AvePoint, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVPT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tianyi Jiang: Yes, thanks for the question. So we’re seeing, it’s still a very challenging macro environment and pretty uncertain. We’re still seeing the same scrutiny around budgets, so we see that continuing. We don’t think it’s gotten worse. When we think about the demand, we actually – I think last quarter we referred to it as stabilization, and I think I would continue to use that terminology when we look at our deal cycles and how long it’s taking to get deals through the process, that doesn’t seem to have changed much. This year is longer than the past, but it hasn’t been getting worse as we’ve gone through the year. So I think that’s kind of stabilized. And when we look at the three segments, our SMB segment is our fastest growing segment that continues to be, but all three segments have been healthy in terms of growth.

So again, we’re not really seeing any one particular segment overly affected. So again, we were really pleased with the quarter’s performance, and it’s really across all three segments.

Chirag Ved: All right, thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Nehal Chokshi: Great. Thank you. Great quarter, guys. Any specific skews driving the slight improvement to the net revenue retention rate?

James Caci: Yes, well, I think it’s a couple of things. Right. In terms of we definitely have seen TJ pointed out a couple customer acceleration or additions in the quarter. I think those were very helpful. I think we’re seeing customers really look to reduce costs. So we’ve seen some consolidation. We’ve seen some of our products that are helping them do that with existing customers. So I think that’s really been the key call outs. I think we’re still in this macro uncertain environment. Right. So we’re pleased with the quarter’s performance, but again, we’re being very cautiously optimistic when we think about the rest of the year.

Nehal Chokshi: And if I may, for calendar 2023 ending, you’re guiding to 22% ARR growth as is. What’s the FX adjusted expectation with current rates?

James Caci: Well, again, for us, it’s interesting, right. We’ve got a very global business. So we’ve seen this year, if you look at the FX impacts around the globe, we’ve seen EMEA kind of come back in terms of the euro against the dollar. That’s gotten stronger, but we’ve seen the Japanese Yen continue to get weak against the dollar. And for us, those kind of offset each other slightly. So we’re going to see slight improvement on the ARR in terms of this 22 probably gets us another two points in total for the year. I mean, you can see that as we were in Q3 2023 and 2025, I think it’s probably similar for the year somewhere in that 1% to 2% impact of FX.

Nehal Chokshi: Great, thank you.

Operator: The next question is from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. Please proceed.

Derrick Wood: Oh, great. Thanks for taking my question, TJ, we’re hearing more and more that cloud optimization efforts are something here to stay with workload governance and cost management. A core part of your value proposition, just curious, is the level of the buyer that you’re engaging changing at all? And how do you feel about positioning for larger budget capture? And I guess I’d ask the same thing for AI I mean as companies perhaps view you guys as critical in helping train models against private data, do you think that new buyers to engage with surface?

Tianyi Jiang: Hi Derrick. Great question. The first part of that is cloud Ops cost control really plays into our wheelhouse, our platform advantage, especially with control suite around operation management, entitlement management, and of course this whole lifecycle management, including low code, no code platforms, that’s PowerApps is in high demand. So that part is really well. And with AI, I have so much conversation now with the CISOs and CIOs around, rolling out copilot to make sure that there’s copilot readiness. So that means making sure that folks don’t have over privileged access to suggestions from Copilot in terms of drafting answers and leveraging corporate data. So that’s a very, very active area and topic. We actually see tremendous opportunity to expand our value-added strategic offer there.