TJ, Jamie, thanks for being here. Pleasure to have you on day one at KeyBanc's conference in Park City. Hopefully, the weather's great, views are great, all that.
Thank you, Eric.
Want to dive into it, and then just, I don't know, think a great place to start is on 2Q earnings from last week. Want to get your perspective on how things transpired from your perspective, where you saw strength in the quarter, where you're pleased with where you're seeing progress on the fronts with resiliency and control and AgentPulse and all that kind of stuff, and we'll take it from there.
Yeah, we had our double-digit net new ARR growth.
Right.
13th quarter in a row. I think 14 quarter outperformance, consecutive quarter. We are very pleased with net new logo acquisitions.
Yeah.
Also the top-tier cohorts, whether it is a million, half million, quarter, 100,000 ARR cohorts have all
Markedly increased.
Yeah.
I think 250,000 above cohorts are 30%-plus increase.
Right.
We also see growth, 20%-plus growth in all major geos that we operate in, North America, EMEA, and APAC. EMEA's highest growth, because our pretty much 100% channel model over there.
North America, we have a very strong direct sales organization in the enterprise segment.
Yeah.
Where we do have high NRR retention as well.
Right.
For the customer. What's also pleasing to see is our momentum around governance, AI governance.
Specifically, our SaaS platform has the modernization, has the resilience, has the control. Modernization is data analytics, data integration, data migration. Resiliency is backup, storage optimization, archiving, and also ransomware detection recovery. Governance is lifecycle management, identity management, access control.
Right.
Record management. That is our core. That is now the foundation for any AI deployment projects.
To have a good AI outcome, you need to have foundational data curation and management.
Yeah.
Historically, our control is 26% of our total recurring. Now, going into this year, because of the introduction of products, AI products like AgentPulse.
We see the pipeline's now 40% in control.
Yeah.
The demand for it is so high that while AgentPulse was only GA'd in Q1, we released the independent lite version SKU in July, because we do see the deal sizing getting larger and also just the number of agents our customers are actively managing with this product.
Yeah.
On average is 5,000 agents. The number of those agents are doubling every three months.
It's an incredible growth rate.
Yeah.
That's something that we're pleased to see. Lastly, I would just say we continue to make very strong growth, meaningful growth in the SMB sector. When we went public, we barely did do any SMB because we started in enterprise. Now it's 20% of our total recurring. It's the fastest-growing segment for us, leveraging MSPs.
As the intermediary to be mission critical for the managed service providers to go after.
Right.
So we're pleased to see growth across all segments, across all geos, and really leaning into this AvePoint being an AI trust layer provider-. Si tting between the data and the model. And help companies address the top two concerns-.
Right.
Every company have today, which is AI risk and AI cost.
Right. A lot of things to dig into on that aspect.
Yeah.
We came into the year and set the stage for acceleration on the top line, and you are seeing that bear fruit. At a high level, the highest of levels, what is driving that momentum acceleration of the business, and what are you executing against that is making that play out as we have seen?
Yeah. We are confident enough with the acceleration. That is why we give the long-term target of-.
Yeah.
Not even long-term, right. By 2029, we will get to $1 billion ARR. Ideally, we want to get there faster, so you work that out, it is at least 25%.
Annualized CAGR on the top line. As Q2 demonstrated, we are accelerating.
Most company, once they get to a half billion in recurring, they start to decelerate. We are accelerating, and we are doing this profitably.
Yeah.
There is really multiple areas of growth we see that is what give us confidence. It is not just a singular thing.
Obviously, there is this whole AI risk, AI cost angle that we talk about.
We see that across geos. It is not just the North America conversation. It is a Japan conversation. It is a EMEA conversation. It is ANZ, Singapore. This whole MSPs, SMB, the penetration, that is the long tail. For Microsoft, SMB is 40% of their business. For us, it is only 20% today.
Of course, 90% of our business is still within the Microsoft ecosystem. We are growing because customers are multi-cloud, as we continue to work to improve our GR, NRR.
We are expanding to other multi-cloud ecosystems like Google.
Right.
Salesforce, now Okta, Jira.
Yeah.
And those type of ecosystems because we want to continue to grow the NRR and GR for our customers. There's that improvement there, that drives. Of course, there's also this security angle, data security posture management.
Yeah.
Because of that, we're now also getting into device management, identity management, because to do true shadow AI discovery, not only in cloud, which we do today, we want to get to device level because that's where Ollama runs. These are the basically weighed open source stuff that you can run on little hardware devices, and that's actually quite prevalent out there.
Yeah.
So-
Is that first party or is that third party in terms of how you surface that device telemetry?
We're doing first party today.
Yeah.
But there's obviously, we also have a parallel M&A stream that we're looking at potential third-party.
Yeah.
Kind of acceleration with that.
