All right. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us here in Orlando. Hope the morning has been good. We got a full agenda here for Investor Day today. So thanks for coming. Those of you listening live at home or via archive, appreciate you taking the time out of your day. I'm Matt Humphries. I'm head of investor relations here at BlackLine. I'm sure most of you are familiar with me. We do have a very packed agenda today. We got a lot of things we're gonna cover, starting with innovation with Therese, our go-to-market strategy with Owen. We're gonna have our pillar leaders up on stage talking about how they cross-sell, how they work together to sell our platform.
Take a short break, and then we're gonna bring our CTO and head of product up here to talk about that platform and our innovation roadmap in a bit more detail. And then we're gonna wrap up the sort of prepared day with both Mark Partin and Patrick Villanova to talk our financial strategy. At the very end of the session, we're gonna have a Q&A session with all our panel speakers today that you'll see. So that's the opportunity for you in the audience to raise your hand, ask some questions, and we'll go from there. And of course, no Investor Day is complete without a little bit of a safe harbor statement. Of course, we're gonna be making some forward-looking statements today during the session.
If you have questions on our Risk Factors, etc., please reference our filed documents with the SEC, notably our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. So without further delay, I'm gonna bring up Therese on stage, and she's gonna walk you through our innovation and our platform. Therese.
Hi and good afternoon. Oh my goodness, bright lights this time. Thank you so much for being here today. And I'm so glad that you're able to make it in person. And also, thank you for those that are streaming as well for taking the time to really learn more about what BlackLine's doing and where we're going. If you were here for this morning's keynote, if you weren't, that's so sad. But if you were here for this morning's keynote, we made a very exciting announcement. And I believe that this information, even if you sat through it this morning, it bears repeating because we are doing some really terrific things. And it's important, before we get started, to realize what drives BlackLine, what gets me up in the morning, what gets up our entire fabulous team. And this is around delivering value to our customers.
We know that finance and accounting is not getting easier, okay? We need to provide solutions that make it easier, more scalable, and predictable results, okay? That is just key and at the heart of this idea of delivering value to our customers. So when Owen and I got into this job 20 months ago, we sort of did some work and asked who we were as a company. And we came up with this winning aspiration: to inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation. To inspire is to communicate the art of the possible. What can people expect in finance and accounting? Power, meaning develop software that actually delivers on those promises, and guide speaks to the fact that it's typically a journey, sometimes years long, with our customers to get them fully transformed. All right.
However, you may have heard in Sumit's talk this morning that there are a number of different analysts out there who have published the same figure: 70% of transformation initiatives fail to deliver expected results, okay, and the other number that Sumit spoke of this morning was approximately $2.3 trillion have been wasted on failed transformation initiatives. That number, okay, understand our customer base. They have to fight for every single budget dollar that they get. If they have a transformation initiative that fails, that's, that's the worst possible outcome, so solving for this headwind is a CFO's biggest priority today. They're being driven to transformation by a number of different factors, but they have to deliver successful transformations, so we slightly modified our winning aspiration to say, inspire, power, and guide successful digital finance transformations.
And the great news about that is that BlackLine has worked with more than 4,400 different customers, and we know what that journey looks like. We know where the pitfalls are. We have the expertise both in-house and with an extremely extensive partner network that will actually get our customers to successful outcomes. Now, one of, a person that I spoke with recently, Vernie, and we were just having a conversation about, you know, what we were doing. And I loved how succinctly she put this: a successful transformation project has outputs that include efficient compliance, okay? The entire purpose of compliance is to make sure your financials are accurate. End of the day: have good controls, everything's right. Lower cost. Remember I said everybody has to fight for every dollar? Lower cost. You've got to be able to cut cost. And number three, seamless real-time information.
Today's CFO, CAO, they are expected to be business partners. They are expected to be able to deliver information in real time, virtually real time, that the business can subsequently act on. So much of what you'll hear today really goes back to somebody who is in this industry who just put it so succinctly. So thank you, Vernie. Now, the financial systems landscape. This diagram, which looks like a mess, was actually built off of one that Mark Partin created a couple of years ago for BlackLine, and I looked at it, and I could not believe the sheer number of systems on here, the sheer number of different workflows and data flows that was happening, and this is BlackLine. This is not a company that has literally hundreds of different ERPs, okay? Hundreds of different point systems.
And what's amazing about this is the amount of work that happens outside of the systems. For every accounting process, there's typically a spreadsheet, data, you know, cleansing piece, another extra step in there, an email to verify something. This is what it actually looks like for our customers. Now, take this times 100 for some of our larger customers. They are just trying to organize and manipulate data a lot of times. They are spending time. They selected the profession of accounting, and instead of doing value-added business activities, they're trying to clean up stuff and make sure that there's no point in the chain that breaks that ends up causing corruption to their financials. It's not just the complexity or the applications and the sheer number themselves. It's also this combination of people, process, and technology, okay? And this results in slow and, frankly, sometimes unusable information.
We believe that by providing a platform, essentially a command and control center, okay, that we can help our customers achieve what we call future-ready financial operations. Now, you'll see three boxes on here, three characteristics of these, all right? The hallmarks of this: accuracy, all right? Think about that. You've got to have if we put out some bad financials, oh my God, there goes our reputation. Everything matters around the accuracy of financial results. And again, that is the point of having better compliance. Number two, efficiency. Ask any accountant in the world, and they're gonna tell you that means lower cost, okay? That's what efficiency means to an accountant. And then finally, intelligence. These three are the hallmarks of having a future-ready financial operations platform. Now, innovation, it's not new.
We were the first ones to actually come out with a commercially available solution for the Financial Close, for a number of other things over time. We were the first to market with an Intercompany solution. We were the first to market with a pre-consolidation centralization for our larger customers. We have been looking out for our customers for a very long time. And I have been doing this for a very long time, but that's okay. We went from being a single-solution company to we incorporated Invoice-to-Cash, an additional solution around Intercompany . Okay? And we were in our multi-solution era. But what's so exciting about where we are right now is we are entering our platform era where we tie it all together, okay?
Where we now have this cohesive platform, which will make it easier not just for our customers, but for whatever we build or happen to acquire in the future. Having this platform will give us the ability to plug things in in a much more streamlined fashion. So what is a platform? Everybody's claiming they have a platform right now, okay? I just saw another company. They came out with journals and matching, which we've had for, I don't know, 15-20 years, okay? They said, "We have journals and matching. We have a platform." Well, that's not a platform. That's some additional functionality, all right? There's another company that a few years back, they acquired a integration company. They said, "We have a platform." Integration and connectivity, while very important by itself, is not a platform. Well, it's not really. It's not what I would call a platform.
Why is that, by the way? Wave of vendor consolidation, okay? That original diagram that I showed you, all right? Multiplied by 100 for some of our larger clients. Too many systems out there. CIOs everywhere have said, "You know what? You gotta decrease the number of vendors that we're dealing with. It's unmanageable." Everybody is looking for a solution that does multiple functions for a customer. That's why there's been a wave of vendor consolidations. And therefore, everybody claims to have a platform right out the gate, whether they do or not. I believe that what we are doing with the BlackLine Studio 360 platform will become the gold standard for what a platform should be for finance and accounting. And this is something that we have been working on for literally years.
We have talked to our customer about, and we think we know better than anybody how to design and deliver a platform that really is the basis for future-ready operations. Now, there are five critical components to this platform, and each one really is critical, okay? Number one, Integrate. Very important to be able to get data in and out of BlackLine easily, okay? Gotta have it. And this comes in a variety of forms, all right? We have an integration platform. We have purpose-built connectors because in some cases, out-of-the-box connector won't handle volume or complexity. We have, you know, SFTP file drops. We have API calls, a very robust library. The short version on integration is that not all solutions fit anybody well, okay?
So you've got to have a variety of ways to get the information in and out of BlackLine while also transforming that data, okay, and potentially cleansing it and having it be scalable enough that it can handle literally billions of transactions. Gotta have the Integrate. Can't go anywhere without that. Number two, Studio Orchestrate. You may have remembered this from the Accounting Studio that we talked about a couple of years ago, and one of the things that we learned is that it needed to do a little more, so we've had it in the Early Adopter Program for the last 18 months.
Today, I ran into somebody this morning, and she was like, "This is the Holy Grail of what people want to do in finance and accounting." She and she's an early adopter, and she was one that actually originally did not have a high opinion. She has completely done a 180. She has said, "I cannot stop thinking of all the different processes that I can put into Orchestrate and now manage from a single command and control center for our entire company." Yes, this is definitely a Fortune 100 company, okay? Number three, visualize. Everybody dumps everything into Tableau, Power BI, okay? The need to process massive amounts of information that you, frankly, can't do automatically anymore and turn that into insights and preferably cool graphical insights that actually are easy to understand very quickly is what Studio 360 Visualize does, okay?
There's a number of ways that this is making its way through our products. Each of our products now has its own BI dashboard, all right? If a customer purchases the platform, they also have the opportunity to customize those even more, okay? What's cool about this? The way this kind of came about is I was speaking with one of our French customers, and they gave me this entire presentation of all of these Power BI dashboards that they had built. And I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, "It's not good that the data left BlackLine." And I said to them, "This should be inside of BlackLine.
You should have these insights in real time without any kind of extracting process or anything else." So the ability to visualize data in a way that gives you meaningful insights to run your business is an important part of this platform, okay? Two more, and then I'll pretty much turn this over. Next, Studio Blueprint. I mentioned that we have more than 4,400 customers, all right? We also have a very extensive partner network, okay? They know how to transform successfully. Their business depends on it, all right? Internally, we have our Optimization Academy. We have more than 50 different accounting processes that we work with our customers on transforming. Why not take all of that wealth of information and put it into the Blueprint Marketplace? Give people an opportunity to brag about what they're good at. Give them, give our partners an opportunity to generate more business, right?
I mean, we have certain partners that are very focused on certain industries or certain types of processes. Let that become well-known across the entire customer base. Blueprint will give our customers a leg up on transformation, okay? The ability to get a jumpstart on that in a way that is really not anywhere else in this industry. Last one, control, all right? We have invested in building over the years a compliance product, but we haven't always leaned into it in maybe the best way possible. But compliance, again, remember that compliance, the purpose of compliance is to make sure that you have accurate financials, okay? This should be a part of any platform that's put out there. If it's truly a platform, you should have incredible controls built in.
In addition to compliance being folded into this platform, we also are starting to capture information like the chart of accounts, versioning on the chart of accounts. This might not mean a lot to you if you are not an accountant, but if you are an accountant who's had to do an ERP upgrade and a chart of accounts refresh and you're keeping that in a spreadsheet, it's a nightmare, okay? It's super interesting though because in addition to the chart of accounts, things like accounting guidance, multiple entity structures, all of this is information that we're starting to allow our customers to keep in our platform. Why? Well, they get some benefits. You know, now they've got a better control around things like their chart of accounts. They can do a yearly sign-off. That's all great. But here's the other reason why.
We, more than anybody else, we went to solely SaaS in the year 2007. And yeah, I'm totally dating myself, but that's okay. We have 20 years of data. We have an incredible amount of history on how and why and when people reconcile their books, do their work in finance and accounting. This, plus the metadata, plus things like accounting guidance and other relevant policies and procedures with a properly organized set of data, allows for really a leveraging of AI that's gonna be crazy, crazy fun. And data is well, let's actually first, this is a visual depiction of the new 360 platform. I wanted to start with just the five components because those are really the critical pieces that any platform should have. Two things I wanna focus on on this screen, okay?
One, if you look at the outcomes, they line up with what Vernie had identified. Quick and early identification of risks and anomalies, okay? The ability to automate things, which is going to save time, lower cost. Strengthening controls. You would not believe, even now, the sheer number of spreadsheets that live in finance and accounting. How do we do a better job of strengthening those controls? Reducing costs, that's always near and dear to any accountant's heart. Improving compliance. These are important outcomes, and this is where we are talking about delivering value to our customers. So important. One other thing you'll notice on here is over on that left column, the Snowflake logo, okay?
When we were putting together this platform, we realized that the amount of data that we have, you know, having it be accurate, having it be accessible in a very timely way, security, oh my goodness, it's a crazy world out there right now, and that is the foundation of any real platform, and so we have this little thing in-house that we always say, "Data is the new currency." You have got to have data in order to actually properly leverage AI to its full potential, okay? That's why we did a partnership with Snowflake. We re-engineered our platform so that it sits on Snowflake because we have customers today who are matching literally billions of transactions. We have to have a modern data architecture that allows that kind of scalability.
But there are some other inherent advantages as well to Snowflake around their data sharing and just a seamless transfer from potentially a customer Snowflake site to the BlackLine Snowflake site, okay? What they are doing with AI, what they're doing with reporting, it just opens up a whole new arena where we can do things in a better way for our customers. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to my wonderful Co-CEO, who I absolutely adore in every way. Owen Ryan, please warmly welcome him.
Terrific. Thank you.
Hi everybody. Good afternoon, and thank you for spending time with us this morning and this afternoon. And for those of you that are live streaming this, thank you also for listening. Lots to cover. It's been a pretty busy day so far. Wanna thank the investors in the room and also the analysts that are giving us a lot of your time. What I really wanted to try to do with you in the session that I have here is to bring to life the strategy for all aspects of what we're trying to do. Sort of the where and the how and what's needed and the measure. So if you think about it, the things that we were thinking about when we started was, you know, what is BlackLine? And you heard Therese talk about what our mission is all about.
Then we started to think about, so where do we play? What are the key places we wanna be from, from an ERP perspective, a product perspective, an industry perspective, a geography perspective, a partner perspective? What were the choices that would be in, and then what would the choices be out? Similarly, choices around customers. Where did we wanna play in the marketplace, the mega enterprise, the enterprise space? Where in the mid-market? It's a wide area. So we had to make a lot of choices. We went through a whole process last year to really think about the future of what BlackLine could and should be. Then we realized, you know, a key piece of this was we had to adjust our operating model. BlackLine is no longer a California company. We are truly a global company.
