Two, one. Hey, good afternoon, everyone. It's now 1:00 P.M. here on the East Coast, and we're ready to begin our next presentation. My name is Marc Riddick. I'm a senior analyst with Sidoti & Company, and I thank you for joining us on day two of the Sidoti September Small- Cap Virtual Conference. Our next presenting company is Information Services Group. The ticker is the letter I three times. And joining us today is Michael Connors, Chairman and CEO, and Michael Sherrick, Chief Financial Officer. Now, before we begin, just a reminder, we will have time for Q&A following prepared remarks. If you'd like to ask a question, just feel free to submit those at any time by clicking on the prompt at the bottom of your screen. There's no need to wait until the end of prepared remarks to do so.
With that, we can turn the floor over to ISG. Gentlemen, good morning. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us.
Thanks very much, Marc, and thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon and your interest in ISG. So we'll get right started. Let's talk about who we are. We are a global AI-centered technology research and advisory firm. We've celebrated our 19th year this year. We have 1,600 professionals around the world in 20 countries, and our work is all around technology for the largest enterprises around the world. We help advise them on achieving operational excellence and faster growth using technology, whether that's AI, that's cloud, what have you. We have revenues approaching about $240 million. Our recurring revenue is approximately 45% of that, and we have fantastic stickiness with our large enterprise clients with 96% advocacy for the using of ISG. What do we do for our clients?
We do four things for our clients, essentially, and it's all driven by data and a platform delivery model for our clients. First, we inform them around what is happening in technology, the use of things like AI, cloud, and so forth and just as others might use it. This is subscription-based and all about emerging technology. Second, we have the best technology database in the world, and that's why clients come back to us year- after -year- after- year. We have a market share of greater than 50% of all sourcing technology contracts on any given year. We use a ProBenchmark platform. We also have a second platform called Inform, where we have all of our data into a black box, and then we use it with our client base.
Thirdly, we provide advisory services to the C-suite, to the technologists, to the chief executive officer, to the procurement officers, et cetera, and we help guide them through the use and most efficient use of technology. And then we have to kind of close out the loop. We have capabilities around governance to help manage large technology contracts from the likes of Accenture or IBM or Capgemini that might total somewhere between $50 million, $100 million, $500 million a year in expense for an enterprise. We'll help them manage that from a governance standpoint. Now, our data is our differentiator. This is an area where we get data from three sources. First and foremost, all of our engagements that we work with our large enterprise clients around price, around cost, around all the components that you can imagine around services and software. We load that into our database.
Second, we get it from a data exchange program with the largest technology providers in the world, the Accenture, the IBM, the Cognizants of the world. They want us to be fully informed about their capabilities, what they are willing to offer, so that when we're in front of the clients at General Motors or a Bank of America or wherever, we can be able to advocate on their behalf in terms of what their services are, and then thirdly, some of the public sources that are available. We put all those together and have a very strong, very compelling, and very proprietary and differentiated database. Now, our position is unique. We sit in the center. Our enterprise clients on the left of the screen, they are the ones that buy our services.
The technology and service providers, the IBMs, the Snowflakes, the Salesforces of the world, they sit on the right-hand side wanting to sell into the enterprise. Our work is to be sure that when we're working with our enterprise clients, they get the most efficient, the best capabilities, both in terms of those who have done it over and over and those who may be emerging firms that are out there that may be able to help that particular client. All in all, we influence a little over $200 billion in enterprise spend, so we're a big influence in the market, and that's why clients keep coming back to us time and time again. Moving on to kind of the sandbox that we play in, managed services is a very large market. Software is a big market. You add those two together, you can see the $200 billion.
The software market itself is approaching $1 trillion. So there's plenty of room in that sandbox. There's plenty of very large companies in that sandbox. We have a relationship with all of them. We are not connected to any of them. So we become the third-party objective advisor to the enterprise on these kinds of companies. Now, what kinds of advisory services? This is our array. We provide kind of 15 different levels of services in lots of different areas around AI, benchmarking, cost optimization, your network, software, and so forth, sourcing being the largest of what we offer. But we have capabilities to support our clients in a lot of different areas. Now, let me use an example to kind of walk you through typically how we operate with our clients. Here's an example of a very large client in the manufacturing sector. Their board.