Right. And then your perspective at an overall, just like a macro perspective on the security market and what have you, what's going on? Because it's incredibly dynamic.
Yes.
In terms of the number of attacks and nefarious AI activity we've seen and all that kind of stuff, and the capability of the model. I've been trying to ascertain what's going on, what are the customers doing? Are they spending more? Are they reacting? Are they prioritizing certain areas?
It seems like so much is happening, but from your perspective, what's going on at the ground level of what people are doing? Are the budgets opening up? Are people making decisions faster?
Yeah. In the conversation we have, because we are really helping customers address this whole AI risk and AI costs conversation.
Yeah.
And of course, security comes with that part of AI risk. It's not so much a budget concern, it's really this hair on fire problem of, there's a lot more risk, right? There's a lot more anxiousness.
It doesn't help all the frontier models are, almost from a marketing perspective, letting Mythos level.
Yeah.
Agents go out there and do some damage, right?
It's actually really marketing. They really have control. They could easily air gap the whole thing for.
Yeah.
Research purposes, but they don't. Just yesterday, Meta also announced that, "Oh, we can also hack other people, too." But that's border on level of irresponsibility. So I think companies, they are anxious. Like we, for example, we're even trying out the latest Microsoft claimed MDASH, to be Mythos level, but these things are very expensive to run. Super expensive to run.
Yeah.
I was recently at the Microsoft CEO Summit where the chairman of BlackRock was on stage to say, "At BlackRock, we don't have enough cash to run Mythos against all of our infrastructure." So there's that problem. So on one hand, everybody needs to do vulnerability discovery, but there's also a lot of false positives, and it's also super expensive. On the other hand, you hear in the news every day, there's.
Yeah.
These type of agentic attacks at machine speed. So overall, there's no silver bullet. You have to have multilayered approach.
We consider ourselves as the inner layer, to look at access control, to look at data security posture management.
We're very much focused on structured data today. We just have to help our customers navigate that.
Yeah. The other big thing is just, how do we secure AI? How do we adopt it securely? How do we trust that it's going to behave the way we intend it to trust, and it's going to act on the data that it's supposed to act on?
Yeah.
That's where AvePoint comes in with the AI trust layer. Can you just expand on what that means in practice, why your approach at doing this is differentiated and what else is in the market?
Yeah. We've been doing data governance, because we came from an enterprise content management space.
Our whole philosophy is that this is a continuous data management story from birth, right, from data ingestion to cloud. That is data classification, data integration, migration to then once you are in cloud from resilience perspective to make sure that your data is properly backed up and recoverable, and then to the whole access control life cycle management, delegate administration. One of the things we think we did very well in the early days is to help very large enterprise, so these are the biggest consulting company in the world, like the Big Four audit firms, to be able to Because IT does not really know what businesses use these data for, right?
This delegated kind of accountability model, the governance framework. Now that then apply in the age of AI, allow IT a way to pass accountability to the business side.
You are vibe coding an agent, you need to give me context on that agent.
And what dataset that agent have access to, what kind of permission, permutations, and evolution changes it needs to apply. This is why last week we also released Kinetic Classification, which means.
Right.
We can adjust classification, tagging, and access control machine speed as policy change, as role change, et cetera.
Right.
That is important, right, to be able to keep up with the living and breathing things that is happening in the enterprise.
Because we solve at the data layer, it makes it easier to solve at the AI layer.
Right.
You look at a product like Agent 365 from Microsoft, it is really focused on the agent layer. They do not really go down to the foundational data layer.
We start at the data layer, and we go up to the agent layer. What we feel is that we have the right win because we have a more of a holistic approach.
Yeah.
Because ultimately, AI and the data are actually two sides of the same coin.
Right.
That is how we think about it. At the same time, we also have a pretty robust consulting side. So we have 12% of our revenue is services. Increasingly, that is becoming AI foundry type of services.
So we are doing AI monetization work for us. That generates IP for us that will feed the software side as well.
What we found is that companies can change out the frontier models every couple of months, depends on the latest and greatest, right?
The commonality behind all of that is every single company need to have their data architecture robust.
They need to have their active governance and enforcement and data hygiene done properly. It is a constant thing, because it is not like you drop AI and you forget it. It is a constant refinement because AI can drift very quickly.
We know that 60% of all data today are generated by AI, especially in the unstructured space. That is where GenAI really thrives.
If you are constantly using generated data by AI, very quickly, you go into an echo chamber, then it detaches from reality.
This is why this active governance, active refinement, and also delegate accountability model matters.
Yeah.
The way we win is because we established ourself in that space with some of the largest enterprise and government agencies in the world, and now, of course, we make it available to small to medium businesses as well.
Yeah. What you said in the middle of that resonated because at our dinner last night, security dinner, there was multiple people that said, "Hey, it really is a data problem in the end. You secure the data, and that's the foundation. You got to get that right as the core foundational layer to get right before you can-
Yeah.