And we had to start to think and act and operate that way. And we've made a lot of changes in go-to-market. We've made a lot of changes in our product and tech team. The balance now of resources onshore and offshore, yes, that drives cost efficiency, but what I love about it is it improves cycle time. When you keep working on things throughout the day and not losing opportunity when the clock shuts down for somebody going home for a particular day, those were really all important things that we went through. And then maybe most importantly is building the right team. And Therese is fantastic. She and I have had a ball of fun trying to reposition this company going forward, but we recognize and understand we are only as good as our team.
We have made tremendous changes to that team over the last year and a half. They're gonna be really the people we want you to see and meet because those are the folks that really make that BlackLine engine hum. The office of the CFO is a very broad purview. I think that this is in some ways the money shot as I think about it. I'm not the technologist like some of the other folks are, but if you think about the way Therese has shared and Jeremy and Charlie shared this morning, sort of the platform of how 360 comes together, Studio 360 comes together, what you should understand about BlackLine and what makes us unique, what gives us a distinct opportunity over what we believe is everybody else is where we play.
And if you think about a river and you think about what a headwater is, the headwater is where the river begins. And that's what you gotta understand about BlackLine. That's where we start. And then the river flows downstream eventually into your reporting, your consolidation, your Intercompany , your close, and reporting. Now, there's a lot of people that are out there. They're all the way down at the delta of the mouth of the river, right? And what you have to understand is at the head of a river, at the headwater, the water is clear. It's clean. You can rely on it. You can use it. And that's our data flow that comes down. When you come from the delta, that's where the water is sort of a lot dirtier, a lot more murky, and you're not necessarily sure how much you can rely on it.
I'm gonna give you a true example of something that's real in the BlackLine world. So we're in the process of replacing a company that some of you have become enamored with recently as far as what they do in a certain part of the space. And we went ahead and we were doing the consolidation for this company. And our numbers could not tie out to the system that they were currently using. And after a whole lot of time and hard work, we figured out that the company was still consolidating a subsidiary that they had already sold. It's a publicly traded company. And what it tells you, if you ever hear that old garbage in, garbage out, if you don't know what's flowing into your information, you take tremendous risk of not getting it right.
And the secret sauce in so many ways of what BlackLine is about, we're the headwater. We know the origination of the transaction and make sure it stays clear and clean all the way throughout the journey. And that's the important thing to take away from this picture more than anything else. It's reliable and you can use it. It's clear. And that's the most important thing. Again, I just want you to lose sight of that because we create that one source of truth truly that makes sure the information is accurate and it's efficient and you can rely on it for your intelligence. Now, some of you asked about the size in the market, particularly since we've sort of been changing our focus around the lower end of the middle market. The market opportunity is still huge and still unpenetrated.
I mean, there are 160,000 companies that we look at in the United States that, we think are perfect customers for BlackLine. But to put that in order of magnitude, there's 7 million companies in the United States. 6.3 million of them have less than 100 employees. So if you think about that, those organizations probably have only two or three accountants. That's not where BlackLine is gonna go to sort of really deliver value because when you think about what we're trying to do, drive true digital finance transformation, we have to have clients, customers that have not only some size and scale, but also the belief that they want to go on a journey.
That's really where we've become much more selective is figuring out who we should do business with, who we should partner with, because ultimately, if we believe and we act in the idea that customer success is what matters, then don't let a customer pick the wrong thing for them. I know that sounds sort of counterintuitive 'cause some of you would say, "Just sell the software." That's not good business. It's not because they'll come in the front door and they'll go out the back. That's not where we wanna spend our time. We want people that come through the front door and wanna stay forever. So when you think about this from an enterprise perspective, you can see 50% of our customers generate about 75% of our ARR. You can imagine all the great things that come with this.
The expansion opportunities are just incredible, and you know, you would've been here this morning, and you could have seen as you walked around the offices, meeting people from companies like an Apple, an Amazon, a CVS, a Google, UnitedHealth, a Walmart, all those companies are here. Those are the enterprises that really trust and rely on BlackLine. I was looking the other day, nine of the top 10 revenue-generating companies in North America all run on BlackLine, and when I say run on BlackLine, I mean they use it. They get the value out of it. They understand the importance that it can do for what it can do for them, but then equally important is we have a large and growing segment of the middle market. When I say large and growing segment, not necessarily on customer count 'cause you've seen the churn.
We told you it was gonna happen, but where those opportunities are getting bigger and larger. I think each quarter, and I don't know when we get to the next group, this, and we can validate this, but I think each quarter this year we've sold our next largest ever mid-market customer. So the idea of what we're trying to do in the mid-market is really for these companies that, that can have the aspiration, have the desire, have the, the resources to drive towards real digital finance transformation. They want to be your next big global enterprise. So as we've thought about that, you know, where do we play in the market? And there's some things that you just learn pretty quickly. So we wanna operate in markets where there's well-functioning capital markets. We wanna operate in countries where it's highly regulated.
There's a super strong auditor requirement, statutory accounting. You're looking for places where there's a strong legal profession. We like when people get sued because they use our software to make sure they don't get themselves in trouble. We're looking for places where there's a low corruption index. And so if you think about it, we start with basically the G20 and then shrink it down for some countries that just don't sort of fit that profile the way that we want it to be. Ultimately, you can see the market positioning that we have already today. It's quite impressive.
I won't use the word dominant, but we want to be the first choice, the best choice, the safe choice, ultimately the only choice when a customer is thinking what they want to do on their digital finance transformation, that it's not just a product, it's the outcome that we will drive for them so they will be elated with what BlackLine does. When you start to look at some of these markets and you say, "Gee, you guys only have 20% of the Nikkei," here's an example of an opportunity for us. We serve so many of the largest companies in Japan, except we serve them in North America and Europe. We have to figure out how to continue to drive the upstream opportunity for there. We look at Germany right for what we're trying to do, particularly given the SAP footprint.
We'll talk to you about that in a little bit, but when you look at all this, there's tons and tons of opportunity for us within our existing customer base and when we choose smartly. Now, Therese has sort of shared all this with you, and I'm not gonna go through it, but I'm like the SWAT guy. I sit there and I play the role of the customer my whole time working at BlackLine. I ran an office of CFO business as a CEO. I was running a business at Deloitte that focused on the office of CFO and the controller, and so it's all about the outcomes, and so what we're really trying to make sure is everything we do here can drive true value for our customers.
We wanna make sure that BlackLine is self-funding for not only what you've purchased, but for the next things you wanna do, or it gives you the capacity and the capital to go do something else that's important in the office of the CFO. All the things that we're trying to drive, but ultimately, please remember, if anything you walk away from today, the BlackLine mindset is outcomes. That's the mindshift we're trying to drive. It's not normal in the software industry to think that way. Victory is at a sale. That is nothing. Victory is at the ultimate outcome when the customer is optimized. One of the things I think is really cool about BlackLine, and the reason I love working with Therese is, I call her our version of Steve Jobs.
And I think what I love about it every day is she brings this innovation mojo. You know, the ideas are flying out of her brain all the time. Therese, not all of them are good, but many of them are, and they're interesting, and they challenge us to think about things in a way that candidly really force us to say, "Hey, what should we be doing on behalf of our customers?" And she'll go talk to customers each and every day. She'll go meet with partners all the time. We're testing really what we're trying to do before we actually roll something out. And what BlackLine is interested in, yes, we're gonna do bells and whistles innovation, but what I really care about is marching band innovation.
It's coming down Fifth Avenue, making a lot of noise about what you can do for your organization in a way that truly transforms your business. It's all about the way we platform bundle what we're trying to do for our customers. You know, having them pick off a piece here and a piece there and then they just stall doesn't work. We have to get them to buy into the vision of what they're trying to do, working with their partners, working with their leadership team, getting that executive sponsorship to drive everything across an organization is what's so critical. Now, one of the things we had to change in BlackLine was how we thought about going to market. Therese mentioned that we've got into the Invoice-to-Cash business. We really have doubled down on our commitment to Intercompany .
We've been building out in the Financial Reporting Analytics space, which also includes consolidation. We've now built the platform, which is the foundation under that what looks like a bank on your page there, and what we needed to be able to do is cross-sell more. We have to be able to deliver the journey and not in a vacuum. We need to be able to deliver the vision for each of the buyers, being able to speak to them because in different organizations, different people have responsibilities, and our job was to be able to communicate and connect with these customers in a way that we hadn't. And so we've combined our sales expertise and our pillar leaders to go into the market together to really be able to tell a story.
You're gonna meet the pillar leaders in a few minutes, but what I love about them, what the requirement for the job was, is you can go into the C-suite and have a conversation at a high enough level to tell the story, and then you can get into the bowels down in the mines, figuring out how it actually works and communicating with different constituencies. And that's what that group of leaders is able to do, which really resonates with our customers because we can then help them be successful. Our pillar leaders are really responsible for a few things. One is they have to help drive and create the product, right? They are, we have product-led growth if you wanna think about it that way.
They have to make sure we have the right kind of domain expertise that we can deliver and do it by ourselves or with our partners that can show and capture the value. The articulation of that value has to come through to our customers, and they're making sure that the implementations are done, again, the right way. We understand the only success that matters is the outcome for the customer. Now, one of the things that I think we shared with you starting last year, which was, we have a wealth of data and information that's available to us that I don't know that we fully appreciated. It's like going up into the attic and finding you have a Monet. Like, all of a sudden, what do you do with this?
And I think for us, we realized when we started to look at our customers, certainly by size of company and then geography and the way they operated, that was always very interesting and helpful. But when you really started to get in and think about the industry perspective, that's really where things began to come to life because the co-creation of ideas with even just within our own sales teams that understood, "Hey, you know, I've got this company and I've got that one, and they're in the same industry. How do we bring that together and create real value through use cases and blueprints that speak the language of a customer?" I said this morning, I learned in consulting a long time ago that domain knowledge is fine. If you can combine domain knowledge and industry expertise, you completely separate yourself apart.
If you can add on top of that the ability to execute, there's nobody that comes close to you. That's what we're really trying to drive towards because we know our customers, again, back to that, we wanna be the first choice, best choice, safe choice, only choice. That's what's gonna do it for us, for our customers, and that's what we're looking to accomplish here. We're spending time really looking at what are those, the clear white space. We've got one large opportunity we're doing now. They are as happy of a customer as you could have in the United States. They don't use us internationally. They use somebody else. We're about to rip and replace it, but, like, we probably didn't even appreciate and understand that we had that opportunity till really the end of last year.
So we're doing a lot more work trying to figure that out, where those opportunities are that you can tell that BlackLine. Sorry, I gave you the example of Japan before. We're spending a ton of time and effort in Japan telling the stories of where we're having success in the U.S. subsidiaries, the Japanese subsidiaries. I was on the phone with the CFO a week ago Friday from a large Japanese company. Happened to live like 15 minutes from me. We didn't even know one another, but we were talking about how do you go and convince the parent that this is what they need to do and what does that entail? Then we sent our Intercompany leader. He went over to go talk to them, and that looks like it's very promising for what we're trying to do. And then there's just greenfields.
We know, listen, we serve, I think it's nine of the top 10 largest oil and gas majors in the world. We know who the 10th one is. We just went for the Orals. When we walked in and said, "We got the other nine," you think that gives you credibility? You, you can be certain that it does, right? There's no doubt. And so we start to tell those stories of the who's who because big companies, one of the things you have to find is they often want a safe choice. So when I was working in Deloitte and we would lose a strategy project to McKinsey, often people would say, "Well, I can't get fired for hiring McKinsey to do strategy." It's kinda like years ago when you would hire IBM for your technology. There's something about being, "Well, all the others are doing that.
Why wouldn't we go with that same choice? We're not interested in being the guinea pig for somebody else," and so our customer roster helps us not only in the enterprise space with that, but then for those mid-market companies that have that same aspiration of where they wanna get to, and they go, "Well, if that's what the big boys are doing, take me on that journey 'cause that's where I wanna go," so you'll see from the pillar leaders all the things we're trying to do here. You get the idea of what we're doing from industry, from trying to sell more. There's certainly much more we're doing around the marketing specifically, and you'll see more. I think our new website was launched this morning with any luck. Hopefully, I haven't had a chance to look, but we put the new website up.
Again, much more through industry. You'll see much more of that. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is drive much more collaboration between and amongst the people that are in the pillars and the sales and industry teams. Now, if you take it a little bit deeper, and again, you sorta start to see some of the stories here, all this morning and then this afternoon, if you walked in some of the, the breakout rooms, you could see the industry groups getting together, and what they will tell you and what they care about is the chance to talk to their peers. The community of what BlackLine is about and the chance to share those stories and those experiences are what matter. Again, accounting is not intellectual property, right?
So these customers are not uncomfortable at all with being in the room and engaging in dialoguing with each other. Matt Humphries ran an aerospace and defense conference for us. I guess it was maybe two months ago. It was unbelievable because if you took the top 10 aerospace and defense companies in the world, they were all participating in that conversation and sharing as if they were all on the same team on a coffee break. Really cool stuff. You know, if for those of you who know anything about New Jersey, very well known for pharmaceuticals, we go right up and down Route 202 and 206 from one pharma company to the next to the next, all big pharma right in a row. And you know what they wanna know? What are the guys in the next door building doing?
And then how can we connect it? And those are the kinds of things that we're trying to drive. Now, my background when I was working at Deloitte from an industry perspective was financial services, but in particular, it was insurance. And so now what you're seeing us start to do is go to a level of not just at the insurance industry, but now what do they do in the life insurance industry? What's important to the health insurance industry? What could we do in the reinsurance industry, the property and casualty industry? How do you think about agents and brokers? See a bunch of them around here. And that, again, is what we're trying to do is get to those that level so our customers get that much more comfort and share those stories of what the art of the possible is. Now, we're still early in this.