They spend about a billion, two, on services around procurement, supply chain, HR, finance, and IT. They asked us to come in, take a look at their spending, benchmark it against a peer group, and determine where they sit, first quartile, middle, wherever they might be. In this particular case, we found that they had an opportunity to save over somewhere close to $100 million. So our next step after benchmarking is to say, "Okay, can you take the art of the possible, create a strategy for us, and then help us execute against that strategy so that we can generate that $100 million of potential savings?" And so we'll use a lot of our different capabilities around research, around software, around network, around our negotiating skills, modernizing applications, et cetera.
In this particular case, which starts out as kind of a $500,000 engagement over kind of a three-year period of time, this client has generated $12 million in fees for us. We've saved them nearly $100 million, and we've generated using those savings to help them create a revenue stream that's over $100 million for this client. Very typical on how we go about our clients in terms of how we serve our clients. Now, in terms of the mix on our revenue, so our revenue is about 80% recurring. And what we define as recurring is a set of clients. We have 900 of them. The clients that we had last year, we believe, will generate over 80% of our revenue in the next year. That's been consistent now for the last 15 years for us.
We know going into January 1 that 80%+ of our revenue is coming from that client base that we served in the prior year. As a subset of that, 45% of our revenue is recurring revenue. These are revenues that we know on January 1 we have contracted for. And that includes our research, our platforms, and our multi-year kind of contracts. So a very good, dependable, steady revenue stream for our business. Now, here's an example. We serve 20 different industry segments. Our objective is to get to 10, as close to the 15 largest by revenue companies in the world as our clients. Here's six of those 20 to give you a sample. In Health Sciences, we have 13. Energy and utilities, 11. Insurance, 10, and so on. Our objective then is to serve these large clients because they have the largest technology spend.
And when you're spending $100 million, $1 billion, $3 billion, and some of these on here, $4 billion and $5 billion dollars a year in services and software, it's a big sandbox to play in, and they're all constantly looking for our advice and counsel on how they can efficiently use that technology. So good industries and good growth in each of them. Now, AI. We have pivoted to be an AI-centered technology research and advisory firm. What does that mean? Well, first of all, what is happening in the market? We know that over 50% of enterprises, you would think by all the noise, it would be 100%, but it's a bit more than 50% of clients now are developing an AI roadmap for their business. They're starting small. They're doing some proof of concepts. Most have not scaled anything yet, but we know that the planning is going on.
We expect a lot of revenue and a lot of spend happening in this area by 2030. Now, if you take the next slide and how are we doing it and how are we working with our clients, it's really in three buckets. Bucket number one is in the advisory area. We're helping our clients understand AI, what would be a strategy around it, how you can use it, and primarily around sourcing. So if you think about the sourcing of all the services, it used to be labor arbitrage. Now it's technology arbitrage using AI and other areas of technology to help them. And so we help them define a strategy, how you can use it, how you can interact with an Accenture or an IBM or a Capgemini. How can AI help your business become more efficient, more effective?
What's the ecosystem of companies out there that can help my particular enterprise? The second area is how we're focusing our research around AI. How can we do it in software? What are providers doing? What are enterprises using? What are the use cases out there that are returning a little bit of investment? It's still very early innings, but we're using it in the AI research area as well. And then for ourselves, how are we using AI? And we're using it in our platforms, and we're using it with our patents that we have around intelligent contracting. In platforms, for example, we have ISG Tango. Tango is our platform for all sourcing. It's AI-powered.
The way it works is that when we are doing a transaction for a large company, whether it's a large property and casualty insurance company, a large bank, an auto company, what have you, when we're working on that, we have a platform. We're putting all of the data into the platform from the enterprise. We have the technology providers or the software providers that are looking to get that business from the enterprise use the platform. What are their capabilities? What are they willing to put forward to that particular enterprise? And it's a win-win for all of us. It's a win-win for our enterprise client because they can get speed to value to get their savings faster. It's a win-win for the technology providers, the Accentures, the IBMs, because they know by using ISG and our platform, there's going to be an outcome.
