Good afternoon, welcome to the AvePoint Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Jamie Arestia, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to AvePoint's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. With me on the call this afternoon is Dr. TJ Jiang, Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Caci, Chief Financial Officer. After preliminary remarks, we will open the call for a question-and-answer session. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statements contained in our press release for a more complete description. All material in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of AvePoint with all rights reserved. Please note this presentation describes certain non-GAAP measures, including non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margins, which are not measures presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The non-GAAP measures are presented in this presentation as we believe they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding how management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, a substitute for, or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is available in our second quarter 2023 earnings press release as well as our updated investor presentation, both of which are available in the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to TJ.

Thanks, Jamie, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today, highlighted by 30% ARR growth as well as total revenue and margin performance that once again exceeded our guidance. Our second quarter results demonstrate the demand for our platform and the strength of our business model. Amidst the ongoing uncertainty in the macro environment, we continue to see customers depend on AvePoint's confidence platform to rapidly reduce costs, improve productivity and make more informed business decisions as they advance their digital workplaces. This demand, coupled with our sustained focus on profitable growth, drove another quarter that surpassed expectations on both the top and bottom line. Jim will dive into our financial results shortly, but first, I want to discuss 2 main topics. First, generative AI, and how we're positioning AvePoint for continued long-term success amidst the massive and dynamic changes that are happening in our platform environment; and second, the journey of AvePoint's customers where our abilities to partner with them in every stage of their digital workplace transformation and cloud optimization journey remains a key competitive advantage for AvePoint and led to another strong set of results this quarter. Let's start with generative AI. We're excited about the potential AI to disrupt industries and drive innovation and as the earliest Microsoft SaaS cloud partner and today the most mature B2B SaaS data management vendor, AvePoint is well positioned to lead the way. In conversations I've had with our customers, our partners and my peers, 2 things are abundantly clear. First, the bedrock for impactful AI solutions is data, especially the powerful combination of proprietary data gathered from unique sources on top of foundational AI models, which together will pave the way for unprecedented commercial success and customer satisfaction. And second, the only way to create a…

Thank you, TJ, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us as we review our strong second quarter results. And let me remind you that unless otherwise noted, I'll be referring to non-GAAP metrics. For the second quarter ended June 30, 2023, total revenues were $64.9 million, up 16% year-over-year and once again above the high end of our guidance. Within total revenues, second quarter SaaS revenue was $38.3 million, up 39% year-over-year. And in Q2, SaaS comprised 59% of total revenues compared to 50% a year ago. Looking at the business geographically, we saw solid performance across all regions, once again driven by year-over-year growth in our SaaS business. In North America, on a constant currency basis, SaaS revenues grew 35% while total revenue grew 16%. In EMEA, on a constant currency basis, SaaS revenues grew 41%, while total revenues grew 10%. And in APAC, on a constant currency basis, SaaS revenues grew 46%, while total revenues grew 28%. As of June 30, 2023, total ARR was $236.2 million, representing year-over-year growth of 26% and growth of 30% when adjusted for the impact of FX. We ended the second quarter with 495 customers with ARR of over $100,000, up 19% from the prior year period. As of the end of Q2, 49% of our total ARR came through the channel compared to 46% a year ago and 48% at the end of Q1. And for Q2 specifically, 61% of our incremental ARR came through the channel compared to 56% for Q1. While this percentage may fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter, we expect the overall channel contribution to continue increasing, in turn, driving ARR growth and operating efficiencies. Turning now to our retention rates, which, as you know, are a primary area of focus for us and critical to our long-term growth…

[Operator Instructions]. And today's first question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs.

This is [indiscernible] on for Gabriela. A couple from us. Could you give us more color on what you're seeing in the general macro environment, and how things have trended from a customer budget standpoint over the past few months? And you said you're seeing early signs of stabilization. So what are the signs that you are seeing?

Yes, from a macro perspective, we remain cautious. We are happy with the momentum we have achieved so far in Q2. However, on the enterprise segmentation, we still see continued elongation of deal cycles. It's not worse than Q1, but we continue to see that, so we remain cautious. On our mid-market and SMB, we continue to see very strong growth through our channel scaling.