Expand beyond that." That's the best way, mindset to have when you're rolling out AI, secure the data.
Think of the different ways. Before GenAI, we were operating on the premise of that we help enterprises manage their data so their employees can responsibly share internally, externally, and collaborate at speed without worrying about compliance and governance violations. In the age of GenAI, these are just basically same thing, same risks, except it's just much faster.
Yeah.
Right? Agents don't sleep.
They don't take weekends off. And they're just operating at machine speed, but it's really the same risk factors we addressed before.
Right, just amplified.
It just amplified.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's talk about AgentPulse a little bit more because that's really interesting, and obviously, I don't know, the world is awash with marketing noise of companies that are addressing the AI problem and securing AI.
Everybody wants to have their own angle of securing agents. Help us understand. We've kind of touched upon it a little bit, but just peel back the onion a little bit further on AgentPulse, how you're positioning it.
Who the competitive set is as you roll this out, and just again, coming back to the angle of.
Yeah.
Why you need to do this for AvePoint as opposed to other vendors that also go after the same market opportunity.
We actually give, at the latest earnings, we give two examples.
Yeah.
One enterprise, we say, "Hey." They chose our solution, our platform, over a major security vendor. In that case, actually CrowdStrike.
In the second example, we say over Agent 365, right?
Again, we come at it from a different angle. Also, at the same time, don't forget, the customers are very cost-conscious.
They also need to say, "Hey, everyone's trying to solve this problem. Everyone's incrementally getting better, but no one has the full silver bullet.
Because this is a very dynamic thing. At the same time, we cannot all go to E7 license. We cannot all, for the non-E7 users, all double our Office 365 subscription with.
Yeah.
$15 per user per month.
Right.
Agent 365 subscription. At the same time, we also still have to handle the data side.
Yeah.
That is how we provide value.
Fundamentally, we as an ecosystem player in this space for 20 plus years, our value has always been. There are two things I always say, right? People always ask, "Oh, why does not Google and Microsoft just kill you guys?" Right? I think the hyperscalers, their interests are different than our interest.
Their interests get everyone to use only their stack and only use the most expensive version of their software. If you look at E5 license, it has been 10 years since E5 license rolled out. Penetration rate is 20%.
A little over 19%.
Copilot has been out for three years. Penetration rate is 5%.
E7, I reckon it will be in the teens.
Yeah.
For many years. That is the opportunity, right? Customers are pretty smart. They also want to make sure that whatever they invest in technology, give them the best return on investment.
Increasingly, customers are multi-cloud.
They do not just rely only one vendors. For example, in Q1, our earning release, we actually talk about the conflict in Middle East when it happened, when regional data centers, AWS data center, got taken offline.
Our demand for our resilience suite just skyrocketed off the charts.
That still happened today because people realize they cannot just have all their eggs in one basket. They cannot just have all their infrastructure with the one hyperscalers.
Third party like us provide that opportunity to basically back up and recover in a different infrastructure than where they were. That is what we do. We do that at scale.
Not only do we, again, help them maximize their investment, so they do not have to buy the most expensive of everything, but also help them navigate a multi-cloud world.
A multi-geo, multi-sovereign world. I think that is where we will always find opportunity for monetization.
Yeah. What is the initial monetization of AgentPulse? What is the uplift or how big of an opportunity? Help us.
It has been great.
Frame our thinking.
Not only now the total pipeline is 40%, but every deal that has the AgentPulse baked in compared to a normal control deal is double, if not triple. The deal size. This is why we actually made a lite version of AgentPulse as a standalone SKU. That customer can just go discover the shadow AI that they have, realize they have risk.
Yeah.
Then they can buy more from us.
Yeah.
To actually control that risk and potentially recover from that risk.
Right.
That's how the rest of our platform comes to play.
Right.
That's why we think that in the space of platform preference, in the space of vendor consolidation and maximum ROI, we have the right to win.
The new SKU will remove even more friction that might be there just on price.
That's correct.
Just those price-conscious customers. You're still pricing this competitively relative to what's in the market.
Very competitively compared to what's in the market, yeah.
Which is-
We're doing it by seat base.
Yeah.
That is another thing, I think.
Right. Predictable.
Yes. In the world of consumption-based modeling, it is becoming very difficult for customers to consume. I sit on boards of some larger companies. They were budgeting their AI consumption last year's token maxing, right?
This year, there is this one company, they have 2,000 developers, they were budgeting $6 million, and first half the month, they spent $12 million already. As a CFO, how do you handle that, right?
For us, we are actually still licensing by subscription total employee count, just like how we do our other software.
I think right now there is a real opportunity for us because we were able to control the cost side of the equation pretty well.
Yeah.
There is a real opportunity for us to go grab market share.