We've got a lot of work to do, but it's super exciting 'cause it's changing the win rate. It's changing the outcome. So when you combine, again, that domain expertise with that industry expertise and a world-class partner team, whether it's, you know, some combination of BlackLine and a partner, it's unbelievable and super powerful for our customers. Now, one new industry that we're going into is the largest industry in the world in any country in the world, and that's the government, and so for the last 18 months or so, we have done a deep study with several of our partners. We've been talking to a bunch of the right agencies about how we enter into this SLED market space. Now, this is a great place for us to be.
Now, for those of you who've ever done any work in the government space, it's interesting because efficiency is not what they care about. They don't. Maybe after the election, that might change with the, what do you call these new guys, the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. So maybe the DOGE guys are gonna drive efficiency now, but the reality is that's not what mattered to government agencies. All they wanted to do was be able to free up costs from third-party independent consultants so they could use that elsewhere where they wanted. Those conversations have really been very interesting in the last couple of months for us as government is starting to step on the accelerator. Now, I'm talking the federal government in particular of thinking about ways that BlackLine is useful and usable.
And by the way, there's not much that we need to do to change the product to work in the government space. And so there's tons of opportunity there. We've got lots of interest from agencies. Those that you were listening closely, I would've shared earlier in the year, we won our first sort of agency, TVA. We have more to share, I'm sure, in 2025, but the whole idea is those agencies are committed to sorta figuring out what they might be able to do to use a solution like BlackLine 'cause they're using Excel and they're using other things that you don't even wanna know, because that's just been the way business has been conducted. So we're working smartly with our partners, the resellers, and we have a big relationship with Google Cloud in the federal government space that we're beginning to exploit.
As I said again, it's the largest market in every country in the world. So we're just gonna go after that place by place by place. There's other parts of the world where we already have some level of a government practice, but what we need to have in the United States is that IL certification, FedRAMP. So we're gonna start with IL2 for 2025 and IL4 for 2026. In fact, one of my federal leader, I think, might be in the room here next week. She's got a two weeks from now, she's got a whole meeting with one of the big Department of Defense agencies recognizing things will take long to transact, but that's what we're trying to do is get into that space in a big way. By extension, it then works into the SLED space.
Now, everybody that knows the term SLED, we're probably gonna stop at the S&L primarily, although we did have Gonzaga University on stage yesterday, but state and local, and when we talk about state, we're talking about the big states and the big local municipalities, so think of your LAs, your San Franciscos, Chicagos, New Yorks. That's really where we wanna go. It's important, by the way, because many of these state agencies now are beginning to move to some level of FedRAMP certification, so if you're not FedRAMP certified, they're gonna have StateRAMP, so you have a choice. You can try to build it state by state, or you can build it at federal and then get the waiver, if you will, to go work in the state environment, so that's what we're looking to do as we move into this particular market.
I know we've got a lot of questions about pricing, and a couple things that are really important for what the leadership team is trying to do. We wanna make it easier to do business with BlackLine. That's ultimately what we're trying to accomplish. So we've got a whole effort going on right now to revamp how we do contracting so it doesn't always get tied up with the lawyers going back and forth, but actually puts it in the hands of our account reps in the field. We wanna make sure that we have fewer handoffs as we go through the whole process of doing business.
We wanna make sure we begin to bundle more of our solutions because if you're committed to the journey, then we know that by giving you a more complete pra project or product, excuse me, it will, it will have an impact. We wanna have clearer and cleaner pricing. We are moving away from a user concept. So the things that we're thinking about from a how to price going forward, and we'll have sorta the launch of this in 2025. We used a great firm, Simon-Kucher, to help us over the past year to think about where to get to. But there's four things that are gonna drive how we think about pricing going forward. It's the level of transactions. It's the revenue of a company. It's the number of ERPs and the number of entities. So think of it as TREE.
That was my own acronym I made up this morning 'cause I wanted to make sure I could remember all four. But that's what's gonna really drive for what we're trying to do. And we know from basically the work we've tested this past year with our customers that they like it. They understand it's simpler. It's cleaner. We're not gonna be in the game anymore of, "Well, okay, you know, we create more efficiency from what we do." Therese, when she talks, it always hurts my feelings just a little bit. She says, "Well, if there's 20,000 accountants, I wanna get rid of 19,900 of them." Well, being an accountant doesn't make me feel particularly good, but in other words, for accountant, it's user. And so the better that our customers use BlackLine, the perverse benefit is the number of users come down.
And so we're trying to get away from that into a model that sorta deals with, as a company grows, we can be more successful with them. So our success is tied to their success. As artificial intelligence and other things start to take place, again, users may come down because machines may start making decisions, our pricing won't be tied to that. It'll be tied to the transactions. If you think about it that way, it'll be tied to the revenue. And so our reps should be able to very clearly, almost, you know, sorta go down one column and across and figure out what the right pricing is for us, our customer, as we go forward. Again, what we're really trying to do is make it easier and align our success to the customer's success, outcomes-based again. That's what we're really trying to accomplish.
Now, there's a lot on here about, you know, partners, and you've heard a lot from me about this. I believe this is one of the most important things that BlackLine has been trying to do. Now, you might say, you know, "Why is that?" Well, the most important part I wanna talk to you on this page is the global strategic alliances, the people that do the integration. And today, you're seeing it and you're hearing it, you heard it this morning, we now have two buyers in many situations, the CFO and the CIO.
As we talked, Therese and I were talking to Christian Klein from SAP, I guess it's a month or two ago, and we were talking about the challenge we have is all of his people are good at talking to a CIO, and our people are good at talking to a CFO. But our people are not nearly as comfortable going in to talk to a CIO, and his people are certainly not as comfortable going in to talk to a CIO. But what those SIs are great at is they have the relationships with both. They have the brand permission. They have the track record. They have an understanding. They truly understand 'cause they're the ones typically that architect the digital finance transformation with the customer. And so that's why we have been doubling down and tripling down on these relationships.
It's a reason we cut so many of them out because we need to be important to them. If we're not important, you know, it doesn't matter. We'll just get lost in the shuffle, and so that's what we've been doing is trying to really focus on these folks because they can do something that candidly we can't do on our own. This relationship, if you talk to our partners, hopefully you will tonight or tomorrow, whenever you see them, they'll tell you, right? It's been great to be in the room with BlackLine creating the product, creating the product, telling us how what, what matters, not from a company perspective, but from an industry perspective. They're helping us figure out where the right customers are, who are right for using BlackLine in a way. So again, we're being smarter about where we choose to go.
The amount of training that's gone on, them to us and us to them. I'll give you an example of something I thought was really cool. One of our newer partners, but a household name, last year they had 10 people certified on BlackLine. I met with the leader last month. She now has 130 people certified in BlackLine over the course of the year and looking to keep growing. Every one of our major partners does not have enough BlackLine resource today. That, to me, is really good because it shows what they're trying to do and the success that they're having and their belief, and it becomes the flywheel that Mark Partin talks to us all the time about.
The other thing, when you look, and we've looked hard at it, if BlackLine does an implementation by itself, our track record isn't as good as some of our partners. And why? Because we tend to somewhat focus and understand the product, but we're not as good at the change management. And to drive successful transformation, the outcomes that was in the quote from Rooney this morning is you gotta get the outcomes. And so partnering with our partners definitely proves that when you bring the two together, the results are significantly better. And then there's things we're just doing from a marketing perspective. You know, there's two of our customers, I might've said this on the earnings call, two of our partners, they did two webinars last month. They had 13,000 people listening to why BlackLine in some way, shape, or form. That's pretty compelling.
Didn't cost us anything. We just showed up and, you know, sorta participated, but didn't take much work whatsoever. And so the other thing that is important with this is all of these big SIs have deep, impactful relationships, not with SAP only, but with Oracle and with Workday and Dynamics and all the others. And so we're working with them to figure out our ways that we can be critical, critically important, and certainly have mind share from the teams that do the Oracle implementations, the team that do the Workday implementations. Workday, as an example, has a great financial services business. You'll see a number of prospects here who run on Workday that are here evaluating BlackLine because of the art of the possible, the potential. So yes, we still have a deep and special relationship with SAP, but they're a third of the market.
That means there's 2/3 of the market that we still have to figure out how we go sell and support and work with, and that's why those SIs are important, so here's some of the information that we would just share: pretty remarkable growth in how our partners are helping us, particularly in the enterprise space. About 90% of the business that come from these partners come from what Therese and I affectionately call the CEO dozen, so there's 13 of them. It's like going to the baker and getting one extra one, but this is the group that is driving so much more, and they are invigorated and excited. We have real contracts between each other about what they can expect from BlackLine and what we expect in return, and you could see what's happening from the way outcomes are beginning to shape.
I'm not gonna go through all the numbers, but plus, plus, plus, plus, plus is a good sign. That's what we're gonna keep driving as we move forward. Again, it's interesting we have to understand about partners. They are only as good as their last project. That's the risk always in consulting. You screw it up, there's a chance you're going to the penalty box or you get cut from the team. So one of the things that they will tell you that they love about working with BlackLine is sorta the reliability of what we provide. It's the innovation of where things are going. It's the communication. It's the training. It's the support that when something goes wrong, because guess what? On every big, large transformation and every mid-sized transformation, something always goes wrong. There's no such thing as a project that goes perfect.
But what they love is when the alarm bells go off. BlackLine is there with them on the front line trying to figure out how do we make this right for our customers so that they can have the success that we want. Again, outcomes-based, we wanna make sure our customers achieve. So now let me talk about, you know, SAP, as you know, a big critical partnership for us. It's our biggest relationship. It's our broadest in so many ways, our, our most important. You've had, we've had lots of success. You know, we have 1,400 customers that run on SAP today. 400 of them are Solex customers that just came in in the last six years or so. And you could see all the numbers that are there from a market perspective. You can see where SAP's footprint is.
We've taken this, you know, at a level of detail that we can't quite share with you, but mapped where SAP is, their customers, where our customers are, and then what is sorta the opportunity for us to move forward. But importantly, what you wanna look at is the bottom of the chart, and you can see what's happened over the last few quarters. One of the things that's been amazing about our relationship with SAP and how it's gotten better is how quickly we now can get product through their system. They understand the quality of what BlackLine is doing. And so our FRA solution, which they for some reason call FRO, but it got through the process in remarkable amount of time. What we've been able to do with Intercompany again, sorta remarkable amount of time.
What you see is that this relationship in so many ways is getting that much more powerful. I think, you know, sometimes you might think, "Well, I'm the bigger player, and I built something, so it's gotta be the best." I think what Christian, to a credit for his team and their understanding, they don't have to build everything themselves. They can partner in ways that makes everything that much stronger. That's the thing that they've been communicating and committing to us. We're looking at that ability to be effective through the way to combine SAP expertise and BlackLine expertise to connect with our partners to the CIO and the CFO. That's really what we're looking at here. Now, taking that to a level of depth even more 'cause this is where you guys all ask the questions.
When's the tailwind coming from SAP? And I think the last time I sorta described it last year was like there was no wind blowing one way, and this year it feels a little bit like a gentle breeze. But the winds are coming. It's gonna have to, right? You look at how many customers they still have on-prem that they're trying to move to the cloud. You think about what they're trying to do with their mid-market business, which I'm very excited about 'cause it's the first time they really have a solution that sorta fits for what I would call our ideal customer profile and their ideal customer profile. So there's a lot of potential that's there. And you could see the things that they're trying to do. But remember, SAP's got three strategic priorities. They all align super well with BlackLine.
They wanna move to the cloud, right? They want to be more relevant and more important in AI, and they wanna get back into the office of the CFO. Some of you may, if you have not run into yet Christian Hecker. Christian and I have now spent more time together than I care to admit, but he's sorta running their office of the CFO program. I think that's great 'cause he's dedicated. We're meeting with his teams all around the world to try to drive things that we can do together in the marketplace 'cause that's the mandate from their CEO. We need to be better in the office of the CFO, figure out how BlackLine and SAP can go do that together. So what we're trying to do is really drive that.
One of the things that, you know, if I'm being perfectly candid, this year was a tricky year with us with SAP. They had a very big reorganization. 8,000 people left the organization earlier in the year. That impacted us. We had a lot of things in flight, a lot of relationships that had been built, and they kinda went sideways or stopped for a period of time, and then our executive sponsor took the role to be a CEO at another company, and that problem actually became something that we've turned into lemonade from the lemon. So when the guy right now, Scott Russell, took the job to be the CEO of NICE, Therese and I, we called Christian right away, and he called back pretty quickly, and now we've had sorta this ongoing dialogue.
We've now been spending more time with their head of strategy, their global head of strategy, the global head of the office of the CFO program. We've been over meeting. So recently, I spent quite a bit of time with their CEO of EMEA. One of the opportunities that they really have been asking us about is the Kingdom of Saud . If you listen to SAP calls, they're talking about how much progress they're having in their marketplace. They've been asking us, "What can we do there?" And so that's something we're gonna do in 2025. We are really excited about the art of the possible with this relationship with SAP.
I hope this gives you a decent understanding of what we've been doing, why we've been doing it, give you a little better insight, shows you importantly where we're going, how we intend to get there, and hopefully we'll build confidence in what you're seeing around BlackLine and our team. I can tell you, I've been involved with BlackLine on the board for seven-plus years now. I've never been more bullish on the future of BlackLine than I am at this moment. I am really excited. You're now gonna meet some of our leaders that are really taking the business forward. So Chris Kiehn, our Head of Middle Market Practice, come on up, Chopper, as we all affectionately call him. And then you can introduce all of the pillar leaders. But thank you very much for your attention now.
nLook forward to catching up with you a little bit later and answering your questions and hopefully for a cocktail this evening. Chopper, my man.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
There you go.