Yes. And just to add on to that, we do look at a number of metrics, including, obviously, our bookings in terms of that happened just in this past quarter and looking at the life cycle of those bookings, we also spent a lot of time looking at our CRM data in terms of how things are progressing through the pipeline. And by looking at that information, as TJ alluded to, we're seeing that the things are not necessarily improving, but they're also not getting worse. So when we look at how things are evolving through the process, gives us a little comfort that there is some stabilization, and we don't see things getting worse.

That's very helpful. And then as a follow-up, how are you thinking about investing as you anticipate tailwinds from Gen AI implementations, especially in terms of headcount? And also more broadly, how are you balancing growth versus profitability as you enter this new environment?

Yes, that's a great question. So first and foremost, investing in the product. So we mentioned a great example of our preview records product that's already showing very good results in productivity improvements in the field, and it's been very well received by our customers in EMEA as well as in Australia. We will disclose more at our upcoming Shifthappens Conference in D.C. in October to showcase how we imbue the latest iteration of AI and machine learning into our product to highlight the platform play. Second, as I mentioned, we do win on the platform play and the theme for this year continue to be cloud optimization. So in short, leveraging our platform of solutions, our data orchestration engine to be able to help our customers maximize the ROI in the cloud. So overall, that's the major theme we see across all companies as to how to essentially save and be more -- drive more economic outcome out of their existing investments, and this is where we will continue to shine. And third, we'll continue to invest into channel to scale, and we see really, really good results just in the last few years alone and a couple of years. And as you -- we clearly articulated before of massive greenfield for us in the SMB segment, especially selling to MSPs. So there, we'll continue to invest to overall achieve profitable growth.

And the next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI.

This is Chirag Ved on for Kirk. Congratulations on the strong results. TJ, there are some concerns that as interest around AI continues to grow, that customers may reprioritize spend away from other areas in IT. So it doesn't look like you're seeing any of that based on your gross and net retention rates. But can you comment on that concern and maybe what you're seeing in terms of your discussion related to Gen AI right now?

Yes, that's a great question. As we stated in the prepared remarks, the foundations to effective AI deployment it's actually based on the premise that you have really good information management strategy. That means making sure that you have data collated from all your various sources across your enterprise. And also making sure that the data are actually properly classified, intact and have the right life cycle. So you don't get in to trash in, trash out issues when you build that proprietary layer of modeling on top of generative foundation models. So every enterprise is doing this today to ensure that they can leverage their own decades worth of domain data, proprietary enterprise-owned data to actually form better capabilities and innovation on top of AI to then drive purposeful outcome. So that's a space we actually play very well in, and we've been doing this for enterprises for the past decades. In fact, we're not a stranger to machine learning, AI. As many of you know, my background is machine learning, AI. We have been a long-time consumer of Azure Cognitive Services, and other open source AI capabilities for -- especially for governments, on-prem and hybrid deployment scenarios. So all these things actually points back to the importance of information management capabilities. So it's not a separate use case from AI. It's really very much of the same motion to make AI effective and workable for enterprise.

And then maybe one for Jim. It looks like net retention rate increased sequentially, excluding FX to 107%. Can you speak to what contributed to the step function increase? And what needs to happen from your perspective to hit the net retention rate targets that you outlined?

Yes, great question. So this quarter was a strong quarter for us for existing customer growth in terms of additional ARR. For the first time, we're over our incremental ARR for the quarter, over 50% of that came from our existing customer base. So we had a strong quarter as it related to that existing customer base. And even more so, so that definitely contributed to the NRR growth, and then in addition to that, we saw a really strong quarter for existing customers who were with us less than a year, kind of adding to their original purchase, which is a strong indicator for us. Number one, that our customers are enjoying with the services we're providing, the software we're providing, but also consuming more. And it's interesting that when the uptick in the first year, it's almost a leading indicator because that sale does not impact our NRR. We won't see that impact for a full year. So when we think of NRR, it's really a trailing 12-month or a lagging indicator. And when we sell to a customer within that first year, it's really a leading indicator because it's going to bode well for future NRR. So we feel good about that. I do think we still have a lot of work to do to get to those medium-term targets that we put out a couple of months back in March to get to that 110% to 115%. So we definitely want to continue to see continued execution on what we've been doing so far.

