it very, very simple to transact, so lower the threshold of our entry.
So that allowed them to very flexibly add and remove user seats under management because small businesses can come and go. So, but for us, they are the MSP is the end customer. So that allows us to really grow very quickly with the enterprise-grade capabilities and then this multi-tenant management, you know, single pane of glass capability for these guys. And we'll continue to roll out more capabilities, functions, features and products in that space to grow. That's something that we're super excited about.
It sounds like it probably contributes to your efficiency as well too in your operating margins.
100%.
So just.
Oh, yes. 100%. For SMBs, our unit economics is much better. Think about even at pool licensing level, you know, there's no negotiation, right? We sell canned soda. It's like you buy that at 7-Eleven versus buy at Costco. The price differential is very different. When we negotiate with Nestlé, 300,000 seats, that's a different conversation than, you know, SMB that's, you know, or MSPs that's adding like 10 seats or 50 seats at a time. So that conversations, yeah, it's, it allows us to scale efficiency.
Was there any nuances to your operating margin in Q4? It was, it looks like it was down from on a sequential basis from Q3, you know, given all the efficiencies we're talking about here.
Yeah. So what, what you're referring to is we guided for lower operating margin than Q3 that we just delivered. So completely expected. So that's just the way our budget for the year works. So there's no, nothing specifically to call out as a, as any major change. We just, you know, our marketing expenses are not linear. TJ just referred to at Ignite, we were on the backpack. So obviously, our marketing spend happens at various different times during the year. So for us, Q4 is a very heavy marketing spend quarter, heavy sales and marketing in general. We're starting to ramp up, particularly in Q4. We're adding salespeople for really 2025 and 2026. That actually happens in Q4 of 2024. So you'll see a higher spend. And historically, if you look back previous years, you'll see our Q4 spend is generally the highest for the year.
So, right in line with what we've done in the past and normal expectations for us, and again, nothing to specifically call out what we would expect.
Okay. Just a few more questions here in the last few minutes we've got. Maybe in terms, can you just give us an update on capital allocation, how you guys think about, yeah, allocation or M&A priorities?
So why don't I start and then TJ, you can jump on this one. So when we think about capital allocation, we really think of it as almost three pillars. We have first and foremost is investing in the existing business. So our primary responsibility is ensuring that the teams across the globe have the right resources in terms of people, technology. And so we want to make sure we're funding that properly. So that's first and foremost when we think about capital allocation. Second is M&A that you just referred to in terms of what we can and can't do. We've done a number of acquisitions over the last several years, and TJ can talk a little bit more about that specifically. And then the third, which we've been doing for the past really two and a half years, is share repurchases.
About two and a half years ago, we had a program that we implemented about $150 million of share repurchases. We've executed roughly about $75 million of that to date. That's a program that we actually like to have at our disposal. We've been effectively utilizing that, we believe, over the past two and a half years. Again, that's how we generally think about capital allocation into those three main pillars.
Great. Last minute here, any closing thoughts as we look into 2025, how you guys are thinking about, sort of the spending environment next year?
I think the macro is consistent. It hasn't really changed that much when it comes to spending environment. I think this year there's a lot of experimentation with AI, and that comes from an extra bucket, not from the IT. But next year, when enterprises do more enterprise-wide deployment, that will then eat into the IT budget. So you will see legacy players are having some issues with, you know, sharing the pie, repartitioning effectively IT service pie with, you know, other, we will call ourselves native in-cloud, players.
One thing I was also onto highlight. I think this is very much underappreciated. It is actually how hard it is to have enterprise-grade SaaS capabilities because we as the industry, and Microsoft shared this with us at their CEO summit where they invited their top 200 CEO partners and customers to spend two days with Bill Gates and Satya. It is that we are the most attacked sector by state sponsors, standing army of PhDs. Why? Because we hold some of the most sensitive, you know, agencies' data, right, including State Department, IRS, etc. So to have that capability for the last 12 years consistently, be able to literally go toe-to-toe against these guys to keep them at bay is something that's very, it's not easy to do. This is why you see a lot of legacy guys.
It's not about flipping a switch and become SaaS. It's actually changing the entire business, right? Cloud operation, cloud security, DevOps is a fundamental change in the way software is being managed, operated, and delivered, and we've been doing this for 12+ years, and we continue to do that at enterprise-grade, and that's something that I think folks don't really understand, and this allows us, we always do the hard thing first. We've been around 20, 20 years. We always go after the, do the hard thing, enterprise, government, and then multi, you know, global, and now multi-cloud. It sets us up for very good scaling.
It does seem like GenAI has created a new lease on life for data security and the higher need for data security, data backup, data resilience.
Absolutely. We joke that it used to be that the conversations around data security and data governance were just in the IT department. Now, literally every board meeting, this is a topic of conversation. So it's really elevated. And if I could leave you with one other, one other thing. So, in our investor day in March of 2023, we called out two things. I mentioned one of them before in terms of GAAP profitability. So we called out hitting the Rule of 40 in 2025 and being GAAP profitable in 2025. So, as I mentioned, we achieved the GAAP profitability a year early. So we feel really good about that. And the second was achieving Rule of 40, by the end of 2025. So for us, Rule of 40 is ARR growth plus non-GAAP operating profitability as a percentage of revenue.
So as we stand at the end of Q3, on our Rule of 40, we're at 37. So we had 23% ARR growth + 14% non-GAAP operating income. We feel really good and confident about getting to that 40% or 40, in 2025. And, you know, we're excited about delivering that next year.
Great. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.