Good. Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you, Owen. As Owen mentioned, I'm Chris Kiehn. I run our, excuse me, I head up our mid-market sales organization here at BlackLine. I'm gonna be joined today by Mike Polaha, our pillar leader from Financial Close Management, Cheri Hewlett, our pillar leader from the FRA, Andy Lilley, our pillar leader from I2C, and then Kivanc Pakel , our pillar leader from Intercompany .
I have the pleasure today to help guide our conversation around the pillar strategy, what it is, how it works, but more importantly, how these pillars work together, to serve a unified front, to sell our platform, our solutions, and with a digital finance transformation in mind. I work at these pillars every day. My teams are fortunate enough to get customer feedback to focus on innovation. It allows us to work more efficiently, allows us to be more productive, but also bring a level of domain expertise that enables success in our marketplace and helps us to ensure finance transformation with our customers. To kick us off, I'm gonna ask Mike Polaha to come up and speak about how our pillar strategy is organized, how we work together to drive business across all BlackLine segments. Mike.
All right.
Thank you very much, Chopper. Good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. So what I'll do today is provide a double-click into kind of the pillar motion, and then we'll pivot into each of our pillars to describe kind of our place in the market and the optimism that we have to deliver growth. So Owen had this slide up earlier. We have the four pillars. They're really focused around four discrete process areas. Our goals and those processes are tethered to BlackLine products and solutions. So these pillars tend to have different buying personas as well. So each of us are laser-focused within these individual areas. That said, we are likewise then acting as Owen described as a process COO. And everything that we do at BlackLine, I think starting with Therese's point of view is outside in customer-focused, market-focused.
So how do we live into this role, this expectation? And it really starts with the upper part, that you see on this slide. Owen mentioned it, that we bring our domain expertise into our pre-sales and customer interactions, making sure that they're aware of the fact that we've walked in their shoes, we've worked through these problems, and we have insight and input as to how we can solve them. I think that really provides additional comfort to our sales teams. And I think as we look at kind of the complexity and the solution architectural challenges of many in our customer base, right? They're trying to drive digital finance transformation. They're trying to set up new operating models, thinking about where to place those services, how to think about sequencing.
So, together, as Owen mentioned, with our pillar leads and our partner network, we're really focused on how do we position ourselves to deliver value based on experience, based on what we've learned in the market. Incumbent upon that as well is the focusing around industry and industry-focused. Together with our partners in our customer interactions, learning in our targeted industries, what does a great end-to-end solution look like? How do we bring it to life? How do we inculcate then back into our product and technology roadmap, which you see in the bottom right gold box? That focus on customer solution architecture, domain expertise, value articulation and creation becomes ever important 'cause we're really about the delivery of outcomes, and that's critical to our customer success.
So as we're out and we're active in the market, we're also making sure with our sales leadership that we're identifying the right ideal customer profile. Where do these solutions best fit? Where might they best provide the most value? How to logically prioritize and go after the opportunities in front of us. On the bottom left, I think as part of that motion, as we're pulled into the market and trying to leverage our background and experience, we're also assessing how our marketing messaging is landing, what's resonating with the customers, how are they reacting to how we're positioning our solutions. And likewise, we derive a lot of competitive intelligence through those interactions.
At the end of the day, those three areas, the being in the market from a domain and a solution architecture, understanding the messaging, we bring that back into the operations. That's really the operational part of our role, to help work with our product and technology on a customer-centric roadmap. What should we do when, where's the value for both our customer base and therefore BlackLine, the go-to-market as I described, and as well as on the customer side of it, the implementation and adoption strategies. Where do we need to optimize an approach to implementation? What is working in terms of the adoption that we're looking to drive to help them on their digital finance transformation goals? Now, as we do that, it's incumbent that we do not work in silos, right?
That's, that's not good because, as Therese mentioned, our winning aspiration is to inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation. And we do that with an end-to-end process orientation at the end of the day. So despite we have four pillars, we go to market in a transformative way. All four of us work with our sales team to ensure that this notion is being articulated, and we represent the power, the integrated power of the BlackLine application layer to make sure that that aperture is understood and we are the best partner to drive digital finance transformation at scale. Therese articulated in the middle, and you heard from Charlie and Jeremy as well, all of this kind of integrated end-to-end orientation is empowered by the Studio 360 platform. All right. That allows us to work across these process areas in a leverageable, powerful, and ubiquitous manner.
What I'm gonna do now is pivot to my area of responsibility, which is the Financial Close pillar. Owen talked about the total addressable market. I'm not gonna really spend much time there, but nonetheless, I do wanna pick up a little bit on his theme that this is coveted real estate. I think from experience, I've lived the fact that you need to get your foundational data correct. And in Financial Close, our solutions help in conjunction with the ERP to ensure that you're getting timely, accurate, complete, and reliable actual results. This notion, I think, of data as currency is really starting to take hold because you can't really adopt the downstream predictive elements if you do not have trusted actuals. We're playing in a market where we are sequentially significant.
Owen talked as well about part of our responsibility is to bring the domain expertise to the market, to be able to talk to the CFO down to the end user. And I think we have that in Financial Close, in spades, in terms of over the years what we've been able to do to bring what I'll call the unicorn personas into BlackLine that have worked in the function, have had to live through the problems, have applied our technology at scale to solve those problems. I'm a good example of that. I'm a former customer, former CFO in a Fortune 50 company, had to drive digital finance transformation, use BlackLine with over 5,000 users in the Financial Close space. So I get pulled in to talk to prospects and to customers as to how we did that. Where did we drive value?
Where did we unlock value? How did we build the business case? How did we tether it to the broader strategy? So that's the type of market interaction as pillar leads that we're involved in. Within Financial Close from a market position point of view is we have amazing competitive differentiation, right? We are clearly the market leader. Our solutions in this space work in an integrated manner. It is unmatched in terms of what we can do here. And that, I think, is manifested in the enviable customer roster that we ultimately possess. So the breadth and depth of the application layer is outstanding, and we have a great base against which we continue to expand. On the platform side, that platform, I think, is going to be a powerful gateway for us.
At the application layer, as I said, it's unbelievable application, but now to be able to data integrate in a differentiated way, orchestrate, control, visualize is really going to be a great tailwind for us. And it really is, I think, positioning us. We'll continue to position us as the market leader. As I look at the pillar and the business, confident that we can really deliver growth and a couple of tailwinds and catalysts that we foresee. One, Owen talked a little bit about SAP. Now, it's clear there's an ERP movement, investment to the cloud supercycle. ERP has been on the docket for years, but SAP is really at the forefront, you know, pushing that forward, with customers to move by 2028. So we have great referenceable experience in terms of how we accretively deliver value in conjunction with an ERP program. It doesn't have to be SAP.
It's consistent in terms of how we add value, but the real tailwind is coming from that SAP push. Our ability to match and cleanse data, to create quick wins, low risk, quicker implementations as part of a broader ERP program really sets the program up for success. It ensures that good, clean data is moving into that pristine ERP ecosystem. So, as Owen mentioned, we're continuing to work with SAP on that particular message and that play in the market. The accelerating product innovation continues to be, in my pillar, a real cause for optimistic growth. I think it's really allowing us to reposition the platform into our base. If some of their efforts have stalled, this type of innovation really is a catalyzing event. We can talk about how we're inculcating AI into our solutions.
Our Journal Risk Analyzer is really having a great impact to reposition and re-energize our market-leading journal entry management solution. So we're really, really excited, as we work our way forward. This industry-specific, orientation and momentum, it's, it's very real. It's very evident. I had breakfast in the life sciences portion given my particular background, but it's really starting to spawn that customer-driven innovation even at a, at an accelerated pace 'cause we're able now to understand some of the nuanced use cases against which we can apply, our developmental power. So a couple of examples. Charlie talked on the main stage with the high-frequency reconciliation. Super excited about that, what it will do for both banking, financial services, and retail.
And likewise, spawning from our oil and gas industry focus is a use case around inventory reconciliation, vendor-managed inventory, which is tangential to our solution where we're now pivoting in concept and moving from dollars to units. And what it serves to do is to really unlock opportunity for us from a operational user point of view as well as additional matching and record input into the BlackLine ecosystem. At the end of it, from a growth driver point of view is, you know, platform depth and breadth, right? I think, as we go to market, Cheri and I have spent a lot of time on really, you know, how do we drive an integrated Record-to-Report transformation story. Now, elaborating that further with Kavanch and Intercompany .
But what we're able to do and what's resonating is the ability to ingest data one time and use it for multiple purposes to solve multiple problems within a company's ecosystem. In this particular example, we could bring it in, we could reconcile it, we could move it downstream where we could do flux analysis on that data. And it has all the relevant data lineage where you could click back. And as a Chief Accounting Officer or a CFO, that's very powerful to ingest data one time, solve multiple problems with it, and have the requisite data lineage. Chopper.
Thanks, Mike. So can we ask a follow-up question just with regards to your pillar specifically on Financial Close? You mentioned the close and consolidate approach, as it relates to our go-to-market process here. Can you talk a little bit about how that was formed, that innovation came about?
Yeah. No, it's a great question. I mean, really everything we do is with a customer mindset. So the FRA innovation came from Therese and Cheri and Charlie, and they understood that our customers were looking to take the next step with the data. It was logical. We already were ingesting the data for purpose A. Now we just need to expand and elaborate on our capabilities to solve for a different problem. I could tell you in my former company, Fortune 50, we were doing our flux analysis and commentary in an Excel spreadsheet hosted in an E-room, okay? And it was not done in an efficient and effective manner. So Therese and team spotted this opportunity, and that's a compelling message for any finance professional because the data now never needs to leave the ecosystem.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it, Michael. All right. So we're gonna continue on. So speaking of the cross-pillar alignment and strategy, I'm gonna bring Kivanc Pakel to the stage, and he's gonna cover off on our Inter company.
Thank you very much, Chris. Good afternoon. It's a great opportunity to be here with you. Okay. So Intercompany is still representing very large, mostly greenfield opportunity for BlackLine. So, Owen has already gave a couple of examples. Intercompany must be in the strategic agenda of every single CFO office where they are operating in the multinational environment. It is important, critical, because you can easily Google search multiple companies that you will find. If the CFO office is not paying enough attention in that space, then probably this subject is going to pull their attention forcefully. And most of the time, there's a huge reputation risk with those issues.
So most of the Intercompany problems are universal. And the unique point about Intercompany is a multi-person space. So, different people in the CFO office, whether tax, FP&A, controllers, accounting division, they are all involved. So what it means actually, it is one hand, it is a staggered operation that companies may not have a full visibility about who's doing what. On the other side, it is very essential, critical from a financial reporting perspective. Companies should have a scalable, solution on that one. And beyond the universal generic problems, there are some industry-specific problems. This is where we are focusing at BlackLine currently. I'm comfortable to say there is no problem challenged globally that we cannot address. But when it comes to industry, this is where we are focusing, as an example, biopharma, where they are concentrating their R&D cost versus where they are generating their profit.
Or when you look at the banking environment, how heavy the regulatory environment for them from Japan to North America, it is so obvious that they have some unique problems and they need some unique tailored solutions. This is, this is where we are helping them. So the pillars' roles in BlackLine helping our teams to talk to our customers and partners with the bandwidth from CFO office to operators in the accounting division. We can easily talk about the tax efficiency, tax footprint, compliance risk, audit risks with the CFO, CFO office. On the other side, we can comfortably talk to accounting operators or BPO, where they need some help to upload 10,000 journal entries in a month, like they are just looking for a process efficiency.
So the investment on the Intercompany definitely drives significant process improvement, eventually cost efficiency for the companies. BlackLine is the only and the best available solution where offers end-to-end solution to our customers from the accounting entry generation, to balance and resolve reconciliation of Intercompany transactions, or connection with the treasury applications. We can address any function, any type of solution related to Intercompany . So we can sell and deploy all three solutions in any sequence, or we can sell and implement just one of them by the project need per company's need. So the point, I think Mike was talking about that one too. So since Intercompany is an important element of the R2R taxonomy, that drives a great opportunity from BlackLine's perspective. The Intercompany might be the keystone of our commercial conversation with our prospective future customers.
We can easily pull Financial Close or consolidation into that space. This is the natural progress in the financial reporting and R2R space that we have a bunch of opportunities deals that either Financial Close initiated communication or Intercompany , but we are helping our customers collectively together. From a market perspective, global trade, even after COVID, like still increasing. Depending on the region and the industry, 50%-80% of the global trade is driven by Intercompany , Intercompany -related transactions. That means it will never go away. It is not avoidable. The customers, partners, they will continue to focus on that one, of course, together with our competition as well. What we do in Intercompany .
So what we do in Intercompany , that means it will never go away. It is not avoidable. The customers, partners, they will continue to focus on that one, of course, together with our competition as well. So what we do in Intercompany , Intercompany sounds like very internal, but actually this is number one most exposed data set to the tax authorities. They are constantly auditing, regulating, trying to find out more tax income through the Intercompany data set. So what we do here is the most granular level, sustainable, transparent, system, that we provide at the transactional level. We design, configure our solution per customer's need that helps them with tax audit always, to keep their position compliant and safe.
So, besides the industry space, like definitely there are key industries that in the Intercompany that we are focusing, but on the other side, Japan is a very critical market for us. Like I just finished my quite long road trip in Japan, and we have engaged with a lot of CFO office customers. So the need for our solution is quite obvious. And then I think we are getting an increasing demand from Japan always, for the last couple of years. So definitely we are addressing the market need over there. On top of that one, Europe, they have their own unique structure in terms of Intercompany needs. It's slightly different than North America when it comes to audit.