And the next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Maxim Group.

That was Northland Capital Markets. We had a really strong incremental ARR. Jim you already sort of alluded to one of the drivers of that was NRR being signature positive. But just to be clear, is that NRR moving up a result of increasing the fee for existing customers or increasing functionality?

More of the latter in terms of additional functionality that they're receiving. But we had a strong quarter across the board, Nehal, in terms of if we look at it from a couple of different things. It's really the demand for the SaaS platform, 39% growth was really strong. Geographically, across all 3 segments, we saw strong growth, particularly on the ARR side, where each of the 3 segments really came in just at about the same rate for our consolidated growth rate of that 26%. So really right on target. We talked about channel. We saw 61% of our incremental ARR coming through the channel really strong. So -- and again, that existing customer base that I referred to before, a really strong quarter. So we kind of saw it across the board, not just from the existing customer base, but really throughout both new and existing.

Okay. And then your ARR guidance raise is great to see, but it looks like it's largely bearing the beat in ARR. And so is that a reflection that the improvement in sales motion you're taking it as a quarter-by-quarter basis.

Yes. I think what we're trying to factor in for -- as we think about our ARR guidance, is that we had a really strong quarter. We had strong growth, meaningful operating leverage, and obviously, we generated a lot of cash in the quarter as well over the first half of the year. And when we think about that ARR guidance, we are trying to take into the fact -- take into account that we had a good quarter, but there's still macro uncertainties out there, and we're trying to plan accordingly. We talked at the beginning of the year that this year was going to be uncertain. It was going to be bumpy. It was going to be lumpy. And so although we had a very good quarter, we're excited about that. We're also trying to really be prudent over the remainder of the year and factor that into our -- the remaining guidance.

[Operator Instructions]. And the next question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair.

I just wanted to clarify on the comments on demand, said things are not getting worse. I just wanted to see if you meant for all 3 segments of your business, enterprise, SMB and mid-market. Could you talk about SMB and mid-market being -- seeing good growth through channel and enterprises seeing elongation as the enterprise piece of the business stabilized? Or is that also -- or is that actually getting a little bit worse while the SMB and mid-market are getting better?

Jason. Yes, so enterprise segmentation, it's steady as she goes, no different than Q1. So that's where we see. However, we do -- we are remaining cautious. On the mid-market SMB, it continues a faster growth rate just as we've seen before. So everything is pretty much -- we are being cautious because the macro factors. However, we are not seeing a deterioration. That's why we talk about stabilization.

Okay. So -- and then, Jim, your comment on bookings, is the implication that bookings actually bookings growth ticked up in Q2 versus Q1? Or it was a similar bookings growth rate as Q1?

We actually saw an uptick to your point. We did see significant improvement in bookings in Q2, which was kind of our expectation. We expected Q1 to be on the lighter side. And that was right in line with expectations for Q1, and Q2 was definitely a stronger quarter.

Great. Okay. And then, TJ, when you think about your product portfolio and 30-plus products. Maybe could you call out a few products right now that are seeing a lot of interest were either existing customers or adding that product on or it's a key part of some of your wins for new customers.

Yes. Great question, Jason. So I called out our Cloud Records product. It's something that continue to gain more traction. Not only does it save our customers from a storage cost perspective from archiving optimization, but also leading to leveraging machine learning and AI to actually do much better data classification and life cycle management. That's a high-performance product. The other one is tyGraph, we talk about sentiment analysis and employee engagement management. Every C-level today worry about that from a hybrid work scenario perspective. And third one, I would call out as interest, which is basically entitlement management and operations management of your cloud deployments, again, goes to in terms of the optimization cycle, right? Customers want to know how are these licenses being used, how can it reduce cost on operations?

Great. Great. And when you talk about Gen AI, I understand that there's an element of incorporating it into your products and maybe even having separate SKUs around Gen AI going forward. But can you talk at all about how internally you're using some of the Gen AI technologies out there, things like Copilot from GitHub and other tools that related to Gen AI that might help you guys kind of accelerate development and lower costs.