And if they win that particular outcome, they know that it's going to come faster than it did before, and that means more revenue to them sooner. And from an ISG standpoint, it's the efficiency of that platform. It's more productive for us. It's more margin accretive for us. And it's an ability to take that data in a central repository for us. So that's how we're using AI at the client with research and inside ISG. Now, what is the competitive landscape for us? We don't have anybody that looks like us. We have elements of what we do with different competitive sets out there. In the research area, you have companies like Gartner. We do see them in the market. And in benchmarking, Gartner is our number one competitor around technology.
A lot of times, these large technology contracts have an open clause in them halfway through their three- or four-year agreement. And they typically name two providers in that to open it up to do a benchmark, Gartner and ISG. That's our main competitor there. In the advisory or the, if you will, the execution phase, this is where we'll run into the audit firms, the Deloittes, the KPMGs. Here in the U.S., we run in the PwC over in Germany. It depends geographically who we run into. And then around governance, because we have a nice software platform that helps manage and govern these large contracts, you'll see a lot of different smaller technology players. So it's a competitive landscape that is diversified depending on the kind of element service. But the number one competitor that we have is the internal procurement departments of these large companies.
And that's why we tend to want to partner with them when we're servicing the end user. Now, we are known as the authoritative voice in this industry. For 91 consecutive quarters, we have done a quarterly what we call ISG Index call for the industry. On that call, we get 1,000, 1,500 people. Those people are primarily the ones that follow the large technology providers. So it'd be the analysts that follow the Accenture or the Capgemini or the Cognizant of the world, as well as providers are on that, as well as clients. And what we do is we give them the state of the industry. What's happened in the quarter? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? Who are winning contracts around applications or infrastructure or network? What is happening with AI?
We give a report on that, and we put that report on our website. Culture is important for us. We have one of the lowest turnovers in any professional services firm. We do it because we have great work. It's creative. It's innovative. It's a broad set of clients in multiple industries. We give them total flexibility. We build our business on a virtual model back in 2006 when I launched the firm. We don't have a lot of real estate expense. People love the flexibility to work at clients or work from home. It's worked out great. Of course, COVID hit. We were already very well aware of how to manage and acknowledge a network system to have people work together in a virtual environment, and we get lots of different awards.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Michael to kind of walk you through, in a summary, our growth plan and some of our financials. Michael?
Hey, thank you, Mike. And good afternoon, everyone. Mike just took you through, really, our overall strategy, market positioning. What I want to do is now translate that into how does it impact and drive our financial performance. And so I'm going to start with our overall growth plan. And I'm not going to drone on the whole slide. I'm going to hit on a couple of key points here in terms of the drivers. One is clearly the recurring revenue streams that we have that Mike talked about. That gives us tremendous visibility, and it gives us a base as we begin each year, each quarter of revenue. The other I want to just hit on is ISG Tango.
Mike mentioned that this is one of our newer and most impactful platforms that we have. It's really opening up opportunities for us and enabling us to change how we deliver, how fast we deliver, and the teams that we can put on our engagements, so that's been a really important one that is an underpinning of our growth, and then lastly, really at the bottom is what we've always called ISG iFlex, and that is we've always been a remote organization, even pre-COVID. We have a flexible staffing model that allows us to staff engagements globally from anywhere, so if we have capacity in Germany and we have a need in the U.S., we can staff that resource on that, and that, again, is another piece that has really helped us to be able to deliver and to drive growth.
And when you take all of these together, it fuels and drives our overall objective, which is upper single-digit revenue growth, translating into EBITDA growth at about 1.5x revenue, and again, to strive towards the recurring revenue at 50%. So three really great underpinnings to our financial performance. If I look then at the actual results, and I'm going to look at 2025 year-to-date, and obviously, these are through the first half, you'll see that our revenue grew 7% in the first half of the year. Our EBITDA was up 17%. So we achieved our upper single-digit revenue growth, and we achieved far more than the 1.5x in terms of the flow-through.