Definitely we are addressing their needs and solutions, and the increase is constantly increasing in the Intercompany space, either directly, and customers directly engaging with us or it's coming through partners. We are quite happy with that one. Obviously, when it comes to BlackLine, the brand reputation, the installed base is the key thing. So we have more than 4,000 customers. I think you have already seen the numbers, some metrics about our customer profile. So, we have great knowledge share at the platform level that we are finding our solutions collectively. There are things that we are learning from the Financial Close space or for our reporting space that we are trying to provide the most holistic and effective solution to our customers. Thank you, Chris.
Execllent. Thanks so much . Just again, a follow-up for you. We're seeing a lot of M&A and regulatory changes across the globe. How do you think this positions BlackLine and Intercompany to service those type of customers? Absolutely.
From a CFO office perspective, advanced integration in the M&A can be disastrous. Because the point here is, the CFO of his company would like to have the new acquisition up and running as fast as possible. They don't wanna deal with the accounting and the reporting problems. This is where Intercompany solution can easily help. And actually, we are already helping to our customers to set the standards, boundaries, and then integrate the new systems to each other in a most efficient way and fast. Helps our customers to see the benefit of their acquisition decisions quite fast.
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Now to round out the Record-to-Report process, I'm gonna bring out Cheri Hewlett to the stage. She's gonna discuss how FRA crosses pillars to drive end-to-end financial transformation across our customers. Cheri.
All right. Thank you. Good afternoon or morning, so happy to be here and speak to everybody about some very exciting news and innovation that we are driving throughout the market, and as you heard from my colleagues, our vision has always been to deliver best in class and then move forward, so as we look at the successes that we've been able to see and accomplish with our Financial Close operations, delivering best in class reconciliation, high-frequency reconciliation, supporting industry specific use cases, it makes natural extension to move downstream into the consolidation.
So when we look at the market need and what we've seen as we develop this expertise over the years of experience, we are looking at this vendor consolidation and for many different purposes. When we're looking at the push from IT to deliver a vendor consolidation, when we're looking at the business, keeping that data lineage, as Mike mentioned, we're able to deliver true transparency and connectivity across not just business data, but also bringing transparency and connectivity across the people that run these businesses. When we look at the pillar, one thing that we've been able to, and we, as mentioned, we work very closely together, we deliver deep domain experience, deep product experience, and deep experience with developing a plan for how to execute on finance transformation.
The play that we're looking and seeing within the mid-market is that there's a need for a wider solution to get started and give the office of the CFO directly CFO visibility into what's happening at the top. We've seen a shift in the buyer and who we're selling to when we're looking at mid-market organizations, as opposed to when we shift over and we look at enterprise and large organizations where they're looking for guidance on prioritization. They're starting deeper and expanding forward. Whether an organization is looking to start wider and go deeper into some of the depths of our, our solutions or start deeper and move forward with the, over 4,400 customers that we have, we are developing a natural extension to those processes.
Competitive differentiators, when we look at the market today, when we think of consolidations in the market, it's a top down and you have your ERP with a bottoms forward. When you look at the flow of that data, you also find in the middle a strong disconnect between entity and group teams. So as we've gone through and built this data layer and then extended that downstream, we've also developed that connection between processes.
And when we're looking at the connection of data, as I mentioned, we're also delivering the outputs of the processes that these large organizations where they have these teams that are operating in their local currencies and their local languages under their local reporting requirements, but then taking that information, that knowledge and the work that they're doing and handing that over to the reporting teams, to the group teams so that they can accurately report, go through disclosures and deliver timely insights. But when we talk about AI, we can't deliver strong, powerful AI, and predict what's gonna happen if we didn't know the trends of what already happened.
And so as we continue to follow forward, you'll hear the movements that we're making as we're going into delivering the office of the CFO meaningful insights that they can rely on and not worry about false positives getting returned back because of the lack of data. So tailwinds for us, and as we've gone through and focused on really deepening the strengths of our offerings, and that has been through our pre-consolidation, when we initially launched FRA as a solution, as Mike mentioned, and I've worked with tons of organizations, big, small, doesn't matter the size, they are operating in Excel for this pre-close process. And it's not a pre-close process, it's a post-close process.
What we've been able to deliver is taking data at the time of business and delivering that insight so that they can start these processes sooner, shifting the pre-close processes to pre-close and delivering a connection between these disconnected businesses. The reason it's in Excel is because the ERP lives over here and the accounting teams and the local teams live over here and the reporting teams live over here in a separate consolidation system, and none of them connect together. So there was a gap that we fulfilled in that middle space. As we continue to develop enhancements that support complex ownership that deliver true consolidation capabilities throughout the complexities that our larger organizations need, we are working closely with our partners in that co-development. We're working closely with our customers to get instant feedback as we're going through because we don't wanna just deliver consolidations.
We wanna deliver a transforming journey that allows them to do a bottoms-up consolidation that no longer I have to do consolidation runs and wait for time to until I get my insights. I want information today, and I want it fast, and I want it to be good data, so we are transforming the space of how we even think about consolidation.
When we look at the cross-pillar opportunities, as we've mentioned here, the integration and the partnership with Snowflake, strengthening our data at its core, our Financial Close and the strength that we have of delivering best in class Financial Close so that we know our accounting teams and our entity teams are actually in our platform, working closely to modify our solutions as the customer needs, giving them a space to start where they need to start, but giving them expansion opportunities to go deeper, go further, go backwards, and proactively address all of their processes and delivering, meeting the demand. When we launched FRA, it was one of our largest responses that we've seen to a solution in a very long time.
And we are meeting that demand by working, continuing to work with our customers, taking that feedback, continuing to address the gaps in the market. And we will continue to drive this forward as we continue to innovate through the Record-to-Report space. Thank you.
Excellent. So just one more follow-up question for you. Just since we asked Mike about it earlier and you mentioned it a little bit here with the close and consolidation, can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits some of our customers have had? I know it's near and dear to me in the mid-market space, but what are some of the benefits they've seen from close and consolidation?
So, super excited. We heard on stage yesterday, Gonzaga University, who's been one of our early adopters for AI as well. Where they were able to take and not only get a full end-to-end solution to support their close and consolidation, but then because of the data that lived inside of BlackLine, we were able to use AI to generate their CFO letter. So when we look at the power of data and the transformation of giving solutions that can support the end-to-end, it's very transformative.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Cheri.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. Okay. Just to recap so far, you've heard from our Financial Close pillar, our FRA pillar, Intercompany . And that kind of rounds out the Record-to-Report process. Now we're gonna talk a little bit about the next pillar, which is our inter, or excuse me, Invoice-to-Cash pillar. And I'm gonna ask Andy to come up here and join me. But what's important about this is this process sits upstream and flows into a record to report process, but it's also critical in our platform strategy and to expanding off of the CFO and their transformation duties. So with that, Andy, I'll give it over to you.
Thank you, Chopper. Yep. Appreciate it. So, hi, I'm Andy Lilley , and thank you, like my colleagues here, for the time to spend with you this afternoon. So I'm responsible for the Invoice-to-Cash pillars. Chris summarized upstream or Quote-to-Order , actually, the clean water flowing through into the R2R process running through. So our role is to be accurate, efficient, intelligent, and managing customers from the invoice creation to the cash applied, reconciled, and freeing up what's in the business.
I'd like to expand on that value proposition to our customers globally on what we're seeing in the Invoice-to-Cash space with you this afternoon. We remain excited by this $11 billion TAM and increased focus of the analysts, of BlackLine, of our partners, and of CFOs in this still underserved market. The economic factors are driving a lot of the market need that we're seeing. While we're not back to where we were three years ago on things like interest rates and also trade changing trading relationships between buyers and sellers, it's increased the focus of the CFOs and global process owners in this area. We, as BlackLine, have continued to deepen our expertise internally to ensure that we can inspire, power, and guide that transformation of our customers in their journey to success.
We're seeing that through our partner relationships where we've expanded beyond the R2R practices within those organizations into the practices that are working with our customers in this area. So while BlackLine can't claim to have created the nvoice-to-cash space like we did for Financial Close, we're well placed to differentiate ourselves in this marketplace with our breadth of offering to the office of the CFO, with our global footprint as an organization to deliver, to serve our customers, and ultimately deliver on those outcomes and the success of those businesses.
And finally, and maybe the thing that I'm most excited about is our investment in innovation, not only in the Invoice-to-Cash pillar, but with Studio360, brings our applications closer together for us, for our customers, and makes it easier for them to deploy, easier for them to achieve success, and easier for our users, whether they reside within our application, within the platform, or within the downstream processes and the success that we've been talking about throughout these presentations today. Just stepping on a little bit and following in the same vein as my colleagues here, we're seeing a number of tailwinds and growth levers in this space. As you'll recall, maybe from the last earnings calls, we're seeing growth and interest in our products across the portfolio in our strategic products.
But we've still got more that we can do to achieve that success in Invoice-to-Cash. So let me expand a little on some of those tailwinds that we're seeing in the market. So I mentioned it a little bit earlier, the economy. We can't not talk about the economy. This hasn't gone away. It's driving the market for us. And while we've seen stabilization of those interest rates, we don't see a return to where we were in 2020, 2015, and the years that we've enjoyed that. And that is driving the focus of CFOs. And dare I say, has removed some of the complacency from businesses, from CFOs, to focus on their cash flow as the lifeblood of their business. I met with a customer yesterday, for a coffee. It's an existing R2R customer that we're talking about Invoice-to-Cash to.
The number one focus for that organization's CFO is cash flow into the business, and these are the stories where we add value. These are the stories where we can really focus in and be consultative with our customers as to how they're gonna achieve that, that agenda. That's driving into the digital transformation agenda. The first point is really important for organizations and when they think about that transformation that we've been talking about. It's making onto the agenda, and we're seeing both our partners and directly inbound to BlackLine more requests, more RFPs around this space, or it's part of the larger global transformation that they're trying to drive. Organizations need to reduce cost of processing, drive the efficiency that we're talking about, but whilst increasing their cash flow, their collection of accounts receivable dollars, and accessing cash that's tied up on their balance sheet. The gorvening's starting.
From a platform point of view, with both of these sets, CIOs, you've heard it quite a few times today, CIOs are becoming more focused on their vendor relationships, partnering with the CFO, with the CIO together, as they do within BlackLine as well, to look at their technology landscape, their vendors, and rationalize who they partner with, who they trust to look after their data, who they trust to look after their business processes and the success of these transformations, and we look at our extensive installed base as to how we expand our footprint with them, and then finally, with the ongoing regulation changes around electronic invoicing around the world, the acquisition that we made a year ago that we announced at last year's Beyond the Black, actually, to move us and to accelerate our roadmap to include electronic invoicing, EIPP in our platform.
What we're seeing is this is another inflection point for organizations to look at their Invoice-to-Cash process, not only from the CFO and the cash flow point of view, but also from the regulation and delivery of invoices to the governments and to the taxation side of things. As you can see from this last illustration, we're still, the world is still early in the cycle for countries adopting this, and we're really at the beginning of this becoming real. These standards are starting to see organizations include in the RFI and the RFP process, not only Cash Application collections, credit and risk, disputes and deductions, but EIPP as an important part of their transformation and the journey that they're on. Thank you for your time. With that, I'll hand you back to Chris.
Actually, we got one more question for you. I knew you would. All right. Well, you know, we gotta keep you honest. So in the field, we're seeing a lot. You mentioned e-invoicing. We're seeing a lot of questions come up in RFPs for e-invoicing. And we know it's not just an ITC thing, and it spans Intercompany . Can you talk about the benefit of using BlackLine as a platform with those data, the same data and insights and how we can apply that to that use case?
Yeah. Absolutely. Great question. Thank you for that. So I guess two things that I'd say around that, that they're the same, whether it's Intercompany trade between organizations as part of the same family, or whether it be trading relationships between a traditional buyer and supplier, the same implications, the same legislation applies, and as much focus on either, maybe a little bit more focus on if it's an Intercompany to make sure that that's running through. So we're seeing it on both sides. We're seeing it combined in there. The beauty for us, as BlackLine and having that capability in-house and having that capability in our platform is we can join that together. So we work very closely, and a lot of what myself and my colleagues have talked about today is how we work in interacting terms. So myself, Kivanc, and the team, we have the functionality in the platform.
We can both leverage that functionality. We're not building that twice. And we can provide that to the same customers in the same way, giving them a consistent experience, whether it be traditional trade or Intercompany trade.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Excellent. Well, thanks, Andy, and thanks to all of you for listening. I'd like to give a special thanks to Andy, Kivanc, Cheri, and Michael for joining us today. This concludes the pillar portion of our discussion. We're gonna take a 10-minute break, and then we'll cover innovation across our platform and solution set. So thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The event is about to begin. Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The event is about to begin. Hello, everyone. Hopefully, you all had a good break and stretched your legs a little bit. I'm Jeremy Ung , Chief Technology Officer at BlackLine. I'm really excited to be here. Prior to BlackLine, I was at Apptio, leading technology for the cloud cost management s pace, their transition from single product to multi-product family, as well as their entry into FedRAMP for cloud cost management. Prior to that, I was at AWS as well as Microsoft, and I'm going to share with you a little bit about the scale that we have at BlackLine.
What we do here is so special from what you've heard from the prior presenters, but to put it into context in some numbers, we manage over 30 petabytes of data. That is data that is critical for AI workloads, for predictive intelligence, and for the machine learning models that we have, and we'll talk about further. We're also on a journey to the cloud, which I'll touch on as well. We're well on our way with over 80% of our customers migrated to date. But while we've been doing this, we've also been raising the bar for how we operate with over a 77% reduction in client incidents year over year. These are sustained investments in ensuring that we are modern, scalable, and supporting the kinds of activities and behaviors that our customers expect from a quality perspective.