Right. The non-Microsoft opportunity, can you just talk about where you are from a product perspective in terms of being able to support these workloads from a go-to-market perspective to be able to go-
Yeah.
How are you thinking about the priorities, whether it is SMB enterprise of going about expanding, diversifying the workloads that you cover?
Yeah. We are very strong in Office Cloud, so productivity, Microsoft calls that productivity. We start also getting to, we have now very fast-growing IaaS and PaaS, so that is compute.
A lot of the AI workloads and application workloads are in the compute cloud.
That is AWS, Azure, GCP. The equivalent productivity in the Google space is Google Workspace. We have now near parity of functionalities when it comes to resiliency, when it comes to control for Google as well. Also, we have resiliency for Salesforce.
And a number of other, Atlassian and others. Our strategy for multi-cloud is really just to follow our customers and their multi-cloud, so we extend, so it is one of continuous work to improve the GR and R.
Yeah.
I always get this question, "Why are not you or multi-cloud bigger than 10% yet?
Because for us, we do not think of our, even the Microsoft side of the revenue side is slowing down.
It is still accelerating, and the TAM is much bigger.
Microsoft, just in Office Cloud alone, has about 450 million users.
There is still massive growth there, and then we are doing the multi-cloud in tangent, because customer is multi-cloud.
Right. But now, increasingly, we see the really good opportunity with Google, so we are investing more into Google go-to-market t o target that as a separate ecosystem. Oftentimes, it is not the tech that costs the most time and money. It is the go-to-market.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. If there's any questions, let me know, but on margins, I wanted to highlight this opportunity because you are seeing accelerating growth.
Margins are a little bit of a pause relative to last year, and you decided to spend a little bit incrementally in the second half of the year. Just talk about where you are from framing that opportunity of growth versus margins.
Yeah.
What the incremental opportunity is that you're trying to invest against and go get.
Yeah. First of all, our free cash flow generation last 12 months, $100 million.
Yeah.
We are GAAP profitable. We are very much disciplined, focused on this profitable growth mantra.
Our GAAP operating margin continue to expand because we are very disciplined on SBC.
This year, we bought back a lot more shares t han previous years. At this rate, we will probably buy back almost $180 million this year.
Yeah.
Which is really good for shareholder value creation. In term of the why did we do the step-up function investment mid-year, that 1%, it is because we see the market opportunity, we want to lean into it, and more than half of that investment is go to market. Go to market is hiring more partner development managers, launching more brand marketing campaigns.
And those things take time to ramp.
So rather than wait till the end of the fiscal, new budget, we want to do that now, so then we can ride and build up the acceleration well into next year and beyond.
Yeah.
That is our goal. Less than half of that is technology upgrades.
Also some increased costs, for example, in AI-accelerated IDE tools.
Right? There is some consumption-based modeling there. That is part of the tech investment that we make. Overall, the investment is to accelerate growth. We are not changing our medium to long-term operating margin profitability guidance.
We think we can still well maintain that, as you saw from our latest, our software margins remaining in the mid-80s.
Our gross margin's lower because we have that service component where we do the whole AI.
AI foundry work. We think that's very important, especially now.
It's not a surprise Anthropic, OpenAI all launch consulting arms because people realize that you still need very good engineers to land AI.
Maybe in the last 20 seconds here, but curious your perspective of where you are from an adoption maturity perspective using AI internally.
Yeah. I think on the tech side, it is pretty decent.
In fact, we are actually.
R&D side, kind of.
R&D side.
Yeah.
In fact, we are actually even using, as part of our M&A stream, there is now, I directly lead that for now, my first question often is, "Do we buy this asset, or can we use AI to build this asset faster?
There is that happening. That is mature. On the rest of the organization, of course, we have obviously a lot of AI agents that we deploy to improve sales efficiency to improve customer support efficiency on the finance side, but there is more to be done. As everyone knows, it is always a change management.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome. Jamie, anything to add in, or TJ, anything last parting comments?
Just really quickly, I think the results and the guidance are very strong and reflect on the ARR, a raise, and the same thing with revenue, where the Q2 beat has been passed through. Just the FX offset in terms of those headwinds because we are so international, is sort of offsetting those raises, but we want to make sure that the operational performance isn't being clouded in just how strong it is. That's the only thing that.
Yeah.
We've been discussing since earnings is just the FX headwinds that we didn't cover today. So wanted to-
Yeah.
Mention that.
Between the quarter, the guide, and the, I don't know, the messaging on investing to go get more opportunities seems really encouraging from a demand perspective, execution, et cetera. So appreciate the.
Yeah.
Commentary there.
Yeah, you will see more product announcements all the way till the rest of the year as we really lean into this AI trust layer messaging.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome. All right, well, thank you.
Thank you.
TJ, thanks. Jamie, appreciate it.
Yeah. Thank you.