We credit a lot of that to Tango, which was launched about 12, 18 months ago, and the effects that's had on our utilization, where we've seen great improvement there. One of the other things we get asked about a lot is, obviously, we generate a good amount of cash flow and what we do with that cash flow. And we obviously have a pretty balanced approach as we look at M&A, we look at dividends, we look at share repurchase. What this chart really shows you is just the consistent shareholder returns we've had over the last really five years via the dividend and share buybacks. And we're particularly proud of that and pleased with it. And we would expect for that to continue as we go forward, as we look at ways that we deploy our excess cash. On capital structure, I'm very much pleased with this.
I mean, over the last two years, we've put a lot of effort behind the balance sheet, driving cash flow, reducing our leverage. As you can see from here, as of last quarter, we had gross debt of $59 million, net of $34 million. That gross debt level is about 2x debt to EBITDA, which is right at the bottom of our 2-2.5x range. So we're very comfortable and very pleased with that. And we've had very good operating cash flow generation year-to-date. And I can tell you that we are very much focused on continuing that as we push into the second half of the year. So lastly, as we wrap, just I would give you these five sort of key points for the investment thesis as you take away from this presentation.
One is, as Mike really highlighted, we have a very unique and leading market position, right? And that position is supported by what we call our data moat, right? That proprietary industry data that really differentiates us from the peer set and really provides us with an offering that others cannot deliver. We have great market permission, 96% advocacy. Mike showed the recurring revenue at 80%. I mean, these are very strong endorsements from our clients that come back and do business with us year in and year out. As I highlighted, we have a growth plan in place, recurring revenues, Tango, our overall transformation work in enterprise. So we have a lot of growth drivers, a lot of offerings that we believe continue to have strong relevancy in the market and will drive our growth.
And then lastly, as I noted, we have the track record and history of a prudent use of capital, dividends, buybacks, selective M&A to create shareholder value. So hopefully that gives you a better sense of us and why we're excited about the story. With that, I will turn it back to Marc to open it up for any questions.
Thank you very much. And as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, just click on the Q&A prompt at the bottom of your screen. I will start us off with this. Maybe the strength of Tango has been one of the things that has been a little underappreciated, I think, with the ISG story.
And maybe you can spend just a little bit, a couple of moments, talking about the competitive advantages and the benefit to the folks that have signed up with Tango and sort of what it does for them and how it's really benefited.
Okay, great. Thanks, Marc, for that question. So again, just to level set, ISG Tango is our sourcing platform that we use with enterprises and technology suppliers in order to come to a technology deal. And the advantage of using this platform is, A, it's standardized. So now the enterprise knows how it operates. All of the technology suppliers who are vying for business with that enterprise know that it's standardized. All the data goes into the platform.
And by going into the platform, then we can have full transparency as to what the current cost base is versus what a technology provider might be willing to provide going forward. And so the advantages to the enterprise is that it's all in one place, number one. Two, there's speed. So the ability for them to get their cost savings will be faster. As an example, normally something that would have taken 16 weeks, we can get about 20% of that time off. It would come in 13 weeks. So you're getting your savings as a client maybe three weeks earlier, maybe a bit more. From the technology provider who is participating and putting their data into the platform, what they get is they get standardization from ISG. They get the ability to know that there will be an outcome because they're using the platform.
If they win, then they are also going to have speed for their revenue. They're going to get their revenue sooner, and they're going to have certainty about what that revenue is. From ISG, our advantages here clearly is that it's efficient to put all the data together that we can then extract for our database. Second of all, for us, it's much more efficient and productive. If we can do something at a fee of $1 million in 13 weeks versus 16 weeks, then our margins are being enhanced, and you're seeing that with margin acceleration in our business. Thirdly, the utilization of our talent is good. Instead of spreading their time over 16 weeks, you spread it over 13 weeks. They're more efficient, and you're seeing that in our utilization results.
It's a win for the client, a win for the technology provider, and a win for ISG, Marc.
Excellent. Thank you for that. One of the things that I did want to touch on is one of the potential uses of cash is M&A. You did make an announcement of Martino & Partners when you reported Q2 key results. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that opportunity and sort of how that frames to some of the potential targets you may have in mind going forward.