We've also continued to do this with our APAC region build-out. Being able to serve these customers in the region of their choice, having data locality as well as timeliness of data and data sovereignty are critical in the increasing demands for these customers. And so APAC region allows us to serve them this way. But we've been busy also innovating, releasing over 144 capabilities last year alone, some of which you got to see earlier on the keynote presentation.
To do all this, we're guiding our development process and how we build our products with these principles. We want to ensure that our solutions are unified, comprehensive, flexible, and scalable. This is critical to ensure that we are the definitive platform at the office of the CFO. Today, we'll walk you through a couple of these key areas. We'll talk about how we are scaling the platform to capture new opportunities and growth, how we're leveraging PLG, or product-led growth, to also enable our users to more easily discover new capabilities for our products, and AI and its criticality in transforming workflows. We're going to be giving you a look at that as well. We'll touch on public sector, and then Charlie will come and talk about our innovations in the product front.
To go back to what Therese introduced earlier with the platform, I just want to go back to this because it's so critical to what we're doing and how we're setting the stage for the future of BlackLine's innovative potential. This platform is based on data. We announced a partnership with Snowflake. This partnership is really to enable scale. 30 PB of data, an amount we see growing year over year, is what this platform is going to enable us to do: capture this data and bring more data into the platform to power these workflows. These five key solutions, these five parts of our platform, are supercharging the applications that you see above. This is a fundamental shift in our thinking around products. This data in a central place is connecting all of them. It is where all the data across all these products resides.
This is really about agility. Having data centrally located gives us agility to build new products and solutions on top of this data, responding to the market more quickly. It also enables cross-sell, allowing us to connect our products more easily so new scenarios and use cases can be adopted. But data is foundationally important to have as clean and comprehensive as possible. This is kind of the power of Studio. This is where it's critical to talk about Studio Integrate. We have a robust ETL platform that allows you to bring in data from any source system, whether it's file-based, whether it's API-based, whether it's an ERP or multiple, whether the data is clean or messy. It can be brought into BlackLine in a centralized location. It can then be acted upon through orchestration or automation, which will then bring AI capabilities to the market around.
Also to be able to visualize these capabilities is critical. One thing to note about Blueprint, which I think Therese mentioned as well, is really around its power enabling our partners to create an ecosystem around this platform. These three key components are key pieces that partners will be able to extend with their own capabilities as well. Think of this as templates they can bring to the market as well, whether it's connectors, orchestration workflows, or dashboards. I think it's important to see how powerful this is that we've created a community around this platform as well. With Control, I think the last aspect there is really around how we're bringing data together that doesn't have a home. We are going to be that central hub for data across the office of the CFO and drive action through it through orchestration. More about data.
I think we touched on the fact that data is a new currency. Data is so fundamental to what we're doing here at BlackLine. So we talked about our data lake on Snowflake and the scale that enables. On top of the scale, it's really about also being able to engage with the stakeholders in the enterprise. Snowflake is already within many of the Fortune 100s and across many of the enterprises. It has great adoption within the CIO office. It's a trusted partner. Being on Snowflake allows us to easily integrate data, lowering the barrier to get the data into BlackLine, improving time to value. This is really about driving to those successful outcomes that I want to talk about earlier much more rapidly. The other piece is connectors. We have a robust library of connectors.
As we've built them out, we've also seen the desire for our partners to be able to bring connectors to market as well, to build on top of our platform so they can extend into systems that may be more specialized. Powering this all is APIs. We are API-first, and building APIs across our products allows for agility in terms of the extensibility and the speed at which we can develop software, but also enables partners and customers that have specific needs to customize our solutions to use these APIs to extend our capabilities as well. We've seen a lot of adoption of these APIs, which speaks to the power and the value of them. I mentioned operating with excellence earlier. With the scale at which we operate, it's important that we continuously raise the bar in the quality that we are able to bring to our customers.
The trust that they place on BlackLine, the security certifications we've talked about are world-class. Across SOC and ISO, our certifications are foundational in providing a level of security expected by the customers we serve. That's a building block for us. We are also looking to improve the way we operate in terms of completing our cloud migrations next year. I mentioned 80% migration of the cloud year to date. We're looking to complete this in 2025. Bringing all of our customers into the cloud creates a single platform from which we can innovate. This consolidated footprint on the cloud is about getting scale. Economies of scale from our cloud hosting, but also about being able to scale up and down our workloads. This is going to improve our cost to serve by leveraging the elasticity or cloud-native and other cloud-native services offered by our cloud providers.
We're also investing critically in improving our ability to detect customer issues before they happen. It is vital that we continue to raise the bar here, and we've made investments in observability to do this. Our observability has enabled us to bring that down, that 77% reduction in customer incidents and improve our MTTR. It's about this customer obsession that we have and customer centricity to be able to improve the quality here. So now we're going to talk a bit about AI. But to anchor everyone on AI, I think there's a natural hesitation from some of our users and uncertainty around AI and what that brings. Our strategy around AI is fundamentally that users are in control. They are in control of AI decision-making and outputs, and we'll always be able to weigh in or override any of the AI outputs they see from BlackLine.
It's about building trust with our users. But fundamentally, these technologies, AI is critical to actually transforming their space. So we want to build that comfort with them so they adopt these features as well, driving stickiness with these solutions. So what are we doing with AI? These are just a glimpse of some of the features we've released this year that are powered by AI. Some of the success stories from our customers speak volumes. Some of them who have adopted some of the summarization capabilities have saved over 18 hours a day adopting them alone. That's super powerful in terms of optimizing workflows and giving people time back. But what's next? So I really want to talk about how we're going to invest in the future with the data and the capabilities that we have. Our first key investment is about accelerating decision-making through agentic experiences.
I know agentic experiences are probably a hot topic that a lot of you have heard about at many of the conferences you've been at or other keynotes that you've seen. But we believe it's critical in this space as well. Agentic experiences are going to allow us to accelerate decision-making through embedded intelligence. This is really about taking things that you've seen really through ChatGPT or other large language models, but taking that next step further. Chat is not really sufficient to excite people around what the possibilities of AI. AI needs to drive action. This is where that accelerated decision-making comes in or agentic experience. So next year, we'll be building our decision engine. This is about leveraging the ability to put AI in workflows in Studio 360 Orchestrate.
Having AI capabilities in those workflows allows humans to be really just exception handlers, to have humans out of the loop when they don't need to be involved in decision-making or to gain greater efficiency or to set different bounds around some of the data sets they're going to be looking at. This is going to drive more efficiency in those workflows and also enable them to leverage AI in a safe and trusted way. The other key area I mentioned is 30 PB of data. This has really been useful for predictive intelligence. Predictive intelligence in terms of forecasting, which we've done with Cash Application forecasting or risk detection or anomaly detection in the Intercompany space, have been some of the ways we've leveraged this data to date. We have our own in-house machine learning models, which we've built on top of this data.
We've also leveraged best-of-breed third-party models as well. But we've used this data to be able to provide differentiated AI capabilities and models for our customers already. What we're doing in the future, though, is taking this further into different spaces. Our next key area of investment is around AI-driven matching. Last year alone, we matched 14.6 billion transactions. That's 14.6 billion that were automatically matched. But when unmatched was roughly 6 billion. That's a volume that people had to deal with, had to look at, had to review. So how do we use AI to drive better use of matching? We're using AI to help detect trends, to cluster things together, and suggest rules. This is going to accelerate getting to 100% match. We're really excited about this because this is a critical capability that, with the scale and data that BlackLine has, is truly differentiated.
To be able to get to this scale, you need the data to be able to define these models. The last piece is around visualization, so Therese talked about how critical it is to be able to visualize and share rich dashboards. Being able to explore data and be able to ask questions of data is important. Really, what people are looking for is to get to those actionable insights much more quickly. We believe AI can accelerate this through natural language exploration and visualization of the data. We've done this successfully today with Journal Risk Analyzer. These rich dashboards surface insights to our users that they otherwise would have had to comb through before or leave BlackLine to bring into another system. Now they can stay in BlackLine to get these insights.
With Studio 360 Visualize, we're going to extend it across all our products as well with that single pane of glass across that data lake we've foundationally built. This is going to give you those rich AI capabilities across all the data within BlackLine, and that's really exciting to us as it gets the actionability and the insights to our users more quickly, but all that data also needs to power the products, and one of the critical pieces is how we use this to drive product-led growth. Adoption of new capabilities, time to value are some critical areas that we've been addressing. We are investing in having a seamless user experience across all our products. This is going to connect them and allow new workflows or new use cases to be more easily adopted and discovered by our users without the need for as much enablement.
The other piece of this is self-service configuration. Once you have the data in one place, we are enabling that to be configured more easily by end users or partners. That self-service configuration accelerates time to value. It's about getting that successful story from our customers much more quickly and rapidly than before. I went and touched on public sector. We are making an investment in public sector to get FedRAMP certification. This is a journey I'm familiar with, doing this in the past for other cloud SaaS solutions. We are pursuing FedRAMP Moderate or IL2 first and using that as a stepping stone to IL4. We already, as I mentioned, have foundational building blocks with our security posture.
With our security posture and the controls we have in place, we already have the foundation to build our FedRAMP practice on top of and to bring our environment into the public sector's compliance posture that we need. This work largely represents the buildout of a new hosting region with tighter security controls, and we are doing this in a way that also benefits our commercial customers. We're going to be upleveling our commercial software as part of FedRAMP, which will bring better security across the board. We are doing this also on top of GCP. We have partnered with GCP to bring our solution there. We've also had other proven SaaS solutions that we've seen move on GCP to FedRAMP. I think that's exciting for us is that we were leveraging this partnership to really accelerate our journey there.
Now I'm going to welcome Charlie up to talk about our product innovations.
I'm coming. Thanks, Jeremy. All right. It is very bright. If you heard our keynote earlier, I've actually been at BlackLine 19 years. So there's a lot I could tell you about where we've been, but today I'm going to talk to you more about where we're going, and some of the pillars touched on these various areas, but I want to talk a little bit more about why we're doing some of the things that we're doing, so let's start with Financial Close. We've been a leader in this market since the beginning, and we have products with very mature capabilities, so how do we continue to extend our leadership and capture more of the addressable market, so we want to do this in a couple of ways. First, we want to scale up and out. We are seeing higher volumes of data, and our enterprise clients are as well.
So we want to support these higher volumes, and we want to take advantage of the new platform capabilities that Jeremy was just talking about. So we're tackling these things, for instance, with an initiative that we have called Big Data Matching so that we can properly scale and support these higher volumes. We're also, as Mike mentioned earlier, focusing on industry-specific use cases. This has been really interesting because it's almost like when we can go in and have our customers feel that they're seen, that they're known. It's almost like having a trusted playbook that we can come to them with these use cases where they know that we can support their way of doing business.
So high-frequency reconciliations is a great example of this because what we've often seen is when not only is there a need, but a requirement in these cases, we know that adoption will be successful. And then we also want to expand our geographical footprint into some key areas. Again, by looking at different industries, but also in different areas, we are noticing patterns in countries and how they do their financial operations. So we want to be able to take our products, again, with all these mature capabilities, and match them to the way that they're doing their business that best fits them. Account Analysis is a great example of this. For certain areas, countries that take more of a bottom-up approach to their reconciliations, Account Analysis would be a perfect match for them. We also, with that geographical footprint, want to focus on our partner strategy as well.
So speaking of partners, two key areas that we're focusing on Intercompany is both in partner extensibility and in deeper integration with Financial Close. So we know that with Intercompany it's inherently a complex process with lots of sprawl. So what we have seen to be the most successful because it requires so much change management is to have partners driving that change management. So we need to make sure, as Jeremy mentioned with self-service configuration, we want to accelerate initiatives that are promoting more extensibility and the ability to serve yourself during these complex implementations. We feel this will give the capability that the partners need, the flexibility they need to tackle very complex use cases. We want to continue to deepen and refine our Intercompany features because, as Kivanc said earlier, it's a largely untapped and greenfield market, and we want to maintain our first-mover advantage.
And then again, we want to extend integration into account recs and into journals so that we can unlock cross-sell and upsell opportunities into our very robust Financial Close customer base. Moving on to FRA, Financial Reporting Analytics. FRA continues to be a key differentiator for BlackLine. The idea of having these real-time insights, I think I heard of it recently as flash consolidation, which I thought sounded really impressive. That it's very appealing to our mid-market clients, and we're seeing an uptick in our enterprise clients as well. What's great about FRA is that, as Cheri said earlier, customers already have the data that's needed to fuel FRA. So what we found and have been finding is this significantly reduces the implementation barriers that you often see with other consolidation systems.
It's also been a great way that we've been able to introduce generative AI into financial reporting because it involves so many different teams who are going around doing the investigation, explaining the balances, understanding why the flux happened, and putting all this data at the account level into BlackLine. What we've been able to offer through generative AI is a way to automatically aggregate that data together and provide a summary at the financial statement level on behalf of the end user. So again, not having to rely on all the different teams to go in and do the investigation, it can happen automatically. So we want to continue to deepen our consolidation capabilities and these summarization capabilities because ultimately these serve as the outputs that turn into the inputs into the internal reporting capabilities that we are beginning to build within FRA.
We feel with these things, it will seal our leadership in the Record-to-Report space. Then Invoice-to-Cash. This year, we added EIPP capabilities into the Invoice-to-Cash solution, which is what allowed us to place on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Now we want to take efforts to shift right. How are we going to do that? First, we know that a streamlined user experience allows people to perform their work more efficiently. We are taking strides first through our Cash Application, through a big modernization effort. We recently put this into sandbox just a couple of weeks ago, and we are already seeing our existing customer base excited to be testing out these new workflows.