Yes, absolutely. So I think we mentioned even in the last earnings, we already utilize GitHub Copilot on the Dev side. We are using more for the senior developers who see material efficiency boosts up to 30%. The newer developers who are still learning the ropes are less so. So -- because to be a sophisticated user, you actually need to know whatever is generated is actually truly efficient and useful for the segment of the feature that you're working on as a developer. But for the other side, again, it's not just for Dev Gen AI, we're leveraging and deploying across customer success across customer support across marketing -- content marketing to actually make things more efficient. So for example, in customer support, we have decades of user -- use case support, Tier 1 through 5 -- Tier 1 through 3 and then go into premier support. And of course, we can also ingest all of our user guides into Intelligent ChatBot that can actually interface and do even Tier 1 support for our customers to alleviate the load to level up the Tier 1 responsiveness. And of course, on the content side as well, be able to generate much more intelligent content as a drafting tool to make our content markets and product marketing folks much more efficient. So overall, leveraging generative AI allow us to bring up the overall quality of work as well as shorten the time line to deliver results. So these are various aspects of our company we think we can really level up, ultimately, it's to improve the bottom line.

And the next question comes from Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I guess a lot of software companies have reported in the back half of June has been kind of like a material slowdown. It appears that's something that you guys didn't see given the strength that you're talking about in the quarter, am I right in how I'm framing that?

That's right. We don't see a slowdown.

And I guess, you guys talked about being a very uncertain macro year, but 2Q was stronger than the first quarter. And I guess the full year ARR growth guide about 21%. You guys held up AR growth pretty nicely in 1Q and 2Q at 26%. So I guess, what's baked into the guidance that we're going to expect to see that, call it, over the coming quarters to 21%? Is it just, call it, larger numbers or conservatively.

Yes. I think it's maybe a little bit of both, right? It's -- I think we're still thinking that this year, although as TJ just said, we don't see any deterioration in the pipeline, but we're sitting here in August, and we're looking out for the rest of the year. And I still think there is some uncertainty out there in terms of the macro environment. And although right now, what we can see looks good, I think it's prudent for us to -- we've raised guidance but to manage that accordingly. And I think we feel real comfortable with the guidance we put out there, and we don't really see it as a deceleration. We think we're just trying to plan accordingly and be -- again, be prudent and be thoughtful in terms of the guidance we're providing.

Understood. And can you just help frame how we should think about when you kind of announced new functionality, for example, what you did this kind of cloud backup for sales force. Is that something that you see like an immediate demand pickup for? Is that something that your sales force goes out and targets? I guess when you announced it like that, how should we think about that maybe adding to the pipeline?

Yes. So clearly, the multi-cloud support continue to be focused for us. So when we do announce the support for sales force, especially FedRAMP data centers being able to sell to more secure oriented government clients that will help strengthen our pipeline build. There is different -- depends on the sector we support, there's some learning curve for our sellers also to sell to a different audience, for example, in the record section, right? We're not just selling to traditional IT, but we're actually selling to record managers. So there's a bit of that training and onboarding and on ramping for our sellers to be able to familiarize in the new features and deployment out there. But overall, you're absolutely right. These new products goes a long way to strengthen the pipeline. But ultimately, the goal is to improve NRR for us to be able to do the cross-sell and upsell for our existing customer base.

And this concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor to TJ Jiang for any closing comments.

Thank you. First, I want to thank the entire AvePoint team for their dedication to advancing the digital workplace, capturing growing markets and prioritizing profitable growth. I've been meeting with our regional management teams in EMEA, APAC, North America in person these last few weeks during our quarterly business overviews, and I'm confident we are well positioned to continue capitalizing on the opportunity in front of us. Lastly, as I shared during our Investor Day, we're excited to host our upcoming Shifthappens conference in Washington, D.C. in October. We're especially thrilled to return to an in-person format, and I encourage you to attend. In addition to our continued innovation around AI, you'll hear more from our team and other industry leaders about experiences, strategies and best practices that define the digital workplace transformation. We'll release more information about topics and speakers in the coming weeks. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation, and you may now disconnect your lines.