Right. Our M&A strategy is we try to do about 80%+ organically, around 15%-20% inorganically. We've done 14 acquisitions in our 19-year history. We do bolt-ons. The latest one from Italy was a small bolt-on, all recurring revenue, all in the public, for the most part, all in the public sector.
It was a strategic move for us to take advantage of what we think will be a growing, emerging technology market for us in Italy, where the government is spending over the next 5- 10 years and additional monies around kind of digital technology transformation, and we felt by beefing up that unit for us, that would give us some great recurring revenue streams and capabilities in the future. On a broader M&A scale, what we look for is recurring revenue streams, technology capabilities, whether that's in certain areas where we may want more capabilities, or an AI where there's growth capabilities, anything that will advance the channels that we have, the distribution channels that we have, which is into the C-suite.
If we could expand in the sales or in the marketing and/or some of these other areas, already having a trusted relationship with these clients and these very large corporations, we can expand our footprint, expand our spending in those enterprises. That's how we think about our M&A strategy, Marc.
Excellent. Those comments actually segue pretty nicely to one of the questions that came from the audience. That's whether you could speak to the advisory services that you offer and maybe talk about how your client management is handled throughout that process.
So the ones that we offer, and Michael, you may want to just put up slide eight, the different services that we offer here, these are kind of the 50 areas that we focus on with our clients, if you will.
On the AI, what they're asking for, typically, a lot of technology contracts on average are 3.5 years in length, so if you think back 3 years ago, there was no AI embedded in any of those contracts, and as those contracts come up for renewal, what they're asking us for do, well, how do we think about AI as it relates to our $100 million of spending and applications that we signed 3 years ago. How do we think about that going forward, and so we talk about where the efficiencies are, where automation can occur, and that $100 million like-for-like is more like going to be $75 or $80 million, depending on whether their scope they want to be able to expand, so using AI as all of these contracts become renewal over the next couple of years, big area of focus.
And then, of course, new areas of AI. So that's an example, number one. Number two, if you look at the software block here, software is almost a trillion-dollar industry. And we know that the software industry is also evolving with AI. We also know that every client, every enterprise that spends millions of dollars on software, whether that's Salesforce, whether that's Oracle, whatever you may have there. And our view on software is a couple of things. One, how can we make the use of that as efficient as possible for you? And number two, are you getting the best bang for the buck? So we will help them negotiate contracts with the Microsofts, with the Oracles, with the Salesforces of the world, based on all of the database that we have and we know what is possible.
And also to be sure that they're not adding modules that they're not getting full use of. So those are some examples of some of those services that we offer at the enterprise level.
Great. And then one of the things, Mike, that you've talked about over the years and we've talked about quite a bit is the mix of customer activity that is offensive and defensive, if you will, growth-driven, cost-savings-driven. Maybe you could just touch a little bit on some of those trends and how you're able to help with both sides of that equation.
Yeah. Good question, Marc. So there's two areas focused primarily with these enterprises on technology. One is optimization. How can you cost-optimize what I'm currently spending in applications? I spend $300 million today. Top quartile might be $200 million. How do I get that $100 million? That's one area.
The second area is around using digital, using AI, using kind of capabilities to transform my business, transform my claims processing in a property and casualty firm, as an example. And what we're seeing in those two buckets, cost optimization right now is about 55%-60% of the work. And the transformation is about 40%. And it varies by industry. For example, energy and utilities, big area, AI needs lots of energy. They need a lot of work done to transform who they are, big in transformation. Healthcare, need cost out. It's completely going to change with the whole work, especially here in the United States with Medicare and so forth. They're all about optimization. So the healthcare industry wants us to focus on cost optimization. So it's those two buckets. It varies by industry, a little overweighted right now on cost optimization versus transformation.
That's really helpful.
Thanks, Mike. And that's where I'm amazingly already out of time. I wanted to maybe just turn it back over to you for some closing comments. And thank you, of course, for joining us.
Yes. Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us. Thank you for your interest in ISG. And we're happy to carry on this dialogue. Just feel free to reach out to Marc or talk to us, and we're happy to continue the dialogue. And thank you to Sidoti and to Marc for hosting us today.
Thank you, everyone, for participating. Everybody have a wonderful and productive remainder of the afternoon. Take care.
Thank you.