This effort will next extend into AR Management, and we'll sort of get a two-for-one in this case because as we modernize AR Management, we will also continue to deepen those capabilities as well. Within Invoice-to-Cash, it's been a great opportunity to embed AI-fueled insights into our AR Intelligence Center. So we've embedded machine learning into our existing Payment Forecaster, and in doing so, we are getting better predictions by up to 40%, which we think is very significant. So we are seeing this all as a prime opportunity to unify these five distinct processes into one platform solution for Invoice-to-Cash. If we combine that with our current global footprint, as well as, again, leverage that really strong Financial Close customer base, we are aiming to win the Invoice-to-Cash market.
To bring these investments to life, let me turn it over to Mark Partin and Patrick Villanova, who will provide you with a financial summary of the state of our business.
I can't figure the math out. I can't do it. I might need some help with that. But I'm Mark Partin. I'm BlackLine's CFO. I have been here 10 years. I am retiring soon. March will be my last month, so I'm not going to get sentimental up here and cry unless it'll make the stock price go up, in which case I wasn't said to do it, and then I'm going to be joined in a minute. Actually, Patrick is going to come up on stage because he's going to talk about the go-forward financial target model and our capital allocation strategy, and I'm thrilled that you guys got to meet the team today. We're really sort of loaded, locked and loaded, and ready to go with a great new team.
They've been doing a lot of hard work, a lot of investment, a time and effort over the past 18 months, and I know you can see the result of that. I think the opportunities that they've talked about in front of us are really exciting. I mean, as a CFO to see slides in their presentations that say tailwind is such a great feeling. I mean, enterprise software has been getting hit with any number of headwinds over the last two years. And so to have that kind of visibility and vantage point is really exciting. And that might be ERP modernization, which is in front of us.
That might be some of the new markets that we're entering, including the public sector, a real opportunity for us, or industry-specific opportunities, the way we differentiate and execute in the market, or even the maturity of our pillar and our product, right, really coming to life and at just really the right time, so these large thematic areas we believe are going to help drive this business and re-accelerate our growth, allow us to do that profitably and maintain and generate free cash flow moving forward, so I'm going to start, I think, with the confidence we have as a management team and as a company. When we talk about accelerating profitable growth, it almost always begins with our greatest assets, and that is our large customer base, 4,400 companies, and you've heard the names today, some of the greatest global brands in the world.
It also includes a large addressable TAM. It also includes, and the reason that I even got here to begin with is a beautiful, elegant business model, one that I think is one of the best on the street, particularly at our size. It's high recurring, high subscription, highly visible, high margin business, and it's a really great business model. And that's the platform or the building blocks for accelerating our growth rate back to our target model of 13%-16% from where we are at the moment. This will come through account expansion and upsell products into our base, new products, new innovation. This will come through new logo acquisitions to the ecosystem that we're building, including SAP. And this will come from our innovation and our innovation model. And as we grow and scale, we have visibility.
We have a path to continuing to drive efficiency and productivity in our business, whether that's enhanced cloud economics for greater gross margin, or whether that's a go-to-market sales motion that has really improved and will continue to accrue to our operating margin. And that's wrapped, of course, in a capital-light business model that will allow us to continue to proactively manage the balance sheet and support strong free cash flow. And we think that ultimately that's going to drive that long-term shareholder value. And so the story begins here, really, again, with our customer base. And Owen, and earlier in the main session, you've heard about this. This is 4,400 of some of the best companies in the world. It's 75% enterprise ARR. It's sticky. It's high recurring. And remember, these are companies that are trying to make a difference. They're invested in digital transformation.
They're trying to change their business in the office of the CFO. This is the basis or the foundation for everything that we're doing moving forward. From that base of operation, we have a large global TAM. Owen talked about this earlier. I'll just remind you, we still believe that it's early in the office of the CFO for digital transformation. Their willingness and ability to invest in systems and process change is where we are making our mark and where our leadership and our partner network will really help capture this market share moving forward. Within our own existing customer base, we talk about an embedded opportunity. This is the opportunity right in front of us. We're a $638 million ARR company with a $2 billion embedded white space within those customers.
The opportunity for us is, of course, to continue to upsell our strategic products and our solutions. Three times our existing ARR to sell these products and doing it with this pillar leadership group into our own existing customers is a great way to capture that opportunity. Now, as you can see, we have had some success since 2020. More adoption from 10% to 13%. Still a lot of work to do, but when it happens and when we do sell more products into customers, the proof is compelling. Customers with two pillars are two times the average ACV, and they're five points higher than the net revenue retention rate average. Similarly, three or more pillars, eight times the average ACV and 10 points higher net revenue retention rate. And of course, these are larger customers, higher renewal rate, and sticky. More to the point.
Over time, as we sell more products and they get larger and they work with us, we see great growth in some of the best cohorts in our business. Since our IPO, a 58% CAGR in customers over $1 million, 24% CAGR in customers spending $250,000 or more, and a 2x expansion in the average ARR per enterprise customer from 113 when we went public to 224 recently.
And so before I turn it over to Patrick, this is really Owen used the word earlier, flywheel. This is really how we think about our growth algorithm. Three areas of growth for us, beginning, of course, with the cross-sell and expansion, using our pillar model to sell strategic products and using our partner ecosystem. Second, new logo acquisition, using industry differentiation, more deeper into international markets and starting in the public sector.
And then last, really getting that innovation engine moving again has been great for us. That'll be a pull-through that'll help us sell and upsell strategic products. So let me turn it over to Patrick, who will talk about our financial targets and our capital structure.
All right. Thank you. Nice to meet everyone. Patrick Villanova, Chief Accounting Officer of BlackLine. Right before I got up on stage, Mark told me something that he never told me in nine years. He said, "Take your time closing." Never heard that before from him ever. So sorry. I had to start with and end with my last accounting joke. I know everybody's been listening very carefully for two and a half hours now about everything we're doing from a strategy perspective, where we're innovating, where we're investing. You have to be wondering, what does this all culminate in? What does this add up to?
To provide a little clarity in terms of everything we've been doing and where we're making our investments, this is our target model over the next three to five years: 13%-16% revenue growth, 85% gross margins, and an operating margin range of 26%-30%. These numbers are not CAGRs. This is where we expect the business to be operating in three to five years. This is the output of a sticky, growing, profitable business that generates significant free cash flow. Now, the question is, how do we get there? Before we talk about our growth bridge or our revenue bridge, it is important to reiterate some of the things that Mark said during his kickoff. Over the last couple of years, the industry has experienced a tough macro environment, the software industry specifically.
And we've seen that ourselves in terms of slowing growth rates, lower NRR, and slower deal volumes. And after years and years and years within the industry of investment and growth, over the last couple of years, we've seen a trend of a consolidation of vendors, of rationalization of products. And we've experienced that, and many companies in our sector have felt it. Well, during that time, though, as we've talked about, we've been revising our strategy. We've been strengthening our foundation, innovating, enhancing our platform. And what we see here is a path that we control, a path to 13%-16% revenue growth compared to the 10% guide provided for 2024. This is driven by a number of items that you see depicted on the left, building blocks, if you will.
From an account expansion standpoint, you heard all four pillar leaders speak earlier about the ability to cross-sell within our existing base. Additionally, Owen has talked quite a bit about the power of our partners, the power of SAP, and how we can continue to leverage those relationships to continue to sell more into what we already have. From a new logo acceleration standpoint, those two things still hold true. But as Jeremy brought up, we're also entering FedRAMP or the public sector, which represents a great opportunity from a new logo perspective. And then, as Owen pointed out, we have an industry strategy, something that we're already seeing the benefits of today by leveraging our institutional knowledge and using that to attract customers that also share similar, I guess, problems that they're trying to solve within their Financial Close in similar markets.
Then lastly, BlackLine Studio 360, something we're all very excited about, an innovative product that Therese talked about, and it presents a great opportunity from a platform perspective. Then finally, pricing. Pricing or packaging. That applies to both our account expansion growth model as well as our new logo growth model. All this will culminate in about 13%-16% growth. Now, there are some additional tailwinds that are out there. There's the ERP supercycle that is pending and coming up as many SAP customers that are on-prem move to the cloud. Then, of course, the macro environment, to use Owen's words, even if we get a little summer breeze instead of the headwinds, if you add all these things together, there is a path to 16% and even beyond with those two additional items. Then let's turn to margins, specifically gross margins.
Jeremy hit on the progress that we've made with the cloud. Over the last several years during the GCP migration, we've been incurring additional costs or redundant costs by having physical data centers that we're now retiring. We see those data centers being retired over the next several quarters and removing these costs. In addition to that, we also see an opportunity to increase partners in our support strategy to offshore and find lower-cost locations from a support standpoint and then improve our tooling in terms of how we serve our clients, customers. When you put all this together, what you end up with is a gross margin back to 85%, a margin that supports our overall profitability growth profile and free cash flow generation. Now, speaking of margins, let's talk about operating margin.
Now, our gross margin is still going to be our number one contributor to operating margin expansion, but it's not limited to that because all functional areas of the business will contribute to our expanding operating margin. For one, from a sales and marketing perspective, a more mature, more productive Salesforce that we continue to develop as we grow will continue to be more efficient as it generates higher growth. We're also working much more with partners from a leverage model perspective to make sure that we are allocating or working with partners in the right areas to minimize the cost to deliver and close deals. From a G&A perspective, we are making investments as we speak. With our new CIO, we're making several investments to drive more innovation in the back office, more automation, more scalability, and we're even evaluating some AI ideas as we speak.
All those put together will generate a more effective and efficient back office and a lower G&A rate as a percent of revenue. And then lastly, from an R&D perspective, several of the same initiatives that we're instituting from a gross margin perspective will have the similar benefit on our R&D spend. And while overall R&D spend as a percent of revenue should not decline by much, we are going to get much more efficiency and much more productivity by better tooling and more offshoring in lower-cost locations. So with regard to the expanding operating margin, what does this add up to? Well, it's also going to extend to more free cash flow generation. And we're achieving that through efficient working capital management, which we'll talk about in a moment. And then we have an investment strategy that is aligned to generate net interest income.
Now, I do want to highlight that in the short term here, because of our recent profitability, we will see an increasing tax burden in the short term and thereafter. So let's talk about our capital allocation strategy. We mentioned the expanding cash flow profile of this company. We have a very strong balance sheet. And by the end of the first quarter of 2025, we will be at a net cash position. That's largely a function of both our profitability as well as a couple of debt deals that we did over the past couple of years that were at very favorable terms. Our number one deployment of cash, though, capital will always be investing in this business, investing in our innovation, investing in our product, putting the money back into our own growth and our own ideas. That will always be the number one.
We still have sufficient capital thereafter to do tuck-in M&A, and we're going to retain that capital so that if there's an opportunity in the marketplace, we have the ability and agility to take advantage of that on a real-time basis. But with all that said, you may have seen this morning that there was a press release, and we were authorized to do a share repurchase program, $200 million over the next two years of share repurchases. And I think one thing that I really want to drive home on this slide, sometimes there's a belief that these three items are mutually exclusive, that if you're buying back shares, you're moving away from growth, or that you're doing M&A, you're no longer investing in organic business. Well, the model that you saw up there today contemplates all three.
We are going to continue to invest in this business and continue to innovate, and you've heard that with all the ideas you saw this morning. We're going to continue to keep our eyes open for strategic M&A that fits into what we do here, and taking both of those into account, we still intend to execute on a share repurchase plan on the next two years and return capital to shareholders, and before I close out, we think that the model that was described today lends itself to a positive trend in our share-based compensation framework. We believe that over the next three to five years, our share-based compensation expense as a % of revenue will trend downwards to about 11%-12%.
So as Mark and I discussed, you've seen this slide probably two or three times now throughout the presentation. We are in a very strong position right now, financially, strategically, all within the office of the CFO. I've had a very distinct and great opportunity this year to work with the management team. There are several new members of this management team that I got to know, and we worked together with the finance department and that team to put together this model. My fingerprints are all over it. And we expect to make more critical investments in the future in our business and see traction in a growth profile that's already taken root. So that being said, we're going to take a short break right now and bring our presenters back on stage for Q&A. Thank you.
L adies and gentlemen, please take a quick five-minute intermission. We'll be back shortly in the next five minutes.
All right. Well, welcome back. So we've got about 20, 25 minutes for open floor Q&A. What you'll have and you'll see is two mic runners on each side. So if you do have a question, please feel free to raise your hand. When you do raise your hand and you ask a question, please make sure you say your name and affirm your wish so those watching at home can pick you up. So with that being said, we've got our whole team here that you saw today, and we'll open the floor to questions.
Great. Steven Enders from Citi. Thanks for doing this, and I appreciate the presentation. It was great. Maybe just to start on agentic AI, I know you gave some stuff up there and some previews about what's coming, but can you help us think about the customer's willingness to adopt and maybe what that future looks like for you all? Thanks.
I'll start. All right. I'll start. Jeremy is more the expert, but I always have an opinion. Our customer base is, by definition, extraordinarily risk-averse. And so while they love the idea of AI in theory, it's going to be a journey to get them to where we think you can actually have incredible value. And so what we are doing is we are taking an approach around, we call it responsible AI, where we are embedding certain features. They are helpful, but they can be overridden. We are providing certain products like the Journal Risk Analyzer because currently, your auditors are taking the entire population of manual journals and running it through their own AI tools. So giving them a tool that they can use to highlight risks and anomalies is part of taking them on that journey to start to trust what we're doing with AI.
So specifically on Agentic AI, I think this is where that experience of having that trust built in is critical. We have capabilities like document summarization where you can override the outputs. This is how we see this as well with Agentic AI and the outputs of that, giving users control, the ability to build confidence in any outputs or decisions being made before the systems take place of those human-driven decisions. I think another thing to note is really, while our users have some trepidation, we are seeing a lot of pressure for AI adoption. People keep asking about what features have AI, how do we utilize AI? You're seeing that in terms of analysts and the types of things that they're doing in this space and asking about of other companies. It is critical that we are able to also invest in leveraging the vast data that we have to drive innovations with AI.
And those agentic experiences are taking what is really just the starting point, which we've seen with large language models, and taking that the next step further.
Next question.
Hey, everyone. Chris Quintero from Morgan Stanley. Thanks for such a great event here. I've got two questions. First, Owen, you mentioned improving win rates multiple times throughout. So I'm just curious, where are you seeing most of that? Is that coming across the board? Is it from more of the legacy vendors, more against the newer vendors? And then second question, for the new growth target, that 13%-16%, is the right takeaway that hitting that 30% is more on execution and based on what you have today? And then the 16% and above, that's more about some of these more tailwinds, ERP supercycle, macro again a little bit better. Thank you. Yeah.
So certainly, the second part of the question is we expect to be able to execute and get to at least the middle or the low end of that range, but if not even the middle. I keep a book near my bed that says, "Hope is not a strategy." And so all this team is focused on is really execute, execute, execute. And I think that that shows up each and every day for what we're trying to do. And hopefully, that came across in the presentations earlier. What was the first part of the question?
Win rates.
Oh, the win rates. Sorry. So you have to sort of break it apart by different categories. I think in the enterprise space, a lot of our wins are rip and replace. I think people are realizing and understanding what we have and recognize that we are the best solution by far. We are, I like to say, the first choice, best choice, safe choice, only choice, and so really, that's been where we've had a lot of success. In the mid-market, I think what we can see is if a customer is only going to sort of do recs and tasks, our win rate is just okay. When we're comfortable that that customer is really going to do recs and tasks and journals and Intercompany and matching, then our win rate goes way up, and so, again, for us, a lot of what we've been really trying to do is be much more thoughtful about where we go into the market.
It's a lot easier for us to say, "Thanks, but we're not the right solution for you," than spend a lot of time, cycle time pursuing something that doesn't make sense. So that's where you're starting to see the distinction in the win rates.
Great. Thanks. Dan Jester, BMO Capital Markets. So I wanted to go back to the growth question and the updated NRR of 109%. I think you just did that like 18 months ago, and when I look at the presentation, only 13% of the customer base has multiple pillars. We've got $1.4 billion of opportunity in the customer base to sell. Feels like 109% is very conservative, so maybe can you help me understand how you got to that, and given all of the focus on cross-sell, why couldn't that potentially get back to higher historical levels? Thanks.
I think the short version, it could, but we want to make sure we deliver on what we tell you. And so we're still in the early stages of proving how this all works together. The pillar leaders, I think, are doing a fabulous job of breaking down silos in the marketplace when they're talking to customers, figuring out how to really sell the true value proposition. So if we execute the right way, yes, there's more upside to that. But right now, we just want to sort of make sure we deliver on the commitments that we tell you w e can make.
Thanks so much. Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs. I just wanted to ask on the platform and packaging side on any early customer feedback around the new pricing model and bundling. Then when we think about 2025, what should we expect the cadence of the rollout to be? Should that be as customers renew, or is there anything else we should be taking into consideration there? Thank you.
Patrick, do you want to take it?
Sure. Mic on. Preliminary customer feedback has been largely pretty positive. We ran a small pilot to do that and to gather the overall pricing model. We interviewed and sent out surveys to hundreds and hundreds of customers that came back to us with their feedback. Customers liked the fact that we're approaching them more strategically, meaning we're presenting them a platform with four solutions within it. Those solutions are interconnected through Studio 360.
And rather than being constrained by the number of users or how many accountants they have or how many people want to log into the system, we're providing them unlimited users. And they love that concept because they say, "Okay, everyone within the Office of the CFO now has this platform with no constraint to us." And then the more that they get to use the platform, because it's a consumption-based model after the initial platform fee, they see immediate ROI. So the feedback has been good in that, "Okay, we get a platform fee. We land a little bigger," which is good from an ASP standpoint. And then we see the benefit in terms of expanding revenue because they consume more because more users are on the platform.
They see the benefit because there's a direct correlation of ROI in terms of the automation they enjoy or incur as the rate of matching and other consumption-based products goes up. So that's the initial feedback that we've received. We're going to kick off, I guess, start rolling it out in the first quarter of 2025. We've identified customers with what I'd say is the ideal profile in terms of how they use our platform now, and our intent is then to work it through the renewals base over the next three years. In terms of new logos, we're going to start that as well in the first quarter of 2025, selling under this new pricing
model. Next question. Koji.
Hey, guys. Koji Ikeda from Bank of America. Thanks for doing this. Great event. Super exciting. Lots of new news.
It almost feels like it's a transformative event for you guys with Studio 360, the four pillars, new pricing model. I guess with transformative change or transformation comes change. And one thing that I've learned a lot with your customers, and especially the end users, is they're kind of resistant to change. They like to stay with their ways and their workflows. And so what is it specifically about this time specifically that you think the end market is ready for this change? Are they ready to absorb this change? What data points are you seeing that is giving you the confidence that now is go time to do this?
Let me start new follow-up. Okay. So I think Therese and I both spend a lot of time in the marketplace talking to customers, as do our pillar leaders. Remember, one of the things that we talked about when Therese and I came into the company was to really elevate the conversations to the office of the CFO, and that's what we've been doing, and we've been doing that with our partners. We've been doing that directly. The CFO and the controller, they understand things can't be the same, so you're right. There's sort of always a little bit of resistance to change that isn't easy. It's one of the things I talked about this morning and I think earlier this afternoon about change management. That's the really hard part of all this, and I think it's something that we have a much better and a greater appreciation for as we've been sort of evolving over the last 18 months with our own business.
And then a lot of lessons and experiences with those partners that are not only SI partners, but they have really strong change management programs as part of it. So we have a prospect, future customer that's here today. And it's interesting when he was a former BlackLine user at another company. He's now the CFO of, let's call it, a top 50 Fortune company. And he wants this done. And his team has been resistant. And what we cooked up in the kitchen was, "Well, why don't we send your team to be on the BlackLine so they can see and experience it for real?" And that's the way we're trying to, again, win those hearts and minds of the people on the line. Because you're right. There's always going to be, "I'm used to it this way." The old SALY model, same as last year.
I don't want to do anything different, but I think people recognize with all the pressure that they're under and the constraints on resources, you can't just keep doing what you were doing. That's not going to change the outcome. I'm going to take the microphone, please. I think they can hear it.
Okay. I'm going to take a little bit of a different tack to the answering that, and that is technology buzzwords come and go. The difference with AI is that everybody can play with ChatGPT. Okay? It's a game changer. You can get incredible. I did the other day, I said, "Give me a podcast for BlackLine based on our website." And in five seconds, I had a really very credible podcast. All right. AI has become available to everybody.
I think that our finance executives have really understood that not changing is not an option. This really is game-changing technological advances. If they are not going to become obsolete themselves, they do need to embrace change. So it's different in that it's technology in the hands of everybody. That's different from previous sort of big buzz waves in the past.
Next question. No more questions?
Okay. We got it. I'll see you next time. It's not that easy.
There are some over on this side of the room too. All right. I'll be quick then to give someone else.
Dan Jester, BMO. On the Invoice-to-Cash, appreciate the updated color on the market. When you think about the digital transformation that happens there, it feels like maybe it's a little bit different than the other three pillars. So can you spend a moment sort of talking about how you're helping catalyze that change? And as we think about the ERP supercycle, is there a linkage there, or should we think about this as maybe a little bit separate? Thanks.
Yeah, I'll take that. So I think what we're seeing is it very linked to the ERP supercycle, but also sat outside of it. And I know that that contradicts. But the focus and the drive for doing the Invoice-to-Cash change is around that cash flow, that economy. I'm working with the customers running through. So a lot of the times we're seeing it ahead of or separate to or a part of, but it's at the early phase and the early stages.
And we're seeing, unlike things like AP automation that a lot of businesses have done for many, many years, the AR side of things has been much more laggard in here, which is driving a lot of that white space coming through. So we're seeing, I think I mentioned it in the presentation, we're seeing it through the direct, but we're seeing a lot more interest through our partners with the inbound on the consultancy side of their business. In fact, I met with one of our key partners this morning, and they were saying they've been quite steady with the uptake, a partner that we're adopting now through Invoice-to-Cash.
And they're saying the technology side of that partner. They're saying our front office teams, our client partners in front of the C-suite, are coming to us saying, "We need to talk about this now because customers are talking about it as they're walking the halls and running through." So it's very much attached. There's a number of projects that we're involved in at the moment and deal cycles that we're involved in at the moment where they're asking the question, "We're going to be doing our ERP change or putting a new ERP in the coming years, but we want to do this now." So what will it look like when we do the ERP? How easy is it for us to adopt when we do ERP because we don't want to wait?
John.
Thanks. John Messina, Raymond James.
Maybe just following up on Adam's question, can you provide a bit more detail on how to think about pricing and packaging from an ACV uplift perspective? And also on the simplified pricing and packaging and bundles, how should we think about the new logo deal sizes as a result? Is that what's sort of giving you confidence in the 1%-2% better new logo growth as a performance driver there?
Start with the second question first. Short answer is yes. You basically have a pull forward there from a user standpoint where you look at the users you expect to expand in the next couple of years. You pull that revenue forward onto day one and deliver unlimited users. So yes, by that means alone, we expect to land bigger from an ACV perspective.
That then our growth in the future with that customer will be based more on cross-sell because this pricing model works very neatly with Studio 360 and the ability to integrate the two. And then two, it also promotes more consumption into our products and will drive revenue in the out years more. What was the first question in that?
On AC? Yeah. In terms of AC uplift in the model, year one or 2025 is, from a bookings perspective, about 1%, a little less than 1% on revenue. And then in the out years, it's 1%-2%.
We got time for about two more questions before we have to close up the session.
Jigna Patel, JP Morgan. Thanks for taking the question. It's exciting to see the medium-term outlook that calls for an acceleration in growth. How should we think about the shape of that acceleration curve over the time horizon?
So I won't say it's a hockey stick, but yes, it does happen in the out years. What you would expect in 2025, well, I would expect that that growth would happen more 2026 and thereafter.
Hey, Chris Cantara from Morgan Stanley again. Maybe one for Jeremy and Charlie. Would love to hear more about how you're building in extensibility into the platform. Seems like there's always some interest there from customers. So just curious to hear kind of what your plans are looking like over near-term and medium-term.
Yeah. So to talk about extensibility, there are a couple of key areas where we have extensibility baked in. So Studio 360 Blueprint, I'll start there. That is our platform component that allows us to extend templates or best practices and have that extensible via BlackLine, customers, and partners as well. This is really serving as a marketplace or ecosystem of these templates that can be shared. Those templates that are not just about configuration, but it's about delivering connectors and connectivity of data, orchestration of data, as well as visualization and dashboards. So it's across those key platform components as well. So we expect those to be fully extensible by partners and customers. The next area is around APIs. So APIs specifically have been a big investment. They power our applications and are allowing us to extend and modernize our user experiences. Those APIs are also publicly accessible by our customers so they can extend our platform as well with new capabilities.
We've also seen partners use these in extending integrations as part of their solutions that they're delivering to their clients. So those are the key areas where we have those extensible components.
Steve, did you have one last one before we close? I know you had one more. All right. You can close this out.
No pressure here. Well, I guess I'm going to ask two things th en if I can squeeze it in. Just from a high level, you've talked a lot about product and go-to-market changes and everything now being set in place. But if we think about the next couple of years, where do you kind of see the most opportunity or the most upside to maybe contribute to that? And then secondly, on the margin guide, how should we be thinking about the progression there over the next few years? Is it steady?
Is there a similar kind of step up in the outer years? Just how should we think about that?
From a margin perspective, it's not linear, but you could expect it again in 2026 and then it ramping up from there.
I think the opportunity right in front of us, that really matters. And these guys have gotten to know me pretty well in the last year and a half. I'm somewhat relentless and maybe a little bit intense. And so that ability to execute together to drive what the promise of BlackLine is, when we do that, we're going to do really, really well. And so it's not about a particular product or a particular market. It's about execute, execute, execute each and every day. And that's really what's going to create the greatest opportunity. You've heard the story.
We have a really good strategy, but execution beats strategy all the time, and so every day, these guys wake up and think about, "What are we going to get done today?" I remember as a CEO of one of Deloitte's businesses a while back, and Gartner came in and did a review, and I'll always remember the feedback at the end of it because it's sort of an epiphany for me. They're like, "The strategy is pretty good, but these guys execute with maniacal focus," and so since that point in time, I have never forgotten how to execute around maniacal focus. She's the same way, which is just awesome, and that's really what I think makes it exciting for all of us because we want to drive success for our customers. That's a very common purpose and vision for what we're trying to do.
I said it this morning, we'll say it again. Our success is when our customers really optimize what BlackLine's about, and that's the greatest opportunity that's right in front of us.
And that's why Owen and I are a perfect couple because I'm super excited. I think we have groundbreaking technologies that are really going to deliver value to our customers. I think over the last two years, we have gotten close to our customers again. We understand like nobody else in the market what their issues are and how to solve them. And so I'm sort of the yin to his yang because I believe in what our team has put into the market. And the responses from our customers in this conference have been a great starting point for that.
That's going to conclude the program today. Owen, any last words before we call it a day?
Sure. So first of all, for our investors, thank you for staying on the journey with us. We'd like you to even be a bigger part of our journey after today. And then for the analysts who follow us, we do appreciate the questions you ask us. Keep us on our toes and keep doing that. I think it helps make us better. So thank you all for coming. Thank you for those that are at home streaming in. Look forward to spending more time with you later today and over the coming weeks and months. And for those of you that celebrate Thanksgiving next week, have a terrific Thanksgiving. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Thank you.